Five days after mudslides crippled roads and rail access near the Machu Pichu ruins in the mountains of southern Peru, more than 1,000 people had been evacuated by helicopter, but hundreds more remained stranded and faced food and water shortages.
SINGAPORE - Peru's President Alan García and his delegation pulled out of an Asia-Pacific summit in Singapore in protest over charges neighbouring Chile had paid a Peruvian military officer as a spy.
The Supreme Court sentenced former President Alberto Fujimori to seven and a half years in prison for paying a $15 million bribe to his former spymaster, Vladimiro Montesinos, in 2000.
First the soldiers came to Río Seco, a coca-growing village in the lush mountain jungles of southern Peru. “They called us subversives and they opened fire,” said Benedicto Cóndor, 55, a coca farmer. They shot dead four people at close range, including a woman who was five months pregnant, witnesses said. Two children, ages 6 and 1, disappeared and are believed dead.
To the relief of organizers of a summit meeting here of leaders from Latin America and Europe on Friday, the encounter was notable for being relatively free of insults being flung publicly.
Peru asked the International Court of Justice to set its sea boundary through waters claimed by Chile, inflaming a diplomatic dispute with its neighbor.
PISCO, Peru, Aug. 17 — No area along the southern coast of Peru, which was ravaged by an earthquake that killed at least 510 people, appears to have been harder hit than this port city.
