About fourteen people have died and five others have been left injured after a small passenger van veered off a highway and plunged into a steep ravine in northern Peru.
Local emergency services and government officials confirmed the tragic event on Thursday. The accident took place just outside the municipality of San Juan, which sits in the rugged Cajamarca region roughly five hundred miles north of the capital city, Lima.
Ricardo Chilon, the head of institutional communications for the San Juan district, stated that a minibus carrying nineteen people had fallen directly into the deep gorge. Emergency service personnel, including police officers and fire crews, rushed to the remote site to recover the bodies of the victims. Among the dead were the driver of the vehicle and a young child.
The vehicle had been travelling from San Juan and was heading towards the town of Ciudad de Dios when it suddenly left the tarmac. Local authorities have launched a full investigation to determine exactly what caused the vehicle to lose control.
Rescue efforts at the crash site have proven exceptionally difficult. Edson Roman, a senior official with the local fire department, told reporters at the scene that workers were struggling to reach all of the victims. He explained that the vehicle had become tightly wedged deep within the narrow ravine, leaving several bodies trapped inside the wreckage.
Fatal traffic collisions are a frequent occurrence across Peru. Transport safety experts point to a combination of poorly maintained mountain infrastructure, a distinct lack of traffic police enforcement, and human errors such as excessive speeding as the main causes behind the high accident rate.
Official government data shows that the South American nation suffers heavily from transit accidents, with more than three thousand people losing their lives on Peru's roads last year alone.
