Peruvians

President Bush dusted off his Spanish for an Oval Office meeting with Peruvian President Alan Garcia on Monday as the leaders discussed trade, reviewed efforts to fight cocaine production and exchanged condolences over the Virginia Tech massacre, which claimed the life of a Peruvian student.

The Qori Kalis glacier in the Andes of southwest Peru is retreating by about 600 feet a year. Its icy blue headwall is melting away. As the ice disappears, so does the water supply for hundreds of thousands of people in the valley below. Cuzco, the closest big city, is already starting to ration water. "You can almost sit there and watch it retreat," says Lonnie Thompson, a 58-year-old Ohio State University geologist whose research first brought him to the glacier in the late 1970s.

The United States on Tuesday announced the arrests of three former South American military officers suspected of war crimes, including the accused chief interrogator for Argentina's former military government. He and two former Peruvian army officers accused in the 1985 killing of 69 villagers in Peru, known as the Accomarca massacre, were arrested in the last week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. They have been charged with violating U.S.

Re "Peru's path to prosperity," editorial, Oct. 11 Contrary to The Times' assertion, congressional passage of the free-trade agreement with Peru could actually undermine development and increase poverty in a country where more than half of the population is poor. The U.S.-Peru agreement would impose stringent new patent rules that would obstruct access to medicines for poor people while offering special privileges to foreign investors to contest environmental protections and the public interest.

Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman, whose communist vision inspired a 12-year rebellion that cost nearly 70,000 lives, was found guilty Friday of aggravated terrorism and sentenced to life in prison. The 71-year-old former philosophy professor stood impassively with his hands crossed in front of his waist as a court clerk read the sentence, ending a yearlong civilian retrial. Guzman's longtime lover and second in command, Elena Iparraguirre, 59, also received a life sentence.

President-elect Alan Garcia declared Monday that the weekend vote here featured only one loser: "Someone who doesn't even carry Peruvian identification." That would be Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose protege, Ollanta Humala, was beaten decisively in Sunday's runoff with Garcia. There is little question among those who have followed the election that Chavez's strong backing of Humala, and vocal heckling of Garcia and President Alejandro Toledo, backfired at the ballot box. U.S.

You didn't need to understand Spanish, much less the Inca language of Quechua, to grasp the ancient race and class conflicts played out in "Santiago." The haunting, dreamlike drama by Peru's provocative theater troupe Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, opened Thursday at REDCAT. Ugly, unhealed wounds of colonial conquest and religious warfare are embodied onstage in the very image of the play's title character, known in English as St. James the Apostle.

OUR boisterous group falls silent as soon as the waiter sets down the piqueo marino, a stunning arrangement of Peruvian-style seafood appetizers that's a house specialty at Jose Antonio in La Mirada. Piled high with ceviches and cooked seafood, the crowded platter -- a Peruvian equivalent of the French plateau de fruits de mer -- has even the jaded food lovers at the table beguiled. Warm gratineed scallops are presented on their half shells under a bubbly veneer of cheese.

Alberto Fujimori, who was Peru's president for a turbulent decade before fleeing the country amid human rights and corruption charges, was in custody here Monday after a stunning return to the continent from exile in Japan. Fujimori, 67, was detained at the Marriott Hotel in the Chilean capital after courts here received an extradition request from Lima. He was taken to a police building and later moved to a more comfortable training facility, authorities said.

Potatoes originated from a single domestication, not from multiple domestications throughout the hemisphere as researchers previously believed, U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Comparing DNA markers from 261 wild and 98 cultivated strains of potatoes, the team concluded that the plant was first cultivated more than 7,000 years ago in southern Peru.