Peru's ex-President Alan Garca shoots himself before arrest
Source: Associated Press
LIMA, Peru (AP) — Former Peruvian President Alan García underwent emergency surgery Wednesday after shooting himself in the head as police attempted to detain him amid corruption allegations in Latin America’s largest graft probe.
Health Minister Zulema Tomás said doctors provided cardiac resuscitation three times and were proceeding to operate on the 69-year-old former head of state at the José Casimiro Ulloa Hospital in Peru’s capital city of Lima.
“The situation is very critical,” Tomás said. “It’s grave.”
Local television program ‘Hablemos Claro’ reported that when police arrived to García’s residence to arrest him, the ex-president shut himself in his room and attempted to take his life.
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during his bloody Presidency.
Blood at the Blockade: Peru's Indigenous Uprising
Beginning with a series of protests last year, Peru's Amazonian indigenous groups are now leading a full-fledged rebellion against the pro-business policies of President Alan García. The government has responded with brutal violence to the protests, which are demanding that a series of decrees to promote extractive industries in the jungle be overturned among other things. Amazonian groups, who are being joined by an ever-widening swath of society, are now calling for García's resignation.
June 8, 2009
Gerardo Rénique
On June 6, near a stretch of highway known as the Devil's Curve in the northern Peruvian Amazon, police began firing live rounds into a multitude of indigenous protestors – many wearing feathered crowns and carrying spears. In the nearby towns of Bagua Grande, Bagua Chica, and Utcubamba, shots also came from police snipers on rooftops, and from a helicopter that hovered above the mass of people. Both natives and mestizos took to the streets protesting the bloody repression.
From his office in Bagua, a representative of Save the Children, the child anti-poverty organization, reported that children as young as four-years-old were wounded by the indiscriminate police shooting. President Alan García had hinted the government would respond forcefully to "restore order" in the insurgent Amazonian provinces, where he had declared a state of siege on May 9 suspending most constitutional liberties. The repression was swift and fierce.
By the end of the day, a number of buildings belonging to the government and to García's APRA party had been destroyed. Nine policemen and at least 40 protestors were killed (estimates vary). Overwhelmed by the number of wounded, small local hospitals were forced to shutter their doors. A Church official denounced that many of the civilian wounded and killed at the Devil’s Curve were forcefully taken to the military barracks of El Milagro. From Bagua, a local journalist told a radio station that policemen had dumped bagged bodies into the Utcubamba River.
Indigenous leaders have accused García of "genocide" and have called for an international campaign of solidarity with their struggle. Indigenous unrest in the Peruvian Amazon began late last year. After an ebb of a few months, the uprising regained force again on April 9. Since then, Amazonian indigenous groups have sustained intensifying protests, including shutdowns of oil and gas pumping stations as well as blockades of road and river traffic.
More:
https://nacla.org/news/blood-blockade-perus-indigenous-uprising
