By Walker Simon AYACUCHO, Peru, March 5 (Reuters) - The United States is bankrolling efforts to train hundreds of native Indian language speakers in Peru to battle cocaine traffickers working with Maoist guerrillas. Peru is the world's No. 2 supplier of coca leaf and its refined product cocaine. Washington hopes it can put a dent in the trade by financing the recruitment and training of youths from coca-growing areas as anti-narcotics officers. About 240 agents proficient in Quechua, an Inca language, and Ashaninka, a tongue of the Amazon basin, graduated last Friday in the highland city of Ayacucho, a center of the drugs trade and the guerrilla war that ravaged Peru in the 1980s and early 1990s. U.S. officials also broke ground on a new $10.5 million police academy in Ayacucho, saying it will be the most advanced of its type in Latin America. "The graduates have Quechua as a native tongue and also speak Spanish," Peru's Interior Ministry said. "Being bilingual, they will be able to establish direct contact with rural residents, favoring a policy of peace and integration." A linguistic gulf between Peru's indigenous groups and Spanish-speaking security forces generated mistrust and widespread human rights abuses in the 1980s campaigns against Maoist rebel group Shining Path. "Before the police were mostly from Lima, they were strangers in the community," said U.S. Embassy officer James Castillo. "Now we are recruiting in the community, in other words to have the community policing themselves." Using U.S.-funded scholarships, youths from impoverished coca-growing regions are enrolled in police academies. In exchange, they must serve three years as anti-narcotics officers in their home areas. Police aim to field 3,000 of those graduates by next year, up from the more than 600 graduates of the program so far. At Friday's graduation ceremony, six Ashaninka-speaking cadets were watched proudly by relatives, their cheeks streaked with traditional slashes of red. The father of a new 19-year-old officer wore a crown topped with a red feather, denoting authority. Her grandfather clutched shoulder-high arrows, serrated and triple-pronged to snare prey. Washington has sent nearly $500 million for Peru's anti-drugs campaign since 2002 with about half of the total earmarked for law enforcement. Shining Path's rebellion was beaten back in the 1990s but it still has a few hundred members in a remnant force, a shadow of the almost 3,000 fighters at its peak, officials say. The U.S. State Department said in a report last week that rebel holdouts "are providing protection for coca transporters and cocaine base processing and in some cases directly participating in processing cocaine base." Shining Path launched its fierce insurgency in Ayacucho, long one of Peru's poorest regions, and an estimated 69,000 people were killed in the war. About a quarter of the victims were civilians killed at the hands of army and police, and Ayacucho saw some of the worst atrocities. Most of them were native speakers of Quechua or Ashaninka, underscoring Peru's deep ethnic and cultural divide. (Editing by Kieran Murray: Email: walker.simon@reuters.com, +511 211 2130)
