Ayacucho, Peru – Five police officers and two employees of Peru’s state-run coca company were shot to death in a southern jungle state on Saturday, authorities said.
The bodies of the officers and workers from the National Coca Company – the only company legally authorized to sell coca in Peru – were found near the town of Machente in Ayacucho state, 200 miles southeast of the capital of Lima, police commander Juan Rojas said.
No other details were immediately available. Rojas said authorities were investigating.
Attacks in the prime coca-producing areas are often blamed on the remnants of the Shining Path guerrilla movement, which almost brought down Peru’s government in the 1980s and early 1990s with a campaign of massacres, political assassinations, bombings and sabotage.
Since the 1992 capture of the group’s founder, Abimael Guzman, the Shining Path been reduced to a few hundred guerrillas who stage sporadic ambushes on security forces in Peru’s coca-producing jungle regions and provide protection to cocaine traffickers.
