Shining Path rebels assassinated two leaders of presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa's Democratic Front coalition in separate attacks, police said. The shootings took place less than two weeks before Vargas Llosa, a celebrated novelist and free-market advocate, faces centrist Alberto Fujimori in a runoff presidential election. Fujimori, a political newcomer, is favored to win the June 10 showdown. Felix Vega Riquelme, the former governor of Piura, was shot to death on Tuesday in the coastal city 530 miles northwest of Lima, police said. Hours later, in the Andean city of Cerro de Pasco, Prospero Delson Huaman was shot and killed, police said. Cerro de Pasco is 110 miles northeast of Lima. Vega was gunned down by two men on a motorcycle as he was getting out of a pickup truck, police said. An unidentified companion was seriously wounded. Delson was shot twice in the head by two rebels as he walked home from his job at the Centromin mining company, police said. Before the formation of the Democratic Front coalition, both men were leaders of the center-right Popular Action Party of former president Fernando Belaunde. The Maoist-inspired Shining Path has tried to sabotage the electoral process in Peru. Before April 8 general elections, the rebels called an armed strike in Lima and most of Peru's countryside. The government says more than 18,000 people have died in political violence since the Shining Path took up arms 10 years ago. Also Tuesday, police said villagers armed with sticks, stones and machetes battled over a disputed plot of land, leaving seven people dead. As many as 50 people were injured in the clash, which took place Monday night between the small Andean villages of Lircaycacca and Chinabamba, police said. The villages are 30 miles southeast of Huancavalica, an Andean city 145 miles southeast of Lima. The land battle followed three years of deteriorating relations between the two isolated villages, police said. Earlier clashes between the villages, each of which has 200 to 300 residents, resulted in injuries but no deaths, police said.
