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Peruvians march for death penalty During the insurgencies Shining Path rebels would attack villages Thousands of Peruvians have joined a march in Lima supporting a proposal to introduce the death penalty for members of the Shining Path rebel group.Many of the crowd waved pictures of relatives killed by the Shining Path. Last week President Alan Garcia suggested changing the constitution to allow a referendum on the issue after parliament rejected the proposal. MPs argued that capital punishment would breach the American Convention on Human Rights, which Peru has signed. Protesters from the Association of Families of Victims of Terrorism,...

Suspected rebels in Peru have killed seven men, including five policemen, in an ambush in the country's coca-growing interior. The police convoy was attacked during a crackdown on illegal coca-growing in the second major ambush in a year. The interior ministry has not blamed any group for the attack but remnants of the Shining Path guerrilla movement are known to operate in the region. More than 20 police have been killed in ambushes in the last year. The rebel group, which led one of Latin America's bloodiest insurgencies in the 1980s and 1990s, has claimed responsibility for similar attacks. The...

Troops have been dispatched to the central Andean valleys of Peru in recent weeks to counter renewed guerrilla activity by re-equipped leftist rebels of the Shining Path, according to high level government officials. ... Twenty-three members of the group have been arrested since Shining Path resumed operations at the beginning of the year with a road ambush that killed eight police officers. In a videotape released at the end of last month, a hooded leader using the pseudonym of Comandante Artemio said the group would resume large-scale attacks in three months. ...Comandante Artemio threatened to renew attacks unless the government...

LONDON – Britain's secret intelligence service, MI6, has established the first proof al-Qaida is playing a major role in the new Cold War between North and South America – with Osama bin Laden's terror network seeing itself in league with Mexican subversives in infiltrating the U.S. border. The evidence emerged as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez swash-buckled into London after scoring a win in yet another venomous battle with Washington for influence and economic advantage across the Latin American continent. Chavez is in London to meet the capital's anti-Bush mayor, Ken Livingstone, and other prominent British opponents of the war in...

Aucayacu - Peru's brutal rebel movement, the Shining Path, long thought to be all but extinct, is on the warpath again, boosted by an alliance with drug traffickers. Its Maoist guerrillas almost vanished after the capture of their founder and leader, Abimael Guzman, in 1993, with only a few hundred left sheltering in remote highlands. But those mountains are now the setting for a dramatic growth in cultivating coca to produce cocaine, and veteran fighters are now serving new masters, the drug barons. The Shining Path once forced the whole country to its knees in a war that claimed 70,000...

IN ONE of the bloodiest incidents for more than a decade, Shining Path guerrillas ambushed and killed eight police officers, amid fears that money from drug trafficking is giving the Peruvian rebel group a new lease of life. The ambush was set along the road to Aucayacu, more than 240 miles east of Lima. As the vehicle carrying nine officers entered the rebel killing zone, 20 members of the Shining Path opened up with automatic weapons. The police driver managed to get the vehicle off the road, where those not killed in the initial hail of gunfire fought on for...

LIMA (Reuters) - President Alejandro Toledo on Thursday declared a state of emergency in Peru's central jungle after Shining Path guerrillas killed eight policemen amid an upsurge in violence from the Maoist group. The emergency decree bans public gatherings and gives police and military the right to search houses and make arrests without warrants. The rebels killed eight policemen in an ambush on a police vehicle out on routine patrol in the remote Huanuco region on Tuesday, some 220 miles northeast of Lima. The group that led one of Latin America's bloodiest insurgencies in the 1980s and early 1990s has...

Lima, Oct 18 (EFE).- Peru's Abimael Guzman, the founder of a Maoist guerrilla movement-cum-death cult that sometimes dynamited the bodies of just-murdered functionaries and hanged canines from lamposts as warnings to "capitalist dogs," also had his soft, sappy and romantically poetic side. The man known by his fanatic followers as "President Gonzalo" revealed some of his secrets in a hand-written ode dedicated to his wife, who died in 1988 under mysterious circumstances. A video seized in 1992 by the security forces, after Guzman's arrest, shows the wake of Augusta La Torre, better known as "Comrade Norah" and the Shining Path's...

LIMA, Peru, Aug. 18, 2005 – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is slated to meet here today with Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo and his new defense minister to show support for Toledo's democratic initiatives and further bolster on what a senior defense official traveling with the secretary called the warmest defense relationship between the two countries in 40 years. Rumsfeld and Toledo are expected to discuss ways to build on Toledo's progress in cracking down on narcotics trafficking, cooperating with its neighbors in countering threats to the region, and modernizing Peru's armed forces and their obsolete 1970s-era Soviet equipment. The leaders...

Watching the Economy Crumble Paul Craig Roberts Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2005 The United States continues its descent into the Third World, but you would never know it from news reports of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' July payroll jobs release. The media give a bare-bones jobs report that is misleading. The public heard that 207,000 jobs were created in July. If not a reassuring figure, at least it is not a disturbing one. On the surface, things look to be pretty much OK. It is when you look into the composition of these jobs that the concern arises. Of the...

The United States continues its descent into the Third World, but you would never know it from news reports of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' July payroll jobs release. The media give a bare-bones jobs report that is misleading. The public heard that 207,000 jobs were created in July. If not a reassuring figure, at least it is not a disturbing one. On the surface, things look to be pretty much OK. It is when you look into the composition of these jobs that the concern arises. Of the new jobs, 26,000 (about 13 percent) are tax-supported government jobs. That...

LIMA, Peru -- Maoist Shining Path insurgents ambushed and killed three Peruvian policemen in a remote jungle area known for guerrilla activity, officials said Monday. The officers were driving Sunday evening in the Huallaga Valley about 205 miles northwest of Lima when more than 70 rebels sprayed their SUV with semiautomatic weapons fire, police said. The officers were shot to death as they fled the vehicle, which was then looted and set ablaze, police said. Sunday's attack was the first on police in the former guerrilla stronghold since June, when two officers and a marine died in a similar ambush....

CALLAO, Peru (AP)The first public trial of Shining Path rebel leader Abimael Guzman fell apart on Monday as the second of the three judges presiding over the case stepped down citing a conflict of interest.

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. Oct 7 - A new report found that layoffs reached an eight-month high in September, while new hiring rose only slightly. Employment consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said companies announced 107,863 layoffs in September, 45 percent more than in August. The figure was the largest since January, when employers laid off 117,556 workers. Meanwhile, employers hired only 16,166 new workers, compared with 132,105 in August. The computer, transportation, telecommunications and consumer products industries were particularly hard hit by the cuts. "Historically, the period from September 1 through December 31...

Watching the screaming fanatics last night who tried to disrupt President Bush's convention speech reminds me of scenes in the movie The Dancer Upstairs when the fanatics of a movement based on Peru's leftwing Shining Path screamed "VIVA EL PRESIDENTE EZEQUIEL!!!" One particular moment in the movie was when the seemingly normal dance instructor, when revealed as a follower of the Shining Path type movement, dropped her previously calm demeanor to scream fanatically and with a twisted face, "VIVA EL PRESIDENTE EZEQUIEL!!!" I beleve that as the Democrat ticket starts to go down and tubes and especially after they lose...

KATHMANDU : The blockade declared by Nepal's Maoist rebels of the ancient capital, Kathmandu, echoes the tactics of Peru's shadowy Shining Path militants -- the ruthless movement upon which they model themselves. Like the Shining Path rebels, who waged an over decade-long battle to forge a peasant revolution in the South American nation, Nepal's Maoists seek to rule the countryside and now are boldly attacking big towns and even the capital. The group launched their struggle in 1996 to overthrow the monarchy and feudal caste-ridden system, and to turn the Himalayan country of 26 million, one of the world's 10...

LIMA, Peru, June 24 (Reuters) - Some 30 Shining Path rebels killed one soldier in an attack on a military patrol in Peru's Andean region, the second fatal assault on state security forces this month, the army said on Thursday. Rebels attacked soldiers guarding an asphalt factory on Wednesday in the remote highland town of Cangari 360 miles (575 kms) southeast of Lima, an army spokeswoman told Reuters. "One soldier was killed in the attack," she said, adding that there were no reports of injured officers. The Maoist-inspired Shining Path, which has largely been dormant since the 1992 capture of...

LIMA, Peru, June 5 (Reuters) - Peru's Shining Path rebels killed two policemen and a naval officer and injured several others in an ambush in the country's central jungle region, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday. Rebels shot at a police vehicle on patrol on Friday as it crossed a bridge near the jungle town of Aguaytia, 310 miles (500 kms) northeast of Lima, killing two policemen and injuring another, the ministry said. Rebels then set the police car on fire, it added. A naval officer was also killed after rebels ambushed another patrol in the area -- a drug...

Cheerleaders for TerrorismBy Erick StakelbeckFrontPageMagazine.com | June 17, 2003 Two groups whom Islamic terrorists can count on for sympathy and support are radical lawyers and their counterparts in American law schools. Lynne Stewart is a hero of the National Lawyers Guild and a sought-after campus lecturer. While out on bail under indictment for colluding with a terrorist leader, she has been a sought-after speaker for law school audiences who relish her attacks on Attorney General John Ashcroft as a modern-day fascist and on her country for its imperialist and racist policies. Stewart made national headlines in April 2002 when she...

AYACUCHO, Peru (Reuters) - Colombia's largest rebel group is growing coca -- the raw material for cocaine -- over the border in northern Peru, an area that has not typically been used to grow coca, Peruvian Defense Minister Roberto Chiabra said on Friday. "There is an increase in cultivation of coca leaf in our territory which requires an operation (to prevent it)," he said during a visit to the southern city of Ayacucho. "If we allow it to grow, it's going to create a big problem because we know it's a source of funds for the FARC," he added, referring...