Panel Probes Alleged Rights Abuses in Mexican State

International human rights workers went to Guerrero on Friday to investigate alleged police and army abuses in the troubled Pacific Coast state amid growing concern that the government is militarizing parts of the state in the name of peace.

The probe by the Organization of American States human rights commission comes a day after President Ernesto Zedillo met sharp criticism from some local officials during a tour of the state’s impoverished towns. It is in those towns that thousands of soldiers have been searching for a new rebel group.

On Thursday afternoon, when Zedillo entered a town square near the village where the armed group surfaced last month, he was showered with flowers and praise. But suddenly, opposition federal legislator Leticia Burgos burst from the crowd, shouting, “Get the army out of Guerrero!”

Later, the town’s mayor, Maria de la Luz Nunez, beseeched the president more quietly: “Please, for the love of God, return the soldiers to their constitutional duties.”

The Mexican president and his advisors have denied that sending the army in constitutes militarization, and they continue to minimize the threat of rebellion in the state, which contains Acapulco and other famous Mexican resorts. The army was deployed to Guerrero within hours after the new armed group suddenly surfaced June 28. On that day, dozens of masked men and women carrying new AK-47 assault rifles and calling themselves the Popular Revolutionary Army interrupted a memorial service for 17 peasants massacred a year earlier by Guerrero police.

Zedillo’s interior secretary has labeled the armed group “common criminals”; the army and police have detained eight suspected rebels in the hunt. Ruling party legislators have added that the army presence is needed to promote public security in one of Mexico’s most impoverished states.

Meeting with eight mayors in the region Thursday, Zedillo acknowledged Guerrero’s widespread poverty and the government’s neglect--which the armed group’s manifesto cited among the reasons for their rebellion. Similar inequities in another southern state, Chiapas, drove the Zapatista National Liberation Army movement to rise up on Jan. 1, 1994.

The president stressed that armed rebellion is no solution to such problems. “What I’m telling those who believe in the path of violence is that they’re wrong,” Zedillo told the mayors in Atoyac de Alvarez, the town where officials appealed for a military withdrawal. “Violence will not serve the people. . . . The path that guides us is democracy and justice.”

But by keeping thousands of soldiers in Guerrero with armored cars and helicopters on patrol since June 28, Zedillo has opened his administration to charges of militarization. And during the same period, Zedillo appointed an army general as Mexico City’s police chief, prompting similar charges of militarization in the capital.

“It is very worrisome that the tendency one sees in our country today is to give the army more and more duties to secure public order and prosecute crime,” declared opposition legislator Alfonso Solorzano during a congressional debate this week. “It reveals profound failures in the judicial system and ordinary security forces.”

Solorzano’s populist Democratic Revolutionary Party called for the debate after four suspected members of the armed group alleged they had been tortured while in police custody. The men, who were rounded up in the search, stated in an Acapulco court last week that police used electric shocks and beatings to gain their confessions.

Responding to those and other charges of abuse in towns under army patrol, the OAS human rights commission sent delegates to interview witnesses there this weekend.

Such allegations have been widespread during the military deployment. They have led critics to speculate that hard-line politicians may have financed the group to justify an army-backed crackdown on Guerrero’s outspoken populists. Seven of the eight suspects rounded up so far say they belong to an activist group but not the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR.

New evidence surfaced Friday, however, suggesting that the EPR could be a genuine rebel force. A communique signed by “Insurgent Commander Antonio of the EPR” claimed responsibility for an ambush on an army patrol in Guerrero earlier in the week.

Zedillo’s government Friday refused to call the ambush a rebel attack. But anonymous callers directed several newspapers to the communiques, one of them in a Mexico City telephone booth. If the claim is authentic, the ambush would be the group’s first hostile act; a civilian was killed, but the army denies any soldiers were hit.