… And now suddenly, we’re seeing where — in the emergence of shantytowns now beginning to ring America’s major cities such as Houston, making them resemble Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Mexico City, Caracas, Medellín, Lima, Quito, San Pedro Sula, and other places — all of which have nice ritzy centers, housing for the rich and upper-middle classes, and endless rings of shantytowns in the hillsides and valleys outside these big cities, where the desperately poor live in tin-roof hovels, some precariously positioned on cliffs, with no flush toilets, no running water, no paved roads, no electricity, or only pilfered electricity from power lines to power the television sets and sometimes refrigerators inside. When I first saw the shack cities (known as ranchos rather than colonias in Venezuela), I needed to lie down, almost feeling as if I would faint. They were so huge and overwhelming…and awful. I felt the same way when I saw the shack cities ringing Tijuana, utterly horrified that such human misery could be so close to the prosperity of the United States. And Manila, Jakarta, Shenzhen — the same sensation.
