Peru coca farmers protest govt crop eradication

Hundreds of coca leaf growers in Peru were blocking a road that links southeastern Peru for a fifth day on Tuesday, demanding the government stop the destruction of their crops.

The Ministry of the Interior said in a statement that ambulances are allowed to pass through the  Interoceanic Highway. The protest started at the beginning of the eradication of coca fields in Carabaya province, in the Puno region.

In Peru, growing coca leaf is legal as long as it is registered on an official list which hasn't been renewed for 43 years by various governments. Thousands of growers plant it without that permit so their crops are destroyed.

Peru receives support from U.S.-funded helicopters to transport hundreds of workers the government hires to uproot coca leaf bushes from the ground.

According to the authorities, most of these crops serve, through a chemical process, as the main ingredient for the manufacture of cocaine.

On Friday, the first day of the protests, a group of people intercepted three minibuses where the workers who uprooted the crops were being transported in, took their bags to the road and burned them.

The protesters, who mostly voted in the last elections for the current president Pedro Castillo, called on the president to stop the destruction of illegal crops.

Meanwhile on Monday, during the announcement of the arrest of a suspected terrorist, Defense Minister Walter Ayala Gonzales, reiterated his department's commitment to fight terrorism and drug trafficking.

"We will not give a millimeter of space, so that these scoundrels advance," he said.

Peru is the world's second-largest exporter of cocaine, after Colombia, according to the U.S. drug enforcement agency DEA.