I never would have thought I’d see teachers of young children rampaging through the streets like lunatics, throwing bricks at police while screaming obscenities. But that’s exactly what I saw today.
Teachers from across Peru, many without accreditation, took part in what ended up as violent protests across dozens of cities in Peru. People were injured, property destroyed and tourists scared away.
Puruchuco, the site in Ate I visited not so long ago, has turned up yet more spectacular finds. In the Inca cemetery not far from the ruins in which 2500 mummies have been excavated, archaeologists uncovered what appeared to be a skeleton with a Spanish musket ball hole in the back of its skull. The traces of iron in the skull, from which Spanish muskets balls were made, seems to confirm this.
Dating of artefacts buried alongside the bodies allowed them to date the burials to an extraordinary time – about one year after the Spanish had founded the city of Lima.
Miners from the Lima province of Huarochiri blocked the Panamerican Highway for the second day running today. Hundreds of Casapalca workers continued their protests against the Government who are not meeting their demands of forcing the mine operators to improve salaries and reinstate 300 workers made redundant.
Mexican telephone giant Telmex has been accused of destroying part of a 2000 year old necropolis belonging to the Paracas pre-Inca civilisation. According to Alfredo Gonzalez, Ica regional director of the INC, the telephone company cut straight through the protected heritage site in order to lay new fiber optic cable.
As predicted by Peru’s meteorological service, this weeks temperatures have dropped below the 15°c average to as little as 12°c as an unusually cold cold-front has hit the capital. The city of Lima was swamped by heavy fog, streets running with water and people in winter coats as I arrived back, having travelled from the sunny north of the country.
If something is stolen and no-one sees it or hears it being stolen, is it really stolen?
Not according to Christie’s. This month the auction house will sell off as many as 35 Pre-Columbian artefacts looted from various sites throughout Peru. These artefacts, from various cultures, are expected to fetch a total of $140,000 US.
During Alan García’s first term, in which he destroyed the country’s economy and fled to France with untold millions, his Government began a project to build Lima’s first mass transit system. The project failed and $400 million disappeared into an abyss. Now, with only a few kilometres of the electric train system constructed, there is talk of
finishing it.
Watching TV or looking at the advertisements across Latin America, you might notice something strange, particularly in countries like Peru. The models and actors look nothing like the majority of the population; they are overwhelmingly fair skinned whilst the population isn’t. In Latin America, and in Perú, there is an unfortunate correlation between what is considered beautiful in a person and the amount of European blood they have.
Hospital Chalaco is the recently inaugurated medical centre of Callao, which attends 3,000 people daily from the various areas of the country’s main port.
The most dangerous crossings in Lima – this is a report released by the Ministry of Transport and Communication highlighting and mapping the most dangerous traffic intersections in the city, the fourth most dangerous being Surco’s Ovalo Higuereta, which I cross a couple of times each day.
By C.J. Schexnayder – Kephblog On Sunday, Julio Cusurichi – a Shipiro Indian from the Madre de Dios region of Peru – was awarded the Goldman Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for environmental activism. Cusurichi was recognized for his work with the Native…
There has been much in the news recently about protests from Peru’s coca farmers and forced eradication by the Government.
Peru is the second largest exporter of refined cocaine in the world, and due to its size probably the largest producer of the coca leaf. Peru had a serious problem in the 1980s and 1990s with cocaine production as the Shining Path terrorist group began using the drug as a means to fund their war against the Peruvian State. Since then, production levels had became less of an issue, and what coca was grown was more often used for local medicinal and cultural needs – not all, not most but a slightly larger part (Ratio 9:100).
