LIMA (AFP) - The Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, brought a message of solidarity from the pope Friday as he toured the Peruvian region devastated by an earthquake that killed 540 people.
Bertone visited the Pacific coast towns of Pisco, Chincha and Ica, and met in Lima with President Alan Garcia, who told the cardinal that he hoped Pope Benedict XVI would visit Peru.
"I bring the pope's message of solidarity as well as his spiritual and material help to the people affected," Bertone said during a mass in the main square of Pisco, a town of 130,000 people that lost 80 percent of its buildings.
The 8.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the region south of Lima on August 15 left 540 people dead, the majority in Pisco, and another 1,100 injured.