There were silver Policia Nacional Toyotas stationed at 12-mile intervals all along the Pan-American highway, and transit police stopped me twice for bribes. In Lima, they are trying to contain police corruption by recruiting women. Fleets of very attractive policewomen in flatteringly tight uniforms ride big white Harleys around the city, and are said to be unbribable, but the general view is that their effect is largely cosmetic.The only serious purpose I can offer for repeating a journey I made 27 years ago is to give some account of how things have changed. I have come 25,000 miles now through Africa and much of South America, and things are falling into place. In all of this territory, people with any kind of means live behind bars They are, in effect, prisoners of their own device.

The amount of protective ironwork around homes is astounding. Most shops don’t have doors; they have steel shutters, and the rest have both. The number of people employed as security guards is phenomenal, and I can only wish I had an investment in the flak jacket business.Without any doubt the most startling change I’ve seen is in the way crime has become an acceptable way for many poor people to solve their personal problems, and resolve their frustrations.It seems to me that crime in the good old days was generally either petty, as in the pickpockets my mother was always warning me about, or organised, ?a Capone and Kray. To do violent stuff with guns you generally needed some kind of a mob behind you. Nowadays, the crime everyone is scared of is very much a freelance affair, committed by individuals or small gangs, often spontaneously, and often drug-related.

One could see this as an automatic consequence of the drift to the cities, which is happening everywhere Population growth is one cause. Disruption of the countryside by Cold War policies is another. The carrot is the fantasy of urban lifestyles promoted by the media. The rural habits that link honesty to self-respect are easily broken when the city fails to provide a living.Personally, I date the beginnings of it to the day in 1964 when Kitty Genovese died a long and agonising death in the courtyard of her New York apartment block, and nobody answered her screams for help.

Street violence grew and spread endemically across the country. It led to the affluent suburbs, the gated communities, and the ghettos. Now, 30 years later, the rest of the world is catching up.What is so obviously happening everywhere now is a reorganisation of society according to these principles, and it is difficult to see why the process should stop. The kind of world in which I was raised, where arbitrary violence in public places was almost unheard of, looks more and more now like a brief aberration.