Quake, Massacre Show Life Is Precarious in Poor Guerrero : Mexico: Temblor is the latest violent episode in state known for poverty, drug trade. In June, police shot dead 17 peasants.

Just eight miles up a rutted mountain road from the modern highway linking glitzy Acapulco with the new Ixtapa resort is a mausoleum for five men who lived and died in a Mexico that few international beach-goers will ever know.

In those men’s Mexico, life is precarious, easily ended by one of the frequent earthquakes that rock the coast--or by a stray bullet.

This Mexico is so poor that peasants must sell pigs to buy fertilizer; so unsafe that, for fear of robbers, they dare not carry cash from those sales when they go to the county seat for supplies. And it so violent that even such a precaution ultimately did not protect them.

All five died in June in a massacre that the federal government’s National Human Rights Commission blames on the government of the state of Guerrero. In a report widely lauded as the federal agency’s most thorough investigation of human rights abuses, the commission called for the firing of nine state officials and police but stopped short of demanding that Gov. Ruben Figueroa resign.

It also drew attention to “the conditions of poverty, marginality, isolation and insecurity suffered in various zones in the state of Guerrero, where promised solutions have been long postponed, producing disappointment in some cases and, in others, irritation and desperation.”

Guerrero, the site of Thursday’s deadly 7.2-magnitude earthquake, is Mexico’s third poorest state, after of Oaxaca and Chiapas--where a rebellion has simmered for 20 months--and, by reputation, its most violent. Folklore blames the violence on the brutal way nature treats the state: drought, flash floods and earthquakes.

Add to that mix the proliferation of high-powered weapons linked to a flourishing drug trade and it is clear why government officials privately worry that Guerrero could erupt in guerrilla war, just as Chiapas did.

The weekly newsmagazine Proceso has reported that groups of armed peasants are training in the state and that army troops have been sent to look for them. Government and military officials have repeatedly denied that there are guerrillas in Guerrero, as officials did in Chiapas in the months before rebellion broke out there.

Guerrero’s rugged mountains, extending to a coastline of hidden coves, combined with the seething resentment of impoverished farmers living so close to the wealth of two international resorts, make the state an incubator for rebellion, analysts say.

“Maintaining Acapulco as a first-class resort takes a lot of the state’s investment,” said Vicente Diaz Fuentes, a longtime Guerrero politician for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. “That creates a lot of inequality. Look at the Highway of the Sun [the four-lane toll road from Mexico City to Acapulco].”

In contrast, farmers have barely passable dirt roads for getting their products to market.

Besides the tourists, there are the caciques , or local political bosses. Since the revolution at the beginning of this century, Guerrero has been run by families such as the Figueroas--ancestors of the current governor--the Ruizes and the Massieus, who married into the family of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and are currently at the center of an international drug and murder scandal. A host of lesser-known families control rural areas throughout the state.

“The caciques have all the economic power,” Diaz Fuentes said. “This produces a lot of resentment among the peasant population.”

The result is a smoldering anger.

“Guerrero has been one of the states where development has fallen behind,” said Pindaro Uriostegui, leader of the state’s congressional delegation. He added: “The state has constantly been attacked by armies from the center of the country, because it has been a focal point for rebellion. That has created a tradition of struggle that has made people combative.”

Guerrero, a name that means warrior, has played a key role in most Mexican wars, starting with the war for independence. This nation’s only prolonged guerrilla struggle took place here in the 1960s and 1970s, when Ruben Figueroa Figueroa, the father of the current governor, ran the state capital of Chilpancingo.

Imprisoned members of those old guerrilla groups say some of their comrades are still in the mountains and that they set off a bomb last year in Acapulco to show support for the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas.

“We have survived for more than 20 years,” said David Cabanas, brother of Lucio Cabanas, one of the 1960s leaders. “We are a dispersed army. There are comrades who continue the struggle.”

Government officials publicly dismiss such statements as rhetoric. But privately, many Mexicans believe that they are worried.

“Gov. Figueroa lives under the tension that there will be a repeat of the peasant insurrections of the 1960s and 1970s that his father so cruelly and successfully fought,” said Carlos Montemayor, a historian who has written extensively about that era.

That tension may have cost the five men from Paso Real their lives.

Florente Rafael Ventura, a 35-year-old father of five, believed he was lucky that day in June when he saw two truckloads of farmers from the neighboring town of Tepetixtla traveling down the road to a protest march at Atoyac de Alvarez. Ventura had sold a pig earlier in the week to a butcher from the county seat of Coyuca de Benitez. He asked his customer to keep the money for him until he could get into town to buy fertilizer. The march gave him a chance to go. The protesters would pass though Coyuca de Benitez on their way, and he could get a ride down the hill.

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He and four of his neighbors--Jose Rebolledo, Fabian Gallardo, Gregorio Analco and Amado Sanchez--jumped on the back of one truck. They had almost reached Aguas Blancas, half way to Coyuca de Benitez, when the trucks were stopped at a police blockade.

Analco, who was riding on the bumper, clinging to the back of the truck, got down. A policeman told him to get back on the truck and jabbed him with a rifle, according to witnesses. The gun went off and Analco fell to the ground. Another man tried to help him, and the policeman shot him also, witnesses said.

Suddenly police were firing. People cowered inside the trucks for cover, and those on the outside ran. Within minutes, 14 people were killed. Three more died later, including Ventura, who was shot three times.

“It is so unfair,” his mother, who would not give her name, said through tears. “He was not doing anything wrong. He was a serious man who liked to work and take care of his family.”

The government gave the widows of the murdered men about $8,500 each--part of which they spent on the tomb--along with threats against the women talking anymore, said their mothers-in-law.

“This is the kind of government we have,” said one neighbor, who would identify himself only as Margarito. “They kill us. Then, they threaten us.”

The whitewashed adobe walls of buildings in Paso Real are covered with slogans such as “Killer government that murders peasants, we want Figueroa’s head.”

“They are trying to prevent an armed rebellion, but all that such bloody political repression does is provoke it,” Montemayor said.

That was exactly what happened in the 1960s, historians say.

Montemayor said that an incident similar to the Aguas Blancas killings, in Atoyac de Alvarez--the town where the protesters were headed--in fact, first sent guerrillas into the mountains in 1967.

Within a week of the incident at Aguas Blancas, a dozen people were killed in an apparent family feud in another part of the state, and half a dozen police officers were ambushed trying to deliver a warrant in yet another.

In an interview with reporters, Figueroa called the succession of deaths “bad luck.” “Check the police files for the past 50 years,” he said. “There is nothing new here.”

That is exactly what worries many Guerrero residents. A glimpse at police records shows an overwhelming level of violence: shootouts between opium poppy growers and police, seizures of cases of AK-47s, revenge murders that are the most recent chapters in Hatfield-and-McCoy-like feuds.

Police records blame much of the violence on incidents related to the drug trade. But people here say their state suffers from a culture of violence.

Sen. Felix Salgado of the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party recalls that, when he was in grade school in a remote Guerrero village, he saw one man chop off another’s head with a machete during a fight. In his hometown, jealous husbands routinely tie their wives to the backs of horses and drag them across fields, he said.

No one is immune. Mario Ruiz Massieu, the former federal assistant attorney general now fighting the Mexican government’s attempts to extradite him from the United States on embezzlement and torture charges, is from a prominent Guerrero family. He lost two brothers to a fight over a woman’s honor.

Homero Aleman, a Mexico City journalist who was born in Guerrero and visits frequently, said the violence is a result of poverty. Moreover, “this is an authoritarian culture,” he said. “The government is seen as the maximum authority, and the authorities are not accustomed to justifying what they do.”

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Changing that culture will be nearly impossible as long as towns such as Paso Real and Tepetixtla remain isolated.

“How do you end this?” asked Montemayor, answering: “You build roads. You put these towns in touch with each other and with the major highways.”

Solving the problems of Guerrero will require deeper changes, say local political leaders. “Guerrero is a state that has suffered political instability because of bad government,” said Diaz Fuentes.

Many Guerrero residents--particularly the relatives of the men killed in Aguas Blancas--believe that the current governor falls into that category. “Just the name Ruben Figueroa opens old wounds,” Salgado said. “He has to resign before we can start to heal.”

Darling was recently on assignment in Paso Real.