“Go up, let’s escape from Peru”: book shows testimonies of those who left the country and have not returned

The image shows a woman with dark glasses in a car. She opens the door while, outside, a man who has fallen to the floor looks at her. “Come up, let’s escape from Latin America,” she says. Variations of this “meme” travel the networks; a form of humor in the face of regional reality. And between jokes, a story is guessed, or perhaps thousands of these, according to the news from two weeks ago: “Six out of ten young Peruvians consider leaving the country” (IEP).

Whether for work or studies, Peruvians are leaving: in 2022 alone, more than 401 thousand Peruvians have left the country and have not returned (EC Data – Migrations), almost quadruple of those who left in 2021, 110,000. Thus, leaving the country is back in the conversation, and it is not the first time this has happened. The figures, says lawyer Luis Pásara, confirm the difficulties that exist in Peru, but above all the narrowness. “The narrowness to make a place for you, to recognize you and give you a place like the one that each person deserves according to their abilities, merits and efforts. I think that in that sense Peru gives very little to Peruvians“said the academic from his home in Madrid, Spain.

Pásara has edited the book “Why not live in Peru?”, published by the Literal imprint of the PUCP editorial fund and which compiles texts from various voices written at three different moments in our history: 1981, the beginning of the conflict internal assembly; 1998, in the heart of Fujimontesinism; and 2021-2022, the aftermath of Covid-2019. Three key moments in the history of Peru, where the first two included texts published respectively in the magazines “Hueso Húmero” and “Márgenes”, while in the last batch they were commissioned by the editor, which includes contributions from Margarita Saona, Raúl Tola , Kathya Araujo and even Mario Vargas Llosa. Here, an interview with Pásara.

—It is understood that the reflection on Peru’s migration abroad has always been in the discourse.

I think it is a very old thing and this seems to me to be one of the interesting things about the book. There are many people who consider leaving Peru today and think, first, that it is a purely individual matter, that it is a matter for each person. And second, he does not know that this question or possibility has been asked by many Peruvians over the last 50 years.

—Luis, citing your own testimony, you mention that there was no place in Peru for you if you wanted to change it. It’s a little sad, right?

Well, it’s sadder; It wasn’t just me who had that feeling. There is a very dramatic case in the book, that of a doctor from San Marcos who tries to return to Peru after having trained in the United States. And they simply don’t let him, they put him at the back of the line, as if he had to start his entire teaching career. [él ya había enseñado ahí]. So there are moments when you feel, to different degrees, that the country expels you, makes you feel that you are expendable, that it doesn’t need you. Of course, Peru doesn’t say that, which has no mouth, but your interlocutors tell you. They make you feel like there is no place for you.

—Is Peru an ungrateful country?

I think it’s quite ungrateful. It is ungrateful, as this book demonstrates with some testimonies, for people who have tried to do something from outside and the country does not give them space to do it. But this is also seen in other areas. I am an old man, and I am old enough to realize how easily Peru has forgotten the people who either tried to do something or did it. This impresses me a lot.

—If it doesn’t give opportunities to those who stay, it doesn’t seem to give them to those who leave either. It has always been like this?

Well, I think it is a phenomenon that has been getting worse. For example, if you allow me again to use my case as a testimonial, in the years when I left university there were not too many problems finding a place in the job market. That has changed very radically. I imagine that the people who today consider leaving Peru are largely because they don’t have work. And I’m not talking about the most depressed, poor and unprotected sectors, which curiously do not migrate. Those who migrate have certain conditions, certain preparation; I’m not talking about university preparation, but they handle a trade, for example. So those people don’t find a place in Peru or they find a miserable place, right? That is not proportional to your preparation and your effort. For example, think about the thousands of compatriots we have in Argentina and Chile, who are not in the book but who carry out modest jobs there that give them much better prospects.

—Now that you mention that the most depressed sectors are not those that emigrate, I had a slightly different reading. It seemed to me that the book included people of various levels of privilege and that wanting to leave was a constant.

If you look at the graphs that I collect from Ipsos, the question about whether you have thought about going to Peru is then broken down by socioeconomic levels. The highest frequency is in levels A, B and C. In D and E they decline. I believe that these levels, the most depressed, are people in whom the scarcity of resources in every sense is very great. He who plans to leave the country first knows that there are countries to which he could go and has an idea not because he reads about it in a book, but because he has a friend or relative who lives abroad and has told him that there are certain conditions there. People from the lowest sectors of the country do not have those resources, not in the economic sense, but in the sense of having someone to turn to. This probably explains why this person considers the possibility of leaving in much lower proportions than the rest.

—Along those same lines, is leaving Peru the same as leaving Lima?

[Luis piensa un momento antes de responder] Well, I have not seen differentiated migration statistics; Lima versus the rest of the country. It is common that the migrant who goes from the interior of the country, sometimes to the capital of the region and then to Lima, is better prepared to leave Peru. He has already gone through a migratory experience, he has an idea of ​​the costs, the difficulties, the pain that a migrant goes through – which are always many – but at the same time he hopes that what he can get out of that experience is worth the grief. Those who have always been from Lima may not be as trained to leave as those who were born in an inland province and have gone through this process.

—Luis, the book has several lapidary phrases. I do not forget what Alberto Guzmán said in 1981 and I am going to quote it here: “At least in Paris I live free from abuse of authority.” In Peru this situation has not changed at all, right?

Or it has changed for the worse. Look at this decree that has made a police practice the norm, which is intervention. One is not detained, but rather one is intervened. And they can intervene on you for up to four hours before releasing you again. This is simply an abuse, the pretext is given that there is a lot of crime, but crime is not combated by stopping those who walk by at random. It is fought with intelligence work. So I think yes, the scope for abuse is much greater. I think this is because the Police are much more corrupt than they were before. Many times the abuses aim to extort the citizen. So I believe that the extent of corruption, which includes the Police, Prosecutor’s Office, judges and of course the government sector, makes abuse much more frequent.

“I think it is quite ungrateful. It is ungrateful, as this book demonstrates with some testimonies, for the people who have tried to do something from outside and the country does not give them the space to do it.”

Luis Pasara

—And to what extent does this feeling of oppression, of there being problems in every instance of government, added to corruption, influence someone deciding to leave the country? Or is it too high a topic and the person does not see it as close?

I think that people perceive it and it seems to me that what drives what you have elegantly called “problems”, this series of degeneration phenomena that exist in public institutions, I think what encourages it is hopelessness. And hopelessness is the main subjective motivation that one has to migrate. Hopelessness consists of saying “there is no solution here.” This will continue to be the case, because it is getting worse. The Peru that I left almost 40 years ago was relatively much better than the Peru of today.

—I was very struck by what Kathya Araujo said in the book about the characteristic moral abuse of Peruvians, making fun of others and then passing it off as if it were a joke. Is Peru a society of institutionalized bullying?

I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it could be. The jokes in Peru are very cruel. Look, I have lived in seven countries apart from Peru. And that way of joking about others, that hurtful way of making fun is very peculiar to Peru. I had not thought of bullying as a formula to label her, but it is very cruel, very harsh and sometimes when it is a person who has less capacity to react it is extremely humiliating.

—Returning to the topic of migration, Mario Vargas Llosa said that “being Peruvian is an incurable evil.” Is leaving the country then a form of treatment? A palliative, perhaps?

It depends on how you live being outside. There are people, few, I think, who forget about Peru. They go abroad, make a life, get married and Peru is a very distant, very forgotten reference. Then there are those who leave, but they don’t leave. I have met Peruvians in the United States who have everything in their house as if they were in Peru; from the effigy of the Lord of Miracles to Doña Pepa’s nougat. There is a version that is a little more painful, which is the Peruvian who says that he has forgotten about Peru and you realize that he has not. Once I met a Peruvian in a restaurant here in Spain, and from the way he spoke I realized that he was Peruvian. And you know that the ways of truth are difficult to erase. I told him “you are Peruvian”; “No,” he told me. But he backed down: “Well, my mother was Peruvian, but I’m not Peruvian.” This is a very serious case because they not only reject, but deny being Peruvian.

—I read the compilation just in the week in which the IEP launches its survey in which more and more Peruvians want to leave the country. How do you take these new figures?

As very firm indicators of how difficult it is to live in Peru. And I think this confirms some of the important things that the participants in the book say: the difficulties, the denials, the narrowness that exists in Peru for all intents and purposes. The tightness to make a place for you, to recognize you, to give you a place like the one that each person deserves according to their abilities, merits and efforts. I think that in that sense Peru gives very little to Peruvians.

—I don’t want to end this interview without asking you the opposite question to the title of your book: Why would someone want to stay and live in Peru?

Once again, the data are interesting to answer that question and not answer it in a whimsical way: it is very clear that those who least want to leave Peru are those from the so-called sector A, those who have the most resources, are better settled and have certain people in Peru. privileges that range from having one or more employees in the house, to having a series of facilities for what most Peruvians do not have; to reach a minister, to carry out a procedure, to obtain some favor. Those people who have the best resources have much fewer reasons to leave.

—Cecilia Méndez, historian, has said that including her testimony in this book without asking permission has been, and I am going to quote her, “unethical.” How do you respond to him?

I requested permission from the heirs of the magazine’s editors; They gave me permission. And secondly, the magazine “Márgenes” from which his testimony was taken has on the flap an express authorization to reproduce the content of the magazine as long as the source is cited. I regret that she will misinterpret this inclusion, but I have not been able to help it.