Sal Si Puedes — palabra.

Peruvian television this summer broadcast images of coronavirus patients lying on clinic floors in the city of Iquitos.

U.S. citizens and residents encountered chaos and steep air fares as they tried to leave a South American nation hammered by the coronavirus this summer. How did leaving Peru become such a nightmare?

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series that explores the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America. The reporting was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

*Read here about the homecoming of hundreds of Brazilians -- including some exposed to the coronavirus -- deported from the United States this year.

*Read here about how ICE’s “COVID Flights” turned one Colombian deportee into a super-spreader.

*Read here about health care problems inside ICE’s expansive immigration detainee transportation system.

Update on Nov. 5, 2020: This story contains an updated paragraph that clarifies the role of the non-profit Warrior Angels Rescue in helping US residents leave Peru.

By the time Rossana Tello made it to the staging point in Lima, she’d traveled by car, motorcycle and foot across 800 miles of Peru in two weeks. She was relieved to be waiting -- with dozens of other U.S. citizens and residents -- to catch a free flight that would take her home, ending a monthslong nightmare that had started as a journey of personal discovery .

Peru was becoming a mess, caught in an explosion of COVID-19 cases and death.

But as Tello and the other passengers waited, they received devastating news:

The free flight they were anticipating, arranged by a nonprofit group, was canceled.

Dejected, Tello returned to her hotel room to consider her options. The New York resident became one of more than 100,000 people worldwide, 12,300 of them in Peru, who had to turn to the U.S. government to help them get home as the coronavirus became a global pandemic.

Expatriates, business travelers and tourists rushed to airports, hoping to catch flights home.

Despite the pandemic, most countries experienced fairly orderly evacuations of foreigners.

But in Peru, the exit became a massive, frustrating undertaking. U.S. officials had anticipated repatriating only 5,000 people, but more than twice that number actually needed help. They became the largest group of U.S. citizens and residents evacuated from any single country.

In the South American republic where Tello found herself stranded this spring, chaos reigned. Bodies of COVID-19 victims were stacked on concrete floors of morgues. Infected patients, tethered to IV-lines, slept on floors of crowded clinics.

As COVID-19 spread across the globe in March, countries worldwide took drastic measures to limit the virus’s spread. Peru is next door to Ecuador, which has one of the highest death tolls in the world and stringent restrictions on travel.

Peru responded to the pandemic in the spring, canceling commercial flights and limiting domestic travel. Thousands of U.S. residents, many of them Latinos from the region or visiting relatives, were suddenly stuck. For some, months would pass before they could rejoin family here.

Feeling like a low priority

By the time Tello finally reached Lima in late April, she was exhausted and couldn’t afford any of the commercial options available to return home. She’d spent more than $1,000 just to get to the capital. As she headed to a rallying point near Lima’s airport on April 30, she thought she’d avoided what other travelers, facing dwindling options, had chosen: taking out a $2,000 loan from the U.S. government to get on Miami-bound charter flights.

“We pack up all of our stuff, our passports are stamped, the buses pick us up to the airport, and our bags are checked,” Tello said. “After standing in line for four hours waiting to board the plane, we received the news that the flight wasn’t leaving. I was in disbelief and thought it was a joke.”

With the traumatic experience behind them, a number of those who found themselves stuck in Peru spoke with palabra. about their experiences.

The interviews paint a picture of what happened over several weeks in March, April and May as thousands of U.S. residents tried to leave. They describe harrowing journeys across a country where commerce and transit ground to a halt in a strict lockdown.

Many said they were made to feel like afterthoughts -- low priorities -- by their own government.

They said the U.S. State Department, which is tasked with helping U.S. residents get home in time of crisis, was unhelpful and uncommunicative. Not only were there long delays getting out of the country, but many U.S. residents said they felt pressured by embassy officials to take out loans for unspecified amounts of money to pay for return flights. Upon arrival in the U.S., some learned they owed the government as much as $2,000. Their passports were voided until they repaid the money.

The U.S. didn’t do as much as other countries, Tello said. “It was all about money. Either you sign a promissory note that you have to pay a bill later, instead of just rescuing people and allowing them to pay a normal ticket price.”

At least three U.S. citizens died in Peru during the coronavirus outbreak, according to news reports in that country. William Perez, a Peruvian-American man who family friends said split his time between Peru and the U.S., died after suffering a heart attack on a repatriation flight to New York, weeks after his wife died of complications from COVID-19.

The situation in Peru also raised questions about the U.S. government’s role in repatriating its residents. Other countries cover the cost of return flights for their people, and some go so far as calling in their armed forces to help.

The chaos in Peru has sparked questions from lawmakers in Washington, and some are trying to change a law the State Department says requires reimbursement for repatriation flights.

“A lot of it, it’s expectations,” said Jim Dickmeyer, a career foreign service officer who left the State Department in 2017. “You’re the big United States. You’ve got all these resources and we hear of other countries doing better by their citizens. So why don’t you?”

State Department officials have explained that an outbreak at the Jorge Chávez International Airport in Lima, Peru’s capital, hindered repatriation. Domestic curfews trapped tourists and visitors in far-flung reaches of the country, which includes parts of the Amazon Basin and the Andes Mountains.

State Department officials didn’t respond to a list of questions submitted by palabra. Instead, a spokesman for the department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, who was authorized to speak to the media but insisted on being quoted anonymously, wrote in an email that the government “is required by law to ‘provide evacuation assistance to private U.S. citizens ‘on a reimbursable basis to the maximum extent practicable,’” the official wrote. “As such, evacuees who traveled on all State Department-funded flights signed a promissory note or completed documentation for a repatriation loan.”

Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra. Photo by Mariana Bazo/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News

The long road home

Tello, a citizen of both the U.S. and Peru, left New York in late January for a South American trip to learn more about her Peruvian heritage.

On Feb. 24, she arrived in Cusco, a mountain city known for its historic architecture and as a portal to the Machu Picchu ruins. Cool temperatures made hiking and sightseeing bearable. She planned to stay for two weeks to learn more about the sacred lands around what was once the capital of the Inca Empire.

On March 14, she decided to help a group of travelers study jungle plants. It was going to be just for two weeks, but it would end up being more than a month before she could leave the Amazon town of Nauta, where locals had begun suspecting travelers of bringing in COVID-19.

On March 15, Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra declared a two-week shutdown. Vizcarra’s order closed Peru’s border, suspended international flights and even set strict limits on domestic travel. Two days later, the airport closed altogether.

“No one knew what that meant,” Tello said. “Now, I’m in the jungle with strangers with the exception of the one person who (originally) invited me to go to this place.”

She decided to wait and see what happened.

Here’s a rundown of Rossana Tello’s long, strange trip in and out of Peru this year, during the coronavirus pandemic.

Feb 24, 2020: Rossana Tello arrives in Cusco, Peru, on a trip that started in New York City. (US has 15 cases and1 death/ Peru has 0 reported cases and 0 deaths)

-- She decides to stay in Cusco for two weeks to learn about the country’s native, sacred lands.

March 14: Rossana agrees to stay with a group of travelers who wanted to spend two weeks in the jungle near Nauta to study Amazon plant life.

-- Rossana begins to hear that Peru is about to close its borders because of spreading COVID-19 infections.

March 15, 2020: Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra proclaims the nation is in lockdown -- a nationwide quarantine-in-place -- for two weeks.

-- Rossana decides to ride out the quarantine in Nauta. (Peru has 71 active cases and 0 deaths)

March 30, 2020: National lockdown quarantine orders are extended two more weeks. (Peru has 853 active cases and 44 deaths)

-- Rossana starts a difficult process of planning a departure from Nauta, short on cash and with no transportation or lodging reservations for a trip to Iquitos.

April 12, 2020: Rossana travels from Nauta to Iquitos on the back of a motorcycle; the ride is affordable, and an increasingly hostile environment towards foreigners (accused by some of bringing COVID-19 with them) made her want to leave.

-- Rossana persuades an off-duty police officer to drive her back to Nauta, for $120. Despite the difficult environment there, she believes it’s safer than Iquitos, which is in the middle of a coronavirus outbreak. As Peru’s strict curfew approaches, the officer leaves her stranded on the side of the road outside of Nauta. (Peru has 5,257 active cases and 464 deaths)

April 26, 2020: Through a support group on WhatsApp, Rossana finds an affordable taxi to take her to Iquitos so she can board a free flight called “Citizens of the World,” arranged by the nonprofit Warrior Angels Rescue (WAR). The flight, scheduled to travel from Lima to Miami, is canceled at the last minute. (Peru has 17,446 active cases and 1,983 deaths)

May 6th, 2020: WAR provides Rossana a hotel room in Lima, until she’s able to book a seat on an Eastern Airlines flight to Miami, using a friend’s credit card. (Peru has 33,384 active cases and 3,906 deaths)

-- Arriving at Miami’s MIA airport, she said she was not subject to any health screenings, even though her travel documents clearly state she’d been in coronavirus-plagued Peru for more than two months.

May 7, 2020: She travels to New Mexico to reunite with a friend during the first wave of the pandemic in the United States. (U.S. reports 985,630 active cases and 78,485 deaths)

May 21, 2020: She finally feels it's safe enough to fly back home to New York City. (U.S. reports 1,131,849 active cases and 98,754 deaths)

Ian Brownlee, deputy assistant secretary for consular affairs at the U.S. State Department. Photo courtesy of dpa/Alamy Live News

Peru: The ‘special logistical issue’

By March 20, the State Department had started chartering flights to repatriate U.S. citizens. With the commercial terminal closed, the Peruvian government agreed to let passengers depart through a military base on the other side of Lima’s airport. But the process was plagued by miscommunication. Over the next few days, officials gave shifting reasons for the delays.

Speaking shortly after the start of the pandemic, one State Department official called the global repatriation effort “unprecedented,” telling reporters that a system for those abroad to register with the U.S. government was “overloaded.” In the 24 hours leading up to that March 23 press briefing, the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs had rushed to double the system’s capacity, the official said.

“We need to be aware of the fact that the Peruvian capacity for handling these flights is very limited,” the unnamed official added, according to a transcript of the press briefing on the State Department’s website.

The next day, a State Department official told reporters Peru also had a “special … logistical issue”: American Airlines wasn’t certified to fly into Cusco, in the Andes mountain range. The official also hinted at another holdup. Peru wanted its own citizens in the United States loaded onto the government’s repatriation flights.

“Peru had some special challenges related to some of the issues the government of Peru had in terms of potentially having some of their citizens fly on planes that were going into Peru from the States,” the official said. “Once that was resolved, I know a number of flights have occurred.”

But even as officials told reporters that flights would resume, problems persisted on the ground in Peru. On its website, the embassy in Lima said the U.S. ambassador to Peru was assured by the Peruvian foreign minister that permission would be granted in time for a pair of flights set for March 24. But a LATAM Airlines flight from Cusco was denied permits and never got off the ground.

An American Airlines flight left Miami that morning with plans to pick up U.S. residents and take them to Florida. The crew learned in the air it didn’t have permission to land in Lima and turned back. In response, the State Department announced that Julie Chung, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, would be dispatched to Peru to help coordinate on the ground. But even Chung, a top-ranking State Department official, faced problems getting permission to land in Lima. Her flight was initially canceled, and she wouldn’t reach Peru until March 27.

On March 25, Ian Brownlee, the State Department’s principal deputy assistant secretary for consular affairs, told reporters that promises “from the senior-most levels of the government … didn’t efficiently trickle down to the people in the regulatory agencies that had to issue the permits, the landing permits for the planes.”

Once flights resumed, however, problems continued. Delays in getting permits and announcing flights meant many U.S. residents weren’t getting to the airport in time to get on the airplanes, officials said. As a result, some flights to the U.S. in late March departed Lima with empty seats, even as thousands of people waited to get home.

Chung, on the ground in Peru, said that as more and more U.S. residents contacted the State Department requesting help, the magnitude of the problem became more clear.

“I think the unparalleled scale of this was not expected by either the Peruvian government or by the embassy,” she told reporters in April. “I’ve seen all walks of life and every diverse kind of American citizen out there, everyone from backpackers, long-term residents, a lot of missionaries from the Latter-day Saints and other faiths. We’ve had adventure travelers, teachers, basically just a wide swath of people who, because they were really surprised by the sudden closure of the borders overnight and the airport closure. ... And so I think the scale of this is beyond any magnitude that we’ve seen before.”

In an email to palabra., a State Department spokesperson wouldn’t address specific questions about the delays.

“In the midst of this crisis, the U.S. Embassy in Lima worked closely with the Peruvian government to begin the repatriation of these U.S. citizens, some lawful permanent residents, and the immediate family members of U.S. citizens,” the spokesperson said.

Officials from the Peruvian foreign ministry didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions from palabra. In a brief phone interview, Gilberto Guevara Rospigliosi, a spokesman for the ministry, told palabra., “All the flights requested by the U.S. government were approved.” He added, “We obviously collaborated with every country to return their citizens.”

Masked Peruvians queue up at a bus stop this summer, as national quarantines pushed many to return to home villages to ride out the pandemic. Photo by Cesar Lanfranco/dpa/Alamy Live News

A most unusual circumstance

With the Covid-19 outbreak, the State Department found itself in an unusual circumstance, said Dickmeyer, the former foreign service officer. After natural disasters, when the department often has to step in to help stranded U.S. residents, there’s some expectation that commercial air carriers will quickly try to restart regular service. In the spring, no one knew when there would be a return to normalcy. Regular commercial flights didn’t return to Peru until October, leaving it up to the State Department to repatriate U.S. residents in the spring and summer months.

“There was probably a difficulty in matching resources to demand,” said Dickmeyer, who spent much of his career in Latin America. “A whole bunch of people were really panicked … and suddenly there was a spike in interest in getting out.”

He said the State Department is reluctant to ask the military for help, because the Pentagon will charge for the use of its equipment and personnel. “They charge a lot of money,” Dickmeyer said.

As the State Department struggled to organize repatriation flights, U.S. residents were streaming toward Peru’s population centers, searching for any way home. With domestic travel curtailed, just reaching Lima was difficult. On March 26, the Peruvian navy had to send a boat up the Amazon River to extract a pair of U.S. citizens trying to make it out of the region. The State Department chartered buses to get U.S. residents from remote regions of the country to Lima. The Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, a branch of the State Department that helps other countries combat drug trafficking, used its own airplane to transport 470 U.S. residents to Lima.

‘They started screaming at us’

In Nauta, where Tello awaited word about the pandemic, a multinational group of tourists was drawing unwanted attention.

“The locals started to get very angry and frustrated, almost like accusing us of bringing the virus in. It was so chaotic. They started screaming at us,” she said. “And that’s when I started to feel like maybe we are not safe in this town.”

She recalls the people around her contacting their home country embassies, afraid they might be killed and no one would know. Strict curfews had been implemented, limiting travel by gender and to certain days and times. On days she could leave her lodgings, Tello said, she was only allowed on the street for four-hour windows.

In mid-April, she was finally too fearful of conditions in Nauta. Tello decided to travel to Iquitos, a larger city, and then catch a flight to Lima. She paid a man 300 soles, about $85, to take her the 64 miles to Iquitos on the back of his motorcycle. At the time, Tello was dealing with an infected foot, so swollen from an insect bite that some of her skin was peeling off.

In Iquitos, Tello stayed with two American friends in an Airbnb. They’d been waiting for a month to catch a flight to the U.S.

COVID-19 cases were surging and soldiers patrolled the streets in Iquitos. Tello decided that, despite the resentment against foreigners in Nauta, she’d be safer there. So she paid 800 soles, about $235, to persuade another police officer to drive her, this time in his car, from Iquitos to Nauta. On the road, locals had set up flaming barriers.

“From what I understood from the police officer, they (were) protecting their town,” Tello said. “I don’t know if they were going to ask for money. For the most part, they were being cautious to protect their town.”

But a lockdown had begun in the area, and when she reached Nauta, soldiers were enforcing the quarantine at the edge of the town and wouldn’t let her enter. The police officer wanted to take her back to Iquitos, but Tello refused, so he left her on the side of the road with her two suitcases and guitar.

“Fear at this point crept in my body,” Tello said.

Desperate, she started knocking on doors, asking strangers for shelter. The first family she asked refused, saying they were afraid she had the coronavirus. Eventually, a couple in a rundown house took her in. Tello said she was grateful she could wait out the lockdown there even though the couple shared the small home with five children and bats and insects that came and went as they pleased.

“I had to distract my mind,” Tello said. “Thank God I had my guitar and I just kept playing my guitar and singing. Kinda keeping my mind out of thought of fear.”

Her host finally persuaded the soldiers to let Tello enter Nauta, where she returned to her previous lodgings. But she was still looking for a way out of Peru. Tello contacted the embassy in Lima and learned that once she got to the capital, she’d face another hurdle: the cost.

“That’s when I was told of these $2,000 flights,” she said

Any way out

As Tello absorbed the news of the price of her exit, U.S. citizen Connie Gong was looking for alternatives to a U.S. government loan to get home.

Gong, 26, said she emailed the U.S. Embassy in Lima and was given the options to either pay $2,000 for a one-way flight to Miami with Eastern Airlines, or sign a promissory note with no amount stated on the document. Frustrated, she contacted other countries’ embassies. British consular officials identified a free flight from Lima to Frankfurt, offered by Germany’s government. She looked online and realized that for $390 she could then catch a flight from Frankfurt to New York City.

“I added it all in my head and all the travel hours were worth it rather than paying a flight worth thousands of dollars,” Gong said.

On April 18, she made it to Frankfurt. German officials did not appear to mind that she was a U.S. citizen. She’d only told them she was “in transit to New York.” They let her through without objection.

The Boston resident added that, upon arriving in the U.S., she did not receive any health screenings.

Ground crews ready an Eastern Airlines charter jet for a flight repatriating U.S. residents from Peru this summer. Photo by Gabrielle Eppright.

The costly skies

Under pressure from the U.S., Peru in early April allowed some repatriation flights chartered independent of the State Department. By April 14, after repatriating about 7,000 U.S. residents, the government had fully handed over repatriation duties to private companies, like the recently reborn Eastern Airlines. With its business model in tatters as air travel crashed, Eastern found a new niche in providing repatriation flights from Latin America. The embassy in Lima continued to offer loans to U.S. citizens who couldn’t afford the flights.

And many needed the loans. One-way tickets that once cost around $200 suddenly cost as much as 10 times more.

Eastern didn’t respond to a request for comment from palabra.

One-off charters often cost much more than commercial flights, aviation experts say. The airplanes usually run empty on one leg. The lack of regular service and the COVID-19 outbreak at Lima’s airport also increased the cost of ground crews.

“Passengers complained about not getting price quotes beforehand, and market’ fares being lower,” Bob Mann, an airline industry analyst, wrote in an email to palabra. Fares for regular commercial flights “undoubtedly are lower, but that is for scheduled service with a variety of fare rules and some passengers paying far more for premium services, and cargo revenue onboard, all of which make ‘market’ fares lower.”

For those desperately trying to flee Peru, however, the pricey flights came as a shock. Many were forced to ask for loans from the State Department, and are still trying to figure out how they’ll pay them off.

“There is no way I would give Eastern my money,” said Ash Maki, a Californian who ended up $2,000 in debt and separated from his family for months after he accepted a loan from the State Department to buy a return flight. “They are charging four times the cost of a flight from San Francisco to Peru. It’s extortion.”

The 40-year-old Maki arrived in Lima with his wife, who is Peruvian, and 4-year-old stepdaughter to visit family on Feb. 13. Their $525 round-trip tickets with Copa Airlines had them returning March 28. With commercial flights canceled, Maki had to find a different way home. He emailed the U.S. Embassy in Lima and was told his only option was a $2,000 Eastern Airlines flight.

All the money he and his wife had saved up for their month long vacation had run out, leaving Maki to decide whether to scrape together money for the Eastern Airlines ticket and leave his family behind or stay in Peru with dwindling finances.

“I live paycheck to paycheck from my rental income,” Maki said. “Based on (my tenants’) income from what they make from work, [COVID19] affected that and then it made the situation for me desperate. I was borrowing money from my mom.”

Maki had another concern. His wife and stepdaughter are Peruvian nationals with U.S. green cards. If they stayed outside the U.S. for too long, their green cards could be revoked. In the end, Maki felt like he had to get back to California.

“There was no way I was able to support my family” in Peru and still pay bills (in the U.S.), Maki said. Leaving Peru “was the only option. I would have sat down there in Peru and starved.”

With no better option, Maki signed a promissory note for an undisclosed amount of money to pay for the Eastern Airlines flight.

“I remember they told us, ‘If you want to get back to the U.S., you better decide now,” he said. “I felt pressured to make the decision to take out the loan to ensure my return back to the States.”

On April 22, Maki left for California.

Five days after arriving in the U.S., he received an email from the State Department’s Accounts Receivable Branch stating, “We are working closely with our other Bureaus, Posts and Embassies to gather all of the necessary documentation in order for us to prepare your bill. Please allow 6-8 weeks to receive a bill from our office. Your payment will be due within 30 days from the bill date.”

So far, he has not received a bill from the State Department, and his passport remains unusable.

Lawmakers have been critical of the department’s insistence on seeking reimbursement. Now, some members of Congress are trying to get the law changed.

A bill introduced in March by Nydia Velázquez, D-New York, would let the department waive reimbursement “in the case of a communicable disease for which the Federal Government has issued a travel alert or travel warning.” That bill and similar legislation introduced by Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Michigan, have yet to get hearings in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“In the middle of this crisis, it is unconscionable that our government would foist enormous travel fees on stranded Americans who are desperate to get home and reunite with their families,” Velázquez said in a statement. “This bill is meant to send a message to the State Department to waive these fees, immediately.”

Luggage is lined up as foreign visitors in Peru anticipate boarding charter flights out of the country this summer. Photo by Connie Gong

The WAR room

Tello came in contact with a support group on WhatsApp where she heard about an affordable taxi service from Nauta to Iquitos. On April 26, she boarded a Lima-bound flight arranged by a U.S. nonprofit called Warrior Angels Rescue (WAR). In the capital, she checked into a Swissotel and two days later prepared for what she thought would be her flight home.

The moment Tello had been waiting for finally arrived.

“We are all ready to leave from the meeting location at an early start in the day,” she said. “After waiting in line for four hours with our bags ready and passports stamped, a woman makes the announcement that LATAM airlines canceled the flight due to lack of payment from WAR.”

Valerie Edmondson Bolaños, WAR’s founder and president, said a payment mixup with LATAM resulted in the flight getting canceled. Edmondson Bolaños said LATAM refunded the $145,000 she’d raised for the April 26 flights. Edmondson Bolaños said that despite the one canceled flight, and a difficult working environment in Peru, the organization did subsequently arrange charter flights out of the country.

Like Maki, Tello found herself with no other option but to buy a $2,000 flight on Eastern Airlines.

Rather than accept a loan from the embassy, she purchased the ticket using a friend’s credit card. Tello landed in Miami on May 6.

“Was this experience necessary?” Tello asked. “No. If the government would have reacted in a more smart way to protect its citizens, all of this (would) not have happened,” said Tello.

A family reunited, at last

After two months apart, Maki and his family were reunited on June 17 at Miami International Airport. His wife and stepdaughter took a charter flight arranged by a company, AC Tours, that charged far less than Eastern Airlines. Lima to Miami cost $500 per person, according to Maki.

Due to overbooking, a flight employee asked Maki’s wife if her small daughter could sit on her lap to make room for other passengers, thus saving the family even more money.

Maki is still waiting for the State Department bill for his own flight home on Eastern.

But the family is back home in Northern California, far from Peru, which today has the highest COVID-19 mortality rate in the world. The economy began to reopen this month, but strict curfews remain in place.

“Up until the last couple of days before my family boarded their flight back to the U.S., I lived in uncertainty,” Maki said. “The financial stress of the situation is a minor thing to get my wife and daughter back, so the best I could have done is talk to them every day on WhatsApp. After two months, I finally got them.”

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