National Insecurity Elevates Mexico Army to Hero’s Role

When the Mexican army rumbled past Isabel Pinzon’s corner store and occupied this muddy hamlet in Guerrero’s mountains, folks were skeptical.

The slaughter of 17 peasants by state police in Aguas Blancas a year earlier had shattered them. And hours before the army moved in, the town was shaken again: Self-proclaimed rebels appeared at the massacre site to mark its June 28 anniversary with gunfire.

So Pinzon and her neighbors feared the worst when 108 combat troops commandeered the schoolhouse as a counterinsurgency base. Yet when the soldiers left about a month later to pursue the mystery rebels elsewhere, Pinzon said, her 9-year-old son cried. So did many other residents.

“We didn’t want them to go,” the storekeeper whispered sadly. “They gave us security.” Security, she said, not from the rebels but from the police--the state and federal judiciales who for years have terrorized this and other towns in the Pacific Coast state.

In a land where the cops are often the criminals and few local civilians see the rebels as a threat, even the harshest critics of the army’s mobilization in Guerrero agree that its presence has been a welcome relief for many--if only as a security force of last resort.

At a time when the militarization of Guerrero and other pockets of Mexico has drawn the concern of human rights groups, opposition leaders and peasant activists, the view from Aguas Blancas testifies to the depth of Mexico’s national insecurity.

That view is shared in other towns now occupied by the army as thousands of soldiers deploy in some of Guerrero’s most remote areas. Many agree even in Mexico City, where, amid a continuing insecurity crisis, President Ernesto Zedillo has put a tough army general in charge of the police force. The capital’s record crime and rampant corruption have silenced most criticism of the general’s first act: dismissing department heads for what he called their crooked “brotherhood” and replacing them with army generals.

The army has a reputation as a far more moral force than the police. Jose Espina, a city assemblyman from the conservative opposition National Action Party, observed: “The military presence in the police force will reinforce certain values, such as discipline, efficiency and professionalism, including fighting corruption and respecting human rights.”

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The problem is more complex in Guerrero, a state plagued by drug trafficking, kidnapping, poverty and a history of political bossism.

The state leads Mexico in marijuana seizures--nearly 11 tons between January and May this year alone. It ranks high in street crime--and most of that, officials admit, goes unreported. And Mexico’s 1990 census ranked Guerrero as one of the worst in terms of housing, literacy, employment and household income.

That state of neglect follows decades of rule by authoritarian governors, often from the same few families. Among these bosses was Francisco Ruiz Massieu, who rose from governor of Guerrero to the ruling party’s second-highest post before being assassinated in Mexico City two years ago.

Guerrero’s ruling families also include the Figueroas. Former Gov. Ruben Figueroa was kidnapped as “an enemy of the people” by leftist rebels during a guerrilla war in the state in 1974; his son Ruben Figueroa Alcocer was forced to resign the governorship this year when his regime was implicated in the Aguas Blancas massacre.

It is against this backdrop that troops and light tanks have fanned out in dozens of remote villages in the days since the armed group appeared in Aguas Blancas with masks, assault rifles and a manifesto calling itself the Popular Revolutionary Army.

On Wednesday, leaders of the Popular Revolutionary Army led journalists to a secret camp to promote their rebellion. At a remote site in the eastern Sierra Madre mountains, in an undisclosed state along Mexico’s Gulf Coast, the group showed off its weaponry and announced the formation of a political party made up of 14 armed revolutionary movements in Mexico.

In Guerrero, Maria de la Luz Nunez--the mayor of Atoyac de Alvarez, near Aguas Blancas--is the fiercest local opponent of the military intervention in her state--although she acknowledges the need for protection from police.

“There needs to be a deep purge of the federal police force, not only in Guerrero but in the whole country,” she said. “Many times the criminals are the judiciales. They’re the kidnappers, the thieves and the drug dealers . . . So an army presence can be very beneficial for the population.”

But De la Luz said she opposes the way the government is using the army in this case. “It’s their arms, their tanks and the policy of solving poverty with weapons. Instead, the government could break this cycle of violence with dialogue and investment,” she said.

The mayor’s left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party has criticized the militarization from the floor of the Mexican Congress. And Guerrero’s largest peasant-activist group, the Peasant Organization of the Southern Sierra, has alleged that state police are using the army presence as cover for illegal detention and torture of its members, forcing them into false confessions that they are Popular Revolutionary Army members.

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Last week, the peasant group added a new charge. “Military harassment,” it said, was forcing scores of villagers to evacuate their homes in towns where the army is out in force.

After a two-day fact-finding mission in Guerrero last month, the Organization of American States’ human rights commission said it had recorded “numerous” accounts of police torture and false arrests in Guerrero.

It cited no abuses by the army. But its report warned the Mexican government that “using armed forces in civilian security functions . . . could cause serious human rights violations, due to the military nature and training of those forces.”

“For us, the federal police and the army are the same. Both represent the government . . . and they’re both trying to do away with us,” insisted Rocio Mesino, a leader of the Guerrero peasant group. She asserted that the troops have photographs of her and of other activists, who she alleged are the real targets of the military operation.

“I suppose there are sectors that accept the militarization of Guerrero, but I find it hard to believe that peasants and the indigenous people aren’t opposed to--or at least afraid of--the army,” she said.

De la Luz, whose town borders the Coyuca de Benitez municipality that includes Aguas Blancas, said there is a difference between a military presence and militarization.

When she took office in 1990, the army’s 49th Battalion was based in her town, the mayor recalled. “I polled the 7,000 residents, and I would say 99% wanted the battalion to remain in Atoyac. They wanted the army to stay because of the security they provided. . . . And when the battalion left [in 1994], crime increased again. There have been robberies and kidnappings, and no one prosecutes.”

In the current deployment, however, “they’re coming in with huge guns and light tanks, and it makes people nervous.”

Asked whether her townspeople fear the army, the mayor said: “No, I wouldn’t say they’re afraid. They’re annoyed. . . . Honestly, we haven’t received even one report of human rights abuses or even poor treatment of the people [by the army].”

In Coyuca de Benitez, there are no complaints from Mayor Ezequiel Zuniga, a member of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party who was appointed when his predecessor resigned. The army, Zuniga said, maintains that it came to Guerrero to repair damage from three hurricanes that have battered the state since early June.

But as another convoy of troops arrived with heavy weapons in hand, Zuniga acknowledged that the repairs may be coincidental to the army’s real mission: preventing rebellion. “It’s worrisome that these armed men appeared out of nowhere . . . so it’s better to prevent them, and that’s what the army is doing,” he said.

Officially, Mexico’s Defense Department has no comment on its mission in Guerrero. Even Zedillo, during a recent tour of the region, did not speak about the military.

Zedillo acknowledged in his speeches here that the region is among Mexico’s poorest. In Atoyac, he also acknowledged that growing unrest is reinforcing opposition support in the least developed towns.

“Sadly, we also have grave security problems, problems of violence that lead to even graver injustices,” Zedillo said. “But I’m telling those who believe in violence as an option: You’re wrong. Violence will serve no one.”

Presidential aides confirmed that the administration and the army are concerned about the sudden appearance of the new rebel force--especially in towns such as Aguas Blancas, where the rugged and remote mountain terrain creates a potential guerrillas’ haven.

The Popular Revolutionary Army is not seen as an immediate major threat. The group has claimed responsibility for just one incident--an ambush that killed a truck driver last month. The government believes that the rebels--although clearly well-armed--are few in number, with little organization.

Military commanders in Acapulco said a second ambush by heavily armed men left one soldier dead and two wounded in Coyuca de Benitez on Wednesday. No one has claimed responsibility for that attack.

Rather, analysts and activists say, injustice, fear and neglect could breed revolt in Guerrero.

Most villagers in Aguas Blancas agree that justice has not been served in the case of last year’s massacre. A handful of the state police officers who opened fire here on unarmed peasants en route to a demonstration have been arrested.

But the state’s top officials--including then-Gov. Figueroa Alcocer--have gone unpunished despite the Supreme Court’s findings in May that, at the very least, those officials tried to cover up the crime. The high court said they were responsible for editing a videotape of the slayings; the original tape surfaced this year and showed police planting guns in dead peasants’ hands.

And during the past year, crime has run rampant in Aguas Blancas--much of it, residents said, committed by the same state police force that was behind the massacre. Just days before the military arrived, Isabel Pinzon said, her neighbor was killed trying to resist kidnappers.

“When the army came, all that ended,” she said. “When the army was here, the kids sometimes stayed out until midnight, playing in the streets. Now they have to be in by 5 again.

“It will go back to the way it was,” she continued. “That’s why we need the army.”