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Picture of two peasant Quechua-speaking men sitting on a stone bench in the
Plaza de Armas in the city of Cusco (Cuzco) Peru in the mid-1960s.
As demonstrated in the
photograph, the poverty of the Quechua people living in the Andes Mountains of
Peru was extreme 45 years ago with the majority of Peruvians living in poverty.
According to Peruvian Government statistics the rate of extreme poverty has been
greatly diminished in recent years. However the 2010 data shows that
approximately thirty percent of the Peruvian population is still classified as
poor by the government and the World Bank. Many Quechua people are still
bound to the earth, making a living by farming small parcels of land.
Water is a major limiting factor to agricultural production and when there are
droughts, the people literally starve to death. Unbelievably, the national
government of Alan Garcia is currently diverting water resources from the Cuzco
Region to other Regions, thereby exasperating the shortage of water and sparking
protests and riots in the City of Cusco in 2010.
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