Reuters North American News Service, November 2nd, 2007
LIMA (Reuters) - Peru will send 100 police to quell
drug violence in a coca-growing region and track down suspected
guerrillas who killed a police chief in a grenade attack, the
interior minister said Friday.
In the most audacious assault on security forces in months,
nearly 30 alleged insurgents who traffic cocaine attacked the
police station with machine guns and grenades early Thursday
in Ocobamba, a town 560 miles southeast of Lima.
Interior Minister Luis Alva said the raid appeared to be
the work of holdouts from the Shining Path guerrilla group, who
now work for drug gangs in the South American country, the
world's No. 2 cocaine producer after Colombia.
"Narcoterrorists always try to show force like this," Alva
said. "It's an area where there are terrorists and drugs
traffickers, and this happened because, in the last few days,
we've been working in the area and seizing drugs."
Several days before the attack, the government said it
feared powerful cartels from Mexico, including the violent
Sinaloa gang, were starting to operate in Peru.
The body of the slain police chief arrived Friday at
police headquarters in Lima, where dozens of officers saluted
his casket and a brass band played a solemn march. Three other
officers were wounded in the attack.
Last month, police killed seven suspected guerrillas in a
different region and in August they captured 20 others.
Members of the Shining Path, which led a rebellion that
killed thousands of civilians until its leadership collapsed in
the early 1990s, have become involved in drug-trafficking. They
have killed at least 13 anti-drug workers since President Alan
Garcia took office in July 2006.
The Maoist group nearly disappeared after its leader,
Abimael Guzman, who once taught philosophy to university
students, was arrested in 1992 and later jailed.
Officials say the Shining Path have small but active groups
in Peru's two main coca growing areas -- in the Huallaga Valley
in the north and in south-central Peru.
