A group of Peruvian Jews made aliyah on a special charter flight on the background of one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Latin America and resulting street riots, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported.
The group of 37 landed at Ben-Gurion Airport on Friday and immediately entered a two-week quarantine.
Despite being one of the first Latin-American countries to go into lockdown, Peru has suffered the second-largest outbreak in the region, recording 232,992 infections and 6,860 deaths, with the actual numbers believed to be far higher.
Almost half of the cases are in Lima, the capital and largest city in the country and where most of the Jewish community lives, a tiny population of about 2,000 in the country of almost 33 million people.
“We were required to stay at home as a result of the closure,” Gabriel Shnaider Ackerman, 20, told JTA. “From the window of our house, we could see the riots happening outside.”
Peurvian President Martín Vizcarra imposed an early and strict lockdown on March 16, mobilizing police and army forces to enforce it, shared health data with the public, implemented testing and adhered to all the WHO’s recommendations.
So what went wrong? Peruvian health officials say that citizens have not been respecting the law. The consequences have been devastating with public hospitals collapsing and tens of thousands fleeing the cities to their rural home villages, many on foot, after the loss of their jobs left them homeless, with some even begging for food door to door. The migration to the country has reversed years of urban migration.
Many of Peru’s poor citizens are just not capable of following guidelines, with one out of three poor households not even having access to running water and half of Peruvian homes lacking refrigerators. The poor have no savings and cannot afford to sit at home without working.
The coronavirus crisis has become a sad saga for Peru, which in recent years has become a Latin American success story, with years of increasing economic growth allowing millions of poor people to improve their circumstances. Unfortunately, the pandemic has reversed years of growth.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Latin America and resulting street riots Same way Floyd rioters are heading to Corona disaster. Of-course other contributing factor is Peru being just 5 days away from winter solstice.