Today in Latin America
Top Story — The police said that rebels belonging to the Shining Path killed a police officer and two civilians who were eradicating coca crops in central Peru on Tuesday morning, according to The BBC.
The attack was first announced and reported by Spanish wire agency EFE on Tuesday, but police refrained from commenting on the suspected identity of the assailants, saying they could have been drug traffickers or guerrillas.
The victims were attacked by sniper fire coming from the jungle surrounding an illicit coca field.
The Shining Path is a guerrilla group that grew to 10,000 members and helped plunge Peru into a violent conflict that claimed tens of thousands of lives in the 1980s and 1990s. The group has been largely defeated, but some rebel activity continues. This was the first deadly attack this year, according to The BBC.
The news comes about a week after the founder of the group, Abimael Guzmán, lifted a hunger strike that he and his fiancée Elena Yparraguirre had begun to protest bureaucratic obstacles to their marriage.
Peruvian President Alán García supported allowing the two to wed, though the two live in separate jails. Guzmán and Yparraguirre — his second in command — have been sentenced to life in prison for terrorism and human rights violations.
Just Published at the Latin America News Dispatch
- At Beyond Borders: Immigrants rally nationally to protest the new Arizona law.
- Arizona’s governor Jan Brewer signed a strict new immigration law on Friday.
- With the conference under way in Cochabamba, Nikolas Kozloff, author of No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Affects the Entire Planet, asks how climate change will affect El Niño — an irregular weather pattern that periodically wreaks havoc on the Andes.
Headlines from the Western Hemisphere
- A humanitarian aid caravan in Mexico came under fire outside a town in the Oaxaca state, killing two people.
- A measure that makes soldiers accused of incidents involving civilians accountable in civilian courts was passed by the Mexican Senate.
- The United States Coast Guard said it will hold a controlled burn to minimize the environmental risks of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
- A petition filed by the ACLU before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights charges the Puerto Rican government of mistreating a largely Dominican squatter community.
- Fred Sajous walks around Haiti with a camera trying to figure out how the International Red Cross is spending the money collected to help his country.
- Honduran President Porfirio Lobo discussed his goals for peace in the country in the face of rising crime during a visit to Miami.
- Nicaragua will increase its food exports to Venezuela, the country’s Minister of Forestry and Agriculture said Tuesday.
- Eric Volz, an American who spent 13 months in jail in Nicaragua before being cleared of a murder charge, said Nicaraguan prosecutors are trying to reinstate the conviction.
- U.S. Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Arturo Valenzuela will begin a week-long trip to Guatemala, El Salvador and Panama on May 2.
- Costa Rica will receive $300 million from the Inter-American Development Bank to help finance highway projects.
- Panama’s ex-dictator Manuel Noriega, now 70, is reportedly sick and struggling to settle into a French prison,
- Opinion polls in Colombia show the two presidential candidates, Juan Manuel Santos and Antanas Mockus, tied in the upcoming may elections.
- Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez signed a decree late Tuesday for the seizure of land from Venezuela’s leading beer and food company as well as for three sugar mills.
- Hugo Chávez also started his own Twitter account Tuesday, the name chosen for his Twitter account is chavezcandanga.
- Chevron wants the unused footage from a documentary about the $27 billion lawsuit against the oil company in Ecuador.
- Bolivian President Evo Morales apologized to gay and lesbian groups for comments he made that were viewed by some as linking the consumption of genetically modified crops with homosexuality.
- Brazilian priest Jose Alfonso was accused of abusing 8 alter boys between the ages of 12 and 16 in cases dating back to 1995.
- Chile’s LAN airlines, the largest airline in Latin America, increased quarterly profit more than analysts predicted.
- A 16-year-old boy in Chile was charged with killing his brother in a fight over a PlayStation.
- Uruguay is working with the World Bank to secure a 5-year deal that would lead to a total of $700 million in aid.
Image: Advocacy Project @ Flickr.