John Rapley, Contributor
I THOUGHT taxi drivers in Kingston were bad. They're worse in Lima, Peru.
The mini-bus mentality, I once heard Mark Figueroa call it - the every-man-for-himself striving of a competitive, unregulated economy.
Peruvian cabbies have taken it to the next degree. They have no qualms about blocking traffic up at intersections as their conductors race one another to the sidewalks, haggling with waiting customers and knocking down their prices to attract riders. The battered shells of their vehicles testify to the fact that in the Peruvian capital, driving is a contact sport.
It is especially troublesome in Lima, because there, you start to get anxious when the traffic backs up. For when the traffic backs up, you are more at risk of being kidnapped.
A wave spreading across Latin America, kidnapping is one of the latest income-generating activities hit upon by armed gangs eager to escape unemployment in an age when everyone looks after his own.
It's straightforward, really. As a continent, Latin America has always had an uneven distribution of income. Peru has been no exception.
But in the last couple decades, things got worse. When Alberto Fujimori was president in the 1990s, he managed to arrest the hyper-inflation and sliding economy of the 1980s with a programme of crash liberalisation.
However, while growth resumed, its distribution was skewed.
LIFE OF POVERTY
A drive through the big, sprawling city makes this evident. Built out rather than up, because of the risk of earthquakes, Lima is home to some eight million Peruvians.
So you drive for miles through potholed, crowded streets strewn with garbage, where the sidewalks disgorge their surplus pedestrians to snake through the snarled traffic. These are the barrios, many of which started as shantytowns in the mid-20th century, when Indians fleeing the poverty of the Andes flocked to the hopes of employment in the city.
The state rushed to catch up, and, in fairness, Peru did better than many countries. Over time, sturdy if rude permanent structures grew up, and electricity and water pipes were run in a huge boon in a city which, built as it is on a desert plain, does not see rain.
Yet the poverty, and the tenuousness of life here, remain clear. In a context of high unemployment and weakened, overburdened families, dozens of youth gangs have cropped up.
While a few have networked with the more established, organised criminal gangs that control the inland drug trade, most simply give their members a sense of belonging, plus a modest livelihood.
CONTRASTING LIFESTYLE
But when you reach the Pacific coast of the city, you behold a different sight: wide boulevards lined with immaculate parks, their geometric gardens watered nightly by water-trucks.
Fountains fill the public squares, and tall, glass-fronted apartment buildings look out over the cliffs that tumble into the ocean, their rear windows opening to spacious, enclosed courtyards.
The contrast is stark. It is easy to despair of Lima. It is just as easy to fall in love with it. It all depends on which side you visit.
One evening, during a recent trip to the city for a meeting, I went out to dinner at a seafront restaurant overlooking the sea. There, liveried waiters carried us endless platters of one of Peru's famous smorgasbords.
Plate upon plate of beef, fish, beans in milk and other local delicacies, amid endless glasses of juice made from sweet corn and Pisco - the local liquor - were placed before us in what felt like a game of chicken between us and the waiter.
After the 20th round, I called "no más," (though I admit I relented when the dessert cycle began).
Afterwards, though, we were ushered to a bus parked outside the restaurant. An armed guard stood watch. He followed all the patrons back to the hotel where we were staying.
This, I was told, was one of the precautions one took when going out in Lima. It is not so much that life hangs by a thread.
It is that, as in Kingston, you are ever aware of the price of being able to afford a good meal.
BLAME THE COUNTRY'S LEFT
It was not always this way. Peruvians on the left blame it on the neo-liberal economy, in which the state stopped looking after its citizens and left them to fend for themselves. And so - goes this reasoning - that is just what they are doing. Being a kidnapper is just as enterprising as being a shopkeeper - it is just the private market's way of redistributing wealth.
But there seems to be more to it than this. Many blame the coarsening of Peru not just on the rightward drift of its policies, but on the country's left itself.
They point out that in the 1980s and 1990s, brutal revolutionary movements created the crucible of violence in which the current generation was forged.
The Sendero Luminoso, in particular, were an uncompromising band of Maoist rebels inspired by radical university lecturers. They disdained all signs of progress as compromises with the status quo, and so targeted not only right-wing politicians, but left-wing ones as well.
The rebellion was pretty much crushed in the 1990s. But by then, a generation of children in the barrios had seen violence all around them, and had learned to dismiss moral objections to it as bourgeois ideology. The foot soldiers were made redundant. And so, they used their skills to look after themselves.
ELSEWHERE IN LATIN AMERICA
The struggle between left and right may have left a peculiarly bitter legacy in Peru. But it does not stand alone in its discontent.
Elsewhere in Latin America, growing dissatisfaction at rising insecurity and the maldistribution of wealth has led to both organised expressions of anger, and disorganised forms of violence.
In Peru's southeastern neighbour, Bolivia, the last few years have, thanks to rising commodity prices, seen healthy economic growth. Yet most of this has taken place in the capital-intensive natural-gas industry, meaning few have benefited.
There, because the class divide overlaps with the country's ethnic divide to a particularly large degree, marginalisation has taken on an ethnic dimension.
Early in June, popular demonstrations and roadblocks brought the country to an effective standstill, forcing the liberalising president to step down.
The most prominent opposition leader, Evo Morales, who seeks to reverse the tide of liberalisation, is now a serious candidate for the new presidential elections due to take place next year.
Bolivia had caught the fashion of Peru's northwestern neighbour, Ecuador. There, in April, a similar popular rising had helped topple an unpopular president, and brought to power a populist administration.
Rather than use oil revenues to pay down debts, the new government is boosting social spending. But this, warns some oil industry analysts, is leading to underinvestment in oil, and thereby threatening future growth.
So it goes in Chavez's Venezuela, and across the continent where populist politicians are on the rise after a decade in which neoliberal globalisation seemed to be the only game in town.
But the most famous instance of the populist tide so far has come in Brazil, where left-leaning President Lula is calling for a new deal for Third World countries.
In trade negotiations, for instance, he is pressing for developing countries to get much more favourable access to developed markets than they have been given so far in the World Trade Organisation system.
EQUITY, EFFICIENCY STRUGGLE
In Peru, meanwhile, the socialist president from the 1980s, Alan García, is poised to make a comeback. As in Bolivia and Ecuador, Peru's economy has actually been doing well in recent years, thanks to rising prices on its commodity exports.
However, the growing efficiency of those firms, as they ramp up to compete in a global economy, has meant that they have not generated sufficient jobs to absorb the country's unemployed.
Profits have soared; wages have not kept pace. Governed as it is by a deeply unpopular president, Peru seems to be eager to go back to the future in next year's presidential elections, whether it be to Fujimori's authoritarianism or García's populism.
Not everyone has fond memories of Mr. García, though. After all, for all his rousing oratory, Mr. García presided over an economic collapse.
To that charge, some would add that he helped deliver the country into the insurgency of a left grown impatient with his inept attempt at gradual change. But the possibility - however remote it seems for now - of his return raises a question: in the struggle between equity and efficiency that animates economists' debates, is Latin America abandoning the neo-liberal stress on efficiency, returning to the socialist stress on equity?
Perhaps. But it might seem a pity if the only response to the inequities of the neoliberal age were another pendulum swing.
For as in Peru under Garcia, equity without efficiency can lead to crisis. But on the other hand, as Lima's streets reveal, efficiency without equity, the hallmark of the Fujimori years, risks descending into anarchy. And the lesson is not so difficult for someone from Kingston to understand. Surely, we can do better.
John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the department of government at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
