Peruvian president orders airstrike on coca plants, airstrips
Peru's President Alan Garcia said on Monday that Peru should launch airstrikes and machine gun attacks to demolish drug manufacturing plants and clandestine airstrips used by drug traffickers.

"We must do away with the last cocaine factory and the last clandestine airport. Use the A37 airplanes, bomb and attack these airports, their cocaine factories with machine guns," Garcia said.

He once again refused to be blackmailed by coca-leaf farmers to resume protests. "I am not willing to be blackmailed, I am neither a political dummy nor a puppet," he said.

"We must choke cocaine production," he said, adding that it was the best way to make the coca-leaf farmers plant alternative crops such as coffee and cocoa.

On Sunday, Garcia said the destruction of coca crops would resume in one of the most important cocaine-producing regions, even though earlier protests led to a deal to halt the eradication.

Peru produces about 200 tons of cocaine annually and is the second largest producer of coca-leaf -- the main ingredient for cocaine -- after Colombia. Most of the coca is exported illegally and only 10 percent is seized.

"If we do not eliminate the danger (of drug trafficking)," Peru might face "an insurgency as big as the one faced by a brother nation," the president said.