Street vendors defy virus lockdown in Lima

Police in Peru cleared impoverished market traders off the streets of the capital Lima on Wednesday, as authorities extended the country's coronavirus lockdown.

Mariselda Umiña is one of an estimated million people who have lost their jobs in Lima because of the lockdown, and says she needs to sell clothes on the street to earn enough money to support her family.

On Wednesday she arrived to set up her wares, only to find dozens of police officers on horses and motorcycles urging people to leave.

Selling clothes on in the street is prohibited, affecting hundreds of vendors. The quarantine rules only allow food markets, pharmacies and banks to be open.

Umiña, who lives in a cramped room with her husband and children, has run out of money after 70 days of lockdown.

Last month she started cooking with firewood because she did not have enough to buy bottled cooking gas.

She didn't have the money to pay the internet bill for her children to take online classes and she sold her only cell phone.

Umiña used to earn enough to rent an apartment and start a business making children's clothing after migrating almost two decades ago from southern Peru, near the mythical lake of the Incas, Titicaca.

But the pandemic pulverized Peru's fragile economy and now Umiña thinks that if things worsen she will have to leave Lima and return to her rural house to plant crops, as more than 160,000 people have done over the past two months.

As of Wednesday, Peru had close to 130,000 COVID-19 cases and 3,788 deaths.