As National Police marched in a parade at the Plaza de Armas in the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa for the Santa Rosa de Lima celebration Aug. 30, peasant cooperatives from the region rallied in the middle of the square and later held their own march to protest government plans to turn state lands over to Chilean agribusiness interests. At issue are some 475 hectares of state-owned lands at Valle de Majes that the government proposes to sell to Grupo Layconsa, which is already producing artichokes for export to the US at nearby Pampabajas. "We are the owners of our lands, not the Chileans," says protest leader Luis Calderón Lindo, asserting that Layconsa is controlled by Chilean investors.

Awajún and Wampis indigenous leaders in the valley of Peru's Río Cenepa, in the Cordillera del Cóndor near the Ecuadoran border, issued a statement Aug. 25 giving the Dorato mining company 15 days to quit the territory. The statement came following a resolution by local apus (indigenous leaders) meeting in the town of Imacita, Amazonas region.

A total of 15, including two police officers, were injured Aug. 27 when the village of Cocachacra, in Islay province of Peru's southern Arequipa region, exploded into angry protest following the release of an environmental impact statement at a public hearing on the Tía María mining project proposed by the US-based Southern Copper Corporation. (RPP, Peru, Aug. 27)

Six years after the final report of the Truth and National Reconcilliation Commission (CVR) on Peru's 1980-2000 "dirty war" against the Sendero Luminoso guerillas, the citizens group Para Que no se Repita (roughly translated as "Never Again") has pledged a new campaign to raise awareness of human rights in the Andean nation. The move comes in response to comments by Defense Minister Rafael Rey calling the CVR's findings "false, unjust and calumnious." (La Republica, Aug. 27; RPP, Aug. 26)

Two Peruvian army troops and four presumed narco-senderistas—remnant Shining Path guerilla fighters turned drug gangsters—were killed Aug. 26 in a shoot-out at San Antonio de Carrizales, Huancayo province, Junin region, in the coca-producing zone dubbed the VRAE, for the Apurimac-Ene River Valley. The confrontation brings to 30 the number of soldiers killed in the VRAE since October 2008.

Peru issued a formal request to Interpol Aug. 27 for the capture of three Amazon indigenous leaders who have taken political asylum in Nicaragua, including Alberto Pizango, leader of the protest campaign that climaxed in violent conforntations in June. Pizango is accused of "sedition," homicide and attacking the armed forces.

The United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued a formal recommendation Aug. 28 that the government of Peru open an "exhaustive, objective and impartial investigation, including indigenous represetatives" into the June 5 deadly violence that ensued when National Police troops broke up an indigenous road blockade at Devil's Curve in Amazonas region—a bloody episode that the Peruvian press has dubbed the "Baguazo." (24 Horas Libre, Lima, Aug. 29)

The closing festival of the Primer Encuentro de Culturas Andinas in the southern Colombian city of Pasto was suspended Aug. 27 "as a gesture of solidarity" following the massacre of 12 members of the Awá indigenous group in the region. The Encuentro brought together more than 1,000 representatives of indigenous peoples from seven Andean nations, as well as Mexico, Guatemala and the US.