US troops to do humanitarian work in Peru where Shining Path rebels active

US troops to do humanitarian work in Peru where Shining Path rebels active
VICTORIA BEKIEMPIS, Associated Press Writer

May 23, 2008 5:05 PM

LIMA, Peru (AP) - Three hundred U.S. troops will launch a humanitarian mission in a mountainous Peruvian region that is home to drug traffickers and resurgent violence by Shining Path rebels, the U.S. Embassy said Friday.

The soldiers will be building schools and medical outposts and digging wells from June 1 to the end of August in the Ayacucho region of southeastern Peru, Embassy spokesman Dan Martinez told The Associated Press.

Peru's opposition Nationalist Party protested the mission, dubbed New Horizons, calling it ''foreign interference.''

But Martinez said the mission aims to show ''the human face of the armed forces,'' and the troops also will conduct ''medical readiness'' exercises intended to prepare Peruvian military personnel for natural disasters.

The highland region where the soldiers will be operating is a hotbed of the drug trade, crisscrossed by paths that traffickers use to haul cocaine out of the Apurimac River Valley in backpacks and on mules. Peru is the world's second-largest cocaine producer after Colombia.

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Ayacucho is west of Cuzco, about 300 km (??) from Bolivia, at the closest point.