Caught in a sobering incident in Lima, Peru

A lot of these pictures I am showing you are of the beautiful side of Lima.  For we found Lima to be a clean city and historical Lima to be beautiful as you see here and in the previous post.  We were impressed at how polite and kind many of the Peruvians were.

These two pictures were taken from the Plaza Militar or Plaza de las Flores pictured in the previous post.  It reminded me of Cartegena, Colombia. 

But Lima, Peru also had her sad side and poor sections too; I may share photos of that later.  I was told somewhat jokingly by a missionary friend that it is said that the thieves there in Lima can steal your socks off of you without even removing your shoes and that even the police and cats walk the streets in groups of twos and threes.
We were there on the last days of their Presidential elections. The two candidates were Keiko Fujimori, a woman who aligned herself as a conservative and had Rudy Giuliani (former mayor of New York) as her special security advisor.  She had also turned in her father years ago for corruption when he was the President.  The other candidate was Ollama Humala a Communist running with the Communist party.  On Saturday night we got caught in a Communist demonstration for Humala which somewhat shook me.  We were walking back to our hotel and we heard shouting and honking as a sea of people flooding the street and sidewalks rushed toward us shouting, beating "drums," and waving red flags and other flags going to the plaza near our hotel.  When the wave of people hit us, they pushed us with them and then I understood the real danger of getting trampled by a mass of people.  With Jimmy following me, I had to struggle to get to a metal kiosk on the sidewalk to stand behind where we were protected from the oncoming river of people.  The thunderous noise and emotion of the multitudes (the majority were youths) yelling, chanting, and banging and honking were tremendous and filled that part of the city and I saw how youths are enchanted with the promises of a Communist utopia.  I wanted a picture of when we were being nearly swept away, but I didn't dare for fear of angering the mob.  But after things had calmed down a lot and the main mass of people had already past, Jimmy took this picture of the stragglers later and captured a not-very-happy look on this man's face.     

More stragglers later.  By now we had reached the door of our hotel.

The next day was Sunday and election day.  Keiko lost and Humala won.  So Peru now has a Communist President who has promised to "get rid of the corruption."  I ask a taxi driver if there were a lot of corruption to get rid of and he said, "I don't know of a lot of corruption."  Many think that Peru could turn out to be another Venezuela with Hugo Chavez.  God sets up and takes down kings, and will use this for the good of His kingdom.  But depending how things go there, in the future we may loose opportunities for entering this precious, needy country for ministry there.  Please help us pray for Peru, her new president, and for the building up of God's holy Church there.
Thanks,
Phillip