Previously published on the Journal Peru website.

During Peru’s 2006 elections, a giant billboard of presidential candidate Alan Garcia towered over the La Marina Avenue in Arequipa, promising “potable water for all”.

The residents of Villa Ecologica would be most pleased to see that particular election promise kept. In one of the newest and poorest of the pueblos jovenes on the city outskirts, the sense of thirst is as palpable as the dust clouds blowing along the dirt streets.

With barely 100 millimeters annual rainfall, Arequipa relies for its water on the river Chili, which wends its way down from the Andes. But the new settlements, which sprawl to the north up the dry slopes of the city’s iconic volcano El Misti, are isolated from the river and the town water supply. Residents make do with communal wells, filled weekly at the cost of $20 USD a truckload.

Pueblo joven (”young town”) is the Peruvian equivalent of the Colombian comuna or Brazilian favela. The different names represent a universal phenomenon in Latin America - the migration of the poor and landless to the marginal zones of cities, hoping for a fresh start and a better life.

First impressions of Villa Ecologica lead you to question exactly what it’s better than. One-room dwellings of crudely plastered stone blocks are scattered across the hillside, looking barely tall enough for a person to stand up in. Stray dogs run madly between piles of rubble, and political graffiti is scrawled across many walls. On the hillside beyond the settlement, about fifteen people wearing face masks work in a little inferno of heat and dust, gathering together heaps of shattered rock.

It all looks rather post-apocalyptic, like a scene from one of the Mad Max movies.

But the president of the Villa Ecologica community association, Vladimiro Quinto, and his associate, Carlos Fuentes, are proud of how far the township has come in its short history. Six years ago, Vladimiro, Carlos, and about 60 others began to squat here, on what was then unoccupied public land.

This is the way most new settlements start, they explain. A group of landless people get together, and form a registered association, which then petitions local government to allocate it an area of empty terrain.

“That’s an impossibly long bureaucratic process, so you have to cut it short”, says Carlos. You pick a day - call it ‘D-day’ - and just invade the area”.

The men are unapologetic about the technical illegality of their actions. “In Peru, 70 percent of people don’t have formal employment. How are you going to get credit to buy land, when the bank demands proof of where you work?” asks Carlos.

They remain bitter about the attitude of the local municipal government. “Instead of helping us, they made things difficult for us every step of the way”, says Vladimiro. He says that the first six months were the hardest, when they had to camp out and resist several attempts by the police to remove them. Gradually, as they constructed their dwellings and developed the township, they won acceptance.

Now, there are about 2,500 families settled in Villa Ecologica, with more planning to come. From the top of a rubble heap, Carlos and Vladimiro show me a panorama of the township, pointing to evidence of geometric order and careful planning.

“We worked hard”, asserts Carlos. “We leveled the streets and made drainage channels. We made sure the plots are all the same size. We even follow the town planning rules, with a certain proportion of ‘green space’ set aside (he points to a semi-complete concrete football pitch). The suburbs down the hill don’t conform to those rules”.

Their six-year struggle for property rights has finally met with success; in June 2006 the provincial government began to process an application for titles to the approximately 3500 lots in Villa Ecologica. But the battle to get basic amenities such as running water is just beginning.

Down the hill, at the Selva Alegre council offices, the local mayor and the chief engineer admit they’re well aware of the water issue for Villa Ecologica and other pueblos jovenes. But it’s not a simple matter of connecting them to the town supply.

“That would be very expensive for just a couple of thousand families”, says Mayor Antonio Marquez. “It needs to be part of an integrated project which can benefit more people”. Such an integrated project is actually underway, he claims.

The chief engineer sketches a diagram showing how they plan to extend a pipeline to a high point on the slopes of Misti, from where a new reservoir will direct water downhill to the five pueblos jovenes in the area. There’s no fixed timeline for when water will reach Villa Ecologica, though the mayor says that plans for the first phase of the project are drawn up, and the provincial government has agreed funding. “Local elections are in November, so we have to at least make a start, to show people something is happening.”

The mayor is from Alan Garcia’s APRA party, and when asked about Garcia’s grand billboard promise he nods his head. “Yes, with Alan as president, all this will happen more quickly”, he says. The community leaders of Villa Ecologica are skeptical. “We’ll believe it when we see it”, they say. “In Cono Norte (another pueblo joven, in the northwestern outskirts) they’ve gone twenty years without access to water”.

For now, residents have to drag heavy buckets several blocks from the communal wells, to supply all their drinking, washing and cooking needs. Chlorine is regularly added as a disinfectant, but inevitably it’s a struggle to keep the wells clean and well-maintained. Drinking-water quality is a key factor in the chronic levels of stomach parasites in this and other poor communities.

Despite this and numerous other health, environmental and social problems, people in the township seem to have an incorrigible optimism. They’ve already created something from nothing, and are determined to build on their achievements. Carlos points back down the hill to the now well-established suburbs of Independencia and Graficos, which also grew up informally from beginnings as pueblos jovenes. “Thirty years ago, they were just like us”, he says.

As Alan Garcia and nationalist rabble rouser Ollanta Humala faced off in the elections, each had their supporters in Villa Ecologica. But the dominant attitude, as in much of Peru, was one of cynicism. The macroeconomic issues which attracted paragraphs in the foreign press - arguments about free trade and who controls the country’s gas and mineral resources - are largely irrelevant for people who don’t participate in the formal economy. Without access to property, credit, formal employment, or basic infrastructure, their hard work and entrepreneurial skills are directed towards simple survival.

In the end, Alan Garcia won the day, advocating “responsible change”, and more help for the poor and marginalized. One of his first objectives is to bring running water to some of the many informal settlements surrounding Lima, an initiative which those in Arequipa hope will eventually extend beyond the capital. In the November 2006 local body elections, Antonio Marquez was also re-elected as mayor of Alto Selva Alegre, and will have the opportunity to progress plans to extend the municipality’s water supply.

In between electoral cycles, politicians will do well to recognize that practical assistance for those in the pueblos jovenes is less a moral burden than an investment in the country’s future. Resilient and determined, the people who currently struggle on the margins of Peruvian society may be its greatest untapped resource.