300 Villagers Die in Peru Mudslide

Rescuers using picks, shovels and their bare hands searched Wednesday for the bodies of as many as 300 peasants buried under a mudslide that swept away two remote Andean villages.

“This is a disaster with very serious consequences. It has literally buried two communities where there were approximately 100 families,” President Alberto Fujimori told a local radio station. “We calculate that there are between 250 and 300 people buried under this immense amount of mud that we are seeing here.”

He added that 41 bodies had been recovered by midafternoon, although an official at the local headquarters of the rescue operation had earlier put that figure at 47.

Fujimori said that there were few survivors from the tragedy, and warned that there was a “huge mass” of mud at the site that could slide if it rained again.

The mountainside in southeastern Peru collapsed before dawn Tuesday, burying the villages of Ccocha and Pumaranra at its foot with a torrent of mud, earth and rocks.

The few survivors of the tragedy told harrowing stories of the mudslide.

Alejandra Huallya Quispe, 14, said she heard a loud rumbling noise just before 4 a.m. Tuesday.

She grabbed her sister and managed to run out of the house “but it crushed my mother and other sister,” she said.

Fujimori said that emergency aid was being flown in and that soldiers had been drafted to pull out bodies. At the scene, Fujimori looked grim-faced, brushing aside most reporters and hugging several weeping villagers.

From a helicopter overhead, a vast swath of mud could be seen covering the villages. The roofs of some houses could be seen poking through the mud.

Health Minister Mario Costa Bauer, accompanying Fujimori, warned of epidemics among those left homeless by the mudslide and other flooding in the vicinity.

Congressman Dennis Vargas Marin, who comes from the area and who flew in to assess damage, said up to 350 people had disappeared.

Rescue workers pulled dozens of bodies from the mud, many mutilated by stones.

Flash floods, mudslides and landslides, known locally as huaycos, are common in Peru’s Andes during the January-to-March rainy season.

But Congressman Jubert Chavez Serrano, who also flew to the scene, said: “It’s the worst tragedy of this kind we have seen in many years. We had some big huaycos 20 or 30 years ago, but never like this.”