Peru’s squatter neighborhoods were collectivist villages, not anarchic property-defense zones.

Evidence

Evidence available in the same World Bank documents suggest a contrary view: Peru’s informal urban communities are described as having very strong collective organizations and a great variety of neighborhood mutual-help arrangements. Typically, a squatter neighborhood was formed by a single village, whose members would plan their relocation collectively in advance, allocate each family a building plot, and reproduce the communal associations of the village in the new location. None of this indicates a situation in which people feel so threatened they must stay home to guard their individual properties. (The World Bank also reports that titling programs tend to weaken these neighborhood associations.) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1957

Categorization

• XREF: Directly challenges Hernando de Soto’s titling thesis — connects to the broader de Soto vs. collective-property scholarship the reader may know.