No image available
/ 21 December 2006
It was by any measure a remarkable protest. More than 800 Achuar tribespeople from the borders of Peru and Ecuador, headed by their traditional leaders with their red and yellow feathered headdresses, arrived by the boatload in the twilight hours at four oil wells in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest.
No image available
/ 21 December 2006
As a Quechua Indian quintet plays a solemn Andean muleteer’s march on harp, clarinet and violin, their notes spring up as wave forms on a computer screen in an ultra-modern recording studio. In a dark and smoky rehearsal room across town, a sound engineer tweaks a console, weaving electronic beats and bleeps between the thumps and slaps of a sweating conga player.
No image available
/ 4 November 2006
In only 100 days, President Alan Garcia has made Peruvians forget the food shortages, four-digit inflation and guerrilla violence that marred his first government in the 1980s. The once-reviled leader has an approval rating near 60% from preaching responsible, thrifty government and increased spending on social programmes.
The notorious ”death buses” taking Peruvians and tourists up the Andean nation’s snaky mountain roads have killed 68 people in road accidents so far this year. Travelling in Peru, whose Inca ruins attract tourists from around the world, has become the road version of Russian roulette as many buses are built out of old truck chassis.
Peru’s government on Sunday sought to play down a diplomatic rift with Venezuela after announcing the withdrawal of its ambassador from Caracas amid accusations of interference in Lima’s domestic affairs. ”I’m confident that an attitude of equanimity will persist,” Peruvian Foreign Minister Oscar Maurtua said.
The Ubinas volcano in southern Peru is spewing out clouds of gas and sulphur and threatening about 3 500 local inhabitants with acid rain, officials said. Local authorities on Thursday declared a state of emergency in the remote area 900km south of the capital, Lima, allowing evacuation plans to go into effect.
No image available
/ 26 September 2005
At least four people were killed in northern Peru late on Sunday when a strong earthquake shook the region, local authorities announced. But they said they expected damage from the tremor to be limited. The tremor, measuring seven on the Richter scale, shook an area north of the city of Moyobamba at 8.55pm, according to the Geophysical Institute of Peru.
At least 41 people were killed but 57 survived when a Peruvian jetliner with 100 people on board crashed in a storm just seconds from landing in Peru’s Amazon basin, officials said on Wednesday. A control-tower official said a violent storm with fierce winds had broken out as the plane prepared for landing.
The leader of a Peruvian paramilitary nationalist group that seized a police station, took 10 officers hostage and allegedly killed four more surrendered late on Monday as security forces launched an offensive against his followers, an Interior Ministry official said. Former army major Antauro Humala turned himself in to Peru’s national police chief.
No image available
/ 21 December 2004
A passenger bus careered off a mountain road in Peru and plunged into a jungle river, killing 49 people and injuring 15 others, police said. The accident occurred on Sunday in the Andean jungle, 346km north-east of the capital, officer Juan Siu Gomez said on Monday via telephone from Aguaytia, near the crash site.
No image available
/ 19 October 2004
After 34 years of patient tinkering, researchers at Peru’s most prestigious agrarian university have bred a new culinary export they hope will scamper on to dinner plates throughout the United States and the world: the super-size guinea pig. Peruvians consume an estimated 65-million guinea pigs each year.
Peruvian authorities on Sunday helicoptered hundreds of stranded tourists away from the famed Machu Picchu Inca ruins after flash floods in the region that left one confirmed dead and 10 missing. About 15 homes were destroyed by Saturday’s avalanches, which killed one person in Aguas Calientes.
Shining Path rebels ambushed an army patrol in a remote mountainous jungle region on Wednesday, killing one soldier and wounding two others, army officials said.