Hundreds of indigenous protesters were holding 38 police hostage early yesterday in Peru’s Amazon jungle after fights between tribes and police killed up to 33 people in the worst violence of Peruvian President Alan Garcia’s government.
Demonstrators were also threatening to set fire to an oil pumping station of state-owned Petroperu unless the government told police to halt efforts to clear weeks of blockades of roads and rivers that have hurt food and fuel supplies.
Tribes, worried they will lose control over natural resources, have protested since April to force Congress to repeal new laws that encourage foreign mining and energy companies to invest billions of dollars in the mostly pristine rainforest.
Violence broke out on Friday as police tried to disperse a roadblock on a stretch of highway called “Devil’s Curve” in the Bagua region of Amazonas province, about 1,400 km north of Lima, the capital.
Indigenous leaders said at least 22 protesters were killed. The government reported the deaths of three protesters and 11 police officers, some from spear wounds. At least 100 people were injured and more conflict appeared possible.
“Everyone must know that right now there are 38 police hostage at the pumping station,” Prime Minister Yehude Simon said at a news conference late on Friday. He urged calm but defended the government’s use of force.
The bloodshed, which prompted calls for Simon and Garcia’s interior minister to quit, has underscored deep divisions between wealthy elites in Lima and poor indigenous groups in the countryside.
It also has exposed the central government’s lack of control over remote regions of the country.
Late on Friday, in a separate incident, the army said one soldier was killed and four injured when a remnant band of Shining Path rebels shot explosives at one of its helicopters parked at a base in the coca-growing zone of the Apurimac and Ene Valleys east of Lima.
The group led an insurgency for years against Peru’s government but went into the cocaine trafficking business after its leaders were captured in the 1990s.
Garcia, whose approval rating is 30 percent, suffers from a lack of support in rural areas, especially the Amazon.
Critics say he has not done enough to lower the poverty rate from 36 percent and that economic boom times enjoyed before the current downturn failed to reach the poor.
They also say his policies favoring free-markets and foreign investment mainly benefit elites in cities.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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