To get back to the issue — that of a country’s Red Cross not responsing to an emergency and letting people die — the Peruvian Red Cross is clearly negligent, and it’s a problem that goes back to the 1990s. Internal and institutional problems with the PRC have made it unable to deliver the disaster response that the country needs so desperately. Many other countries, including the U.S.,have highly functional Red Cross societies that have fair to good relations with the government and with the international Red Cross society. Those relationships are key to bringing aid when it is needed.

As far as the US: there was a break-down in the Red Cross’s and FEMA’s ability to respond to disasters starting with the launch of the Bush Administration, when some key posts were handed out as political favors to people without the institutional knowledge to respond effectively. The Katrina disaster was a prime example of a country’s disaster-relief network falling apart. It was a great tragedy and people were justifably outraged by the needless deaths and suffering that occured then. As we all know, corrections were made and now, I believe, the Am Red Cross and FEMA are back in the business of saving lives and mitigating disasters.

Would that similar mess-ups in Peru would spur the country to fix its disaster-response mechanisms.

Since this issue means so much to you, why don’t you start your own blog to spread your message? You have left many lengthy comments on my blog, some of them filled with 15 or more links, a few of them longer than my original post.

You’re probably not aware of it, but the readers who comment on my blog posts and disagree strongly with me generally link to their pieces on their own blogs. It’s a matter of courtesy, given that I pay to host this site.

I also speak for many of the readers of this blog that making blanket statements like “most Americans seem ignorant of their own country” isn’t a courteous way to initiate dialogue on a site called “An American in Lima.”

But, it is true and many die every year. It is very unfair. It seems that because they live in reservations, they are not human beings anymore. Very inhumane.

To educate yourself better and whoever else reads this, why don’t you take a look at the link below.

http://www.russellmeansfreedom.com/tag/south-dakota-winter-emergency-declaration-russell-means-republic-of-lakotah/

There are many more articles related to Native Americans who die from cold and negligence in the Great Plains on other non profit organizations websites. But this is a good start

As I said before, culture seems to be the main issue here. Since it mostly happens in Puno where there are people who have Aymaran culture and speak that language unlike the rest of Peru !!

This also reminds me that many Native American in the US die from negligence in the cold weather of the winter of the great plains of the US.

Maybe the Peruvian government should have segregated all the indigenenous peoples to reservations just like the united states did. But, that would have been really cruel and mean in my opinion.

I’ve heard that the International Red Cross has a lawsuit against the Peruvian Red Cross to get the Peru org to give up the Red Cross name so it can be handed over to more competant members. Peru has so many emergencies and ongoing crises; the country needs a stellar Red Cross to take care of all that.

The federal government could have sent in doctors and medical emergency teams to the highlands, but instead, the ministers started to blame the local governments and vice versa, and in the mean time, children began dying. And kept dying. Overall, Peru’s central government should have taken care of the emergency but they didn’t. And when a country’s health and emergency relief agencies don’t do their jobs (or even when they do), the Red Cross is supposed to step in and help victims, regardless of the politics.