STREET VENDORS IN THE HISTORIC CENTRE OF LIMA:
UTILITARIAN SPACE VERSUS A MUSEUM CITY

 

1. Introduction

In December 1991, the World Heritage Committee designated the Historic Centre of Lima a World Heritage site through its inclusion in the World Heritage List. In 1998, the List includes 411 cultural, natural and mixed heritage sites in 155 signatory countries. The Historic Centre of Lima (hereafter the HCL) was approved in the List as an extension of an earlier site, the San Francisco monastery of Lima. The HCL became the World Heritage site No. 500bis.

One of the requirements for the designation of a site is the existence of a legal corpus for its management and administration. In the case of the HCL, there was a set of laws called El Reglamento del Centro Histórico which stipulated guidelines for the management of the Historic Centre and created an administrative structure, ProLima. Originally, El Reglamento was drafted by a private heritage trust (Patronato de Lima) and promulgated as a municipal decree by the Metropolitan Mayor in 1991. In August 1994, El Reglamento was approved as a municipal law by the Metropolitan Council and acquired the status of a special law through its publication in the official journal El Peruano. Special laws in Peru are given precedence over the general laws. Through the wording of its final stipulations, El Reglamento became the law of the Historic Centre, overruling national laws, including those on heritage protection, construction, urban planning and zoning, and the use of public and private spaces.

The contents of El Reglamento have been described in detail in Seppänen (1997). The main points of the law are worth re-iterating here. El Reglamento was clearly designed in order to return the City Centre to its original appearance through the restoration of buildings and removing the past footprints of "modernising efforts" from the cityscape. In controlling the use of space, the law prohibited street vending and limited commercial activities in a way which was tantamount to creating a museum of the HCL. In the central part of the Historic Centre, no groceries or bread were allowed to be traded, for example, whereas hotels and restaurants, travel agencies and airline offices were permitted to operate. Street vending could be allowed in certain trades, such as old books and coins, by "appropriately" dressed vendors.

Over May-June 1995, the El Reglamento was put in action in an operation commonly called the "Reorganisation" of the Historic Centre. Vendors were chased out, traffic was restricted and parking in the streets was prohibited. The Reorganisation culminated in the pan-Latin American tourism fair COTAL ’95, the first time it had been held in Peru since the early 1970’s. The festive celebration presented to the participants of the fair a certain image of the city. All the picturesque figures of the old Lima of colonial times were deployed in the marketing efforts of the "tourism attractions of our Peru", as one newspaper put it. Men wore ponchos and rode horses; veiled women strolled among the festive public; "appropriately dressed" Afro-Peruvian women with white scarves served meals; Andean "natives" danced to the flutes. The Historic Centre of Lima was enacted as a "as-if" colonial city, where everybody knew his/her place, a society divided hierarchically by gender, social class and race.

Immediately after the Reorganisation, the most affected persons were the street vendors, who were supposed to leave the streets and/or the Historic Centre in general. In this paper I will discuss how the street vendors interpreted the HCL, their attitudes and spatial practices. For my purpose here, the significance of monumental and historical heritage as such for the vendors is not relevant. What is relevant is the way the vendors acted in relation to their working place, the Historic Centre of Lima. The question is about what way "their" HCL was different from the one imposed by the Reorganisation.

2. Vendors and vending in the streets of the Historic Centre of Lima

2.1. Who were the vendors?

According to the information quoted by Arroyo (1994), 36 per cent of the vendors lived in the Northern "Cone" (Cono Norte), the part of Lima to the North of the Centre, 38 per cent lived in the Eastern Cone and 27 per cent in other parts of the City. Only 46 per cent of the vendors were born in Lima, and almost the same percentage, 44 per cent were born in the Sierra, the Andes. Therefore, the great majority of the street vendors of the HCL did not live there, and less than half of them had been born in the capital. We can conclude that the vendors were mainly inhabitants of shantytowns, created by spontaneous or other self-help mechanisms. Arroyo points out the disappearance of the old Centre as a place for itself in that the HCL acted as a "soundbox" of the survival problems of urban fringe areas (ibid, 138). The conclusion about the external origin of vendors is additionally confirmed by the fact that 36 per cent of those living within the limits of the Historic Centre worked outside it and in other parts of the City (ibid, 140).

When asked about the image of, and the attitude towards, the Historic Centre, the vendors expressed the following opinions: 73 per cent did not want to change their working place while 86 per cent did not carry out any economic activity other than vending in the HCL. Only five per cent of the vendors considered the Centre "historic"; 4 per cent administrative, 13 per cent "touristic" while three-quarters valued it as a commercial place. The motivation for vending was found being tourism in only 4 per cent of cases. In all other cases the motivation stemmed from the abundant flow of Lima residents in the Centre. What is conspicuous about the results is that there seemed to be either ignorance or a conscious denial of the symbolic role of the HCL as the national and municipal centre of power and administration. The surveys quoted by Arroyo are consistent with my fieldwork findings. In the context of my small survey (see below) I had asked why the vendors worked there. All the 48 interviewed vendors answered by appealing to "selling well" there; not a single answer referred to the symbolic status of the HCL.

2.2. Types of street vending in the HCL

Street vendors are a part of the urban informal sector (UIS). Apart from trade, other small-scale, non-formalised economic activities also take place in manufacturing, services, transport and construction (Thomas 1995, 21). Because my focus is on the public space in the HCL, I will concentrate on vending (commerce).

The 20,000 street vendors (Civil Defence s.d.)¹ of the HCL were not a homogenous group. There are no statistics on the percentage the categories of vendors in the HCL. The latest statistics for Metropolitan Lima as a unit date from the mid-1980’s. From the most comprehensive research on the UIS in Lima (Carbonetto-Hoyle-Tueros 1988), different types of vending (and a classification of vendors) can only be deduced indirectly by the frequency with which merchandise is bought or the advancing of credit available for the same purpose (ibid., 112-3)². The greater the frequency of purchase (daily as opposed to monthly), the poorer the vendor. Vendors operating with cash are more likely to be poorer than those with access to credit. My classification of vendors is consistent with the statistics but also derives from the occupation of space rather than economic activity even when these two categories cannot be completely separated.

The street vendors active in the HCL until May 1995 can be divided into three categories by their occupation of public space. The first category, the very small-scale "sedentary" vendors, comprised three subgroups, including the vendors of home made pastries and snacks or some other small goods; the vendors selling sweets and cigarettes by the unit; and the vendors of incense and pictures of saints in front of the churches. This category consisted almost exclusively of elderly or middle aged women. By "sedentary" I refer to those vendors who have a more or less permanent, customary site on the street. The vendors of sweets and snacks sat either directly on the pavement or on a small stool; the vendors of saints mostly stood behind little tables on which they had their merchandise.

It can be supposed that this first category was the least wealthy of all vendors, some of them were even indigent. The Reorganisation had an uneven impact upon the group as a whole. For example, the vendors of religious objects could keep their trading posts whereas the others were not considered traditional and would have to leave. These were the vendors who "panicked" about their future location during the Reorganisation although they momentarily maintained their cash flow due either to their inconspicuous presence or to the absence of a force to chase them out. The first two subgroups were not organised and could not offer strong resistance against the municipal measure.

The second category comprised the ambulatory, mobile vendors who peddled all kinds of merchandise, ranging from fruit to clothes and toys. Some of these vendors carried their merchandise wrapped in sheets of easy to roll-up plastic, in case they needed to move on. Others had carriages or tricycles, enabling them to search for the best possible spot at a given moment. Those carrying their merchandise wrapped in plastic used pavements for spreading out their goods. Most of those with carriages used streets, obstructing traffic by either parking in the middle of the roadway or by cycling slowly in search of clients. Therefore, this subgroup was chased from the HCL months before the Reorganisation was announced and were later to be relocated. Some of these vendors were members of associations for defending their rights.

The third category consisted of the larger scale sedentary vendors. Some would have carriages for transporting and storing their merchandise but they also had established permanent vending spots on the pavements, unoccupied at the night. Their carriages were stored in rented spaces indoors in nearby houses. Others, analysed in more detail in the next section, had managed to occupy permanent vending stalls. There were few of these permanent stalls in the core area of the HCL where the Reorganisation started but they were abundant on the fringes of the Historic Centre. All of these vendors were wealthier in relation to the two former categories. They had both fixed capital, a carriage or a stand, and a fixed location for establishing regular contact with customers³. Except for vendors of newspapers and magazines these vendors would have to leave the HCL if they wanted to maintain their trade and not change, for example, to souvenirs⁴. Because of their daily contact with neighbouring vendors and a common territorial interest, the vendors of the large-scale sedentary category were strongly organised in associations and most associations were recognised by ProLima.

The most important group of customers for the urban informal vendors in the HCL, in addition to the people living in downtown Lima, were the inhabitants of Lima’s shantytowns, especially from the Northern parts of the City (interview at Patronato 12.1.1995). There were also some linkages with the formal sector. Thomas (1995, 55-59) defines forward linkages as the output of UIS intended as an input of the formal sector, and backward linkages as the merchandise or services offered by the formal sector which are used as inputs in the informal sector. Almost all persons employed by the formal businesses and civil servants in the HCL used the services of street vendors to some extent, either by buying a cigarette or a bargain durable consumer good or for shoe polishing, although the bulk of their purchases would be bought in other parts of the City.

The connectedness between the two sectors was much more extensive and intensive for backward linkages since a relatively large proportion of merchandise offered by the vendors came from formal manufacturing. Some obvious articles of consumer goods were cigarettes, biscuits, unrecorded audio and videocassettes, plastic utensils and metal tools. However, it was not always possible to know whether a certain article or group of articles were produced by formal or informal manufacturers, especially in the case of clothing and leather goods sold in the streets. Clothes, mainly jackets, T-shirts, blue jeans and women’s dresses, were produced in substantial quantities in Gamarra, a sector of La Victoria, where there was an important cluster of informal textile manufacturing, and which used street vendors as the principal if not the exclusive outlet⁵.

The Historic Centre thus also operated as the marketing outlet of informal manufacturing. There were no statistics or even estimates of the proportion of formal versus informal sources of goods. The problem with the distinction between forward and backward linkages is that it is not completely suitable for analysing commerce; it is better in helping to understand manufacturing and crafts production.

The phenomenon of street vending in the HCL was more complicated than the "normal" backward and forward linkages between the two sectors of an urban economy as described by Thomas (1995). One could see brand new refrigerators or electric stows sold in the streets and one could not help noticing, for example, that there were heavy concentrations of shoe vendors in front of shoe shops. While this was a clever strategy of vendors in positioning scale economies, one could also ask why business owners would permit competing vendors to operate just outside their shop doors. Here, we come to the fourth group of vendors, called jackals (chacales) by the other vendors. They were "unemployees" of formal businesses selling the shops’ articles on the street, and thereby not apparently distinguishable from the larger scale sedentary vendors with transportable stand. Shop owners would argue that this was the only way to keep their business going because of the unfair competition of vendors. Shop owners were also motivated by evasion of sales tax and of obligations towards employees. It was not possible to estimate the proportion of jackals to the total vendor population. The other vendors, without formal business connections, claimed every formal business in the HCL had 15-20 chacales working on the streets (interviews at Seminario Nacional de Orientación 13.7.1994). According to my own estimates, in the busiest commercial streets, especially La Colmena, nearly 90 per cent of vendors were likely to sell merchandise from formal businesses. My method of estimation was to use a kind of common sense.⁶ Those vendors who had 50 stereo radios and cassette players or 100 leather jackets, each costing $75-125, together with those who promised to obtain the latest cassette of Sting music for me within an hour, were assessed to be chacales. The chacales phenomenon was a special case of backward linkages. Merchandise was brought to the streets out of formal sector shops to be sold by informal vendors.

The degree to which the vendors of the HCL privatised public space varied according to the above categories. The first category was the least conspicuous in this respect. Some of them, the vendors of sweets and those of saints, had their permanent, habitual location in a certain spot, on street corners or in front of churches, but did not occupy more space than a person standing or sitting. Their location was not marked on the ground in any way. Also the second category was "inefficient" in privatising public space. Vendors using tricycles or peddling around with merchandise wrapped in plastic did not occupy a fixed location. They constituted more an obstruction for the general circulation of people or an aesthetic nuissance rather than permanently occupied street space. However, the third category, those who had succeeded in acquiring a permanent trading spot, had marked out the limits of "their" "lot" on the asphalt of many streets and numbered each lot. During daytime, it was difficult to observe the markings because the carriages obstructed the view of the numbers, but during the early hours of the morning and national holidays the painted lines were visible.

The second subgroup of the third category, the vendors with fixed, permanent stands, was a special case, and this group will be examined below.

2.3. How to privatise public space legally

The privatising of public space in Lima was not an exclusive feature of the Historic Centre, carried by street vendors alone. In many parts of the City, from middle-class quarters to slums, one could observe houses being built in parks or sport fields. According to the press, similar infractions of the municipal code, in many cases, were due to the negligence or corruption of the authorities. In some wealthier districts, restaurants would extend their services to parks and squares without permission. The reason for including the topic of privatising public space in this study is that it offers a prism for looking into the way some street vendors in the HCL related to the Municipality and its authorities. At the same time, the prism gives a special viewpoint of the local government. The question to analyse is the way which the municipal institutions worked, and how the vendors managed to cope with these institutions to their own advantage.

The most organised and best established of all the vendors in the HCL were those who had succeeded in privatising public space in Avenida Grau, and created there open air market places (campos feriales). The avenue marks the limit of the HCL, since it was constructed along the site occupied by the wall surrounding the City until its demolition in 1870. The platform separating the main lanes and the service road for local traffic of this wide avenue of six lanes, was covered with vending stands, leaving no space for walking except along the corridors of the markets. Clothes, shoes and leather accessories and other household goods, such as cups, pots and pans were sold In the first five blocks. The largest antiquarian bookshop in town was located in remaining three blocks. My fieldwork concentrated on the fourth block, not only because it contained the strongest trading organisation of all, but also because it presented some significant characteristics.

Street vendors working in the Historic Centre were often organised in associations that worked as interest groups lobbying at the Municipality for improvements and defending vendors’ "rights". Associations, for example, were the micro-level counterpart of the Municipality in cleaning campaigns. The associations were formed by vendors working in a certain street, block or park. They elected their representatives for boards, comprising a chairperson, secretary and treasurer, in direct elections. The associations could charge a membership fee which later was used for a common purpose, such as purchasing carriages or uniforms, hiring legal counsel and printing official stationary.

This vendors’ association, on the fourth block, was called Asociación Miguel Grau. The association was formally legalised but its occupation of street space was illegal and informal. The association was the owner of a covered market building built of iron bars, plywood and wood with 64 small, about 1,5m x 1,5m, bazaar shops in 4 rows along two corridors. It had an official taxpayer’s status with an identification number⁷ painted outside of its entrance. The association thus paid, or could pay⁸, income taxes to the internal revenue service. All the shops were locked with chains and locks for the night when the marketplace was guarded by eight armed guards whose salary was paid by the association out of the membership fees that its members paid. The plenary assembly of the association could exclude a non-paying member, thus denying him or her access to a vending place. Therefore, a formal private association occupying public space illegally had the power to give or deny access to formally official public space.

There was a legal public toilet within the marketplace, the entrance fees of which went to the association. Despite its illegal occupation of the street, the association had an official permission for the toilet from the Public Works Office of the Municipality, from the Water and Electricity Department and from the Health Department. In addition to a public toilet perforated to a street, the association hosted and ran a day-care centre, the only one for street vendors’ children in any similar setting in Lima. The initiative to found the day-care centre was taken by a Canadian NGO that financed promotion of day care among poor women in Lima’s urban areas. The day-care centre, hosting about 20 babies under 2 years of age, celebrated its first anniversary on July 1, 1994, with a high degree of representation of delegates from several bodies, such as UNICEF, a national federation of trade unions, INABIF (the Peruvian official governmental body in charge of infant care, orphanages and adoptions) and the Canadian NGO.

The association owned also a mansion house one block away from Avenida Grau, and received 500 soles (about $250) a month in income for letting it as a storage for vending carriages of less fortunate vendors. No taxes were paid on this source of income. In addition to the house, the association also owned a piece of land which was too far from the City Centre according to its leadership, so they saved money to buy another lot of land in the Centre itself. But, as Doña Carmen, the chairwoman of the association, very eloquently put it, "as long as [they] are allowed to stay in the street, [they] would be stupid not to take advantage of it". In fact, in spite of some efforts to formalise their businesses, the vendors were in no hurry to do so. The price level in their shops was about the same as in any shop in Central Lima, because they paid night guards, membership fees and eventual taxes. But according to the association’s chairwoman, it was important to maintain the appearance of informal street vendors in order to attract buyers who thought vendors sold at lower prices.

The struggle for vending space in the case of the Grau Association was different from the weaker ones. Doña Carmen, the "Black Thatcher" according to her own words⁹, was waging a war against any talk about relocation. Her strategy consisted of toying with the ground left open by the non-co-ordinated administrative measures of the Municipality’s different departments. The legal toilet was one weapon in this struggle and the day-care centre, with international dimensions, another. This was the reason why the association constantly refused to move the day-care centre to the house they owned, despite overcrowding in that 15-20 children occupied a space of 2m x 7m. The chairwoman felt confident that "so far" they would be allowed to stay in Avenida Grau. First, she knew that the Mayor would not want them evicted because of his fear of losing votes in presidential elections. Second, the Municipality had no money to give the vendors another marketplace in which to trade. Carmen saw no contradiction between the Municipality having to pay for another marketplace and the association owning both a mansion house and another lot for possible relocation.

Doña Carmen also touched upon a sensitive issue, that of corruption in the Municipality. Talking very openly and without visible fear, she said that at the Central Market, about ten blocks to the North from Avenida Grau, a "black bag" was handed out monthly to the Mayor in order to avoid relocation of vendors working in the streets outside the municipal, legal market. About six months later a similar piece of news shook the city and annoyed the Municipality. Patronato de Lima, the private heritage trust collaborating with the Municipality in the designation of the HCL as World Heritage site, had denounced a municipal "mafia" in court. According to Patronato, all vendors without an official vending permit regularly paid 1 to 5 soles to municipal guards circulating on the streets with the objective of controlling illegal vending. If there were 12.000 vendors in the HCL, and each of them paid on the average 3 soles to corrupt guards, this meant that 36.000 soles ($18.000) was paid each day to the pockets of corrupt employees. Furthermore, this "dirty" money was later laundered in the brothels of the Historic Centre, where numbers had grown from 12 in 1991 before the Designation as World Heritage site, to 80 in 1994, because of a Municipal Decree from 1991 which prohibited street vending. (Interview at Patronato 12.1.1995). In another interview at Patronato in June 1995 (7.6.1995), three weeks after the Reorganisation had started, I was told that despite pressure and threats from municipal civil servants, the law suit was proceeding in court.

3. Vendors in a heritage site

3.1. Territorial organisation

Above, it has been mentioned that some vendors were organised in associations while others were not. The question, now, is what explains which vendors were organised and which not. Even when there is no single causal "factor" to "explain" the degree of organisation among vendors, the following factors help to understand why certain vendors were strongly organised while others lacked any degree of association: 1) permanence of time at a certain location; 2) space; 3) the activity of authorities; 4) associations’ leadership; and in some cases the vendors’ field of specialisation.

The best organised of associations would be the groups of vendors with a strong leader, who worked together for a lengthy time in a certain restricted space vending a certain article, and were exhorted by authorities to form an association or otherwise faced trouble from municipal officers. On the other hand, vendors scattered all over the HCL and without a permanent vending location would not be organised unless their field of specialisation would bind them to a unifying interest, internal or external. The case of Asociación Miguel Grau would be a representative case of the first extreme. The incipient association of vendors selling cassettes at the Seminario Nacional de Orientación1¹⁰, with enormous problems in organising themselves, was an example of the second extreme.

It is worth mentioning that in contemporary Andean countries, the field of specialisation of vendors, or merchants in general, is not independent of locational space. As in many marketplaces all over the world, the bazaar city of the HCL was arbitrarily arranged in sections according to where certain articles were sold. Most sedentary street vendors, except the very small-scale vendors of sweets and snacks, were selling the same article as the neighbouring vendor in the same street block, and customers would go to a certain section of the Historic Centre in order to purchase a certain type of good.

It is, thus, not surprising that most vendors’ organisations, especially the efficient ones, were territorial, belonging to the vendors of a certain geographical place such as a street, a block of street, a square or a park. This pattern of territorial organisation, prevalent for instance in the shantytowns of Lima, is very common in the Andean countries, whether in rural indigenous communities to urban informal sector. This fact is often suggested to be as a typically Andean ethnic feature, or as a creation of the military government of Velasco Alvarado, as in the case of Peru (Stokes 1995, 120). However, there is no need to seek a recourse in ethnic explanations or political history for this phenomenon. Rather, it is space that facilitates social relations. In circumstances where the state is not able to guarantee contracts through legal mechanisms, and/or communications technologies are not widely used, the surveillance and control that proximity offers is a condition sine qua non which makes the association or enterprise able to operate. Adams and Valdivia (1991) apply the same idea of proximity in reference to kinship ties as a guarantor of loyalty in the absence of operative contract law. In a social and political climate where mistrust reigns, both spatial and social proximity as a means of control and surveillance is one powerful way of enforcing agreements.

What is important here is that the modality of organisation of street vendors in the Historic Centre was identical to that of the neighbourhoods’ organisation in Lima’s shantytowns. Vendors practised direct, though not necessarily egalitarian, participatory democracy for self-management at a micro-scale of a street or block. The organisations were territorial units, based on location within a delimited space. As had happened with the self-managed shantytown organisations in several occasions over the last decades, the vendors’ associations were not able to efficiently organise themselves within larger geographical areas, even when the circumstances strongly suggested the advantages of co-operation beyond micro-scale common interests. In the case of the Reorganisation, the inability of the associations to extend the same level of organising to the whole of the Historic Centre implied weaker possibilities of offering resistance to the municipal measures from the side of the vendors.

3.2. Use of vending lots

When walking in the streets of the Historic Centre of Lima one could observe a curious habit by the street vendors. They would put their merchandise on display in a very distinct way by showing all of their articles and not just a sample of each category of articles. The articles were not only on show but were also extended on a table or a plastic sheet side-by-side and not one on top of the other, so each individual vendor could occupy as much space as possible¹¹.

This type of open display was especially practised by semi-ambulatory vendors who would move in search of best locations or when they were chased by the municipal guards. But many vendors, who had also succeeded in occupying a permanent site on the pavement, would extend their merchandise to the whole area available to them. One could see old women with twenty pastries side by side on a woven cloth or men with fifty packages of cigarettes or bottles of shampoo of the same brand side by side on a table. The same pattern would also apply to the vendors with carriages, where the available space was limited by the size of their carriages. All the more striking was this type of display when comparing with the vendors of newspapers or books who rented municipal kiosks, small in horizontal dimension but tall in the vertical sense.

The first point of interpretation is about the appearance of wealth that this display created. The visible abundance of articles to be sold can constitute a marketing trick. A buyer may be lured to purchase an article when the vendor exposes the merchandise in large quantities, creating a belief that the good is "in" and fashionable to buy. On the other hand, the appearance of wealth reveals a desire of the vendors to be identified with upward social and economic mobility. Merchandise is also displayed in large quantities at supermarkets. The HCL’s vendors did not underline their poverty or scarce resources by trying to show as little as possible of their working capital. Yet, a difference with the style of supermarket display remains. Whereas in supermarkets, including Peru, bargain goods are piled in high stacks in order to create an illusion of abundance, merchandise were displayed in the streets of the HCL horizontally for the same effect.

Thus secondly, the horizontal dimension of display has to be interpreted by taking into account the crucial period of the Reorganisation, when I made these above observations. Initially, I supposed that filling the space with merchandise acted like an amulet against the relocation of vendors. The abundance of goods displayed was a proof of a long-term occupation of street space. It anchored the vendor to the site and protected him or her against harassment as if saying that the vendors were entitled to stay because of customary law. But symbolically, and this is important, the display can be seen as a form political rootedness, of "filling" the Historic Centre metaphorically¹². It indicates a consolidation of presence and of occupation at all levels of interpretation.

On the other hand, as is to be expected, this specific type of display was not a reaction to the Reorganisation, in that it had not evolved overnight but had been present for quite some time before my eyes "saw" it.

The vendors themselves could not give any answer to my question about why they put their goods on display the way they did. After having asked ten vendors the same question without response except for a perplexed silence, I gave up the exercise. I therefore inferred that the display was due to competitive economic behaviour. Starting from the ground, the horizontal display of merchandise occupies more street space than a vertical one. As the street is a limited physical space and the amount of goods defines the extension of occupation, the horizontal display means that fewer vendors can fit into a given space. The horizontal occupation thereby guaranteed the business of those who had succeeded in consolidating their presence to the detriment of thousands of others who would have wanted to peddle in the same streets. The practice of piling goods in order to fit in more vendors did not exist. On the contrary, the more horizontal space vendors were able to occupy, by extending goods as widely as possible, the less vendors were able to be present in the best selling open air market place of Lima -- the HCL.

I would therefore suggest that the vendors were petty capitalists who competed for business space. But if we consider another common practice among the vendors, the conclusion will be more nuanced. It was normal to see vending posts with merchandise spread out for display without the vendor being present. In these cases, the neighbouring vendors would reciprocally keep an eye on the momentarily abandoned post, sell and keep the cash until the holder of the site would return. There was co-operation and solidarity among those who were present, as well as a competitive mechanism at work to keep outsiders from coming in to trade.

Indeed, seen from this angle, associations of vendors as described above can be seen as a nexus where small capitalist competition on one hand, and insiders’ solidarity on the other, were played out, regulated and resolved. The access to vending space, a critical moment in the informal sector business cycle, was not regulated by municipal authorities before the Reorganisation, as it should have been according to the General Law on Municipalities. Regulation was carried out by associations or informal congregations of vendors. As seen also in the case of the Asociación Miguel Grau, granting access to public space was a practical monopoly of structures of civil society, subject to several factors ranging from personal animosities and kinship ties to keen business instincts.

3.3. Perception of monumental heritage

Earlier, I quoted the results of a survey carried out by a polling company on behalf of Patronato and published in Arroyo (1994) on the attitude of street vendors in relation to the Historic Centre of Lima. In order to assess the validity of the conclusion about their predominantly commercial attitude, with little, if any, heritage value attached, a small survey was done on my behalf by a Peruvian university student in the HCL during the last week of May 1995. The type of survey opted for was pictorial. Images were shown to the interviewees. The advantages of a pictorial survey, when compared to traditional questionaire survey, were obvious in a context such as the HCL. A single question ("Do you know what this is?") could be asked quickly and the answers ("yes does know/does not know") recorded without facing the problem of illiteracy.

The survey consisted of four images of monuments of the Historic Centre and a "logo map" of Peru. The monuments selected were public buildings, the most representative ones of state institutions, namely the Presidential Palace, the Town Hall, located at the Main Square, the Congress building and the Supreme Court. The Congress is situated at the limit of the central chessboard street pattern near a wide avenue and behind a small square, marking the transition from the core monumental area to Barrios Altos, the colonial "city of Indians". The Supreme Court lies about one kilometre from the Main Square towards the Southern extreme of the Historic Centre. The photos were postcards bought from the vendors at the Central Post Office, next door from the Presidential Palace. All images were typical frontal pictures with as many recognisable elements as possible.¹³

The survey sample contained 85 persons, the first 43 of which were interviewed in Jirón de la Unión, the main pedestrian street leading from the Main Square to Plaza San Martín, the second important large square in the HCL, about at noon during the middle of the week. The second half of the survey consisted of 42 persons who were interviewed in Avenida Abancay, in front of the Congress, between 4 and 5 p.m. on the day after the first excercise. There were heavy concentrations of vendors on both streets which otherwise represented different characteristics. (Figure)

Jirón de la Unión was a historically symbolic pedestrian street where prohibition against vending was enforced, at least during daytime¹⁴. The vendors there were ambulatory, mobile vendors who either carried their merchandise in order to easily flee from municipal guards and/or located their stands around the corners of perpendicular streets. The main articles sold were clothing and other light objects. A large majority of them were women, comprising three-quarters of the sample surveyed. Avenida Abancay, with six lanes, had wide pavements where miscellaneous articles, including batteries, toilet paper and mattresses were sold. The sample of 22 men and 20 women interviewed there was also representative.

The results indicate a high level of positive identification of the images which were presented. The image most recognised by the interviewees was the logo-map, 95 per cent recognised it. The Presidential Palace was identified by 81 per cent. The other images were slightly less commonly known by the interviewees. Significantly, the lowest score was of the Municipal Hall; only 69 per cent identified the monument in the photograph. The results are listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Pictorial survey in the Historic Centre of Lima: identification of monuments

It is unsurprising that the logo-map scored high in the survey. The Peruvian map as a sign, without geographical references, is printed in all school materials, on many stamps and in official stationary. In addition, the survey was carried out less than six months after the armed border clashes with Ecuador during January 1995, when the map of Peru widely appeared in all media. During this "guerrita", the defence of the national territory was symbolically represented in the form of the map. At other extreme, that of the Town Hall, there was a significant difference between the two sites of interviews. Of the 26 persons who failed to identify the municipal building, six were interviewed in Jirón de la Unión but 20 were recorded in Avenida Abancay. Thus, a relatively high proportion of vendors in the pedestrian street at a short distance from the Municipality recognised it, but only about a half of those working out of sight of the Main Square succeeded in identifying the local government palace. It is worth mentioning that the Municipal Hall was exactly the place where all vending permits were issued. It was to be expected that the vendors had first hand contact with the building much more than of the other monuments of the survey. On the other hand, the Town Hall appeared significantly less in media coverage than, for example, the Presidential Palace in all TV news representing the dominant political power, namely the presidential institution.

Although, in all cases, men recognised more images than women, the only significant difference was found in the case of the Congress where even the women who worked just in front of the building did not recognise the image. When comparing men’s recognition of the Parliament with that of other images, the results are strengthened by the fact that although only three men failed to identify the Parliament building, five men did not recognise the Presidential Palace.

The specific position of the Peruvian Parliament at the time of the survey helps to understand the Congress image score. The two-chambered Parliament was closed down after the coup of President Fujimori against himself in 1992 and reopened after the new constitution was approved in a referendum during 1993. Because the President’s political alliance had an absolute majority in the Parliament, the legislature lost its position as an independent source of state power and became an instrument of presidential power. Therefore, at the time of the survey, the Congress building was not a site of significant politics, with little outside news coverage¹⁵. This fact might partially explain the low score of the Congress in the survey

In any case, it is possible to conclude that physical symbols of the nation state – buildings and the logo-map -- were widely identified by street vendors who are "typical" representatives of the popular sectors of the Peruvian society. Thus, on the basis on my survey, I am able to better understand the findings presented by Arroyo (1994) about the vendors’ commercial attitude towards the Old Centre, together with my observation about the absence of commentaries on the symbolic meaning of the HCL by the vendors (see 2.1. above). I would suggest that there was a conscious and straightforward negligence of the symbolic values, and an equally conscious denial of the historical values, officially put upon the Historic Centre. Because of well being aware of the symbolism of the power which embraced the Old Centre, as empirically observed in the survey, the vendors opted for neglecting the symbolic sphere and stressed the commercial side of their attachment to the place. Because they did not want to accept the historic importance of the HCL, of which the vendors received first hand knowledge through the Reorganisation and the threat of relocation, they preferred to see the Old Centre as an exclusively commercial zone.

Peruvian popular nationalism was strongly identified with President Fujimori and his politics. The President had flirted politically since his election in 1990 with small enterprise and street vendors, and promoted an economic ethic, the so-called capitalismo combi¹⁶. This ethic included support for negligence, or a contestation, of laws and a refusal of the political system, preferring the "law of the jungle", individualism and social progress, all three values identified with, and exposed by the informal sector (Adams & Valdivia 1991, 165-168). On the other hand, the Mayor of Lima had pointed out that the benefit of the Reorganisation was to enable Peruvian families to carry out leisurely activities in the Historic Centre such as strolling, listening to music and dining in restaurants (interview in EC 5.6.1995/A7). The vendors knew that support for efforts to relocate them from the City’s best vending sites would not come from the President. On the contrary. President Fujimori had attempted to imperil the workings of the Municipality since 1994¹⁷. Furthermore, these same petty capitalist values were a basis for denying the historic value of the HCL imposed on them by the Reorganisation. This could be the reason for the fact that the Municipal Hall was recognised by fewer vendors in the survey than any other image, in spite of their much more probable personal contact with the building than with the Presidential Palace. The Municipality, with its El Reglamento and the Reorganisation, imposed values other than those promoted by the central government. This was an "as-if" colonial city struggle versus capitalismo combi; tradition-minded cosmopolitanism versus popular nationalism; liberal "masculine" competition, under which "only the strongest survive", versus aristocratic "feminine" idleness and family values.

I now look at some reactions of the vendors to attempts to control the use of public space in the Historic Centre.

4. Reactions to attempts to control the Historic Centre

4.1. Introduction

There had been attempts to exclude street vendors from the old Centre of Lima over the decades. The Reorganisation was not the first time that the Municipality was taking measures in this direction. Although when seen ex posteriori, the "recovery" of 1995 turned out to be a decisive moment in the state of the old Centre, during my fieldwork it was impossible to observe any organised opposition to the Reorganisation from the vendors’ side. At the beginning of the municipal campaign, many vendors had opted for leaving the HCL in search of alternative locations, perhaps anticipating that the recovery would be rigorous or for fearing decreasing sales caused by traffic restrictions. Thus, I only was able to study those who had stayed in the HCL and the associations, with whom I had contact, were appealing to ProLima to help them find a new place for vending. There was a conspicuous lack of opposition to the Reorganisation by the street vendors, the reasons for which can only be surmised. The fact that I had to leave Lima just after the tourism fair, in the middle of the Reorganisation, limited my possibilities of observing what happened after the external pressure of "washing the face" of Lima for tourism marketing purposes, had ended. In fact, there was violent opposition to consolidating the absence of vendors from the HCL but I did not have the chance to see it happening.

4.2. The "Speech"

After the Reorganisation had started, news coverage, when it gave voice to the vendors, reproduced a certain verbal pattern of speech in all media interviews. I encountered the same discourse from my interviewees, mainly small-scale sedentary vendor women, when asking about their attitude towards the relocation. The "Speech" is what I call this specific combination of words, message and tone of voice. Speech also repeatedly appeared in the context of repelled squatter settlements, price hikes of consumer goods and other political measures which caused rage among the population because they were perceived as unjust.

The Speech consisted of the following elements. The tone of voice was a lamentation, in that the vendor spoke from a position of inferiority, more pronounced in women than in men. Furthermore, the words of the Speech always included expressions such as ‘mother’ and/or ‘father’, ‘children’, ‘human beings’, ‘to live’, ‘rights’ and ‘justice’¹⁸. The message of a typical Speech in the context of the Reorganisation would be:

We too are parents, we have a family and children and we have to earn our living with honest means. We do not have any other place to go, we too are human beings, you do not have the right to do this to us; it is not just.

The context of the Speech, too, was always the same. A reporter making an interview for TV or radio, or a researcher doing fieldwork, in my case, was questioning the vendor. Common to both cases was the perceived subaltern position of the interviewee, not only by the listener but probably also by the speaker her/himself. The speaker faced an interlocutor with more wealth, knowledge and influence through whom the speaker hoped her/his situation would be improved.

Since my fieldwork did not include deep interviews on attitudes, I am not able to report whether the Speech corresponded to real paternalistic-clientelist attitudes among the interviewees, or whether it was a question of a conscious strategic choice of radical citizenship¹⁹. In the case of clientelism, the person would feel impotent to changing her/his state of affairs through her own efforts. In the case of radical citizenship, vendors would consider this specific type of message as the most appropriate means for making themselves heard. Both attitudes were possibly present. However, it is worth analysing the Speech because it contained both emancipatory and conservative elements.

The Speech appealed to the following elements: Vendors were parents, had children and the right and obligation to earn a living for themselves and their families. They were human beings belonging to the human race and to a nation. Just as for any other Peruvians, the basic setting of family and children was a right and obligation, without any difference between the vendors themselves and the better-off members of society. The Speech expressed consciousness about an unjust state of affairs and about an unjust state. This can be seen as an emancipatory component of the Speech. It is in line with the denuncia of a woman I interviewed, saying vendors were human beings, not animals, demanding a person-to-person interaction on equal terms between that of a citizen and decision-maker.

Yet, there was also a component of resignation: "We do not have any other place to go." Because the vendors rapidly found other places to go in practice, I consider this part of the Speech either as an expression of subjugation or a conscious appeal to feelings of pity. Both are clientelist-paternalist positions. The "real" problem was not having another place to go, but how to finance the unavoidable loss of income inherent in having to find a place and consolidating the business in the new location before customers would "find" the vendor (Seminario Nacional de Orientación 13.7.1994). And insofar as this legitimate complaint was not responded to by the Municipality’s concrete actions, the Reorganisation really constituted a violation of the vendors’ right to earn their livelihood.

Last but not least, we can find in the Speech a failure to contest the Reorganisation on heritage terms. Historic values and the archaic Colonial Arcadia, as the new museum-type of city which was to be created by the Reorganisation, were invisible to the vendors and rejected only implicitly. They appealed to economic factors only. The vendors did not contest the Reorganisation on the only terms that could have worked in their interests, by asking what kind of heritage place was desirable in the context of Lima and what intrinsic value, if any, was possessed by the kind of historic heritage that was promoted by the Municipality. I would claim that the reason for this failure was exactly the meaning of place given to the HCL by the vendors as explained in the previous section. For the vendors, the old Centre of Lima was a utilitarian space for economic advancement. Symbolic meaning and historic values were either denied or refused.

4.3. Filing a legal complaint

The legal complaint was an appeal to habeas corpus (acción de amparo), presented to the Civil Court of Lima in July 1992 after the publication, in the Official Journal, of a municipal decree prohibiting street vending in the Historic Centre of Lima (Decreto Alcaldía 113). In the appeal, Citizen N subpoenaed the Metropolitan Municipality of Lima, the Metropolitan Mayor and the Deputy Mayor in person, together with UNESCO and the National Police through their "representatives". The appeal was soon dismissed on grounds of a technicality²⁰, but its contents are worth analysing carefully. The complaint was clearly written by a lawyer, not a lay person, as can easily be deduced from its appeal to a number of laws and paragraphs and by its phraseology.

The important question here is not whether the appeal could have proceeded. Indeed it would have taken a Peruvian judge and several lawyers to define whether Citizen N had a legal case. As such, the Peruvian law of habeas corpus is a mechanism by which an individual person or an organisation can appeal to legal protection in the case of "violation or threat of violation of a constitutional right"²¹. This mechanism was very often used by persons in Lima, especially by street vendors, as was shown by a case from August 1994, two weeks before El Reglamento was published in the Official Journal. Vendors, because of a municipal order, had been evicted with teargas and firearms by the police from a square at the borders of the HCL. The vendors had presented an habeas corpus appeal after which a judge declared the eviction unlawful, followed by the presentation by the Municipality and the Ministry of Justice of another acción de amparo to the Court in order to have the ruling overturned.

According to Citizen N, the Municipal Decree (113/92) violated his rights to freedom against discrimination, freedom of labour and freedom of contract. The Decree, it was argued, was unconstitutional, in addition to violating the International Declaration ²² of Political and Civil Rights, the American Convention of Human Rights, the law of habeas corpus and the Civil Code.

The first specific article of the original complaint was about the designation of the Historic Centre of Lima as a World Heritage site, which was seen to constitute a violation of constitutional rights. Citizen N stated that the Metropolitan Mayor had signed the "unconstitutional and illegal" decree in collaboration with Mr X, the "representative of UNESCO" and the Lieutenant General Y of the National Police. The second article of the appeal started with quoting the contested Municipal Decree. The legal reasons (considerando) of the Decree read as follow:

Among the topics, functions and responsibilities included in the sphere of application of norms on Monumental Zones of the Metropolitan Municipality of Lima, there is the norm related to the regulation of commercial activities in public streets [en la vía pública], at all time when the referred commercial activities are related to the recuperation, restoration, rehabilitation […] of Monumental Zones.

The occupation of public streets and spaces for vending purposes alters the urban environment and affects the ornate and state of conservation of the mentioned public goods and of the city in general, in addition to seriously violating consumers’ rights, the defence of hygiene [and] public security. […]

It is necessary to remember that public spaces are the property of the state for common use, thus common to all citizens and they cannot be the object of private rights. Public spaces are for the use of all citizens and it is an obligation of the Municipality to take care of public property. It is imperative to recover the public spaces actually used for commercial purposes. […]

Commercial activity in public spaces cannot be admitted by the Municipality, nor by the Central Government, by the Judicial Power or any other authority or power of the state. […]²³

Citizen N argued that "by a simple municipal decree" the subpoenaed mentioned above "pretend to convert themselves" into a "superpower", situating themselves above the Central Government, the Judicial Power and any other authority of state power.

The fourth article of the appeal referred to an article of the Decree, which prohibited the storage of "tricycles, carriages, shelves, boxes and any other implement destined to the practice of street vending". According to N, the article violated the constitutional rights of freedom of contract and freedom of labour. Since he had signed a contract for storing shelves and boxes in a parking house, the Decree would annul and make the contract illegal. The Decree also prohibited, according to N’s interpretation, that "[he] in [his] condition as a citizen could sell any product of [his] private property in the streets of Lima".

Several points of the complaint referred to the articles of the Decree, which declared "null and void" all permits and authorisations in relation to vending, and to establishments letting space for the storage of vending implements. In one of his articles, Citizen N claimed:

As the Court can see, the subpoenaed persons, using their unconstitutional and illegal Municipal Decree, and hiding behind the prestige of UNESCO and the weapons, tanks, teargases, poles and dogs, electric prods and shotguns of the National Police, can afford the luxury of also interfering in private property, such as the private premises which function as deposits and storage of tricycles, carriages, shelves, boxes etc, in spite of having the respective authorisations. […] The ONLY authority that can declare null and void a resolution or annul a contract […] is a Judge of the Judicial Power of Peru. It cannot be accepted nor tolerated that in a country that considers itself civilised and democratic, a Mayor, a Deputy Mayor, a Director of the National Police and a representative of UNESCO would unite and decide to infringe the constitutional rights of freedom of contract, freedom of labour and against discrimination. A businessman with other people’s money, a failed executive of a football club, a representative of an international organisation and a General of the Police cannot conspire to prohibit thousands of Peruvian citizens the right to informal work in the streets of Lima, taken that there are no other job opportunities […].

In addition to violating his constitutional rights, N considered that these articles infringed the independence of the Judicial Power and of the Legislative Power (articles 9 and 11 of the complaint).

Article 10 of the complaint highlighted the reasonable observation that the Municipal Decree implicitly turned street vending in Lima into a criminal offence (delito perseguible de oficio). The Decree 113, according to N, thus modified the Penal Code. He was not able to sustain his argument by appealing to any other law which would declare street vending legal, and did not mention the Law on Municipalities, which awards regulation of the use of public space to the responsibility of the municipalities. Article 10 also contained a rumour about UNESCO having paid "a lot of money" to the Mayor if he could chase the vendors out of the HCL ("I tell it just as I was told"). The story told by N was an accusation against corruption on the part of UNESCO. Thus, the designation of the Historic Centre of Lima as a World Heritage site was interpreted to be an international conspiracy against street vendors. N also commented on the creation of a municipal guard which was responsible for excluding the street vendors from the HCL:

[The consequence of the creation of the municipal guard was] that all owners of shops, banks, newspapers, offices would happily pay a monthly fee, the formal shop owners in order to eliminate COMPETION of the informal vendors, and the rest, for their comfort and cleanliness of the city.

Citizen N, a street vendor, implicitly recognised that his work in the streets "altered the ornate and state of conservation" of the Historic Centre, just as the Decree said, and indirectly admitted the unfair competition that his work posed for formal shops.

Article 14 of the appeal concerned the accusation against the Municipal Decree’s violation of his constitutional right not to suffer discrimination. This point is very interesting for our analysis, because the legal basis appealed to by N referred to spatial politics in a direct way. According to N, since street vending was "legal" in other districts of the City, the prohibition of peddling in the HCL would discriminate against him and other vendors working in the Old Centre. Citizen N unknowingly denied "the pre-eminence of the Historic Centre over and above the other elements and activities of the Metropolis" (El Reglamento Art.4b). The City, he argued, should be a single geographical scale, with no admitted hierarchical difference between the HCL and other districts. It was besides the point whether peddling was legal or allowed in other districts. This is the only place where, within the vendors’ reaction to attempts to control the use of public spaces, we can see an incipient, undeveloped but direct remark concerning spatial politics, and one not only of "dominating place".

N’s argument was that he had a right to peddle wherever he pleases, including the sale of his goods on the streets of the HCL. In spite of recognising the vendors’ legitimate right to earn a decent living, there is no logical inference that vending could take place anywhere since this would amount to subscribing to the law of the jungle. It would not be difficult to see in Citizen N’s attitudes the characteristics commonly assigned to popular capitalism in Peru. As mentioned above, these characteristics include individualism, sense of progress and negligence, or defiance, of rules.

In the complaint we can see the same meaning of place that we saw above. The HCL was considered to be a utilitarian, commercial place for "honest citizens" striving towards economic advancement and overtly conscious about their real or imagined rights. No heritage value was placed upon the HCL, and, even more, the designation of it as World Heritage site was denounced as a violation of vendors’ constitutional rights. The new role of the Old Centre as a node in an international network of heritage sites was seen as a conspiracy. The fact that N referred in the complaint to a rumour about corruption, implicating UNESCO, reveals that several vendors, not only N, shared this opinion. And as the rumour is not factually correct, N’s story hints at a "satanisation" of the international organisation, conspiring with the Municipality and the National Police against the "rights" of the vendors.

5. Conclusions: Vendors and the Historic Centre of Lima

We have considered the vendors from three points of view: their relationship and attitude towards the Historic Centre; different modalities of vending in the HCL; and the interplay of institutions in privatising public space.

As a conclusion about the meaning given to the old Centre, we have noticed that vendors did not live in the HCL and the value of their working place, above all, was commercial and utilitarian. Second, vendors were very heterogeneous, and there were important backward and forward linkages with the urban formal sector. And last, but not least, the case study of a wide street’s vendors revealed a conscious use which was made of the weaknesses of the Municipality’s institutions.

The street vendors’ presence in the Historic Centre of Lima was dealt with in terms of their territorial organisation, the use of vending lots and their recognition of monuments bearing a relation to state powers. We saw that many vendors were organised in associations and that these associations were territorial, reproducing the organisational pattern of the urban fringe shantytowns. The associations were so tightly connected to a territorial unit that the vendors were unable to unite at larger geographical scales, in this case on the scale of the HCL, in order to defend their permanence in the streets. The vendors did not "jump" geographical scales.

We saw a tendency to use space horizontally in displays in vending lots. Merchandise was displayed side by side in order to occupy as much space as possible. It was suggested that the vendors were petty capitalists competing with each other in their intentional or unintended effort to keep other vendors out. On the other hand, the vendors’ territorial associations were seen as a nexus between capitalist competition and internal solidarity.

The wealthier and more established vendors privatised public space. In practice, the access to space was regulated by the associations, which belong to civil society instead of being managed by the state and its institutions. The meaning given to the Historic Centre was above all commercial. In spite of a relatively high degree of recognition of national landmarks, "higher" values of the place were absent in vendors’ relationship to the HCL. This apparent contradiction was explained by the type of popular capitalism dominant in Peru, the capitalism combi which embraces cultural elements such as a sense of progress, and orientation towards the future instead of looking back towards the past.

Third, the results of a survey carried out in two streets of the HCL suggested that there was a considerable amount of nationalism at the popular level in Peru. The high degree of recognition of images of historically and nationally important monuments, each connected with the state or its instances, further suggested that the street vendors were aware of the symbolic position of the HCL, in spite of neglecting it during interviews. A comparison was made between the high rate of identification with the Presidential Palace and the map-as-logo, and the relatively lower rate for the Town Hall. The President, and Peruvian popular nationalism, were identified with popular capitalism and a sense of progress, whereas the Reorganisation, as carried out by the Municipality, brought with it an ideology and spatial practices associated with the Colonial Arcadia, imposed on the vendors. Protestant work ethic against a culture of idleness²⁴.

For the vendors, the HCL was a commercial, utilitarian place, one of the best vending locations in town. Cleanliness and ornate, the "good image" of Lima, was not the vendors’ concern. On the contrary, crowds, bustle and streets filled with vendors were a source of joy; making the Historic Centre theirs. The rock band Los Mojarras, the first to come to the large audience from the shantytowns, expressed their affection towards the city in the words of the following song Noises in the city:

The cars, gases and noises/ of my immense and beautiful city/
make me relaxed/ and at ease in any spot/
the whistles, beams and peddlers at loud voice/ with their loudspeakers/
the noise, patrol cars/ sirens, crossing the town./
I do not imagine the city without the noise/ that people produce/
I prefer the noise/ to silence/ tyres burning at a dumping ground/
people moving around/
I prefer the noise to silence/ noises in the city/
noises I drink without rum/ noises I will make/
noises that arrive here.

Perhaps this is the closest we can get to know the real genius loci of the old Centre of Lima for its vendors, users and passers-by.

6. References

Published sources:

Newspapers:

El Comercio (EC)
El Mundo (EM)
Expreso (EX)

Unpublished documents:

Acción de amparo presentado ante el juzgado de Lima. 12.7.1992.
Signed by "Citizen N"

Historical Centre of Lima. Civil Defence s.d. (a document in English produced by Defensa Civil on the state of conservation of the Historic Centre of Lima)

²⁴Curiously enough but not by coincidence, protestant sects were one of the main factors behind Fujimori’s election to Presidency in 1990, a reason why the Catholic Church had organised a political rally in favour of the professedly agnostic other candidate, Mario Vargas Llosa.
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