MEXICAN UNREST

ThE '80 S Parallels

BY JEff Gillenkirk and S. Brian WiIson

CONSISTENT WITH the fawning press coverage of presidential summits, the
signature press event of President Clinton's recent trip to Mexico had to
be the touching scene of him singing Mexican folk songs, in Spanish, with
schoolkids. A few hundred miles to the south, however, Mexican soldiers
were singing a different tune. In the hills of Chiapas, Oaxaca and
Guerrero, the Mexican military continued its assault on indigenous
peasantsusing hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military hardware,
and commanded by officers trained in U.S. facilities, including the
notorious School of the Americas.

Both writers of this piece have traveled to the conflict zones of Mexico
over the past two yearsincluding the weeks shortly before Clinton's trip.
We were shocked by the rapidly escalating climate of fear and repression in
Mexico's south. In talking with people and reading newspapers and human
rights reports, we recognized a style of warfare sickeningly familiar from
past U.S.backed wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Indigenous people testified about soldiers burning villages, destroying
crops and driving them into the mountains. Peasant leaders have been
threatened with being pushed out of helicopters unless they signed
confessions of rebel complicity. The leader of an opposition democratic
party was shot to death in Guerrero, in one of more than 400 unsolved
political assassinations in Mexico since 1988. Four Indian campesinos were
detained by the army in Guerrero, for helping to build a new headquarters
for one of the three major political parties in Mexicoand were never seen
again.

This kind of information is not hard to find. Neither are the U.S.
government's fingerprints on it. In 1982'90, Mexico leased or purchased
more military goods and services from the United States under all
categories of assistance than it did in the previous 30 years. On Aug. 21,
1995, the Mexican daily newspaper La Jornada listed military equipment
acquired by the Mexican government in 1994. This list included more than
7,000 bulletproof Humvees, 78 helicopters, 78 fixedwing planes, 1,615
machine guns, more than 3,000 flame throwers, 36O,OOO grenadesand 266
cattle prods.

Shortly after the Zapatista uprising in 1994, Clinton issued export
licenses for $64 million in additional military equipment. In April 1996,
after only the secondever visit by a Mexican defense chief to Washington,
a major agreement was signed that included the transfer of S50 million
worth of military equipment and training. In addition, more than 700
Mexican military officers have been trained in the United States in the
past decade more than from any other Latin American country.

The official U.S. reason for this military assistance is to help Mexico
fight the war on drugs. But the Mexican government, one of the world's most
corrupt, has made a mockery of that claim. Last winter, the military head
of Mexico's antidrug forces, General Jesus Guiterrez Rebollo, was arrested
on drug charges. The brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de
Gotari sits in jail, accused of complicity urith drug cartels.

The vast majority of U.S. military aid to Mexico is not being used to fight
drugs. More than onethird of Mexico's armed forces60,000 troopsare in
the southern state of Chiapas; thousands more are fanned out across
neighboring states. Yet the main drug production, transfer and distribution
points, and the compounds of major drug lords, are in the north. The
militarization of Mexico has been accompanied by an increase in reported
human rights abuses. An April 29 report by Human Rights Watch/Americas
documents a growing trend toward officialand officially sanctioned state
violence against the rural poor.

This is not a war on drugs. It's a war on the Mexican people, using U.S.
weapons and the same counterinsurgency tactics that led to the 75,000
civilian deaths in El Salvador and 140,000 in Guatemala. The same sorrowful
litanies echo from southern Mexico: forced relocations of indigenous
populations, disappearances, torture. Such reports fill the ledgers of
local human rights groups, and appear in Mexican newspapers. But they've
been largely ignored by the U.S. media.

Mexico faces enormous problems, with an economy in shambles, a soaring
population and a battered environment. The people have legitimate
grievances against their corrupt and unresponsive government. The United
States should be helping to establish real democratic reform, not sending
helicopter gunships, M16s and cattle prods for the government to suppress
change.

Jeff Gillenkirk is on the San Francisco Media Alliance's Latin
AmericaCaribbean Basin Committee. S. Brian Willson is a Vietnam veteran
and judgeadvocate of the Bill Motto VFW Post 58M Santa Cruz.