In Peru, punctuality is a myth. In this South American country, arriving late is an enduring cultural trait.
By
Rick Vecchio, published on July 01, 2007 - last reviewed on August 29, 2007
When Max Hernández, one of Peru's pre-eminent psychologists, was asked to coordinate a national campaign to make notoriously tardy Peruvians respect the clock, astonished colleagues asked, "You believe you can change deep-rooted habits without a powerful mental transformation?" In Peru, arriving late is an enduring cultural trait that even has a name: "La hora Peruana," or "Peruvian time."
The campaign, "La Hora sin Demora"—"time without delay"—is already showing signs of winding down. Seven weeks after President Alan Garcia asked Peruvians to synchronize their watches in a nationally televised ceremony, Hernández acknowledged a lack of funds. So radio stations, private businesses, mimes, and hip-hop artists are now donating time, posters, and T-shirts to the effort to convince Peruvians that timeliness is a virtue, and that "respect begets respect." Leading newspaper El Comercio ran a full-page photo essay to demonstrate that Peruvians are still "running late," and lamented, "This is going to be a long process."
Recent history suggests the Peruvian proclivity may be too ingrained to change. "We still have problems," says Susana Frisancho Hidalgo, a professor of psychology at Lima's Catholic University, where an earlier incarnation of "La Hora sin Demora" was launched on campus last year, with mixed results. "We have professors here who show up to class an hour after the class has begun." Add it all up and you get a slice of the overall drain on national productivity.
Peruvian time has deep roots. "There is a general tendency toward a different way of timekeeping that dominates in most of Latin America," says Robert Levine, a professor of psychology at California State University in Fresno. In his book A Geography of Time, Levine theorizes that different cultures mark time in varying "tempos"—some define events by the clock and others allow events to run their natural courses. "They're taking people who have been living on what we might call 'event time,' and asking them to switch to 'clock time,'" Levine says.
Some trace Peru's problem to a whimsical sense of space and time in the Andean highlands. As many a weary foreign traveler has discovered, "un minutito," or "one teensy minute," can easily mean an hour. Others blame centuries of Spanish colonial rule and a tradition of ignoring social mores among the elite: Eleanor Griffis de Zúñiga, publisher of the Peruvian Times, says "la hora Peruana" is a form of "upper-class arrogance" that has spread to the masses.
There's no easy fix, but as long as lateness is fashionable in Peru, it will also be costly.
Tardiness By The Numbers
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107 hours: annual tardiness per Peruvian
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$5 billion: cost to the country
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84%: Peruvians who think their compatriots are punctual only "sometimes" or "never"
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15%: think tardiness is a local custom that doesn't need fixing
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