Carnet de Extranjeria

Image via Wikipedia

The carnet de extranjeria is a identification card for foreigners here in Peru. It's pretty much the Peruvian equivalent of a US 'Green Card'. There are various ways of getting one, depending on what type of residency you have - married to a Peruvian, investor, retiree, etc. Most of them allow you to work legally in the country.

Every year, you have to go pay some taxes/fees and get a couple of stickers on it. Well, last year, I never did it. I haven't done it yet this year either. To top off the bad situation, I've lost my carnet - as well as my US Passport. So, I'm basically traveling around and living with no ID except for an expired Florida drivers license. Not a good place to be.

So, the point of this is to say - I'm going this week to (hopefully) get it all straightened out. Dealing with Peruvian bureaucracy is a pain in the tookus at the best of times. I don't have high hopes of this going smoothly. Fortunately, I DO have a photocopy of the ID page of my passport, so hopefully that will help with something. We've been searching, and can't find the folder where we had copies of everything else - my original carnet, the police report where we reported them lost etc.

I'll update as things go along, and let y'all know how it goes. I'm sure there are other people who have lost their ID, or been (considerably) late in paying the annual fees, so I hope my experience will be helpful to others!



UPDATE! - We (and by 'we', I mean my husband) found the folder with all the copies in it, so hopefully that'll make things a lot easier.