[progchat_action] Top Mexican prosecutor slams rebels
 
Resent-Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:41:52 -0500 (CDT)

(Note the attempts to link the EPR with organized crime. SR)

Top Mexican prosecutor: Rebels attacks benefit drug traffickers

The Associated Press Published: September 17, 2007

Mexico City: Mexico's attorney general said on Monday that attacks
by leftist rebels on gas pipelines are benefitting drug traffickers
by diverting police.

Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said some government forces
assigned to fight drug cartels have been drawn away to beef up
security at pipelines and investigate the bombings earlier this
month and in July at oil and natural gas pipelines that caused
factories to shut down across 10 states. He said there was no
evidence traffickers ordered or paid for the bombings.

"To the extent they distract federal forces from the fight against
drug trafficking, which is the government's top priority, they are
performing a service for the drug traffickers," Medina Mora told
foreign correspondents, adding "that doesn't necessarily mean they
are linked."

The Revolutionary People's Army, or EPR, a secretive Marxist group
that killed dozens of police and soldiers in the late 1990s, has
claimed responsibility for blasts.

Medina Mora said the group's motivation appears to be somewhat
outdated revolutionary zeal and noted "they have historically
financed themselves through kidnappings," mainly of mid-level
businessmen and ranchers."

Medina Mora would only say that the group's core numbered "between
several dozen or several hundred," while describing the EPR as a
"severe worry" for the Mexican government because of the effects
of the attacks.

He said the EPR was historically based in Oaxaca - the southern
state plagued by months of political unrest last year - and said
some rebels may have had links to last year's protests in which
leftists seized the Oaxaca City center for five months.

The recent step-up in rebel violence, starting with pipeline blasts
in June, may have been related to an October police raid that quashed
the Oaxaca protest movement, but he said the links "don't mean that
the EPR actually led the Oaxaca movement, at least not in a visible
manner."

He also said that the rebels' justification for their acts - the
purported kidnapping and disappearance of two of their members -
could "hypothetically" have been carried out by other rebels as
part of sectarian conflicts.

The group has demanded the release of two of its members they claim
were arrested by security forces in Oaxaca, but Medina Mora denied
the government detained the men.

Medina Mora said the rebels would be tried under terrorism laws if
caught, but pledged there would be no abuses like those committed
during the government counterinsurgency campaign against rebels in
the 1970s.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/09/18/america/LA-GEN-Mexico-Rebel-Attack
s.php

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