February 8th

Five villages in southern Peru were left in rubble after landslides caused by constant rains on Sunday and Monday, which washed away mud, water and rocks and swept away precarious facilities and homes in an area dedicated to informal gold mining.

Residents of the Mariano Nicolás Valcárcel municipality, settled in the foothills of a mining area, were looking for their belongings buried in the mud on Tuesday, while others with muddy shoes and desperate faces came from remote villages to ask for help.

One of them was Mauro Noa, leader of the Posco Miski village, who asked for help and food to assist more than a thousand residents trapped since Sunday on the side of a mountain. They cannot cross because an immense body of mud and stones has formed in the form of a river that surrounds the hill. “They are hungry and thirsty, no one remembers them,” he told The Associated Press.

Noa said that in 18 years he has never seen an avalanche like the one that fell Sunday in Posco Miski. He added that they have compiled a list of 14 residents of Posco Miski whose whereabouts are unknown. “People reacted in disarray, neighbors who could not leave their homes were carried away by the wave of mud,” Noa said. “Children have been traumatized, with the rain and the mudslide,” he added.

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Police dispatched 15 rescuers who were scheduled to arrive in Secocha late in the afternoon because the road is blocked by mud, said agent Giancarlo Vizcarra.

The agent indicated that after arriving in Secocha carrying stretchers and ropes they will try to climb up to the most remote villages to look for bodies under the mud and for that purpose they were transporting two specialized dogs that work in earthquakes looking for people in the rubble.

A local Civil Protection official reported the day before that at least 36 people had died, however, a prosecutor told The Associated Press on Tuesday that they only had confirmation of 12 dead and three missing. The federal government has not given any new figures, although the president was touring the area to see the disaster and receive the latest reports.

The avalanche that fell on Sunday from the highest mountains swept away houses and everything in its path. Residents could only scream and wail as they watched the dense torrent of brown water and mud slide with force.

“We are isolated,” Arturo Muñoz, who lives high above the village of La Eugenia, where the mudslide began Sunday, told The Associated Press by phone Tuesday. The affected mining villages are in the municipality of Mariano Nicolas Valcarcel, in the province of Camana, Arequipa region.
Rescue tasks could not yet be deployed on Tuesday due to the difficulty of accessing the area with the relevant machinery, according to the local head of Civil Defense.

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The main street of another of the settlements, Secocha, was still covered on Tuesday with a muddy mass that had penetrated through doors and windows. In that street, called Los Angeles, some people were cleaning the kitchens, refrigerators and televisions that until the weekend were working without problems in restaurants, hotels, clothing and food stores.

The prosecutor in charge of the event, Luis Supo, rectified the death toll that had been published on Monday, when it was said that 36 bodies had been recovered in the remote village of Posco Miski. The count was made known by Wilson Gutiérrez, Civil Defense official of the Mariano Nicolás Valcárcel municipality, to the local radio station RPP.

However, prosecutor Supo assured that as of Tuesday they had only received 12 bodies rescued from the avalanches and that three other people were missing.

Civil Defense also indicated on Monday that the landslides affected bridges, water intakes, irrigation canals, roads and houses and around 630 houses were left unusable. The impact of the landslides in the five affected villages was due to the fact that it is a downhill area of about 48 kilometers where miners have been installed for two decades to extract gold from pits.

Constant rains are frequent in February in Peru, a time when precipitation causes landslides that affect homes, but also public infrastructure, including bridges and roads.

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