ABSTRACT
IT WAS A TYPICAL SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN THE CALLEJ6N DE HUAYLAS, A valley high in the Peruvian Andes. Soccer teams played, farmers tended their chores, markets were closing, children's parties entertained the young, and strollers enjoyed the plazas as the sun reflected brilliantly off the vast snow peaks of the Cordillera Blanca. In five minutes the bucolic setting was shattered as an earthquake of 7.7 magnitude on the Richter scale convulsed the earth, precipitating enormous avalanches and floods, destroying nearly two thousand cities and villages, killing over seventy thousand persons, and injuring twice as many. Eight hundred thousand, about 6 percent of Peru's citizens, were left homeless in an eighty-three-thousand-square-kilometer area stretching from the Pacific Ocean across the Andes to the upper Amazon basin, 5 percent of the nation's territory. In terms of death it was the largest natural cataclysm in Western hemisphere history. Today, people still curse the event and its aftermath, the consequences of which are felt almost three decades later.
