Lima’s ‘Wall of Shame’ and the Art of Building Barriers
LIMA, Peru—They came by night, Raquel Yanac remembers, the throngs of construction workers with cement trucks and police, ready to build the wall meant to keep her out.
Yanac, 38, lives with her children on the edge of the great divide here. Their home lies amid a sea of multicolored plywood-and-metal-sheet shacks that make up the city’s slums. Just a stone’s throw away is Casuarinas, a neighborhood of startling luxury, with bright-white mansions and pools twice the size of her home.
And Casuarinas, Yanac learned that night three decades ago, wanted them gone.
“In one week, they had built up practically the entire wall, and people couldn’t do anything about it,” she told me.
The border would soon become infamous in Lima, and indigent Peruvians dubbed it “The Wall of Shame”: a six-mile-long concrete structure dividing the city’s rich and poor. Today, the nearly 10-foot-high barrier, topped with barbed wire, runs
