Lima's unlikely superhero

 It's not easy being Superman.
It only earns about $160 a month for Avelino Chavez, who dresses up daily as the caped hero.

But oh, the adventures!

The 52-year-old Chavez can't fly but does seem to be everywhere in Lima: at political rallies and speeches, at a wedding shoot for Peru's famed opera tenor Juan Diego Florez, hawking tours and flights on behalf of a travel agency in the central Plaza de Armas.

"Hola Superman!" people shout to him.

"Hola, Superamigo!" he'll shout back.
Chavez became a superhero 15 years ago after a failed go at bullfighting and jobs as a craftsman, laboratory worker and brothel security guard.
"I lost my job but realized that I could be Superman. I went to the store and bought a blue shirt and a cousin of mine who is a seamstress sewed the cape, the boots, the belt and the red tights," he told.
He hasn't lacked for work since.
One political party even asked him to run for Congress a decade ago. He agreed, but didn't win the seat.
Chavez says he tries to "maintain order in the city." In 2002, he says, he recovered a purse stolen from a woman by a thief..
"My Kryptonite is my security," he says, referring to the fictional element that is a weakness of the comic book character whose identity he's fused with his own.
As a younger man, Chavez said he sometimes dressed as Carlos Gardel, the Argentine crooner whose tangos "cut to the soul" or wore a beret that made him feel like the revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
But Superman proved the ticket to steady work.
Single and childless, Chavez lives in a rented apartment in a poor neighborhood in Lima's center.
He says he doesn't have a girlfriend.
"But when I get a girlfriend I would like to make love on the moon."