Families’ losses as landslide buries Peru village

At least 13 people were killed and more than 30 others were missing after a landslide buried a remote Peruvian mining village. The avalanche of rock and mud, caused by torrential rain, fell on a remote mining camp early on Monday. Yesterday aid workers were still trying to find those missing. But many roads in the area were closed because of the rain.

Families in the village will be hit extremely hard by the deaths because the village has only a small population of about 50 people, most of them miners.“Seven people are buried and 13 have been confirmed dead,” Miguel Angel Sotomayor, the governor of the Ituata district, where the accident occurred, told Agence France-Presse news agency. The sheer remoteness of the stricken village may hamper the rescue effort. “It is a very isolated area, there is no road to it,” Mr Sotomayor said.“We have to leave for there tonight so that we can arrive by tomorrow morning and survey the area,” he told CPN, a local radio station, “because there is no road, we cannot count on the help of machinery.”

The slide covered Huanchumay, a village in a remote part of Carabaya province, about 808 miles southeast of the capital, Lima.“It has buried everything in its path,” said Carlos Martin, manager and legal adviser of the Huanchumay mine. “There is no shelter. The whole town is covered with rocks,” he told a local radio station. Carabaya official Nancy Rossell, who was in Lima, told AFP she would ask the interior ministry to coordinate preliminary rescue efforts and to send a helicopter to the location of the accident.Peruvian officials had previously placed the number of dead at 10.Last night, it was still unknown whether the missing people were dead or alive, Carlos Martin Roncal, a Huanchumay mine manager, told Reuters news agency.

Landslides in the mountainous regions of Peru are common during the rainy season, which in the south of the country runs from November through to April.

The South American country is rich in copper, silver, lead, zinc, oil and gold. Despite this, Peru's progress has been held back by corruption and the failure of successive governments to deal with social and economic inequality. It is ruled by a small elite of Spanish descendants. Indigenous Peruvians make up most of the millions who live in poverty.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children