Rebels Claim Responsibility for Blasts at Banks in Central Mexico

A little-known rebel group, denouncing government corruption and free-market economic policies, claimed responsibility for explosions that damaged three foreign-owned banks in a central Mexican city early Sunday, officials said.

No one was injured in the explosions in Jiutepec in Morelos state, about 35 miles south of Mexico City.

State officials said they were still investigating the blasts, which tore through the closed branch offices of BBVA-Bancomer, Banamex and Santander Serfin just after midnight. Authorities retrieved undetonated explosives outside a fourth bank, a branch office of HSBC. All four banks are clustered in an industrial area of Jiutepec, a city of 150,000 just southeast of Morelos’ capital, Cuernavaca.

Officials confirmed that a note found near the blast sites came from a group calling itself the “Comando Jaramillista Morelense 23 de Mayo.” According to a report on the website of the Mexican daily El Universal, the note criticized “neo-liberal counterreforms” that have seen Mexico embrace privatization and globalization, but that many Mexicans believe have done little to address economic inequality.

The group lashed out at Mexican President Vicente Fox, accusing him of failing to keep campaign promises to generate millions of new jobs. The note also accused the governor of Morelos, Sergio Estrada Cajigal, of protecting drug traffickers.

Estrada Cajigal, a member of Fox’s National Action Party, has been rocked by allegations that officials in his administration allowed drug lords to use Morelos as a base for narcotics trafficking. An investigation has already resulted in the resignations of Morelos’ attorney general and secretary of state.

The statement also said, “Foxism has demonstrated that under imperialistic hegemony, moral and political degradation have no limits.”

State officials said that there were no witnesses to the bombings, which shattered the windows of adjacent stores, and that no one had been detained. They said authorities knew little of the group claiming responsibility.

Estrada Cajigal denounced the bombings at an afternoon news conference and said federal authorities would assist in the investigation.

“We reject violence in any form, and we condemn and regret the criminal acts,” he said.

All four banks targeted are foreign owned, part of a sell-off of Mexico’s financial sector after the nation’s mid-1990s economic crisis that has angered many Mexicans.

The explosions came as Mexico prepares for a summit that will bring European and Latin American leaders to Guadalajara this week.

The state of Morelos, birthplace of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, has a history of leftist political activity and peasant demands for economic reform.

The namesake of the group that claimed responsibility for the bombings is Ruben Jaramillo, a land-reform advocate in Morelos whose activities put him at odds with business interests and the government. Jaramillo and his wife and three children were kidnapped and murdered in May 1962.

Dan La Botz, who teaches history and Latin American studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, said the bombings appeared to express a growing dissatisfaction “throughout Latin America with what people call the neoliberal model, the free-market model.”

The Zapatista revolt in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas in the mid-1990s and the election of populist leaders in countries such as Brazil and Venezuela are other examples, he said.