Mexican Activists Cry Foul Over Language Charges

Despite the democratic gains of recent years, basic individual freedoms in Mexico still can be trumped by old-fashioned political muscle. Jose Luis Lopez and Enrique Avila Garduno say they found that out the hard way.

Lopez, an accountant, and Avila, a chauffeur, recently spent a harrowing week in one of Mexico’s most notorious prisons. Their crime? Using foul language.

The pair deny they swore at anyone. Their real crime, they say, was opposing a powerful governor by leading marches to protest a controversial new bus terminal planned for their neighborhood in this town west of Mexico City.

They and hundreds of other residents fear that the bus terminal would ruin their middle-class neighborhood by attracting prostitutes, thieves, traffic and pollution. The 400 buses that would clog the local streets every day would pose a safety hazard and depress property values, they insist.

But the two men’s visible roles in organizing three marches against the project in February and March got them crossways with local leaders of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, including Mexico state Gov. Arturo Montiel, who is pushing hard for the terminal.

Montiel’s government claims that the men used foul language, incited riots and blocked public access to roads during their marches. And so, on March 28, state police arrested the two men as they left their houses to run Sunday morning errands.

“Fifteen policemen drove up, put me in a car and took me to a vacant lot. I thought they were going to kill me or beat me,” Avila said. “I didn’t have access to a judge or lawyer. They took me straight to Almoloya.”

Although neither man has a criminal record, Garcia and Avila were denied bail because, according to court documents, they were “threats to society.”

The two men say it is no coincidence that they were arrested the day before they were to circulate a petition opposing the terminal among delegates at a nearby resort during an international conference for which Montiel was the host. They say their arrest headed off a potentially embarrassing scene for Montiel, who is positioning himself to run for president in 2006.

Lopez and Avila say they will continue to fight the project, calling it an egregious example of poor planning, an assertion supported by urban planners.

“The terminal must be built in an area of less population density,” said Fermin Carreno Melendez, the former planning department head at the Mexico State Autonomous University here. “We asked for a dialogue with the government in February to discuss other locations but they refused.”

A spokesman for Montiel, Jose Luis Gutierrez, said the case was still open.

“The state is taking the process forward as set down by law. Nothing less or more. If the gentlemen are really responsible [for the alleged infractions], they have to pay for this,” Gutierrez said.

The pair were arrested on the basis of obscure, seldom invoked laws in the Mexican penal code that permit punitive action against those who use insulting or aggressive language in public.

Sometimes the laws are used by those in power to protect allies or silence the opposition, said Jose Luis Lopez Chavarria, a law professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University. The Toluca case “ is one more example in our country of failures in the application of law for political and party purposes,” Lopez Chavarria said.

Eduardo Alfonso Guerrero, a constitutional law expert at National Autonomous University, said the laws limiting free speech are anachronisms and should be ignored, if not erased from the law books.

“Gross words can be deemed an injurious offense. But if you have political maturity, you should not pay attention, especially public figures, because they are exposed to so much of it before all the world. The use of such words denigrates those who use them, not their targets,” Guerrero said.

Human rights officials point out that attempts to abridge free speech are not limited to members of the PRI, which ruled Mexico for seven decades before Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, or PAN, rose to power in 2000.

Under a PAN mayor, the city of Irapuato in Guanajuato state passed a law in 2002 making it a crime to use obscene or aggressive words and gestures. The measure was criticized by human rights groups as ambiguous and unconstitutional.

The PAN mayor of the city of Queretaro tried to pass a similar “good speech law” last year, but opposition from news media and human rights groups defeated it.

“The objective was to censor free speech,” said Vicente Fentanes, spokesman for the Queretaro state human rights commission.

In March, Mexico City police briefly detained a man who, driving past a ceremony featuring Marcelo Ebrard, the capital’s public security secretary, yelled an off-color epithet and accused the secretary of being corrupt.

“Everyone has the right to free speech, of being respected, but I think that when someone makes a personal imputation with aggression, it is our obligation to see what they mean,” Ebrard later told TV reporters in justifying the arrest.

Lopez and Avila say they continue to receive threats and fear for their lives. But that did not stop them from marching Wednesday with 300 others from their neighborhood to the state governor’s palace four miles away to protest the bus terminal project.

“Yes, we are afraid we might get arrested again,” Lopez said. “But we will defend the movement with our lives until the government gives up this idea of putting a bus terminal on top of our houses.”

Froylan Enciso in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.