Asentamiento en calle Ituzaingo - panoramio

An asentamiento irregular, known colloquially as an asentamiento () is a

shanty town A shanty town, squatter area, squatter settlement, or squatter camp is a settlement of improvised buildings known as shanties or shacks, typically made of materials such as mud and wood, or from cheap building materials such as corrugated iron s ...

Latin America Latin America is the cultural region of the Americas where Romance languages are predominantly spoken, primarily Spanish language, Spanish and Portuguese language, Portuguese. Latin America is defined according to cultural identity, not geogr ...

, particularly around

Guatemala City Guatemala City (, also known colloquially by the nickname Guate), is the Capital city, national capital and largest city of the Guatemala, Republic of Guatemala. It is also the Municipalities of Guatemala, municipal capital of the Guatemala Depa ...

and

Montevideo Montevideo (, ; ) is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Uruguay, largest city of Uruguay. According to the 2023 census, the city proper has a population of 1,302,954 (about 37.2% of the country's total population) in an area of . M ...

. Most have been established in the last 20 years as a result of economic inequalities between rural and metropolitan areas in

Guatemala Guatemala, officially the Republic of Guatemala, is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico, to the northeast by Belize, to the east by Honduras, and to the southeast by El Salvador. It is hydrologically b ...

and

Uruguay Uruguay, officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay, is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast, while bordering the Río de la Plata to the south and the A ...

Guatemala City

In 15 of the 23 districts of

, there are precarious settlements. In 1984, there were 103 and by 1991 there were 232. In 2016 there were 297. In 1984, 800 families made a land invasion and successfully squatted an area called El Mezquital. The settlement eventually swelled to over 25,000 people. It was the first successful occupation since 1976. These places have been considered "red zones" inside Guatemala City, because of their high

crime In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a State (polity), state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definiti ...

rate and some of them are El Caracol, Cañaverales, El Rinconcito. A famous ''asentamiento'' in Guatemala is La Limonada. With a population of around 60,000 it is one of the largest slums in Latin America outside Brazil.

Montevideo

, Uruguay before 1990, there were land occupations known as cantegriles. The land invasions can be split into accretions (gradual, individual actions) and planned (organised, collective actions). Gradually, cantegril has come to refer to the poorest of

s, whilst groups of houses on squatted land are known more generally as asentamientos irregulares or asentamientos in short.

References

{{Squatting Slums in South America Squatting in Uruguay