‘The whole world eats well, and we do not’

In the Andean community of Niño Jesús de Huarapite, the people say they have been forgotten.

Some dirt roads have been paved in the past three decades. Tractors have replaced horses. But despite Peru’s economic success, little else here has changed.

The backbreaking work of harvesting potatoes in the steep hills is still the main way families such as Liez Quispe’s survive.

“The resentment here is that the whole world eats well, and we do not, and nobody remembers us,” Quispe says.

Quispe’s family pain spans decades. In 1984, the family survived a massacre in her town carried out by Peru’s military and U.S.-trained counterterrorism police who were battling a Maoist uprising. Life has continued to be a struggle. But a leftist presidential candidate, from a rural part of the country, is giving them hope.

Voters, many elderly, boarded trucks for hours-long journeys through the mountains to their polling place in June.

Small-town election offices built booths and handed out instructions on how to vote, many written in Quechua, one of Peru’s Indigenous languages.

More than 80 percent of voters in the department of Ayacucho voted for Pedro Castillo in the election.

More than a month later, election officials have yet to declare a winner in the race between Keiko Fujimori, a far-right former congresswoman, and Castillo, a rural schoolteacher who ran with a Marxist-Leninist party. With the votes counted, Castillo holds a narrow lead, but Fujimori is claiming fraud.

The pandemic is crushing the region. Tourist-reliant towns such as Sarhua, famed for its artisanal sculptures and traditional clothing, have seen business evaporate.

The lobby of a once-thriving textile shop, where artisans sold their wares, now sits empty.

The flora of the Pampas River valley, 2,000 feet lower than the potato fields of Huarapite, gives way to cactus and temperate fruits and vegetables.

Julia and Victor Huamaccto moved back last year after living in Lima for 25 years. “We came back here to celebrate Carnival and the illness happened,” says Julia, 70. "Here we have a little land. When there is rain, there is enough fruit. We miss the work in Lima. Here there is no pay, no work.”

Fear of getting sick from the coronavirus and the loss of job opportunities in the cities have driven many to return to the countryside. “To work and survive here takes a lot of strength and tenacity,” Quispe says.

Castillo’s promises of agricultural investment and reform played well in Ayacucho. Now the people of Peru’s highlands wait to see if he will take office — and if he will remember them.