By ASSOCIATED PRESS
PUBLISHED: 16:30 EDT, 24 May 2021 | UPDATED: 20:35 EDT, 24 May 2021
LIMA, Peru (AP) - More than a dozen people were slain in a remote area of central Peru by suspected members of the Shining Path rebel group, just two weeks ahead of the presidential runoff election, authorities said Monday.
Peru's police chief, César Cervantes, told the local TV channel N that at least 18 people were killed, while the military said in a press release there were 14 victims.
The killings took place in a community in Vizcatan de Ene, which is in an area of the Peruvian Amazon that authorities believe is being used as a hideout by remnants of the Shining Path movement that battled the government in the 1980s and 1990s. The area is also known for being used by some local criminal groups to produce cocaine for trafficking abroad.
Leonidas Casas, a local official, told The Associated Press that the victims were inside two bars, one in front of the other, when armed men stormed into them and opened fire. Some women and at least one child tried to hide in a room, but they were also killed. Some of the bodies were burned, he said.
Casas said authorities found some pamphlets signed by Shining Path saying the group will "clean up" the country of bars, "parasites" and "corrupts."
The June 6 runoff pits leftist Pedro Castillo against right-leaning Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former authoritarian President Alberto Fujimori, who presided over the fight against Shining Path for two decades. He was later convicted of human rights abuses during the war.
In 2016, a day before that year's presidential election, a similar incident happened in a remote area, when alleged members of Shining Path ambushed a military convoy traveling to a community to guard the elections. Eight soldiers and two civilians were killed.
More:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-9614389/More-dozen-slain-Peru-allegedly-Shining-Path.html
So, in 2016, guess who the two candidates were for the Presidential election.
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Keiko Fujimori. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski won.
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The Downfall of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and the Future of Peru
By Jon Lee Anderson
March 24, 2018
In December, 2016, at a private dinner with a handful of friends in a hotel in the Peruvian colonial city of Arequipa, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Peru’s new President, sipped on a Martini and grumbled about his political enemies. He called them “the Fujis,” a derisive reference to Keiko Fujimori, a former member of Congress and the leader of the Fuerza Popular Party; Kenji Fujimori, Keiko’s brother and also a member of Fuerza Popular; and Alberto Fujimori, their father and the country’s disgraced former President, who was doing time in prison. That June, Kuczynski—or P.P.K., as he is widely known—had unexpectedly defeated Keiko Fujimori in Peru’s Presidential election, winning by less than one per cent of the over-all vote. But Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular Party still dominated Congress. The Fujis, Kuczynski said, were clearly determined to make his life in office impossible; they had been blocking his Cabinet choices and voting against everything he proposed. Unless he could find a way to halt them, he would have a hard time getting anything done.
Kuczynski’s worries turned out to be well placed. On Wednesday, one day ahead of an all-but-certain impeachment vote in Congress, he appeared on television to announce his resignation from the Presidency. Seated at a desk and flanked by his Cabinet members, who stood uncomfortably behind him, Kuczynski fulminated against those who had driven him from office. He said that he had been falsely painted as corrupt, and that his opponents had brought about “a situation of ungovernability.” For the good of Peru, he said, he was stepping down.
Kuczynski’s Presidency had been hanging by a thread since the end of last year, when he narrowly survived a first impeachment vote. His opponents—led by “the Fujis”—had moved against him following revelations that, while he had been a minister in a previous government, his private investment company had received several million dollars in payments from the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht. For the past several years, Odebrecht has been implicated in one of Latin America’s largest-ever corruption scandals, centered in Brazil and known there as Operation Car Wash. Odebrecht officials, who have been coöperating with prosecutors in exchange for lesser jail time, have revealed that, over a decade, the company spent eight hundred million dollars in bribes around Latin America to secure official contracts worth billions. They have provided evidence showing that twenty-nine million dollars of the total went into officials’ pockets in Peru. Both of P.P.K.’s immediate predecessors, Alejandro Toledo and Ollanta Humala, were fingered as recipients of some of the bribe money. Early last year, Humala was arrested and imprisoned, where he remains, awaiting trial, while Toledo, who has been convicted in absentia, has refused to come home from an aerie in California.
Kuczynski had denied ever receiving any payments from Odebrecht. But late last year it emerged that while he was serving as a minister in Toledo’s government, a business partner had received money from the company. Kuczynski claimed not to know about the payments, which were apparently legal ones—Odebrecht’s officials, who knew about such things, have said that the fees paid to Kuczynski’s firm were aboveboard and not part of their bribery scheme. Still, things did not look good.
More:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-downfall-of-pedro-pablo-kuczynski-and-the-future-of-peru
The father, ex-President of Peru, imprisoned for his crimes against humanity,
given a medical pardon by former President Kuczynski.
Daddy Fujimori's two little angels, Peruvian politicians, Kenzi, and Keiko Fujimori
Kenzi
Keiko
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