People and noise

National Identity

Peru runs an national identity card system, known as DNI (Documento Nacional de Identidad). I’m pretty sure the card doesn’t contain anything like the biometric data that people have been campaigning against in the UK, but nonetheless, it’s a pretty big deal. Ownership of the card is obligatory, and without it you can’t vote or legally get married, and a great number of companies will not employ you. There’s probably a bunch of other things you can’t do without it too. As a result, everyone has one.

Or so I thought.

A friend of ours recently returned from Rio Corrientes, where she had been doing some research with indigenous communities. While there, she was confronted with a problem. A man had abandoned his wife and seven children, and gone to live with a new partner in Iquitos. This left the wife without support or income, and of course still with a big family to feed. As a result, the decision had been made that the oldest son would have to seek work with the petrol company (the only local source of employment) so that the family would have some money to support themselves.

Can you guess the catch?

Yes, you need a DNI to work for the petrol company. Much worse than that, however, you have to go in person to collect your DNI, and, for some reason that I simply can’t fathom, you can’t do this in Corrientes. In order to get their DNI, which would seem to be a basic necessity for life as a Peruvian citizen, the people of the communities have to take the ferry to Iquitos, a journey which will take a minimum of two days. As well as the cost of the ticket, they will most likely have to find somewhere to stay in Trompeteros (the local administrative centre where the ferry stops, which for some unexplicable reason does not have facility to register local citizens for DNI) and in Iquitos, and of course some money for food. And they’ll need to arrange all this again for their return journey.

How was the abandoned family expected to find this money, to make this first step along the road to supporting themselves? Of course, in this particular case the finger of blame points firmly at the father, but the situation could be the same had the father died of natural causes, or been killed in an accident. There are doubtless many more families in communities throughout the country who are faced with similar problems, and cannot begin to earn, vote, or basically be a part of Peruvian society.

In this case our friend found a way to help the family, and I am hopeful that one day registration might be available in Trompeteros (I am going to look into what can be done to encourage this) but this is just one example of the neglect and incompetence that local and national governments seem to show towards the more isolated and impoverished communities of Peru. Health and education provision is insufficient, poor, or in some cases non-existent. There is currently a humanitarian crisis in the Peruvian Andes, where cold weather has caused the death of at least 433 people (figures taken from the start of August) the majority of whom are children under the age of 5. The inadequacy of the health provision in these regions has played a massive role in the appalling number of deaths from illnesses that should be preventable. (See this excellent post from Peru-based blogger Barbara Drake for more information http://americaninlima.com/2009/08/02/journalists-cold-deaths-andes/).

During the indigenous protests earlier this year, Peru’s president Alan Garcia mocked the protesters’ claims, stating that they were “not first-class citizens”, a spectacularly ill-judged comment that was seized upon by those supportive of the indigenous cause (though not to any great extent by the Peruvian media). I believed that he was clumsily indicating not that the indigenous people were beneath normal Peruvian citizens but rather that they were not the kind of special Peruvian citizen that would receive preferential treatment at the expense of others. (Which of these readings is more damning, I’ll leave for you to decide.)

The fact that nothing is done to allow people in many communities to register for the national identity scheme, however, suggests not just that they are beneath normal citizens, but that there is little desire to treat them as citizens at all.

Some additional notes
1.My despair at this situation was compounded by the fact there was an article in the local newspaper yesterday expressing concern that people were travelling on the ferries from the communities without DNI.
2.Apologies to those of you taken aback by this website’s sudden shift from its previous humourous travel blog status. There’ll be more of that in future. I suspect there’ll be more of this too.
3.Today (9th August) is the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People.

2 Comments »

1. 

   The carelessness of the State about these areas far away from Lima is really outraging.

   Comment by M. Isabel — August 12, 2009 @ 4:24 pm

2. 

   Hi, Tom. I think I’m following you on Twitter. Thanks for posting about these important issues. I had heard from a friend working in the Amazon that lots of the people she knows there don’t have DNIs, and your friend’s experience with this family shows how potentially devastating it can be lack this documentation. Also, I’ve heard that because people lack DNIs in the Amazon, they’re not officially counted in the Census/official population figures for Peru. And people who don’t “exist” are, obviously, not people who qualify for social services. Makes me think that the bureaucrats deliberately make it hard for Amazonians to get DNIs.

   Thanks for the compliments re my blog post.

   I find that writing about Peru means alternating between the fun and the surreal, and the tragic and awful. I used to worry about maintaining a consistent tone on my blog. I don’t know if that’s possible if you write honestly about what’s important in Peru. This is a land of extremes.

   Comment by Barb — August 12, 2009 @ 6:12 pm

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