Even more amazing to Peruvians has been the decisiveness with which Garcia has confronted the politically powerful armed forces on alleged human rights violations in the campaign against the neo-Maoist Sendero Luminoso guerillas. Faced with eye-witness accounts of the massacre of 69 people in an isolated Andean village, he sacked the head of the armed forces joint command, forced two senior generals to resign and had the joint command publicly admit to the media that an army patrol had killed the villagers. Peadar Kirby . It is a barren wet desert , and one of the forerunners of environmental disaster in the Himalayan region. Sandwiched between the Himalayas and the Burmese mountains, the area used to be forested.
Today there is no vegetation to hold the soil, and no soil to support a forest.
Population in the area has soared and pressure for agricultural land is acute. Shifting cultivation, locally known as jhum, was traditionally practised, and fallow periods ranged from 20 to 30 years. Now they have fallen to under five years - insufficient for forest cover to regenerate. As a result, up to 170 tonnes of soil per hectare are being washed away by the monsoons each crop year. It would take decades of lying fallow for the soil to recover.