Kidnappers in Mexico Seize Son of a Former Governor

Kidnappers in Mexico Seize Son of a Former Governor
By JULIA PRESTON
Published: Saturday, July 5, 1997 /NYTimes

The son of a controversial Mexican politician has been kidnapped, according to Mexican press reports, in the latest in a series of unresolved abductions of public figures in the weeks before national elections on Sunday.

Ruben Figueroa Smutny, 26, was seized in Mexico City on Wednesday morning by a group of armed kidnappers reportedly wearing ski masks, relatives told Mexican journalists.

Mr. Figueroa Smutny is the son of Ruben Figueroa Alcocer, the former Governor of the violence-ridden southern state of Guerrero, where 17 peasants were gunned down by local police officers on a rural road on June 28, 1995. Mr. Figueroa Alcocer, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has long governed Mexico, was forced to step down as Governor last year after the Supreme Court ordered an investigation to determine if he helped cover up the killings.

Relatives who asked not be to identified by name told Mexican reporters on Thursday that Mr. Figueroa Alcocer had received at least one phone call from his son's captors and was negotiating with them. The Mexico City police said the family had not made any formal report to the authorities.

On Thursday morning, Mr. Figueroa Smutny's mother, Silvia Smutny de Figueroa, confirmed that her son had been abducted a day earlier. The Guerrero State Attorney General also confirmed the kidnapping.

But in a brief public appearance late Thursday, Mr. Figueroa Alcocer said his son was traveling outside of Mexico.

''I want to ask for your help,'' Mr. Figueroa Alcocer said to reporters, his voice breaking with emotion. ''Report that my son is on a trip, please. He is not kidnapped. I beg you with all my heart.''

No one has taken responsibility for the kidnapping, but some Mexican newspapers quoted relatives as saying that a clandestine left-wing guerrilla group from Guerrero, called the Popular Revolutionary Army, had abducted Mr. Figueroa Smutny in order to obtain the release of several imprisoned rebels.

On Thursday, the rebels released a communique from a hideout somewhere in Guerrero reporting that two of their members had been arrested recently by the military police.

Although Mr. Figueroa Alcocer was ultimately cleared in the killings of the peasants, who were en route to a protest against his policies as Governor, many in the state considered the decision by justice officials to be tainted and popular anger over the killings fueled the formation of the rebel army.

The rebels said in a press conference last Monday at a campsite hidden in the mountains of central Mexico that they would observe a cease-fire until July 15 because of national elections scheduled for Sunday.

Outside the Figueroa residence in a walled compound of sprawling mansions in southern Mexico City today, four Guerrero state police cars were parked and a dozen plainclothes police officers stood watch. Relatives and friends came and went, but most refused to speak with reporters. ''This is a lamentable situation for the family,'' said one visitor, a federal Congressman from the governing party, Jesus Rodriguez y Rodriguez.

The reported kidnapping is part of a surge of abductions in the Mexican capital in recent weeks. Some of the crimes appear to be motivated purely by profit while others seem tied to the elections, in which Mexicans will choose representatives to the federal Congress and six state governors, and will vote for the first time to elect the Mayor of Mexico City.

A 74-year-old Jesuit priest, the Rev. Wifredo Guinea, was kidnapped on June 17. The Jesuit order paid an undisclosed amount of ransom, but Father Guinea has not reappeared, church officials said. Father Guinea is the head of the Jesuit publishing house here.

On June 19, an opposition Congressman, Victor Quintana, was abducted for 10 hours in the capital by a group of armed men. Mr. Quintana was beaten and robbed. But he said his captors repeatedly told him that they knew he was a member of the leftist opposition party and threatened to attack his family home in the northern state of Chihuahua.

The grandfather of Mr. Figueroa Smutny, Ruben Figueroa Figueroa, who was also a Governor of Guerrero, was the victim of one of the best-known political kidnappings in modern Mexico. In 1974, he was held for more than 100 days by a band of rural rebels, and $24 million was paid for his release.

Photo: Ruben Figueroa Alcocer, father of Mexican kidnapping victim. (Associated Press)
A version of this article appeared in print on Saturday, July 5, 1997, on section 1 page 4 of the New York edition.
______________________________________________________________________

*4. NEW REBEL ARMY REPORTED IN SOUTHERN MEXICO

As of June 29 hundreds of Mexican Army soldiers and agents of the
federal attorney general's office (PGR) were combing the
mountains of the Coyuca de Benitez Sierra near Acapulco in the
southwestern state of Guerrero for members of the Revolutionary
Popular Army (EPR), a self-proclaimed guerrilla organization that
had made its first appearance the day before. Heavy rains from
Hurricane Boris hampered the military operation, which the
government said was aimed at arresting the rebels for violating
federal gun control laws. Some local elections, scheduled for
June 30, were cancelled.

The EPR is reported to have 500 armed combatants. On June 28 the
group issued a statement demanding "revolutionary justice" and
calling for the overthrow of the government of Mexican president
Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon. The statement was entitled the
"Manifesto of Aguas Blancas," in reference to the Guerrero state
judicial police's massacre of 17 campesinos from the leftist
Southern Sierra Campesino Organization (OCSS) at Aguas Blancas
ford in Coyuca de Benitez municipality exactly one year earlier.
[La Jornada (Mexico) 6/30/96, electronic edition; El Diario-La
Prensa 6/30/96 from AP; Washington Post 6/30/96]

The EPR made its existence public at the massacre site on the
afternoon of June 28, during a rally organized by the Broad Front
for the Constitution of a National Liberation Movement (FAC-MLN)
to mark the anniversary. About 5,000 protesters, mostly local
campesinos, marched 12 kilometers from the town of Coyuca de
Benitez to Aguas Blancas, where the rally was addressed by two of
the widows of the victims and by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano,
the 1994 presidential candidate of the center-left opposition
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Soon after Cardenas
finished speaking, a group of masked men and women wearing olive-
green uniforms and carrying AK-47 rifles appeared unexpectedly.
EPR members--exactly 38, according to the PGR and the federal
Governance Secretariat, and about 100 according to the Mexico
City daily La Jornada--approached the podium; one read the
group's manifesto.

Local police reported that the EPR had a shootout with the
Guerrero judicial police later that evening near the town of
Zumpango del Rio, about 10 kilometers north of Chilpancingo, the
state capital, and 80 kilometers northeast of Coyuca de Benitez.
Some 20 masked and heavily armed EPR members reportedly set up a
roadblock on the Mexico City-Acapulco highway, where they passed
out their manifesto to motorists and asked them to work together
"for the cause." Judicial police say they were attacked when they
arrived on the scene; three agents were wounded in the ensuing
shootout, along with a cab driver who had been talking to the
rebels, who then fled into the mountains. [LJ 6/29/96] The next
day the Guerrero attorney general's office announced that the
incident had simply been a fight between police and common
criminals the police had caught robbing two tractor trailers. [LJ
6/30/96]

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and other PRD leaders issued a communique
denouncing the EPR's presence at the Aguas Blancas rally as "a
grotesque pantomime which would have had no importance except for
the heavy weapons [the group] carried." The communique implied
that the EPR members might be agents provocateurs. [LJ 6/29/96]
Lucas de la Garza, PRD leader in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, noted
that the EPR had better uniforms and weapons than the Zapatista
National Liberation Army (EZLN), Mexico's best-known rebel group,
and suggested that the disruption of the rally was meant to
distract attention from the Guerrero government's responsibility
for the Aguas Blancas massacre. [LJ 6/30/96] [President Zedillo
forced Gov. Ruben Figueroa Alcocer to take a permanent leave of
absence on Mar. 12 over the case, but the state attorney general
and the state legislature formally cleared him of all
responsibility on June 14. [ED-LP 6/15/96 from wire services; New
York Times 6/17/96 from Reuter]]

In contrast to the PRD, the FAC-MLN, which organized the rally,
simply stated that participants "received an unexpected visit
from a group...which brought us a beautiful, fraternal and
combative salute...in homage to the 17 massacred campesinos." [LJ
6/30/96]

*5. MORE MEXICAN REBELS: CHIAPAS FORUM, TABASCO BARRICADES

The FAC-MLN was formed at a Jan. 27-28 meeting of 268 grassroots
and leftist groups from around the country in Acapulco; this was
one of the EZLN's many efforts to unite groups into a broad
civilian opposition movement [see Update #314]. The EZLN, which
carefully calls for a "transitional government" rather than an
overthrow of the government, is continuing the effort with a
"Special Forum for the Reform of the State," to be held from June
30 to July 6 in San Cristobal de las Casas in the southeastern
state of Chiapas, where the Zapatista movement emerged in 1994.
EZLN military leader "Sub-Commander Marcos" and 20 other
Zapatista leaders will attend, along with a large number of
opposition groups and leaders: Cardenas, former Mexico City mayor
Manuel Camacho Solis [who recently deserted the ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)], the El Barzon debtors'
movement, some business people and 335 other groups. [LJ 6/28/96]

Meanwhile, the southeastern state of Tabasco, which borders
Chiapas, was shaken by protests on June 25 when President Zedillo
paid an official visit to the state. The PGR formally charged on
June 7 that Tabasco governor Roberto Madrazo Pintado spent at
least $38 million over the legal limit in his 1994 election
campaign [see Update #332], but left actual prosecution up to
Tabasco state authorities, who are expected to do nothing in the
case. Madrazo and Zedillo are both members of the PRI, which has
ruled most of Mexico for 67 years. The state PRD holds that its
candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (likely winner of the
party's national presidency in party elections on July 14), was
defrauded of the governorship in the 1994 race.

At 8:00 in the morning on June 25, PRD leaders announced over the
XEVA radio station, which has the strongest signal in the state,
that their followers would blockade the three main highways into
the state capital, Villahermosa, letting traffic through for just
20 minutes out of each hour. Thousands of campesinos were waiting
for the signal, and immediately cut off traffic at six points in
the Cardenas-Villahermosa, Centla-Villahermosa and Macuspana-
Villahermosa highways. Campesinos also blocked access to some oil
fields, including the CEN field in Nacajuca municipality; Tabasco
protesters had blockaded some 70 oil wells in February and March
to demand compensation for environmental damage [see Update
#321].

The president flew into Villahermosa, but local PRI politicians
were unable to drive to the ceremonies. Accompanied by state
police and party goons, the politicians tried to break through
the barricades. Police agents used tear gas and fired into the
air, but the more numerous PRD supporters, armed with clubs,
stones and, some cases, machetes, routed the attackers and burned
vans belonging to the goons. By the time Zedillo flew out of
Tabasco in the afternoon, at least 30 people had been injured
(four seriously) and 29 arrested; five vehicles were burned
completely and 15 more were damaged. At one barricade near the
village of Vicente Guerrero, former governor Mario Trujillo
Garcia was injured when campesinos--who say he was firing a
revolver from his van as they were burning another van--threw a
hail of rocks at him. The campesinos pulled his companion, a
local business leader, from the van and deposited him in the town
jail. La Jornada reporter Jaime Aviles wrote that the scenes of
barricades and burning vehicles made him think of Nicaragua 17
years ago, during the Sandinista Revolution. [LJ 6/26/96]

Some 50 PRI members counterattacked the next day, taking over
XEVA for almost three hours to denounce the PRD and Lopez
Obrador. A state legislator announced at a committee meeting that
PRI members were ready to confront PRD members "on whatever
terrain they choose; we're going to win." [LJ 6/27/96] On June 27
a group of PRI state legislators and goons seized a colleague
from the PRD, state deputy Julio Alvarez Santos, in his office at
the state congress building, held him for an hour and beat him
repeatedly. That evening the PRI-dominated Business Coordinating
Committee filed a complaint with the federal PGR that "the Party
of the Democratic Revolution incites to violence." [LJ 6/28/96]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------