Word: peruvian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Brazilian government, meanwhile, came up with development schemes of its own. In the early 1970s the country built the Trans-Amazon Highway, a system of roads that run west from the coastal city of Recife toward the Peruvian border. The idea was to prompt a land rush similar to the pioneering of the American West. To encourage settlers to brave the jungle, the government offered transportation and other incentives, allowing them to claim land that they had "improved" by cutting down the trees...
...would be on Peru, where attempts to eradicate the coca crop have been stalled since February because of attacks by guerrillas and traffickers. Some 34 eradication workers have been killed in the Upper Huallaga Valley since 1983. In May a DEA agent, five State Department contract employees and two Peruvian eradication officials died in a plane crash there. Until six months ago, the Peruvian army kept to its barracks in the Upper Huallaga, leaving Sendero insurgents free to terrorize the local populace. Now the army, trying to fight the guerrillas first, is ignoring the traffickers...
While the presence of U.S. military personnel in any Latin American nation is always a sensitive issue, Peruvian military leaders are desperate to turn back Sendero guerrillas. "I will take help from anyone who offers it," says a top Peruvian officer. In fact, contingents of American Green Berets have already been sent to Peru and Bolivia to train antinarcotics police units in countersubversion and jungle warfare...
...initiative may run into obstacles on the scene too. For one thing, Peruvian army officials say their primary mission is to defeat the Sendero movement. "Wherever drug traffickers get close to the guerrillas, we will get them," says one. "But don't ask us to go against the people growing coca." Another obstacle is corruption. DEA agents and Upper Huallaga residents say traffickers pay "landing fees" to certain police officials to use local airstrips...
Nonetheless, the DEA is already plunging ahead with Operation Snowcap, a hemisphere-wide program that shifts emphasis from crop eradication to search- and-destroy missions against clandestine labs, airstrips, riverboats and warehouses. Last year DEA chief John Lawn, U.S. Ambassador Alexander Watson and Peruvian officials agreed to build a secure base for Snowcap activities in the Upper Huallaga. The deal called for the U.S. to haul bulldozers to a settlement called Santa Lucia, where an airstrip would be cleared so that cargo planes could land supplies. The State Department, however, objected to having U.S. Army Engineers air-drop the bulldozers...