"The world is awesome when there's variety!" A very positive view of a very modern Peruvian.
Julio Padilla is a Peruvian tour leader with Intrepid Travel. We met him on a Patagonian trip before the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2010 in Santiago in May.
He was born in the amazonian city of Iquitos in the late 70s and moved to Lima in 1990 when he was 13 years old. He has worked and travelled in several South American countries and spent time overseas.
I interviewed him in Buenos Aires at the end of the tour. We discussed how he sees the changes in Peru over the last 20 years and South America's overall progress. He shared his hopes for the future with infectious optimism.
The video clips used were taken during April 2010. Most of the photographs are from our 3 month Overland Latin America trip in 1993. Thanks to Google for the Peru map and Wikipedia/Gabymuaa for the Iquitos photo.
Greetings from a very sunny Europe. I stuck somewhere in the village so I have to wait to watch your interview till Friday… But I notice on Al Jazeera that there is the anniversary of Bagua :
So here are some links:
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/06/05/peru-a-year-since-bagua/
http://www.livinginperu.com/news/12373
I also find this, which is quite fresh:
http://www.monitor.upeace.org/archive.cfm?id_article=711
Thanks for this - I was in Peru last year and found it a really incredible country.
There was protests when I was there and we were often told that was the ‘Peruvian way’...
Iwona
Thanks. Juan Arellano, who I met at the recent Global Voices summit, is clearly more sober than Julio Padilla in his assessment of Peru’s problems. Glass half full or half empty? The Peace & Conflict Monitor article reinforces the environmental concerns that Julio emphasises.
Ian
We didn’t get to Peru or Bolivia this time. In 1993 we had the ‘luxury’ of few other tourists because of continuing violence by the Maoist guerrillas the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). Our two months there were amongst the most memorable of our travels.