Thousands of poor coca farmers converged on the capital Monday, protesting for an end to restrictions on their cocaine-producing crop.

The farmers began marching in several groups to Lima about 10 days ago from mountainous jungle valleys where the coca is harvested.

They are also seeking the release of Nelson Palomino, head of a national organization of coca producers. He was arrested on Feb. 20, after farmers began protesting government plans to destroy coca plants. Police charge that he threatened farmers who refused to support him.

[continues 133 words]

LIMA -- Thousands of Peruvian coca leaf farmers marched into Lima yesterday demanding the government halt plans to eradicate their cash crop, the raw ingredient of cocaine, and free their jailed leader.

Men, women and children, who have traveled for over a week on foot from jungle areas where coca leaf is a staple crop, marched with flags and banners from the outskirts of Peru's sprawling capital toward the presidential palace.

''[We want] President Alejandro Toledo to listen to our demands and make good on his promises,'' Marisela Guillen, secretary general of the Agricultural Producers' Association of the Apurimac-Ene River Valleys, said.

[continues 109 words]

U.S.-Sponsored Eradication Plans Spark Peasant Protests

SAN FRANCISCO, Peru -- The mountain slopes that rise around this town in Peru's high eastern jungle were the site of a rare success story in the U.S. war on drugs. But the resilient Andean drug industry is flowing back into the Apurimac River Valley, testing a model partnership in Washington's increasingly aggressive counter-drug campaign.

Once one of the world's largest sources of coca leaf, the valley was the focus of a U.S.-backed effort to intercept planes shuttling the key raw material in cocaine to processing laboratories in neighboring Colombia. Now U.S. eradication efforts in Colombia are squeezing the trade back toward Peru, causing deep social unrest, the threat of armed resistance to U.S. drug policy and political risks for a fragile Peruvian government responsible for implementing the most controversial elements of Washington's strategy.

[continues 1130 words]

U.S.-Sponsored Eradication Plans Spark Peasant Protests

SAN FRANCISCO, Peru -- The mountain slopes that rise around this town in Peru's high eastern jungle were the site of a rare success story in the U.S. war on drugs. But the resilient Andean drug industry is flowing back into the Apurimac River Valley, testing a model partnership in Washington's increasingly aggressive counter-drug campaign.

Once one of the world's largest sources of coca leaf, the valley was the focus of a U.S.-backed effort to intercept planes shuttling the key raw material in cocaine to processing laboratories in neighboring Colombia. Now U.S. eradication efforts in Colombia are squeezing the trade back toward Peru, causing deep social unrest, the threat of armed resistance to U.S. drug policy and political risks for a fragile Peruvian government responsible for implementing the most controversial elements of Washington's strategy.

[continues 1130 words]

[Content not related to drug policy snipped for brevity]

Peruvian Prime Minister Luis Solari blamed a growing drug trafficking problem in his country on the U.S. suspension of an aerial interception program two years ago, and called for the program to resume soon. The United States halted the program in April 2001 after the Peruvian air force accidentally shot down a small aircraft and killed a U.S. missionary and her daughter. The White House plans to resume the aerial interdiction program in a month or two in Colombia, according to a top official, but no date has been set for Peru.

[end]

Rows of riot police guard a specially adapted courtroom at Lurigancho prison in the dismal outskirts of Peru's capital, Lima. The roof has been strengthened to resist mortar attack. The public galleries are bulletproof. And the man on trial - Vladimiro Montesinos, the shadowy national security adviser for disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori - has arrived wearing a bulletproof vest.

So extensive was the web of corruption and secrecy woven by Mr Montesinos that prosecutors fear cronies may seek to free - or even kill - him. Nearly two years after Mr Montesinos' arrest and Mr Fujimori's departure into exile, their decade-long rule continues to haunt Peruvian society.

[continues 671 words]

LIMA, Peru (AP) - Police arrested a prominent coca farming leader Friday as protests in rural Peru against the eradication of coca - the base ingredient in cocaine - moved into their fourth day.

Police in the city of Ayacucho, 205 miles southeast of Lima, told The Associated Press that they arrested Nelson Palomino, head of the Apurimac River Valley Agricultural Producers Federation, for alleged "terrorist propagandizing."

Hundreds of poor farmers in the jungle town of Aguaytia, 235 miles northeast of Lima, began blocking isolated highways on Tuesday in protest of government programs to destroy illegal coca crops.

[continues 135 words]

LIMA -- A court has sentenced Peru's former attorney general - for years accused of protecting once-feared intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos - to 10 years in prison on corruption charges.

In addition to the prison term, delivered late Thursday, the criminal court fined former Attorney General Nelida Colan the equivalent of $570,000.

The court found Colan guilty of crimes related to receiving $10,000 a month from Montesinos, failing to show how she paid for a $750,000 house and shelving an investigation into a bribery case involving the ex-spy boss.

[continues 171 words]

SAN FRANCISCO, Peru - Though only 250 miles from the Peruvian capital, this plunging jungle valley seems just out of the government's reach.

Isolated, impoverished, and connected to the rest of the country by treacherous dirt roads cut into vertiginous mountain slopes, this lush region has for decades enticed drug traffickers and coca growers. Maoist Shining Path rebels arrived in the 1980s, feeding off the cocaine trade. The region's fiercely independent peasants then formed self-defense groups and drove the rebels back into the chilly highlands.

[continues 1185 words]

Region With Lush Natural Beauty Also Proves Suited For Coca Crop, But A Decade Later The Land Is Unusable

MONZON, Peru - Swaths of scarred earth blanket the hillsides of this jungle valley -- the environmental testament of a cocaine trade striving to meet demand in the United States and Europe.

Some 5.7 million acres of Peruvian rain forest have been hacked down in the last three decades to grow coca, a shrub leaf that is the base ingredient of cocaine, experts estimate. More than 14,800 tons of toxic chemicals are dumped into the Amazon jungle every year as traffickers turn coca into raw cocaine paste.

[continues 744 words]

IMA, Peru, Nov. 13 - The United States war on drugs in Colombia is rapidly being subsumed in the war on terror, according to Bush administration officials.

The indictments of three leaders of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, announced today in Washington by Attorney General John Ashcroft, are just the latest in a series of American indictments against Colombians. Carlos Castano, the head of the right-wing Self-Defense Forces, was indicted on drug-trafficking charges in September, and four other men linked to the paramilitary group were indicted on drug-related charges in Houston this month.

[continues 1111 words]

LIMA, Peru -- Barely three years after the United States declared victory in the war on drugs in Peru, the illegal crops are making a comeback.

While some U.S. officials say it's too early to sound the alarm bells, Peruvian and international experts are concerned by signs of increased cultivation of coca, the raw material of cocaine.

Colombian drug traffickers also have introduced poppy plants, used to make heroin, which have rarely been seen before in Peru.

"Production is definitely up," said Peru's Interior Minister Gino Costa. "We don't know exactly how much at this stage, but it's enough to worry us."

[continues 627 words]

Stepping up the war on drugs, the US government is preparing to restart its 'Air Bridge Denial' (ABD) programme more than a year after an aircraft carrying civilian missionaries was accidentally shot down in April 2001. The new measures will include the transfer of sophisticated surveillance aircraft and technology to the Peruvian Air Force (FAP), which will now conduct all the actual operations that are expected to restart by year-end. The involvement of US personnel in the air-intercept programme was ended after the April 2001 accident.

[continues 230 words]

MONZON, Peru (AP) -- Swaths of scarred earth blanket the hillsides of this jungle valley -- the environmental consequence of a cocaine trade striving to meet demand in the United States and Europe.

Analysts estimate that nearly 6 million acres of Peruvian rain forest have been hacked down in the past three decades to grow coca, a shrub leaf that is the primary source of cocaine. More than 14,800 tons of toxic chemicals are dumped into the Amazon jungle every year as traffickers turn coca into raw cocaine paste.

[continues 735 words]

LIMA, Peru,(Reuters) -- Peru, the world's No. 2 cocaine producer, has changed tack in its war on drugs, offering farmers cash and job benefits to eradicate crops voluntarily, but officials admit illicit cultivation still is on the rise.

Nils Ericsson, the Andean nation's anti-drugs "czar," said on Wednesday Peru had launched a new campaign offering farmers a decent day's pay to rip up their cocaine-producing crops, and guaranteeing them jobs in infrastructure and other projects instead to develop legal economies in the drug heartlands.

[continues 544 words]

LIMA, Peru -- Peru's anti-drug czar warned about a possible rebound in coca cultivation Wednesday and said the Andean nation has revamped its efforts to wipe out the illegal farming of the leaf.

Peru's eradication of coca -- the base ingredient of cocaine -- has been touted as a major success in the U.S.-led war on drugs. Once the world's leading producer, Peru slashed its coca production by 70 percent between 1995 and 2001, according to U.S. government figures.

[continues 286 words]

Oxfam is launching a campaign to help coffee-growers in Brazil, Colombia and Peru achieve a just price for their beans.

With coffee prices so low, many growers in Peru are switching to coca in order to make ends meet.

With 225,000 hectares under cultivation, Peru's coffee production pales in comparison with two of its South American neighbours, Brazil and Colombia.

But it is still one of the world's top 10 producers and its coffee is top quality.

[continues 247 words]

WASHINGTON -- About 600 Marines will exercise for the first time in the Amazon Basin of Peru, but Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo said Saturday the maneuvers are not a precursor to building a U.S. military base in the South American country. The Peruvian Congress has authorized the Marine operation at the Peruvian navy's Nanay base on the banks of the Amazon near Iquitos, 650 miles northeast of Lima. Previous significant U.S.-Peruvian operations have been in the Pacific and not inland.

[continues 154 words]

Nearly an hour before a Peruvian Air Force A-37 fighter jet shot down a single engine float plane carrying American missionaries from the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism in April 2001, a CIA contract pilot flying a spotter aircraft said he was "a little nervous" about the Peruvians' assumption that drug traffickers were flying the plane.

The CIA man's hesitation is documented in a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that was recently made available on the committee's Web site. The chronology in the report lays bare a fatal chain of mistakes that took the lives of two Americans.

[continues 1271 words]

LIMA, Peru (AP) -- A civilian court has ordered the release of two air force pilots who were jailed after they mistakenly shot down a small plane in 2001, killing an American missionary and her infant child, their lawyer said Monday.

Defense lawyer Jorge Power said his clients' right to be charged within nine months of incarceration had been violated. They had been in prison for more than 10 months.

Peruvian Air Force Maj. Jose Antonio Redhead and Lt. Richard Hercilla should be released this week, Power said. He said the court made its decision Thursday.

[continues 223 words]