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In this diary, the author reflects on the developments in Lima under the administration of Mayor Alberto Andrade. Waves of assaults, robberies, kidnappings, and rapes are once again sweeping through the city. An older woman, one of the street sweepers who staged demonstrations against the government, partially undresses to express her protest. The connection between nakedness and death, whether it is murder or suicide, is explicitly made by Georges Bataille. Bataille's most thorough examination of the relation between nakedness and death takes place in the context of what he calls eroticism. In Lima, Andrade's urban renewal campaign is quickly fizzling, mainly because President Alberto Fujimori has made it a priority to destroy him as a viable future presidential candidate.

Within ten square blocks in the heart of downtown Lima, there are about ten baroque churches and chapels. Some of them lost their stone-carved porticos long ago, to the earthquake of 1746 or to the no-less-cataclysmic fury of neoclassical renovation, but the few that retained them have also retained, in the riveting intricacy of their sculpted facades, a very eloquent articulation of the dependency of beauty on effect. Of all those temples, the Church of La Merced is one of the most enthralling. Today, despite the churches' dwindling budgets and languishing congregations, one only has to visit La Merced (or San Francisco, San Pedro, or San Agustín, a couple blocks over) to see the power that these baroque altars still command. The Church of La Merced, along with the few other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings that are left scattered around downtown Lima, were centerpieces in Mayor Alberto Andrade's vigorous, if short-lived, project of beautification of the city center in 1996–2002, as part of his urban renewal campaign.

In 1957, José Matos Mar carried out the first systematic study of Lima's barriadas in an attempt to shed light on what was then the fastest growing but most poorly understood form of urbanization in the city. After his work, many other social scientists became interested in the barriadas, noticing that one of the consequences of this form of urban expansion is that life in Lima has grown fragmented, increasingly transpiring within well-delimited coordinates of class and race that rarely overlap. This chapter explores the social and political context of late 1990s and early 2000s Lima, the period before and after the downfall of Alberto Fujimori's regime, when Mayor Alberto Andrade's impulse to order and cleanse the city center coexisted with unprecedented central government corruption. Building on the work of Georges Bataille, the author examines the relation between taboo and transgression, and also reflects on her return to her native city of Lima by citing the work of Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas.

In this diary, the author reflects on Georges Bataille's ideas on animality from his Theory of Religion and how they are applicable to Lima. The negation of our animality, says Bataille, is at times so drastic that the rules concerning the basest aspects of our humanity are seldom the object of our attention, for the mere affirmation of the taboo is deemed or is experienced as a transgression. This transgression is evident in the street sweepers' protests in Lima, along with the tension they produced in the media between the compulsion to silence their public stripping and the compulsion to speak of it in order to explain it away as a “technique” of protest or as a government-backed staged performance for political gain. Roberto Mendieta, a professor at Universidad Católica, implied that the street sweepers' demonstrations were part of President Alberto Fujimori's filthy tricks against Lima Mayor Alberto Andrade.

In this diary, the author reflects on the people and the landscape of Lima, as well as the indolence, the selfishness, the abuse, and the pain that seems to have taken over every space at every moment. She heard about the government's harassment tactics against all election candidates of the opposition. There have been many other complaints, especially by Lima Mayor Alberto Andrade. The author also describes her experience watching bullfighting and Georges Bataille's views on the sport, the demonstrations by ESMLL workers together with some members of SITRAMUN at the offices of SETAME (Metropolitan Taxi Service, run by the Municipalidad), and Bataille's understanding of sovereignty and taboo.