Word: lima
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...compound the government's economic problems, a costly hit-and-run war with terrorists has begun to spill down from the Andes. Street crime is so prevalent in Lima these days that women rarely venture outside wearing jewelry and men routinely leave their watches at home. Electricity blackouts, kidnapings and Molotov cocktails are becoming almost commonplace. The terrorist acts began to rise a few months ago, when the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas decided to concentrate their efforts on the capital. Following its emergence as a violent force four years ago, the group, which numbers about...
Groups of up to 150 people began to gather ominously in the Plaza Dos de Mayo in downtown Lima last Thursday at the headquarters of various left-wing political and union organizers. Over loudspeakers, union leaders exhorted the crowds with revolutionary slogans. Leaflets passed out by the Peruvian Communist Party protested hunger and misery and stated the party's demands for job stability and the control of fuel and food prices. In one shantytown south of the city, small bands of youths flung rocks at bus windows. Almost all of Peru's privately owned buses stayed...
...presence of 8,000 riot-gear-equipped police in Lima made it clear that the government of President Fernando Belaúnde Terry was taking the 24-hour general strike very seriously. Early Thursday morning, police pointed their shotguns at drivers of trucks with space available who tried to ignore workers seeking rides. Youths who were spotted trying to collect rocks or debris were chased, beaten with nightsticks and sometimes shoved into police vans. Jorge del Prado, 73, a senator and leader of the Peruvian Communist Party, was struck in the chest by a tear-gas canister fired at close...
Because the rural economy is especially unpromising, jobless Peruvians have been migrating to the capital in frightening numbers. A pleasant colonial-style city of 1.5 million inhabitants 20 years ago, Lima has become a nightmarish sprawl of 6.5 million. The city has grown so fast that suburban slum districts housing 500,000 people are not even included on current maps. Almost 40% of the country's 18 million people are now crowded into the capital. Says Senator Manuel Ulloa Ellas, a close adviser to Belaúnde: "For many of these people, there are no jobs, no services...
Ironically, the government's anti-Sendero campaign, which officials claim has killed 1,441 guerrillas since 1980, appears to have forced prominent members of the group into Lima. There the terrorists have found they can cause major havoc and tie up security forces with minimal effort. Their contribution to last Thursday's strike was a series of bombings in at least ten locations around the capital, including banks, a police station, an army barracks and a site near the U.S. embassy. But Sendero's splashiest success so far was a well-coordinated New Year...