There’s a huge scandal going on in Peru about some video being shown during Lan airlines -of chilean capital- flights. You can see a capture of these videos at this page of the Lima newspaper La Republica. I don’t see what the big deal is, while it’s true that some images don’t leave Lima looking at its best, the images belong to an old Lonely Planet -actually known as Globetrekker- episode. At least, that’s what I think, I will take a look to the video later.

In the show, filmed in the 90s, the peruvian capital seems quite dirty and chaotic, a situation that has improved considerably in the latest years. While the traffic is still complicated, it’s less wild than some years ago.

Of course, some peruvian polititians say that these images, considered as “denigrant”, were shown on purpose by Lan. To me, it seems only a matter of business: Lan bought the videos package that, for being so old, came cheaper. Besides, this show has repeatedly been shown in cable television and nothing happened. It’s clear, anyways, that it wasn’t appropiate to show it during a flight to Peru; but that only speaks about how bad Lan selects their in flight video material and doesn’t prove a conspiration attempt to give Peru a bad reputation.

By the way, this scandal explains itself for historic reasons. There are old issues between Peru and Chile, recently brought up by an incident in Cuzco, when a chilean citizen damaged historic Inca monuments. Obviously, this video came out in a very bad timing. But one thing is to be amateur and another conspiring.

The note by La Republica about the topic can be found here. I will check the link tomorrow because this newspaper has the awful habit of changing links from one day to the next one.

Update: I just saw the episode again. It was made in 1997, when the show was called Lonely Planet -today is known as Globetrekker. One has to admit that what they portray about Lima does nothing to favor this city, which seems dirty and careless. But the rest of the destinations, particularly Cuzco and Puno, appear in a pretty positive way. The program is no big deal: Iquitos, for example, only appears because there’s forest, but from the city there isn’t a single take -and the amazonica night life is famous for its vitality. There aren’t either many references to the wonderful peruvian food, except for a few street vendors who sell boiled corn and grilled pork meat.

Again, the big problem is the obvious mistake of Lan by showing this video, with all the history of resentment existing between Peru and Chile. The topic is still covered today in a note of La Republica, where they refer to a “pseudocumentary” that aggravates Peru. It seems to me that they’re overreacting, since the only city in the video shown in an unfavorable way is Lima. Anyways, is not new that many touristic products made for the american and european market usually portrays Latin America in a very derogatory manner, as you can see in the case of Argentina guides analyzed by Cecilia Palacios in her graduate thesis (in spanish only). But in this case one can’t miss the fact that this scandal is also explained by a matter of intern politics from Peru as well as its relations with Chile. More than a touristic problem here, we have a problem of nationalism.