LIMA (Reuters) – Two Peruvian soldiers were killed after stumbling onto landmines set by a remnant band of Shining Path rebels involved in the cocaine trade, the armed forces said on Wednesday after its worst setback in months.
While on the patrol in the coca-growing region of the Ene and Apurimac Valleys, seven soldiers were wounded and two of them died from wounds caused by the exploding landmines, which are often used to guard drug trafficking routes or cocaine labs.
“A rescue operation to evacuate the wounded and the dead is under way,” the armed forces said. “The explosives were placed by the delinquent terrorists of the Shining Path.”
President Alan Garcia has sent more soldiers over the last two years to areas rife with coca plantations in an effort to turn the tide in Peru’s drug war.
Peru has surpassed Colombia as the world’s largest producer of cocaine, the United Nations said this year.
The army and police have been caught repeatedly in ambushes that have killed more than 50 soldiers or officers, prompting critics to say Garcia’s strategy has failed to make headway.
After their leader Abimael Guzman was captured in the early 1990s, most fighters in the Maoist Shining Path abandoned a bloody civil war they launched against the state.
Some of them then fled to the jungle and went into the lucrative cocaine trade. Initially they offered protection for trafficking routes and later moved into cocaine production, officials say.
Estimates of the size of the Shining Path range from less than 100 to several hundred. Political analysts say the Shining Path no longer poses an acute threat to the government but is part of long-term risks associated with the drug trade.
Lawyers for Guzman have said they will form a political party and field candidates in general elections next April, although Garcia has rejected the possibility.
Officials say the Shining Path group in the Ene and Apurimac Valleys has had a falling out with Guzman and is no longer driven by ideology.
This month, the Defense Ministry released video footage and photographs it found at a rebel camp that showed images of women and children living with the fighters.
Some of the the women and children were reportedly kidnapped or from the Ashaninkas tribe, while others posed with guns in pictures published by the magazine Caretas.
