![Trucks with merchandise paralyzed on the outskirts of the city of Pasto, on January 13, 2023. [Foto: Óscar Cavadía]](https://thelatestnews.world/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Southern-Colombia-isolated-and-in-crisis-due-to-the-closure.png)
The Pan-American highway, the longest in the Americas, was destroyed as it passed through the Colombian department of Cauca. Months of intense rains that accumulated on the mountain turned the terrain into a river of mud that buried a section of the road and since then it left the department of Nariño, on the border with Ecuador, isolated from the rest of the country.
The landslide at kilometer 75 in the town of Rosas, Cauca, also left some 150 families living on the mountain homeless. The government evacuated the victims, installed them in temporary shelters and promised to relocate them to fertile land.
“A peasant relocation implies a farm big enough to accommodate the people who left, so that the people have more land than they had here,” President Gustavo Petro said from the area of the landslide on Thursday, the place he had tried to reach. arrived since last Tuesday, but bad weather in the area prevented him from landing his plane.
“We already had last year, when 10 winter months ended, with terrible circumstances,” Petro added about the situation that has forced the Executive to allocate 2.1 trillion pesos (about 400 million dollars) to date to attend these emergencies. “We thought that these days marked their end, but they are hardly a truce; winter continues until June, imagine what we will have to face.”
In Nariño, carriers told the voice of america the fear that a serious crisis will hit them, which has already begun to affect the supply of gasoline and other basic products, as well as the departure of merchandise that has been dammed.
“The situation is very serious because the economy in the department of Nariño has slowed down 100%, attached to that the production of our peasants is unable to leave rural areas. Cargo carriers are facing a big problem because more than 6,000 trucks were dammed,” he told the VOAMarcos Arévalo, transporter.
The governor of the department of Cauca, Elías Larrahondo, told the VOA that the works to remove the large amount of earth removed can take up to 25 days; However, due to the magnitude of what happened, it could take months to recover the road again.
“The mountain is in full movement due to the geological fault known as Romeral-Cauca and in addition to that the amount of rain that has fallen, we have been in pure winter for a year and a half, the most likely thing is that the mountain will continue to move ”, he explained.
The businessmen assure that the losses already reach one million dollars, due to the cost involved in removing the products through the Pasto-Mocoa-Popayán road, which they consider rural, because according to them it is a very dangerous corridor through the Andes mountain range.
“It is time to look for other alternate routes, it is already irresponsible to continue investing State resources because in that sector due to failures and in this case the route was completely destroyed,” he told the VOA businessman Mario Guevara.
Finally, from January 16, ships loaded with gasoline and gas will begin to leave the port of Barranquilla, in the Caribbean, to the port of Tumaco, in the Pacific, to facilitate the supply of fuel throughout Nariño.
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