(LIMA) - "Come to the slums, not the conference rooms."

In a slum on Lima's outskirts, inhabitants called for EU and Latin America leaders meeting in the capital to get a first-hand look at one of the top issues of their summit: poverty.

"There's no risk of seeing any heads of state. But if they saw how we lived, maybe they'd do something for us," one resident, Rosa Cabrera, told AFP.

Indignation deepens the lines on the 60-year-old medical assistant's face as she vents in Villa Salvador, a ramshackle neighborhood of 500,000 people built on shifting sand dunes south of the capital.

"Enough talking. We want action," she said.

Taxi motorbikes splutter up the unstable hills of the district, which is littered with garbage piles in the street and packs of dogs picking through them.

"We don't live. We survive. Like animals," said Rosario Padilla, a 46-year-old single mother of eight who works several small jobs to earn 30 soles (around 10 dollars) "on a good day."

Villa Salvador is just 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the comfortably residential zone in Lima where the summit is taking place under formidable security.

The two places underscore the vast gap between the haves and have-nots in Latin America -- one of the zones with the largest wealth disparity in the worlds -- that the presidents and prime ministers were examining.

"It's been so long that the leaders have forgotten us and abandoned us. The situation is just getting worse," said Padilla.

Like her neighbors, her struggling existence has taken a turn for the worse because of skyrocketing prices for such staples as cooking oil, or rice, which sells for four soles the kilogram (2.2 pounds).

Miguel Machicao, a 37-year-old unemployed carpenter, lamented his inability to properly feed his family.

"I can't even buy vegetables anymore," he said.

Their neighborhood has seen little of the benefits of the nine-percent annual economic growth experienced by Peru last year. Half the country's 27 million inhabitants still live under the poverty line, according to official figures.

There is no running water in the area, which houses a big community of Quechua indians who started coming to the city in the 1940s in search of better opportunities. Instead, chlorine is thrown into buckets of used water to sterilize it.

For Alejandro Figuera, a 43-year-old mechanic who earns a living pumping tires by the side of the road, the summit was in fact a financial ordeal, because the government had decreed a three-day public holiday to accommodate it and its security roadblocks. He was seeing far fewer clients.

"I hope it's worth it, at least. I hope the rich European countries haven't come just to talk, but to offer us help so we can also develop," he said.

It was a plea that may not go entirely unacknowledged. Last year, Bolivia's leftwing President Evo Morales made a trip to see the poor district. He was given a hero's welcome.

Summit EU - LAC

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