There’s a Llama on your DNI!

I have been reading Jeremy Paxman’s “The English: A Portrait of a People”, his erudite and amusing attempt to define the English (as opposed to British) personality and discover whether they do indeed have a national identity. Well there’s no question of that in Peru. Here it’s impossible NOT to have one. Here your identity is minutely assigned and rigorously documented.

By the time he was two weeks old my son had both a passport and a national identity card – a most attractive document featuring his photo (twice), his diminutive thumbprint and a holographic llama.

This Documento National de Identidad (DNI) is not so much proof of identity as proof of existence. You can do absolutely nothing without it, pay or get paid, open a bank account, buy anything on credit, enter various national buildings, get health care, issue a receipt, get a driver’s licence, etc. etc. And if you want to live in Peru you too must submit to being sucked into the system.

For resident foreigners the equivalent of the DNI is the Carnet de Extranjeria (CE). And instead of a llama it features a picture of Machu Picchu – no doubt symbolic of the arduous trek you need to make in order to get it. I won’t exhaust you with the minute details of the process. Suffice it to say that it involved a lot of time, money, patience and fingerprints.

Of course, a lot of it is about employment creation. Peru has an extremely service-oriented economy. Labour is cheap and plentiful, and Lima is full of compromises between modern technology and the need to keep a large population in work. All the large supermarkets and shopping malls boast electronic ticket barriers in their parking areas. But each one is manned by at least two uniformed personnel. You drive up to the barrier and there, sitting on a stool right next to the automatic button conveniently located within easy arm’s length of the driver’s window, is an official who pushes the button for you and hands you your ticket. On exiting you drive up to the barrier and hand your ticket to another official, who inserts it into the machine and beckons you through the automatically rising barrier. Similarly, the increased automation of government systems is matched by the insertion of more layers of bureaucracy.

Peru is also a signatory to the Hague Convention which allows an apostille stamp to be put on documents in the issuing country in order for them to be recognised as official in all other signatory countries.

Bollocks. In Peru you get blank stares and shrugs – go get it notarized and then legalized again at the ministry, but pay the fees first. You know how much income is generated and jobs created by one stamp? And all legal processes are so complicated that anyone who can afford it employs a tramitador (runner) to help with the legwork and guide you through the labyrinth.

All documents must be legalized and notarized several times over. Notarios are big business here and their offices can be found littering the streets of Lima in varying degrees of poshness. The notario (always a lawyer with a flourishing practice elsewhere) only ever witnesses you or your signature in the Jehovah’s Witness kind of sense – relying on the testimony of his servants that you are indeed who you say you are. He employs numerous minions to carry your documents up and down stairs, fingerprint you, tell you to come back later, that you needs more copies of this-or-that (a veritable cottage industry of photocopiers located within easy reach of all official buildings), even to charge you one sol to find you a parking space outside his premises and not vandalize your car. And notarized documents are only valid for between 1 and 6 months. Even your official birth certificate must have been issued within the last 6 months in order to be valid for various purposes.

In Peru you must literally be born again...and again.

Having completed the document legalization obstacle course in just over a year I embarked on the hardcore waiting and fingerprinting stage. As a veteran of several election observation missions I can tell you that fingerprint records are notoriously dodgy. I remember in one remote constituency in Guyana an election registration agent had forgotten his inkpad in the capital so simply registered everybody and added his own fingerprint to all the forms when he got back to head office. This was only discovered several elections later during a complete overhaul of the system.

But Peruvians are wedded to their fingerprints. Of course the technology is much more advanced here but even so not foolproof. Upon being employed full-time I was required to electronically register my right index fingerprint to sign in and out at school. My finger was rejected by the system because it matched that of another staff member already in the system so now I have to sign in with the left. I suppose it is in order to avoid such problems that they took prints of all 10 of my fingers at every stage of the process.

After the State had finally deemed my marriage certificate in order and registered it in the system (pay s/15 at any Banco de la Nación and you can get a copy) I was sent to Interpol – yes, the international crime fighting organisation you hear about in police procedurals and the occasional James Bond film – where I was fingerprinted again and photos taken of my teeth and, it seemed, my tonsils. All in one room and in full view of the waiting public. Then a lady at a computer screen entered my personal details (“and what do you call a person from Trinidad and Tobago?”), gazed at me, clicked her mouse and, without consultation, assigned me the skin colour “white”.

Being in smug possession of two black grandfathers and what my columnist hero Kevin Baldeosingh would call naturally curly hair, this was a great blow to me. But I felt it best not to rock the boat after waiting so long to get to this point.

Two months after the Interpol interlude I was informed that I had an appointment at the Ministry of External Affairs at 9 am to collect my CE. It only remained to pay the US$150 fee to be put on the foreigners register and to issue the CE; s/28 for paperwork for the annual foreigners tax; US$200 for the convenience of not having to leave the country and then return in order to change my visa status; and s/40 for transportation.

My tramitador turned up at 10 past 9 to collect me for the 45 minute drive to the ministry. But the lateness did not matter, apparently the 9 am appointment time is given to everyone coming to collect CEs on that day. The word “collect” is also used very loosely. It really means standing in more lines and giving more fingerprints for 2-4 hours while the system ensures that it has squeezed every last sol and ounce of patience out of you.

Whenever I arrive at a Caribbean airport from, say, JFK or Gatwick, I always feel a vengeful twinge of pleasure at the sight of the rows of sweating tourists waiting to go through immigration next to the briskly moving line reserved for Caribbean nationals. I suppose that’s how Peruvian bureaucrats feel watching the sea of gringos at their mercy.

So it was with resigned good-nature that I sat there among the dog-collared priests and wimpled nuns of various denominations and nationalities trying to remain beatific despite their obvious frustration; the barely-post-adolescent Mormon missionaries with their pocket badges denoting them as “Elder” this-or-that, travelling as usual in groups of two or three to present a united front to temptation. I observed with interest Clare, the beak-nosed, Germanic earth mother with her diminutive Peruvian husband, breastfeeding her three year old on demand and being told off for sitting on the floor while doing it. I even shrugged philosophically when my tramitador explain that I would have to apply for a renewal stamp every year and repeat the entire application process every four years. And when a harassed lady official berated me publicly and loudly for not having an entirely pristine page in my passport on which the Director could put his stamp I managed an unimpressed head toss and a truly Peruvian “ni modo pues”.

Finally I was presented with my plastic prize. My identity is established. I am officially a Peruvian resident.

¡Vive La Patria!