17/07/2020 The New Humanitarian | COVID-19 shifts Peru’s internal migration into reverse “We see the conditions at the camps as a possible threat to their 25 years of journalism from the heart of crises Free Newsletter health and their lives.” For years, the ICRC helped families in the area search for loved ones who disappeared in the 19802000 con ict. It funded travel to meetings in Lima and supported forensic work. With COVID-19, that work stopped. The organisation is now providing cash support to vulnerable people who have lost their income and haven’t received government funds since the start of the lockdown. Ángel Porras Campos, with the ICRC’s Ayacucho o ce, explained that the government agency that investigates disappeared persons had asked the ICRC to instead fund travel for people who needed help to return to their homes in the region, providing payments worth 300 soles ($85). “As we are now unable to help families in the search of their loved ones [due to government suspension of work], we are now substituting that with economic assistance, so that those people could somehow withstand the quarantine,” Porras Campos said. “ICRC programmes that have been paralyzed by Covid have had to be re-oriented towards vulnerable families,” he added. Franklin Coriñaupa Flores was one of the luckier returnees. A suddenly jobless taxi driver, he was able to drive from Lima to his village, Huallhua, without being stopped and was quarantining in an old school. Local authorities had provided him with nothing, he told TNH via WhatsApp, and his family dropped off food, blankets, and a mat after he arrived.  Others attempting to return home from Lima have found themselves trapped in a red-tape nightmare, with physical risks added on. In April, after applying for assistance from their regional governments, large crowds of migrant workers waited for ights for weeks outside of Lima’s airport. They included Chota Cora and several hundred others originally from Loreto, in the Amazon basin region. A few boarded ights, but many others were loaded onto buses and sent to locations outside the capital to quarantine before returning home. Fourteen days of quarantine turned into one and then two months, returnees said. They were regularly transferred to different sites, at times being told they were going to the airport when instead they were driven to another quarantine centre.  Approximately 3,000 of them ended up in Huampaní, at a “vacation centre” normally reserved for public servants, where returnees said they spent weeks without news about their transfer requests. Military police using tear gas allegedly suppressed a protest by the returnees. Subscribe https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2020/07/08/Peru-internal-migration-coronavirus 7/10