Without basic services, thousands of families live in camps who lost their homes to torrential rains.
Marilyn Cahuana sobs in her thatched house in the desert in northern Peru. “Here we started from scratch,” he says. He is one of the thousands of climate migrants who lost their home and livelihood due to the torrential rains caused five years ago by the phenomenon known as El Niño Costero.
There, in the precarious camp where they were displaced by the Piura river floods, Cahuana is raising her three children without electricity or drinking water.
And he remembers with nostalgia his life in the old town 20 km from here, now disappeared: “There I had all my things, we were calm, but everything was washed away”the 36-year-old woman told AFP.
“Before we had all the basic services, a nearby school, we had a nearby health system, we had our crops nearby and everything at hand. However, here we are almost five years old and we are still out in the open ”, laments her husband, Leopoldo Namuche, 40 years old.
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The Namuche-Cahuana have 2,000 other families as neighbors who, like them, had to emigrate due to climatic causes to the “Refugio Santa Rosa”, a camp of precarious straw houses and tents, installed in 2017 by the Civil Defense next to the route. Panamericana, 980 km north of Lima.
“We did not anticipate this, it was simply due to the El Niño phenomenon,” says Leopoldo.
Well water
Five kilometers from there is the “San Pablo Refuge”, another temporary camp that became permanent for 600 families displaced by El Niño Costero.
In none of the camps there is electricity, drinking water or sewage. Neighbors draw water from wells, which is also used to irrigate the legume and vegetable crops of some families. Behind each house there is a latrine.
The temperature at noon exceeds 35 degrees Celsius, but there are few trees that provide shade. The thermometer drops dramatically at night, but no one is heated. For cooking, all families use the firewood they collect in a nearby carob forest.
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There is no health center, so patients must be taken to the town of Catacaos, a journey of more than half an hour by car or motorcycle taxi.
The only solid construction is a small kindergarten, which closed due to the pandemic. An improvised school also stopped operating, so the children have not had classes since March 2020. The minors lack computers and internet to receive virtual lessons.
“We are forgotten”
At night, some neighbors light their houses with power from car batteries or small solar panels the size of a sheet of paper. Others use candles.
“We are totally forgotten by the State itself,” complains Leopoldo, who no longer cultivates the land. Now he makes a living by transporting neighbors in a motorcycle taxi. His wife cooks and sells biscuits.
The couple also raise ducks, turkeys and pigs to support their children Greysi, 12, Hans, nine, and Gael, two. A fourth child is on the way.
There are no tents in the camps, so many neighbors sell food. When a family kills a pig, it offers part of the meat with a megaphone. When someone brings fish from town, they also put some up for sale.
300,000 displaced
Internal migration is not new in Peru, but the growing number of people displaced by climatic causes poses a great challenge.
El Niño Costero, which affects Peru and Ecuador, is produced by the anomalous heating of the sea due to the warm winds that come from the center of the American continent. As a result, the phenomenon causes stronger and more frequent rains and floods.
Torrential rains in 2017 left 101 dead, 353 injured and 19 missing, according to official figures.
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They also caused the displacement of nearly 300,000 people, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN agency.
Many of these families left for Lima, where they live in substandard housing on the hillsides and earn their living informally. But others, like the Namuche-Cahuana, settled near Piura, a city near the border with Ecuador.
“Today we can see floods worldwide, but in particular also in Peru, which is one of the countries most affected by this issue of climate change,” the head of the IOM in Lima, Jorge Baca, told AFP.
Explain what “10% of the population of Peru [más de tres millones de personas] it will be directly or indirectly affected by climate change “, which most frequently causes flooding and melts glaciers in the Andes.
Due to climate change “many urban and rural communities in the country are experiencing or could experience the phenomenon of forced migration in the near future,” warns the IOM in a report.
Manuel Pulgar Vidal, former Minister of the Environment of Peru, explains to AFP that “science is closer to showing that these events [de variabilidad climática como El Niño] they increase in frequency and severity due to climate change ”.
“The greater aggressiveness of hurricanes, for example, is the result of climate change, which is even changing the behavior of climate variability events”, adds Pulgar Vidal, leader of the global climate practice of the World Wide Foundation (WWF) who chaired COP-20 in Lima in 2014. (I)
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