Peru’s president condemns conditions of ‘slave workers’ as four young people die in blaze in Lima, at least two of whom were reportedly imprisoned inside

Peru’s public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into human trafficking and labour exploitation following a fire in the capital that killed four young people.

It is claimed that at least two of the men, Jorge Luis Huamán, 19, and Jovi Herrera, 21, had been locked inside a container on the roof of the Nicolini building in Lima by a boss they only knew as “gringo”, when fire ripped through it on 22 June.

“They locked them in, which is criminal,” said Peru’s president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, as he visited the shell of the burnt-out building. “They were practically slave workers.”

The incident has laid bare Peru’s often exploitative unregulated labour sector, which includes some 70% of the workforce, according to the country’s statistics institute.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A person trapped in the blazing building signals to firefighters. Photograph: Luis Iparraguirre/Andina/AFP/Getty Images

In a statement on Saturday, the International Labour Organisation described the conditions in which the workers died and 17 were injured as “close to modern forms of slavery such as forced labour”. It added: “Working in conditions of imprisonment represent a clear and obvious violation of fundamental labour rights and of human dignity.”

Some 250 firefighters battled the fire as it raged upwards. The building was stacked with flammable synthetics, paint and textiles. Clouds of toxic black smoke billowed out as the flames reached about 20 containers stacked three or four high on the roof where the workers laboured in sub-human conditions. Firefighters said temperatures reached up to 800C, fuelled by the flammable materials inside.



“My son is trapped in there and he can’t get out because the door was locked with a key. The owner locks it so the people who work there can’t leave,” Jorge Luis Huamán’s mother, Bertha Villalobos, told reporters at the scene. She said she’d received a desperate call from her son.

Other workers told local media that they had worked from 7am or 8am until 6.30pm with only a 30-minute break at midday to eat lunch and go the toilet. They were locked inside to prevent theft but also to avoid detection by municipal inspectors, they said.

Huamán and Herrera allegedly earned less than $1 (£0.80) an hour and worked rubbing the labels off poor-quality fluorescent tubes and repackaging them as better known brands, which were sold on the building’s ground floor.

“Here we have a totally precarious and forced labour, not just failing to comply with labour regulations but putting life at risk,” Alfonso Grados, Peru’s employment minister, told Peru’s La República newspaper, adding that the building had not been visited by labour inspectors.

“This tragedy marks total contempt for the worker and his life, it goes beyond a labour issue,” he added, urging workers to demand for their rights, and vowing to increase labour inspections.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Firefighters try to control the blaze in a building close to Lima’s city centre. Photograph: Luis Iparraguirre/Andina/AFP/Getty Images

But Jorge Toyama, a labour lawyer, said Peru only had 500 labour inspectors when it needed four times as many. Public life was so permeated by the “culture of informality”, he added, that many workers did not know their rights, let alone how to demand them.

Peru has the third highest rate of cases of forced labour and human trafficking in Latin America, after Mexico and Colombia, and ranks 18th out of 167 countries monitored worldwide, according to the Walk Free Foundation’s Global Slavery Index.