REAL STORIES – LATIN AMERICA
PERU – Lucy’s Story
— Dark Alleys and Bright Office Lights
— The Dangerous Games Adults Play
— Extending the Family
Dark Alleys and Bright Office Lights
The street kids kept coming back to Lucy’s shelter. After one especially brutal incident in a city square, she had to find medical attention for eighteen kids that the police had shot.
Generación had to evolve into something more than a short-term crisis shelter, of that Lucy had no doubt. She above all wanted to bring some normalcy and structure into the lives of the children.
Lucy has a remarkable gift for connecting with youth in crisis. Despite being in her late fifties, she builds an easy rapport with them and earns their trust. Almost any minute of the day she can be found surrounded by a cadre of kids. Their high-paced energy does not seem to overwhelm her. In fact, Lucy keeps steadfastly calm—she neither demands attention nor deems it necessary to use a loud voice to bring order. Yet she can exercise a steely determination when the occasion warrants it.
Once the first wave of street kids made Generación their home base, Lucy established a rule: to stay at the shelter, the kids had to attend school. While the teens could work in the morning hours, they still had to attend classes in the afternoons.
Soon after “Lucy’s rule” took effect, a group of seven Generación boys—from fourteen to sixteen years old—found work at a hair salon. About a month after they were hired, Lucy asked the boys about their jobs. When they told her that they cleaned dishes and washed bedsheets and towels, she became suspicious—the tasks did not seem like the kind that would be required at a hair salon. Lucy checked her sources and discovered that the hair salon was a front for a brothel. She urged the boys to quit their jobs without delay.
The boys went to the salon the next day to collect their earnings and inform the managers that they would be leaving. The women offered to pay them in sex with the young girls whom they controlled. They put a pornographic movie on the television and told the boys to go to the back rooms of the salon and select a girl. When the boys refused and demanded cash for their wages, the managers locked the doors to the salon and said they could not leave until they performed sex with their girls. The boys became quite upset and began ransacking the premises. The managers called the police and reported that street kids were vandalizing their property. All of the boys were arrested except one, who escaped out a back window and ran back to the Generación office to inform Lucy about what had taken place.
When Lucy arrived at the local police station, the officers in charge claimed that they did not know anything about the incident. In actual fact, they were holding the boys in a cell at the station. So Lucy reported the incident to a judge of the court, Regina Chavez, a woman of high integrity. Judge Chavez made a personal visit to the salon and found a library of homemade pornographic movies featuring minors. The judge found additional evidence to convince her that the salon was indeed operating as a brothel.
A few hours after Judge Chavez had completed her investigation, the police showed up at Generación to arrest Lucy on charges of trespassing and impersonating a judge of the court. Judge Chavez promptly exposed the setup and confirmed that she herself had entered the salon.
A subsequent court investigation revealed what motivated the police actions. The salon was located directly across the street from an office building for several important government agencies, including the police headquarters for Lima. Many of the salon’s regular clients walked in from their offices across the street.
Bit by bit Lucy began to put together the pieces of the puzzle. “The criminals exploiting children in Peru do not only hang out in dark alleys,” she explains. “They also sit comfortably behind desks in the halls of power.”
The Dangerous Games Adults Play
Lucy Borja easily qualifies as one of the most controversial living figures in all of Peru. At last count, she has twenty-two legal denunciations pending against her in Lima’s courts, including charges of kidnapping children, giving false testimony to the police, and “acting against the public interest.” On any given day it is not unusual for a political figure to make a disparaging remark about her on the evening news.
To meet Lucy Borja—and track her movements over a substantial period of time—confounds all expectations. She is neither argumentative nor cantankerous; in fact, her gentle spirit and compassion lead some people to call her “the Mother Teresa of the streets of Lima.”
How can we square this bipolar public image? It’s quite simple: Lucy speaks the truth about what she sees around her. That habit can create formidable enemies in Peru.
On Mother’s Day in 1992, for example, Lucy received an invitation to participate in a press conference at the juvenile prison, along with the wife of President Fujimori and Ana Kanashiro, the national director for children’s welfare. Once the press conference began, Kanashiro proudly announced to a television audience that the national government had set aside $5 million to resolve “the problem of street children.” The symbolism of making this pronouncement at the juvenile prison was not lost on anyone.
When the camera turned to the founder of Generación, she proposed that rather than use government funds to punish exploited children, the money should be used to open “healthy homes” for them. Lucy referred to the hundreds of street kids who slept in her office each night. “While children in the prisons are ill treated,” she said, “the street kids at Generación study in the classroom and develop life skills that will move them in a new direction.”
Kanashiro was livid at being upstaged, and from that day forward she made it known that Lucy was to be banned from visiting the juvenile prison and from providing HIV/AIDS courses in the public schools. A friend of Lucy’s in the national congress rose to her defense. She distributed for television broadcast a video of interviews with children testifying to their treatment inside juvenile prison and the trumped-up charges that incarcerated them. A major television personality in Peru, Juan Carlos, watched the interviews and became inspired to produce a series of special reports on the struggles of street kids in Lima.
Overjoyed that a news reporter of his stature would be interested in their cause, Lucy arranged for Carlos to portray the stories of three young boys who lived at Generación. Carlos devoted a considerable amount of time to interviewing the boys and filming their daily activities. Using Generación as a base, the journalist then dove deep into the netherworld of street life. He filmed the story of Alicia, a young girl who for many years dressed as a man so that she would not be raped on the streets. His short documentaries ran on national television and won critical acclaim both inside Peru and internationally, even winning a prestigious cultural award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Lucy, however, could not enjoy watching the documentaries. Just as Carlos was wrapping up production, the kids at Generación berated her for bringing him into their lives. The boys divulged how Carlos had supplied them with drugs and then raped them. One of the more memorable scenes in his documentary shows street kids using drugs and alcohol at a popular street hangout. In actual fact, the boys reported, Carlos had bought the substances and distributed them before he started filming. It was the first time that many of the younger kids had ever used drugs. The kids also reported to Lucy that Carlos had exploited his connection to Alicia. He paid her to find young children and bring them to his own house for sex; later he had her pimp children to the homes of his friends as well.
It saddens Lucy today to look back fifteen years and recognize the pivotal role that Juan Carlos played in the buildup of sex trafficking in Lima. Up until that point, the child sex industry was more or less opportunistic—an adult might find a child in desperate circumstances and induce him or her to engage in sex for money. Carlos initiated a more systematic practice of trafficking. Alicia, for example, began recruiting kids into the sex trade at his urging and went on to become one of the country’s most notorious pimps.
Yet try as she might, Lucy could not bring Juan Carlos to justice. The courts would never convict a man of his stature based solely on the testimony of street kids, and that was the only hard evidence that she had. Nonetheless, Lucy reported his criminal activities to the police and persistently urged them to investigate.
In a vicious retaliation, Carlos produced a television news report on Generación that he called “The House of Terror: Where Children Go to Contract AIDS.” But his assault on the shelter’s reputation backfired. When a judge ordered that the kids at Generación undergo HIV testing, not one of the kids tested positive. The kids actually turned the tables and testified to the judge of Carlos’s sexual crimes with minors.
Worried about a possible arrest, Carlos fled the country and worked for many years as a journalist in the United States. He recently returned to Peru and resumed his successful television career.
Extending the Family
It does not feel right to call Generación an “agency” or an “orphanage” or even a “shelter.” It does fulfill all of these important roles for the children who go there for help. But none of these labels conveys the sense of extended family that permeates the place.
Certainly it starts with Lucy, who makes a personal connection with every child who walks through Generación’s doors. Mention a particular resident’s name, and she can rattle off the child’s history, habits, passions, strengths, and weaknesses. Thousands of youths have run to Generación over the past two decades, and Lucy is mother to them all.
The family atmosphere at Generación extends to Lucy’s husband, Juan Enrique, and their five grown children, who also embrace the street kids as their own. Lucy’s children grew up with a constant stream of visitors invading their home, so it would be understandable if they felt some bitterness about having had to share their mother. If they harbor such sentiments, it does not show. Now that they are adults in their twenties and early thirties, the children still chip in passionately to help their mother.
One of Generación’s most dynamic programs revolves around surfing. Lucy’s own children are avid surfers, and they infused the younger street kids with their love for riding waves. Generación now runs a house in a coastal town about an hour from Lima, and fifteen to eighteen kids live there full-time. It is a remarkable scene to head down to the beach late in the afternoon and watch a pack of ex-street kids mixing in with the local surf bums. Some of Generación’s kids are now entering surfing competitions and performing at a high level.
Juan Enrique, Lucy’s husband, has partnered with Save the Children’s programs in Latin America for almost twenty-five years. An erudite and reflective man, he has helped to establish graduate programs for children’s rights advocates at major universities around the world. Juan Enrique and Lucy offer the perfect complement of academic and activist, all in the service of abolition.
This story is from ‘Not for Sale’ by David Batstone, HarperSanFrancisco
Copyright © 2006 HarperCollins Publishers, All rights reserved.