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Peru Urban, Rural, and Regional Populations
The change in distribution from rural to urban has been
profound: the urban population rose from 47 percent in
1961 to an
estimated 70 percent in 1990. By that time, Peru's
population had
reached a point where its configurations were thus
substantially
different than they were a generation earlier, largely
because of
the enormous growth of metropolitan Lima, which includes
the
seaport of Callao. Indeed, four of the largest political
districts of greater Lima began as squatter settlements
and now
would rank among the nation's top ten cities if they had
been
counted separately. The leading cities in Peru represent a
mix of
old colonial places--Lima, Arequipa, Trujillo, Cusco
(Cuzco),
Piura, and Ica--and newly emergent ones, such as Huancayo,
Chimbote, Iquitos, and Juliaca, whose new elites derive
mostly
from the highly mobile provincial middle and lower classes
(see
table 6, Appendix). In the Sierra, Juliaca, because of its
role
in marketing and transportation, surpassed the
departmental
capital of Puno in both size and importance to become the
most
important city south of Cusco.
Burgeoning cities, such as the industrial port of
Chimbote,
had a kind of raw quality to them in the early 1990s, with
blocks
and blocks of recently constructed one- and two-story
buildings
and a majority of streets neither paved nor cobbled. As
the site
of Peru's prestige industry--an electrically powered steel
mill--
and as a major port for the anchovy industry, Chimbote
attracted
bilingual mestizos and cholos, who continued to
pour into
the city from the highlands of Ancash, especially the
provinces
of Huaylas, Corongo, Pallasca, and Sihuas. The migrants'
dynamism, powered by a will to progress and modernize,
built the
city from a quaint seaside town of 4,200 residents in 1940
to
296,000 in 1990, with neither the approval nor significant
assistance of government planners or development programs.
Although the energy and growth of Chimbote was impressive,
the
lack of urban infrastructure in the basic services,
absence of
attention to environmental impacts, and totally inadequate
municipal budgets led directly to converting Chimbote Bay,
the
best natural port on Peru's coast, into a cesspool of
industrial
and urban wastes (meters thick in places). Even smaller
coastal
boom towns, such as Supe, have suffered the same outcomes.
It was
not surprising that the 1991 cholera outbreak should have
started
in Chimbote.
Just as the cities have grown, the rural sector's share
of
the population has declined. Nevertheless, in the early
1990s
there were still more persons living in the rural regions
than
ever before in the nation's history. In fact, the rural
population in 1991 equaled the total population of the
country in
1961.
At first, the country seemed to relish its growth even
though
the population explosion distressed the urbane
sensibilities of
the elite and the comfortable middle classes. Through its
increase in size, Peru gained stature internationally and
maintained a superiority of sorts vis-à-vis Ecuador,
Bolivia, and
Chile, its regional rivals. It could be maintained that
Peru's
policy was to let the population problem "solve itself"
through
spontaneous migration by which people found their own
solutions
for the maldistribution of wealth, services, resources,
and
power. The vast and growing squatter settlements in Lima,
however, gave many serious pause, and alternatives were
proposed
(see Employment and Wages, Poverty, and Income Distribution
, ch.
3).
Data as of September 1992
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