Agency with the first cholera epidemic in the country in more than a hundred years.
It is the first major outbreak of the disease in the Western hemisphere since 1911. Alberto Fujimori's government declared the state of emergency back in February, when the Health minister estimated that 300,000 people were infected and 10,000 were expected to die as a result.
By the beginning of May over 1200 people had already lost their lives. By the end of this year more than two million will be infected.
Eventually the disease will spread to the US and Europe: but here it will be contained relatively easily, while cholera will remain endemic in the Americas for a whole generation.
The reappearance of this grim disease in Peru graphically illustrates the extent to which the country has moved beyond economic crisis and into economic disintegration.
Huge foreign debt forms the material basis for the political and economic instabilty that engulfs the entire sub-continent. Peru's debt is $20 billion.
Between 1989 and 1990 inflation in Peru rose from 5,230 to 7,000 per cent. Only one in five has a steady job and over half the population suffers from some form of malnutrition.
Peru's neighbouring countries are now staring their own future in the face. Under the direction of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank the line of the Peruvian bourgeoisie, in common with other Latin American ruling classes, is 'if it moves, if it can be sold, export it.
The aim of the export fever that has swept across the Peruvian bourgeoisie is to generate foreign currency in order to service the debt.
To attract foreign capital, production costs have had to be reduced. Over the last seven years this has resulted in real wages falling by 27 per cent, alongside large-scale prvatisation.
Cholera is not a particularty difficult disease to treat or prevent. But elementary health and social provision have been in the frontline of cuts resulting from the Fujimori government's savage austerity programme designed to reduce the When Fujimori was elected last June it was because he rejected the deflationary 'shock therapy' that had been supported by the more rightwing candidate Llosa.
Once in power though, he lost no time in implementing such a policy. In one stroke he abolished all price support.
The poor are told that they should boil their water to kill the cholera bacteria. They are not told, however, how they are expected to cope with a 3000 per cent rise in fuel prices.
Of 22 million people in Peru, 15 million live crammed into slum neighbourhoods. Forty per cent of urban districts are not connected to running water and in many areas there is only one tap per 1000 people.
Millions of dollars in emergency aid are needed now. But the only effective long-term measure is an adequate supply of clean water. This needs the development of large infrastructural projects as part of an extensive and radical health and social programme.
Such programmes however, and a life free from disease and poverty, will not be handed out by charity. They will be won by the political struggle in. which the Peruvian people are now engaged.
Roland Wood Peru Support Group 20 Compton Terrace London, N1 2UN.
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