Mexico’s South: Fertile Ground for Rebels

For months, the rumors spread in a chain of whispers from one tin-roofed shack to another in this mist-shrouded mountain village in southern Mexico’s coffee country.

An armed group was forming in the nearby hills, the neighbors murmured. Its members met at night, lugging guns, and wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone who advertised their presence.

“They have terrorized everyone,” a distraught town elder said, begging a reporter not to use his name.

Now the vague, frightening rumors of San Agustin de Loxicha have a name. Two weeks ago, a new rebel group launched lightning attacks in about a dozen places around Mexico, leaving 16 dead. Of the 21 suspected guerrillas who have been captured, four lived around this remote town in the state of Oaxaca, a bumpy two-hour ride from a paved road.

Mexican authorities say the new movement, called the Popular Revolutionary Army, is made up of perhaps 300 rebels led by a left-wing group famous for planting bombs in cities in the 1970s. Officials say they have no popular base in the dirt-poor states of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Hidalgo, where they have been most active.

But several people in this town of about 3,000 indicated that the guerrillas may have adherents here. And politicians, academics and human rights activists say the grinding poverty of southern Mexico may be spawning a more serious guerrilla threat than the government acknowledges.

“A mass base for a guerrilla movement is people who will feed them, hide them and who the guerrillas can recruit from--but who are by definition clandestine,” said political scientist Jorge Castaneda, who has written extensively on rebel movements.

Do the rebels have such a base?

“In Guerrero and Oaxaca, I think they have one,” he replied.

The guerrillas--known by their Spanish initials, EPR--first appeared June 28, calling for the overthrow of the government, at a ceremony in Guerrero honoring peasants who had been slain by police a year earlier. But it was only in the recent attacks across a wide swath of the country that they revealed themselves as a well-armed, highly organized force.

The state prosecutor in Oaxaca, Roberto Pedro Martinez, said in an interview that authorities are investigating whether the EPR is active around San Agustin. Three of the alleged guerrillas now in prison were recruited in the village by EPR rebels, he said. Another San Agustin resident said he was contacted while working in Oaxaca.

But residents of this mountainside town, who generally speak the Zapotec Indian dialect and appear suspicious of outsiders, say they don’t know the alleged rebels from the vicinity. They note that some outlying houses in San Agustin can be reached only by an eight-hour walk over steep, forested mountains.

Schoolteacher Juan Bohorquez said many people did know the four peasants, whose names were read over the radio. “But no one talks,” he said.

Fear is palpable in the town. One shopkeeper, leaning over a counter to keep her voice low, said: “People support them because they’re afraid. They won’t tell you anything.”

The armed men, she said, met in two places nearby at night and included local boys. One of their leaders was said to be called Celerino, she added.

Several blocks away, the village elder blanched when a reporter asked about rebels. The armed men, he said, had been meeting for several years. They hadn’t spread propaganda, he said, but he now believes they were the EPR. Residents, he said, were too terrified to talk about the group because of fears of retaliation from the rebels.

“It’s better to shut your mouth than to be killed,” he said.

The municipal president, Agustin Luna, denied that any violent group was organizing locally.

“Here, nothing ever happens. We’re peaceful,” he said. “Perhaps these people who were captured were just looking for work.”

In fact, the alleged EPR members from the San Agustin area have told authorities they were hired by strangers offering them well-paid work. Only later, according to the confessions, did the youths learn they were being recruited as guerrilla fighters.

If the EPR is present in the village, it would scarcely be a surprise. Rumors have surfaced repeatedly in recent months that guerrillas are active in the mountains of Oaxaca and neighboring Guerrero state.

To analysts, the two states are natural sites for a new rebel movement. Both experienced guerrilla violence in the 1970s. They have long histories of bloody disputes over land and politics. There is widespread illiteracy, there are few jobs and there is growing discontent.

Here, schoolchildren sometimes faint in the classroom because of hunger, teachers say. Old women sleep on the dirt floors of shacks reeking of smoke from indoor fires.

Poor communities like San Agustin have seen their plight worsen even further because of Mexico’s economic crisis, which has driven up unemployment and sent prices soaring. “There are the necessary conditions for guerrillas,” said Marcos Leyva, a human rights leader in Oaxaca.

Noting how most of the EPR guerrillas seemed to vanish after their attacks, he said, “There have to be native people from here linked to them.”

Added to the desperate poverty here is a sharp change in poor communities’ traditionally passive attitude toward the government. In recent years, numerous civic organizations have sprouted in Oaxaca to defend Indians, peasants and human rights. Encouraged by left-wing teachers and the Roman Catholic Church, analysts say, many of the poor have become politicized.

While leaders of civic groups preach peace, there is fear that the EPR could seek to hijack their members, said Flavio Sosa, a left-wing congressman from Oaxaca.

“If no one pays attention to these communities, people will look for other answers,” he said. “People get tired of looking for solutions via the democratic way.”

Local residents don’t have to look far to see how effective an armed uprising can be. In the southernmost state of Chiapas, Zapatista guerrillas battled the government for nearly two weeks in 1994, leaving more than 145 people dead. The government then entered into negotiations with the rebels, who are seeking greater aid for Indians.

That uprising “had an important effect on communities here,” said Porfirio Santibanez, a sociologist at Benito Juarez University in Oaxaca who studies community organization.

“Since 1994,” he said, “there are communities here that say, ‘In order for us to be noticed, we have to do what they did in Chiapas.’ ”

Santibanez said most communities in Oaxaca are not in favor of the kind of harsh anti-government violence espoused by the EPR. But that doesn’t mean the rebels couldn’t attract support among people angered by the economic crisis or the government’s perceived indifference, he said.

While the EPR seems to have fertile ground here for gaining adherents, it is still unclear who leads the group.

The government believes the rebels are dominated by an urban terrorist group founded in the 1970s, the Revolutionary Workers’ Party and Clandestine Popular Union, known as PROCUP.

It is led, the government says, by a former university rector from Oaxaca, Felipe Martinez Soriano, who was jailed in 1990 and later convicted in the killing of two security guards. He denies any association with PROCUP.

EPR communiques have acknowledged a link to PROCUP. But the EPR says PROCUP is just one of 14 “armed revolutionary organizations” that joined forces in May 1994 to wage war on the government. EPR leaders have said they finance their activities through bank robberies and kidnappings.

The government, however, says it has evidence that PROCUP is the main player. Recently, Martinez Soriano and other alleged PROCUP members managed to smuggle a cellular phone into their jail cells in Mexico City, said one senior Mexican official. While the inmates talked in code, it was clear they were discussing plans for some sort of attacks, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In addition, footage from the June ceremony at which the EPR first appeared shows that the group was protected by a cordon of mysterious men. They have been identified as members of three left-wing civic groups in Guerrero, Oaxaca and Hidalgo states that authorities believe are linked to PROCUP, the official said.

The civic groups, which defend peasants’ and prisoners’ rights, have denied such ties.