LATIN AMERICA : Massacre Probe Signals Mexican Political Reform

The scandal rocking Mexico this week is known here simply as “White Water.” But unlike its American counterpart, it does not trace back to a failed rural development and the president here has cast himself in a lead role--for reform.

Aguas Blancas, or White Water, is the name of a small village in Guerrero state where police fired on a group of peasants on June 28, killing 17 of them. The massacre was videotaped, and, within hours, an edited version designed to show that the peasants were armed was aired nationwide.

But when the raw videotape was broadcast eight months later, showing police spraying unarmed peasants with bullets--then filming their corpses with planted weapons--it became an instant rallying point for critics of Mexico’s traditional one-party state.

In the weeks that followed, evidence surfaced linking the peasant executions and a subsequent cover-up to decisions made at the highest levels of the state government. Guerrero’s powerful, ruling-party Gov. Ruben Figueroa--a close friend of President Ernesto Zedillo--replaced a few top state officials and finally took a leave of absence last month.

Stubbornly professing his own innocence, the strongman governor refused to resign.

On Tuesday, after a two-month Supreme Court investigation ordered by Zedillo--a historic presidential action--Mexico’s highest court issued a report that was hailed as a landmark of political reform and judicial independence.

At the least, the Supreme Court commission found, Figueroa was guilty of “covering up the truth” and had “deceived” the public and obstructed justice by “manipulating” the White Water investigation.

The court unanimously recommended that Figueroa and seven of his highest-ranking state officials be subject to criminal charges in the case.

“In Aguas Blancas,” the two investigating judges stated, Figueroa and his aides were responsible for “creating an artificial version of the facts in an effort to make the public believe that the massacre of civilians [took place after] members of the Peasant Organization of the South audaciously attacked police at a routine roadblock.”

Human rights groups praised the court’s findings as a breakthrough in Zedillo’s campaign against the decades-old tradition of immunity from prosecution among ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party politicians.

Privately, Zedillo’s aides said it represented a new way of doing business in Mexican politics, with the president using the constitution rather than back-room maneuvers to put all 31 governors across this country on notice that if they or their aides break the law, they will be punished.

Zedillo’s friendship with Figueroa only reinforced that message, the aides said. They asserted that Zedillo’s hard line in Guerrero--a key state that includes Acapulco--already has had nationwide impact.

It pushed another ruling-party governor in Morelos state into firing his state police chief within hours of a police shooting that left a peasant leader dead there last month, they said. And it helped convince yet another PRI governor to resign earlier this month in Nuevo Leon amid an array of scandals.

But the nation’s political opposition remains unconvinced.

Behind the lingering distrust is the fact that in the days since the court ruling, not a single state or federal agency has indicated it has immediate plans to file criminal charges against Figueroa.

In a debate in Mexico’s House of Deputies on Wednesday, members of the two leading opposition parties insisted that Congress should try Figueroa.

Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo, an independent lawmaker, said the failure of Guerrero authorities to charge him shows that little has changed.

An interior department spokesman tried to explain the problem: “This is the first time a Mexican president has used his constitutional right to intervene,” he said. “We are facing a totally unprecedented process, and we cannot say with certainty what should happen next.”