3 Mexican Soldiers Die in Ambush
An ambush by suspected Marxist rebels that killed three soldiers in Mexico’s Guerrero state probably was revenge for an army attack earlier this month, and more bloodshed can be expected, analysts said Tuesday.
The clash, which showed a second guerrilla war is heating up on Mexico’s impoverished southern flank, left three soldiers dead and three injured when attackers fired on a military patrol Monday.
Defense Minister Enrique Cervantes said Tuesday that it is not clear who carried out the attack.
But Guerrero state Prosecutor Servando Alanis said the assault on a remote highway about 125 miles southwest of Mexico City was carried out by members of the pro-peasant Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR.
The army has said that on June 7, troops stumbled on EPR guerrillas sleeping in a schoolhouse in a remote Guerrero mountain village and killed 12 in a six-hour gunfight.
None of the hundreds of soldiers participating in the operation was hurt, sparking claims that the attack was not a shootout, as the army insisted, but a massacre.
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