Group Alleges Rights Violations in Mexico

Indian peasants were subjected to summary executions, disappearances and other human rights abuses by the army as it fought a New Year’s rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas, Canadian investigators charged Saturday.

And in the town of Ocosingo, forensic experts sent by the Mexican government’s human rights commission on Saturday exhumed six bodies from a mass grave. At least three more bodies, wrapped in sheets from a government hospital, could be seen at the bottom of the eight-foot pit.

Ocosingo residents said the corpses were those of Zapatista National Liberation Army rebels and civilians killed in the Jan. 2-3 clash, but there was no official identification.

Meanwhile, rebels in the southern Mexican state have threatened to vote on whether to execute a former governor seized shortly after the uprising began, the hostage’s relatives said.

The government’s human rights commission Saturday called for the release “without delay” of former Gov. Absalon Castellanos Dominguez and other hostages seized during the Indian uprising.

The rebels, who number between 1,000 and 2,000, say they are fighting to improve living conditions for Indian peasants in Chiapas. They have yet to respond publicly to a government call for talks, issued Wednesday.

In Mexico City, bomb threats put police on alert Saturday, and 3,000 anti-government demonstrators in the city demanded that the army withdraw from Chiapas.

Investigators from Canadian church and human rights groups returned Saturday from Chiapas, where they said troops were restricting the movements of villagers in what amounted to a state of siege in some parts of the state.

One Chiapas resident leaving his home to buy tortillas as troops pursued the rebels was shot and killed by soldiers, said Marthe Lapierre, head of a Roman Catholic literacy project in Chiapas.

“Soldiers took four indigenous men from one hospital and summarily executed four others,” she told a Mexico City news conference.