KILLINGS LINKED TO MEXICAN ARMY UNIT

Elite Commando Group's Officers Received U.S. Training

San Juan de Ocotan, Mexico - It was just after 2 in the morning when the
Mexican special forces troops arrived unannounced in Victoria Lopez's dusty
back yard, among the scrawny chickens and the dogs.

Trained in commando operations - courtesy of the U.S. military base in Fort
Bragg, N.C. - the dozen or so soldiers dispensed with the formality of
knocking on the front door. Instead, they stormed over the low wall and
smashed in her bedroom door as she cowered with her three youngest
children.

Led by an officer later identified as Lieutenant Colonel Julian Guerrero,
they proceeded to break windows and furniture while demanding to know the
whereabouts of her eldest son, Salvador.

"Tell him to give us back the pistol" barked one of the hooded men, whose
dark blue uniforms bore no insignia.

I knew they were soldiers because they wore military boots," said Lopez,
who is in her 50s. "But they never identified themselves."

The soldiers, who were after Salvador because they believed he had stolen a
gun from one of their colleagues, soon tracked him down at a different
house where he lived. A week later, the 23-year old's badly tortured body
was pulled from a shallow grave several miles away.

Severely beaten, he had apparently died from a head wound. His mother has
not been shown the autopsy report, but a witness who saw the body said
Salvador's tongue had been ripped out.

About 30 teenagers from the village were also kidnapped that night by the
soldiers and later dumped naked or half-naked in the nearby hills. Several
required hospital treatment, which in one case lasted three weeks.

The Mexican army arrested 13 officers and 15 soldiers for the San Juan de
Ocotan incident. But the attention the case received in the Mexican press
was soon eclipsed by news of the massacre of 45 pro Zapatista villagers in
Acteal, Chiapas, by their pro-government neighbors, a crime that happened
on the same day Salvador's body was found.

Although she did not know it, Lopez was dealing with the GAFE (the Spanish
initials stand for AirMobile Special Forces Group). Nor was she aware that
the commando skills used in the assault on her house were funded by the
U.S. taxpayer.

Devised by the Mexican army after the debacle of the 1994 Zapatista
uprising in Chiapas, which revealed the army's lack of preparation for
modern low-intensity warfare," the GAFE is a "rapid-deployment"
counterinsurgency force.

Under a 1996 bilateral defense agreement, the GAFE's officer corps is
trained in the United States. The goal, says the Pentagon, is to equip them
not to fight guerrillas but to combat drug trafficking, which Mexico's
corruption-riddled police have sometimes done more to promote than to curb.

So far, there is little proof that the involvement of soldiers in police
work has helped stem the flow of drugs. But there is growing evidence that
this controversial program has led to serious human rights abuses.

In 1997 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Defense Department, 829 members
of the Mexican armed forces received "counter-narcotles-related training"
in the United States. Of these, 203 were GAFE officers trained by the
Army's 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg. This group, in turn, has
been passing on its newly acquired skills to trainees in Mexico.

The Pentagon admits that at least some of the men involved in the San Juan
de Ocotan incident had received U.S. training. It described the case, in
euphemistic terms, as one in which, "some soldiers sought retribution for
an alleged theft of a watch [sic] belonging to one of their unit's
soldiers."

Although the Mexican Defense Ministry declines to answer questions on the
subject, all 40 of the country's military zones are now believed to have
100-man GAFE units attached to them.

"They are not just for the drug war," said Raul Benitez, a professor
specializing in defense issues at the National Autonomous University in
Mexico City. "They are for everything. Depending on the particular threat
that exists in the region, that's what they specialize in."

The training, U.S. official sources say, includes a "substantial human
rights component." But in one three-month period last year in the state of
Jalisco, where San Juan de Ocotan is located, drug raids apparently
involving the GAFE led to 16 complaints to the official state human rights
commission.

In all those cases the soldiers were either hooded or wearing face paint.
They carried automatic weapons but no identifying insignia, much less a
search warrant. In several cases, they kidnapped their suspects.

By far the worst incident with which the GAFE has been linked to took place
last September in a Mexico City barrio known as the Colonia Buenos Aires. A
military led police raid resulted in the kidnapping of six young people
whose tortured bodies were later discovered in two remote locations.
According to a report in La Jornada newspaper, citing anonymous police
sources, the killings were carried out by GAFE members who illegally
infiltrated elite police units, which have since been disbanded.

The Chronicle traced one of the sources, who initially agreed to talk but
later withdrew the offer. "If I tell you about this," he said, "they'll
track you down and demand to know who gave you the information. These
people are very dangerous."

Statements by the teenagers in the San Juan de Ocotan case suggest that
clandestine interrogation and torture by the GAFE is not unprecedented, at
least in Jalisco.

The kidnapped teens say they were taken to rooms that stank of stale blood.
The soldiers tied them up, threw buckets of cold water over them and beat
them systematically with planks of wood. At least one was repeatedly half
suffocated with plastic bags placed over his head.

Not even the military suggests that the victims had anything to do with the
drug trade. Their alleged crime, as alluded to by Lopez, was taking a
pistol from a drunken soldier. Benitez suspects that those with real, or
alleged, links to drug traffickers may fare even worse.

The Jalisco complaints were passed on to the National Human Rights
Commission, which has done nothing. The national commission did not respond
to repeated requests for an interview.

Washington, too, seems indifferent. "With very few exceptions in Congress

and certainly none in the Clinton administration
nobody has expressed
much concern about the human rights implications of this policy," said Erie
0lsen of the Washington Office on Latin America, a human-rights lobbying
group.

Because the funding for the training program comes from the Pentagon's
budget, not the foreign assistance budget, the usual requirement that aid
be withdrawn if there are human rights violations does not apply.
Congressional oversight is also less rigorous.

Despite the arrests in the San Juan de Ocotan incident, the victims and
their relatives have little faith in the military justice system.

The unit's commanding general visited Lopez to offer her compensation, but
she turned him down.

I don't want any help from them until they punish the murderers," she said.
"My son wasn't an animal but a human being. They have wounded me in the
depths of my heart."