Mexican Officials Seek to Deport 43 Foreigners

To cries of dismay Thursday from human rights activists, the government has brought deportation proceedings against 43 foreigners, including 34 Americans, who joined New Year’s celebrations to mark the sixth anniversary of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas.

Immigration officials said 12 of the foreigners have been told to leave the country. Hearings are still pending in the remaining 31 cases.

Mexican immigration chief Alejandro Carrillo Castro told reporters Thursday that none of the cases involved formal expulsion from Mexico. He argued that officials were invoking a milder form of mandatory departure that allows a person to reapply for a new visa--but only after a ban of several years in some cases.

Still, this week’s action forms part of a sustained campaign waged by the government since early 1998 against foreign Zapatista sympathizers in the troubled southern state, where Maya Indians staged their uprising Jan. 1, 1994.

Foreign supporters have long flocked to Chiapas to support the rebels and their poetry-prone leader, Subcomandante Marcos. The Mexican Constitution forbids the involvement of foreigners in domestic politics, and Mexican leaders are extremely sensitive to perceived foreign interference.

Critics attacked the latest clampdown on foreigners as a fresh sign of the Mexican government’s unwillingness to allow international scrutiny of events in Chiapas.

“It does send a shiver,” said Jason Mark, a spokesman for the Global Exchange human rights group in San Francisco, “and it underscores that, while Chiapas has dropped off the public map, there is still a great deal of tension down there.”

In a separate incident Wednesday, pro-government villagers near the municipality of Chenalho surrounded and harassed 29 pro-Zapatista residents until the military intervened and defused tensions, according to local media reports. Chenalho includes the village of Acteal, where paramilitary soldiers killed 45 rebel supporters two years ago in the worst outbreak of violence in Chiapas since a cease-fire ended open hostilities in mid-January 1994.

The citations for visa hearings were issued Tuesday to foreigners who had attended a pro-Zapatista New Year’s celebration in the self-proclaimed autonomous municipality of Oventic.

Peter Brown, a San Diego teacher who was expelled permanently from Mexico in 1998 for organizing the construction of a school in Oventic, said many of the foreigners targeted this week had journeyed there aboard an “educational caravan for peace” in support of the school. The government regards the pro-Zapatista school as unconstitutional because it was built without official sanction.

Speaking from his home in San Diego, Brown said that whatever distinctions Mexican authorities might draw between types of expulsion orders, “it would seem to be just as egregious if someone is being chucked out simply for visiting folks the government doesn’t want them to visit, which seems to be the nature of the beast here.”

Mario Patron, a lawyer for the Miguel Agustin Pro Human Rights Center in Mexico City, said his organization has brought a legal challenge against the government’s tightened restrictions on human rights observers. He said the new rules, issued in October 1998, limit human rights activists’ stays to 10 days and require them to apply at least 10 days in advance, among other strictures.

“We have always attached great importance to the presence of foreign observers in Mexico wherever there are human rights violations,” Patron said. “For the government, the cost of having foreign observers is that they convey the real facts of the situation, and this undermines the whole lobbying effort of the government. For this reason they try to limit foreign observers.”

Joel Solomon of New York-based Human Rights Watch said: “We don’t deny the Mexican government’s need to regulate who enters and leaves the country through a system of visas. That’s not in question here. The question is the Mexican government’s intentionally blurry interpretation of what is tourism and where does tourism stop.”