FACTORTIERRA

Canchaqué suffered again from a slide of mud and rocks during rains in 2023.     All the footage: © Juan Francisco Facundo Silva .   CANCHAQUÉ, Peru— “Look how it left!,” exclaims Juan Francisco Facundo Silva, a computation technician and producer of a streaming music-TV show, as he saw the debris and the print of a slide of mud and rocks happened just before midnight, March 15 th , 2023.   Juan, artistically known as Facundo, arrived three days later to see how his remaining family was doing in Canchaqué Town , 91 miles by road from Piura City – he couldn’t hold on the sadness despite he tried to manage it by recording with his mobile the clips we share here.   Collating a preliminary report by Peru’s National Institute of Civil Defense and testimonies of eyewitnesses gathered by FACTORTIERRA, on March 15 th , 2023, 23:15 PET (0415 UTC, March 16 th , 2023), Púsmalca Valley, where Canchaqué Town is located, had “intense rains.”   Some...

While the world runs rushly to the future, the land of bocadillos still doubts amid an eternal present… or past.   By LUIS PAUCAR TEMOCHE   AYABACA, Peru –Ninety-nine miles after Piura City , Socchabamba [Sokchabamba] appears for the first time behind the window of a truck that I took random in Ayabaca. The picture of its disperse mountains and melancholic vegetation hasn’t more than splatting with the mud splashing out along the way.   I’m going to search the missing ones at the highlands, who were and who will be, to the land where the drug trafficking continues to be the invisible curtain killing police officers and flourishing like the coca leaves crops. The landscape hasn’t clear in the 45-minute trip, and the fog has been the only companion since we picked up eight miles behind. Nelly is my mate beside. With her, I departure on Ayabaca’s poderoso Cautivo , 1:00 am. Sunday. And now I look at her again, took in a black rod for not falling despite the ...

The routine consists in working, spending, looking like, an waiting for… the next month.   All photographs by Estany Tineo for FACTORTIERRA.    SULLANA, Peru – So near, so far. The towns of Upper Chira Valley’s left bank stand just 20 minutes away Sullana City , and it seems a world aside. So near, so far. The people hold very god TV’s, sound systems, freezers, but what hardly could be found in a house is running water, or, at least, a latrine that guarantees the excrement won’t be anywhere.   So near, so far. Amid the modern furniture, the most houses continue building of pasted mud and mud bricks, so near… so far. The mud is the only one connecting the people of this part of Upper Chira to their ancestors. The archaeologist Daniel Davila , who accompanied us before researching in Malingas Community , suspects tallán people went around looking for agricultural lands, taking Chira River as water source.   The green mantle The archeology is ...

When her life seemed to be condemned to slavery, she found the light, fought for her family, left to be illiterate, and even she was in front of the 264 th Pope.   Written and photographed by Luis Paucar Temoche        PIURA CITY, Peru – She didn’t finish to understand. The last time that Josefa thought what she did and where she became brave from to do it –the clock marked that the twilight began to fall—a handle of tears slided down through her chicks. And she didn’t finish to understand. The only she remembered is that sunny afternoon in 1985, she was told to be chosen –among all the farmer women—to give a gift to the Holy Father during his visit to Piura .   The news got her without warning. She was so nervous that, immediately, her ffeet started to tremble and a –more or less cold—sweat streamwent around her forehead. “How am I going to be, if I’m a farmer woman?,” Josefa wondered, who though that everything she heard was a joke. She was cooking rice ...