News stories by Milagros Salazar, page 5

Legally, each of Peru's 25 administrative regions must have a plan for promoting equal opportunities for women. But over the last year, only 10 regions have actually allocated resources to the task of overcoming gender inequity, while another 10 have not even drawn up the compulsory equal opportunities plan.

'My classmates from Utupampa had to walk an hour to get to school,' said Yasmín Sena, a young woman from a village in Peru's highlands. 'That community is way up in the mountains; no cars can go there.'

The Peruvian government has been forced to offer talks with governors, the ombudsperson's office and Catholic Church leaders, to stem the outcry over two emergency decrees that waive the requirement for environmental certificates for 33 investment projects, including hydroelectric dams in the Amazon rainforest.

Peru will begin to pay individual monetary reparations to victims and survivors of the 1980-2000 counterinsurgency war, with top priority put on elderly people in remote villages in the country's impoverished highlands, where most of the human rights violations took place.

When the price of medicines for treating cancer soared by up to 64 percent in 2010, the Peruvian government set up a watchdog commission that will also monitor prices of drugs for diabetes and HIV/AIDS.

In rural villages in the Amazon district of Datem de Marañón in northern Peru, teachers often have 70 students in their one-room schoolhouses and travel two or three days to get to their jobs, said Emir Masegkai, describing the challenges of providing education in remote areas of this South American country.

The U.S. mining and metallurgical company Doe Run has once again challenged the Peruvian government. The Renco Group, of which it is a subsidiary, notified the government of its plans to start an international arbitration process, invoking the free trade agreement between this South American country and the United States.

Investigations of the raping of women in the 1980s during Peru's counterinsurgency war have ground to a halt, even though the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission filed the respective complaints in 2004. Not one sentence has been handed down for the soldiers alleged to have committed the rapes, while more victims come forward.

The traditional image of rural women in Latin America is shifting, from one of subsistence farmers raising their families to that of women playing a growing role in small- and large-scale commercial and productive activities. But behind that change lie both success stories and exploitation.

As metal prices continue to soar, the debate on a tax on windfall earnings of mining companies in Peru and an increase in the royalties they pay has been revived.