4 dead in Peru police shootout

[bemildred]

LIMA - Peru's president has declared a state of emergency in the town of Andahuaylas after four police officers died in a shootout while investigating a hostage-taking by a nationalist group.

The officers were on their way to the station when gunmen ambushed their vehicle on a bridge Sunday, local radio reported.

Retired army major Antauro Humala and dozens of army reservists seized the station Saturday.

They're said to be holding 10 hostages and are demanding the resignation of Toledo President Alejandro Toledo.

CBC News

[NNN0LHI]

1. I wonder what Otto Reich is doing right now?

Bet he has his fingers in this coup attempt.

Don

[bemildred]

3. I dunno, I think he's sort of our boy.

http://www.gci275.com/peru/toledo.shtml

At least way down the list of those to be overthrown.
I think his problems are indigenous.

[genieroze]

2. Siege forces Peru to declare state of emergency

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200501/s1275318.htm

[bemildred]

4. The New Year's Military-Civilian Uprising in Peru

Al Giordano's take:

A New Year's Eve rebel uprising takes the police station, and several blocks, by surprise, in the Peruvian town of Andahuyalas. The insurgents include - according to a report by Reuters - at least seven women soldiers. Their spokesman - Major Antauro Humala - is one of two brothers who led a similar rebellion against president-dictator Alberto Fujimori, a largely symbolic uprising that led to Fujimori's downfall.

The other brother - Ollanta Humala - was recently purged from Peru's military and is in a kind of reserve exile in South Korea, where he had been sent as the military attaché of his country's Embassy.

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And the military officer Humala's announcement that he will surrender, so quickly into the revolt, is reminiscent of the day in 1992 when a young military officer in Venezuela named Hugo Chavez turned himself in after a similar revolt, telling the TV cameras that he was retreating, "por ahora..."

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I don't know where this is going. But I sense - because past is usually prologue - that this is the shot across the bow that may change Peru's trajectory from Toledo's neoliberal obedience to the "war on drugs' and the savage capitalist impositions that its money-laundering black-market sustains... to a new era more in harmony with the advances underway in most of the rest of this hemisphere.

NarcoNews