Population Growth, Social Segregation, and Voting Behavior in Lima, Peru, 1940–2016

By Henry A. Dietz

As one of South America’s larger capital cities, Lima, Peru, is remarkably understudied as a demographic and economic entity unto itself. In this important book, Henry Dietz presents an in-depth historical, sociological, and political analysis of a major Latin American city in the post–World War II period. Dietz examines electoral data for Lima’s districts from six censuses conducted between 1940 and 2007, framed against a backdrop of extensive demographic data for the city, to trace the impact of economic collapse and extended insurgency on Lima and its voters. Urbanization in Lima since World War II has at times been rapid, violent, and traumatic, and has resulted in marked social inequalities. Dietz looks at how equity across the city has not in general improved; Lima is today segregated both spatially and socially. Dietz asks if and how a high degree of segregation manifests itself politically as well as socially and spatially. Do urban dwellers living under profound and enduring social segregation consistently support different parties and candidates? As institutional political parties have faded since the 1990s and have been replaced by personalist movements, candidacies, and governments, Dietz explores how voters of different social classes behave. The result is a vital resource for researchers seeking well-contextualized information on elections and economics in Peru. This book will be of interest to scholars of politics or economics, especially in Latin America, but also to a much wider audience interested in how the developments in Lima, Peru, affect the global sociopolitical climate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268106157

Henry A. Dietz

Henry Dietz is professor emeritus in the Department of Government and is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Urban Poverty, Political Participation, and the State: Lima, 1970–1990.

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CHAPTER 1

Lima, 1940–2007

AN ANALYTIC FRAMEWORK AND SOME BACKGROUND TO 1940

Lima es un pañuelo (Lima is a handkerchief).

—Author and date unknown

We would be missing . . . an essential attribute of [Lima] if we did not mention el alma limeña [the soul or spirit of Lima]. Something evanescent but real, faded but still present, hints at the most important moments in [Lima’s] life, or perhaps it is just an historical mention found in a book; the truth is that both natives and visitors find a certain peculiar nostalgia in the physiognomy of the city, in the atmosphere of its streets and ancient corners. . . . Everything here has a history. The name of a street, an inscription on a wall or frontispiece, perpetuates an episode from the past, whether trivial or typical, known or forgotten, that clings desperately to life.

—Raul Porras Barrnechea, quoted in Laos, Lima: La ciudad

de los reyes (1928, 17)

Back in 1919 Lima was but a small town surrounded by miserable and insignificant hamlets. . . . Back then, [Avenida Alfonso Ugarte] was a pathetic, hideous boulevard flanked by dried-out willows, bereft of any kind of pavement. . . . January 1935. Lima glitters. Sunlight boosts the joy of the citizenry. There are parties at the Hotel Bolivar, at the Country Club, at the Club Nacional, at the racetrack. . . . Cars drive speedily on asphalt. The sumptuous furniture of the Palace; . . . music . . . flowers . . . beautiful women. Champagne flows abundantly; popular joy manifests itself in gay laughter.

—Guillermo Rodríguez Mariátegui (1935)

(in Aguirre and Walker 2016, 128–32)

This book rests upon more than half a century’s fascination with one city in Latin America—Lima, the capital of Peru. My first visit to the city was in 1963. I was there for less than a week, but I left overwhelmed and intrigued by what I had seen. I then spent two years in Peru (and a year in Lima) as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1964 to 1966, returned for a year of dissertation field work in 1970–71, and have been going back ever since, for perhaps forty visits and a total of five or six years of residency.

The early and mid-1960s saw Lima struggling with masses of provincial migrants set on coming to Lima to improve, if not their own, then the lives of their children. That time also saw the rise of what became hundreds of squatter settlements and shantytowns, and my Peace Corps years took me into such areas across the city. Just how such individuals and communities managed to cope with myriad hardships and obstacles became a question I wrestled with for many years; simply put, I was trying to understand Lima and its inhabitants as best I could.

Lima is a capital city, but does it resemble other such cities in Latin America? The answer is most certainly yes. For one thing, Lima is and has been since its founding by the Spanish in 1535 what is commonly referred to as a primate city (i.e., a city that exercises a condition of primacy or overwhelming dominance over its rivals). In other words, it dominates everything else from almost any perspective—demographically, economically, financially, socially, culturally, and politically. Most Latin America countries and their capitals follow this same pattern, whether it be Bogotá in Colombia, Santiago in Chile, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Montevideo in Uruguay, Mexico City in Mexico, or La Paz and El Alto in Bolivia. Most of these cities are and have been for decades and centuries several times larger than the second-largest city. Across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Lima has consistently been eight to ten times larger than any other Peruvian city. And the condition of primacy in most cases intensified and deepened during the post–World War II period, when rural-to-urban migration sent endless waves of people toward these largest cities in search of jobs, education, safety, and hope. In these and other ways, Lima resembles other capital cities on the continent.

This not to say, however, that all of these capital cities have reacted to these challenges in like fashion. Each of them has had its own way of coping with massive growth and its myriad problems of jobs, transportation, infrastructure, housing, citizen security, and so on. Moreover, each of these cities has its own flavors and tendencies. For example, Lima has always struck me as a city with endless microhistories. Writers and gossipers have told tales about individual inhabitants, dwellings, structures, street corners, and districts (see, e.g., Gálvez 1943), and gathering up such loose ends appears to have been part of being a limeño (native of the city) for decades and centuries.¹

I have no such intentions or goals. This book concentrates on Lima from 1940 to 2007 and uses census and electoral data to address two basic propositions drawn from a summary statement drafted by the United Nations– Habitat program (see ONU-Habitat 2012, xi–xiii):

1. Urbanization in Lima since World War II has at times been rapid, violent, and traumatic, and has resulted in marked social inequalities.

2. Equity across the city has not in general improved; Lima is today a segregated city spatially as well as socially.

Much of the book deals with the pace of urbanization after World War II, and with the shapes and contours of socioeconomic inequality in Lima. But then I go further and examine a topic that the Habitat report leaves unaddressed: if and/or how a high degree of segregation has manifested itself "spatially as well as socially and politically" (my addition and em phasis to proposition 2). That is, have socio-residential inequality and segregation led to identifiable political behaviors?

Restricting my analysis to a single city requires asking what kind of generalizations can be made from a single case. In response, confining an investigation to one entity (country, region, state, or city) does not mean that conclusions are therefore limited to that case. Any entity can be taken apart, and the city of Lima is no exception. It can be disaggregated into components—in this case, its districts—that can then be compared with one another at a single point in time and over time. I can thereby examine how those subunits that make up the metropolitan area differ in terms of socioeconomic status (SES), and I can generate more nuanced and detailed conclusions than would be possible on a larger (e.g., cross-city or cross-national) scale. In other words, disaggregating Lima means being able to keep a whole range of factors or variables constant, which is difficult at best in cross-national studies.²

The consistent focus of this book is Lima, and I do little to compare electoral behavior in the city with the rest of the country. Such research could of course be done; census and electoral data are available (at least since 1981) on a nationwide basis down to the district level, and addressing how and why Lima differs (or does not differ) from the rest of the country in terms of segregation and voting constitutes a critical question. But to do so, disaggregating Lima down to its districts and comparing them across time is not only a necessary first step in that direction but is also, from my perspective, both a means to an end and an end in itself.

Since it rests upon official census and electoral data, the book has certain limitations.³ The smallest unit reported on in every census is the district. The six censuses I examine here (1940, 1961, 1972, 1981, 1993, and 2007; see Note on Methodology in this chapter, below) all report data for this unit (and larger units, such as provinces and departments). I have not incorporated any of the many public opinion surveys that have been done in Lima since about 1980; my aim from the start has been to see how much information I can glean from census data alone. Fortunately, electoral data are also reported by districts, meaning that census and electoral data have both utilized the same unit of analysis since 1940, a fact that has made writing this book far easier than it might otherwise have been.

To emphasize once again: the unit of analysis throughout this book is the individual district within the city of Lima. I can discuss the characteristics of a given district, but I can say nothing about an individual inhabitant of that district. For example, an upscale district such as San Isidro may rank high on a variety of socioeconomic indicators, but that does not mean that every person residing in San Isidro has a high-paying job, is well- educated, or lives in luxurious housing. Or another example: lower-class districts such as Villa El Salvador may have supported candidate X in an election, but no inferences about the behavior of a specific voter living in such a district are possible.⁴

It should thus be clear what this book is and what it is not about. It is not a narrative history of Lima, nor is it a narrative of any of its districts. It is also not a history of political parties or of political leadership in the city, and it provides only a minimal amount of information about specific political parties and/or elections. It draws very little on secondary sources. Instead, I have long been interested in seeing just how much can be extracted from census and electoral data alone, and this book shows what I have been able to do.

SES AND VOTING

From the beginning, one aim of this book has been to see whether a range of widely accepted propositions dealing with SES and voting behavior are upheld in a focused, single-city case. In general, these propositions argue that low-income groups tend to support either leftist parties and candidates and/or populist candidates, while wealthier groups tend to vote for more well-established and/or conservative candidates. The general argument is straightforward: the Left presumably offers a strong and more just alternative to the status quo (under which the poor suffer), while the Right offers either the maintenance of the status quo and/or greater benefits or protection of privilege.

This basic argument goes back in the social sciences a long way. For example, Lipset wrote: The most impressive single fact about political party support is that in virtually every economically developed country the lower-income groups vote mainly for parties of the left, while the higher income groups vote mainly for parties of the right (Lipset 1960, 234).

More than half a century later, Carlin, Singer, and Zechmeister (2015, 63) echoed Lipset’s claim: Generally speaking, one can expect traditionally economically marginalized groups, such as the lower classes, to be more supportive of left-leaning parties that emphasize welfare programs and endorse social equality as a goal. But the authors also note that a societal divide in and of itself is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition to generate group-based voting patterns (66).

Indeed, Mainwaring, Torcal, and Somma (2015) come at this same issue as follows: In contemporary Latin America, having a competitive left-of-center presidential contender seems to be a necessary though not sufficient condition to produce class voting (70). Based on these two observations, I would propose that a societal divide and a competitive leftist contender may both be necessary conditions for class voting to occur, but the presence of either or even of both may not be sufficient for leftist electoral success to occur. The authors warn that class voting must be mobilized by viable left-of-center presidential candidates. . . . Class is an objective condition, but class voting depends on the political activation of class issues. This activation of class issues does not occur automatically. In Latin American party systems without viable left-of-center presidential candidates, class voting has been feeble (70).

I test some of these propositions for subnational (metropolitan and district mayoral) elections in Lima. Since 1940, metropolitan Lima has witnessed vast disparities in class and SES develop and solidify across its districts. Because districts have since 1980 regularly held their own mayoral elections in conjunction with the metropolitan mayoral race, Mainwaring and colleagues’ claim can be probed and tested in some detail both within and across districts and over time. How, for example, do demonstrably poor districts vote if a viable leftist candidate is present in the metropolitan mayoral race and/or in their own district race? And how do they vote if such a candidate is absent?

As background, in the 1980–88 period, the Left in Lima played a significant role from time to time and had some successes, but it experienced more failures. Just where, when, and under what conditions leftist support emerged in Lima is one of the major questions that I pursue. But I also want to see if political parties and movements across the ideological spectrum (not just on the left) also experienced the same mixed bag of results—that is, either having restricted support from one social class or another and/or being unable to maintain even minimal support across elections. And although these questions have been investigated in a variety of national settings, looking at them in a restricted subnational setting where a whole raft of variables can be held constant offers an advantageous way of addressing them.

To test such propositions requires (1) an election (or a series of elections) with ideological choices from the left to the center to the right, (2) a means of characterizing groups or units as varying across a scale of SES or well-being, and (3) a way of tracking electoral behavior not only for a specific election but also over an extended period of time. The demographic and electoral data assembled in this book allow me to meet these three requirements.

EXIT, VOICE, AND LOYALTY

But a second and somewhat broader but still overlapping analytic concern asks under what conditions various groups or classes may change their voting behaviors over time. Why, for example, might a city as a whole back a centrist mayoral candidate but at the same time show significant support for either leftist or conservative candidates on the district level? Or if lower- class districts vote for a leftist in one election but not in the following, where do their votes go?

To address such questions, I draw upon Albert Hirschman’s (1970) treatment of alternative choices or behavior for consumers faced with deciding which firm to patronize. Hirschman posits that a consumer may (1) remain loyal to the firm, (2) voice complaints about the firm, or (3) exit the firm and go to another. Exit has traditionally been a topic of interest for economists, who are curious about why a customer leaves a firm, thereby using the market to defend his welfare or improve his position (15). The concept of exit is attractively clear-cut: the customer either stays with the firm or leaves it. Political scientists, on the other hand, have been more concerned with voice, which in contrast to exit is for Hirschman a graduated, messy concept that ranges all the way from faint grumbling to violent protest (16). Exit is economic activity par excellence; voice is political action. But Hirschman also offers a third option: loyalty, which applies to individuals who stay with a firm and who either actively participate in actions designed to change . . . policies and practices (38) or who simply refuse to exit and suffer in silence, confident that things will soon get better (76).

Each of these behavioral options can be found in electoral politics. First, voters can show loyalty to a candidate or party, even if that candidate is unable to slow or reverse a decline in the voter’s well-being. For a political party, of course, loyalty over time is a sine qua non to be devoutly nurtured among its followers and those independent or undecided voters it hopes to attract to its causes and its candidates. Second, adherents of a political party can attempt to practice voice through complaints or threats to abandon the party if it does not or cannot respond to their needs; non members may, however, find it frustrating, time-consuming, and difficult to persuade a party to listen to their complaints. And third, citizens may exercise the exit option by switching votes from one party to another, by not voting for traditional parties, by not voting at all, or by sympathizing with or in fact joining a group whose aim is the downfall of the entire political system.

Hirschman’s scheme is especially useful since this book examines presidential and municipal elections in Lima over more than six decades, a period during which political parties came and went. Voting data can reveal a good deal about the presence or absence of Hirschman’s alternative behaviors over time and across types of elections. For example, did some districts practice loyalty from one national election to another, while others showed exit? Or more broadly, as political parties disappeared, where did their adherents go? Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the different socioeconomic strata of Lima utilized one or more of these options. Most notably, during the 1980s, Lima’s voters from across the socioeconomic spectrum exited from the country’s existing political parties in search of alternatives; sometimes these different strata found a common alternative, and sometimes not, but they all deserted the older political parties for personalist-led movements. It is during this period in particular that a combination of data on socioeconomic electoral behavior with Hirschman’s scheme becomes especially useful.

It should therefore be clear that many of the arguments and issues dealing with class voting mesh nicely with Hirschman’s be havioral triad, and I make use of each of these separately and jointly. These two frameworks—socioeconomic disparities and three possible electoral behaviors—may assist in understanding what has been going on in Lima since 1940. Jointly, they offer a powerful framing device for the book as whole, and I return to them in detail in chapter 8.

POLITICAL PARTIES AND POLITICS, 1940–2016

During the period under discussion (1940–2016), Peru went through numerous stages in terms of the goals of party politics and democracy. The difficulty and/or tension in making these two goals match up was evident at many times, and even today (2018) there is a substantial gap that separates them, despite the many changes that occurred over time (see Tanaka 1998).

In 1940, for example, electoral politics was a highly constrained elite game; suffrage was restricted to (but mandatory for) Peruvian male, literate citizens over the age of twenty-one. Elections were held only for the presidency and the Congress; all municipal officials (including all mayors) were appointed by the president. Political parties were led by individuals with strong name recognition, and military intervention was never far away (it had last occurred during 1934–39). By 2018, suffrage was universal (and still mandatory), the last episode of military rule had ended in 1980, and all local officials had been elected since 1980. Fundamental accomplishments, to be sure, but gained by a circuitous route that saw two extended periods of military rule (1948–56 and 1968–80), the formation and then collapse of not only separate political parties but also (during 1980–89) of an entire political party system. In this latter period, all of the previously semi-institutional major players (AP, PPC, APRA, the Left) that had held power in one form or another (the presidency and/or the mayoralty of Lima) disappeared, to be replaced by personalist followerships led by a specific individual. All parties followed this same path, whether it was AP and its leader Fernando Belaúnde, twice president but without whom the party was a shadow; APRA, the oldest and seemingly most highly institutionalized party in the country but one that could not avoid a slow death in the first decade of the twentieth-first century; PPC, never a national contender but one that had some successes in Lima; and the Left, which had some victories in Lima in the early 1980s but fell to bitter inter necine struggles.

All these changes are discussed in more detail in the following chapters as they became manifest in the city of Lima and across its various districts. The success (or failure) of a specific political party did not necessarily rest on how well or poorly it did in Lima. But because of the city’s primacy and because it was home to a substantial proportion of the country’s eligible voters, no candidate or party could do poorly in Lima and hope to win.

A BRIEF SKETCH: LIMA FROM 1876 TO 1931

Before proceeding, however, I want to provide some background to Lima and its characteristics and growth prior to the national census of 1940. Its predecessor, the Census of 1876, looked at a Lima that was so different and so removed from the twentieth century that any examination of it would require a historian’s touch. And its data were gathered in such different methods and with such fundamentally different ground rules that comparing it to the mid- or late twentieth century would require a separate book of its own.

However, between 1876 and 1940, the city of Lima undertook several metropolitan censuses, as mayors and city officials tired of waiting for the national government to mount a national census. Here I provide a brief look at three of those censuses (1908, 1920, and 1931) for an overview of the growth of the city. Electoral data for any elections that took place during this period are available only on the national level (if at all) and are therefore passed over here.

Lima in 1876

The year 1876 was not,⁵ in retrospect, a propitious year for Peru or for Lima. In 1868–70, President José Balta hired Henry Meiggs, an American engineer, to tear down the old walls of the city to encourage expansion. The economy was supported and driven by the export of guano, and the prosperity of the city and the country as a whole rested on London guano purchases and banking and on the myriad loans that Peru accrued, despite their somewhat precarious foundation. A mere three years after the census, the country found itself involved in a bloody conflict, primarily with its southern neighbor Chile. The War of the Pacific lasted four years (1879–83), during which Lima was occupied by Chilean troops and the city devastated. The war brought great damage, physical and psychological, to Peru.

In 1876, what most observers have labeled the Age of the Oligarchy/Aristocracy (la República aristocrática) was well established. Peru’s president was Mariano Ignacio Prado, a member of one of Lima’s iconic families. Political parties, especially the Partido Cívico, were machines of the upper classes; only literate males over twenty-one could vote, which meant that political participation was severely limited, but that political com petition for power was vigorous. Elections were held more or less as scheduled (except during the War of the Pacific and postwar periods), but electoral democracy was still a fragile blossom indeed.

The Census of 1876 portrays a city that consisted (as it had for centuries) of a large central district (Lima Cercado) with a dozen or so much smaller suburbs (see table 1.1). These latter were connected to the central area by horse and wagon trails and (starting in 1857) by rail, but the lack of easy mobility meant that these outlying districts shared little of the urban life of the downtown. Lima Cercado had a population of 101,500, or 83 percent of the provincial total; the next largest district, Chorrillos, had 4,329, or 3.6 percent.

Table 1.1. Population of Lima by Districts, 1876

Lima Cercado was classified in the census as totally urban, as were Chorrillos and Ancón (despite its minuscule population of 632 people); the other districts of the city ranged from more than 50 percent to under 5 percent urban. Miraflores, which would become a major residential and commercial district in the twentieth century, had but 1,107 residents; slightly more than half were listed as urban.

Just as Lima Cercado dominated the city, so also did the city dominate the rest of the country. Arequipa (to the south) was Peru’s second- largest city; it had a population (urban and rural) of 30,932, or one-quarter that of Lima. Trujillo, in the north and the nation’s third-largest city, had 10,538 people, or less than a tenth of Lima.

Lima in 1908

Lima’s next major census⁶ occurred nearly a third of a century later, and it painted a picture of a city that had largely recovered from the War of the Pacific. The age of guano had ended and was replaced by an economy that focused on exports, such as agricultural goods (sugar, wool, cotton), mining, and other raw commodities, transported in substantial part by rail and ship into and through Lima. As these national changes took place, Lima also started to change; some new major streets (e.g., Avenida Brazil) connected the downtown center to Magdalena del Mar and other coastal suburbs, electricity and gas became more common, and potable water appeared in a few districts. Politically, the postwar period saw the Age of the Aristocracy still firmly in