It was a late afternoon in April, and hot fog was creeping in from the coast. Lima?s colonial Plaza de Armas was relatively calm for a change: a din of grinding gears and hawker?s cries was in the air, as was a strong smell of diesel fumes and old cooking oil, but there were no jeering strikers, and there was no sting of tear gas.
In the mountains of Peru, a smokestack towers over a bustling city of one-room tin houses, where women carry babies on their backs and hang laundry to dry in the wind.
