Posted on 03/16/2002 3:02:38 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
WASHINGTON, Mar 14 (IPS) - Rodolfo Montiel, the Mexican bean farmer-turned-environmentalist released from jail in his country, told U.S. lawmakers and state department officials this week that repression of activists there remains a major impediment to protecting natural resources.
Mexican President Vicente Fox released Montiel and fellow-farmer Teodoro Cabrera last November under mounting pressure from international human rights and environmental groups. Both men had been sentenced to prison in May 1999 on charges of planting marijuana and illegal weapons possession.
Their defenders, including Amnesty International and the Sierra Club, said the evidence against Montiel and Cabrera was fabricated and the farmers had been tortured and forced to confess as part of a plan concocted by logging entrepreneurs who wanted to rid themselves of protesters.
Fox said he decided to release Montiel and Cabrera not because they were innocent but because they were in poor health. The presidential decree, said Fox, was based on his pledge to improve human rights and justice.
Montiel, however, said there has been little improvement in human rights since Fox took office in December 2000. He told reporters and lawmakers here he was afraid to return to his home in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, where he sought to halt illegal logging and founded the Organisation of Peasant Ecologists in 1998.
''In the countryside, they still persecute people, and we see human rights violations wherever we go,'' he said, adding that neither the police officers who tortured him nor those who killed Digna Ochoa, the prominent human rights lawyer who was defending him, have been brought to justice.
Ochoa and other attorneys with the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez human rights center, who have been defending Montiel and Cabrera, had been subject to numerous death threats, harassment, and interrogation, according to rights organizations.
Representative Hilda Solis, a Democrat from the U.S. state of California, told reporters Thursday that she would publicize Montiel's concerns to fellow lawmakers in the run-up to President George W. Bush 's visit next week to Mexico, where the two governments are scheduled to discuss trade liberalization.
''Since the death of Digna Ochoa, environmentalists and human rights activists in Mexico feel threatened and must take more precautions,'' said Solis, who had asked Fox to release the two farmers during a congressional delegation visit to Mexico last year.
Free trade must come with protections for human rights and environmental protection, added Solis. Her congressional district encompasses East Los Angeles, home to many Mexican immigrants.
Montiel said he started organizing other poor farmers in Guerrero in 1998, when he noticed that commercial logging was causing erosion, drastically decreasing the region's water supply and leading to crop losses. With only a first grade education, he wrote letters to federal officials, telling them that laws were being violated.
When the letters went unanswered, Montiel formed an environmental organization. The group's activities eventually led U.S.-based Boise Cascade to abandon the logging it began in 1995.
But his group - labeled an 'eco-guerrilla' organization by the State Attorney General's Office - was said to infuriate wealthy landowners and senior officers at the local military garrison. In May 1999, the two farmers were arrested and reportedly beaten and tortured by members of the 40th Infantry Battalion of the Mexican Army. During the raid, the soldiers shot and killed another local farmer.
According to Montiel and Cabrera, they were threatened at gunpoint and forced into confessing involvement with an armed opposition group and illegal possession of weapons. Forensic doctors working for the Danish chapter of Physicians for Human Rights confirmed the torture after examining Montiel and Cabrera.
In July 2000, Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights, a government body, acknowledged that the two farmers had been illegally detained and tortured by members of the Mexican Army. The report also rejected the allegation that the two men were carrying weapons at the time of their arrest. Despite these findings, a federal appeals court in Mexico confirmed the convictions in July 2001.
Attorneys with the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez human rights center have tried repeatedly to seek justice in Mexican courts for Montiel and Cabrera, to no avail. In October last year, before the two farmers were released, their lawyers submitted a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that argued the Mexican government violated various provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights. The Commission has yet to rule on the petition.
In an attempt to highlight the plight of the two farmers in the United States, they have been awarded several U.S. prizes for their efforts.
In April 2000, they were given - while in prison - the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize by the California-based Goldman Foundation. The prize consists of 125,000 dollars with no strings attached. In February last year, they received the Chico Mendes award, given by the Sierra Club, a national environmental group.
''The U.S. can and must play a major role in pressuring the Mexican government to clean up its act on human rights and the environment,'' said Diego Zavala, a specialist on Mexico with Amnesty International-USA.
MEXICO CITY -- The party that ruled Mexico for 71 years holds internal elections Sunday to choose the leader many members hope will bring it out of the depression that began with its loss of the presidency 19 months ago.
The duel for the top spot in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, pits Roberto Madrazo, the relentlessly ambitious former governor of southern Tabasco state, against Beatriz Paredes, the moderate former head of the party's congressional delegation.
Madrazo's huge advantage has dwindled under the challenge of Paredes, who heads an amalgam of factions that share a dislike of the tough and controversial southerner.
Most analysts have been unwilling to predict the result of the contest, in which registered voters regardless of party affiliation can vote nationwide.
"It is all up in the air," political analyst Alfonso Zarate says. "Paredes is way more popular in the opinion polls among the general public who see Madrazo as a traditional political baron. But he has an edge among the PRI activists who want a strong leader."
A diminutive, mustached man with a high-pitched voice, Madrazo has long cast himself as a rebel against the PRI establishment, which he and many other party members blame for leading them to defeat against President Vicente Fox in the July 2000 presidential elections.
"He will recuperate the PRI for the rank and file from the small group that hijacked it," says Samuel Aguilar, a member of Congress who supports Madrazo. [End Excerpt]
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Madrazo Declared Winner in Mexico - Mon Mar 4, 2002 12:56 AM ET
[Full Text] MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexico's former ruling party officially declared Roberto Madrazo the winner of disputed internal elections, saying he had won the race for the party's presidency.
Madrazo won with 1.52 million votes compared with 1.47 million votes for congresswoman Beatrice Paredes, Sen. Humberto Roque, who supervised the Feb. 24 elections, said Sunday.
Paredes had disputed the results, charging Madrazo's supporters with widespread fraud.
Madrazo, the former governor of oil-rich Tabasco state, was scheduled to be sworn in Monday as the leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Considered a possible presidential contender in 2006, he has cast himself as a successor to his father, a former PRI leader who tried to open up a party dominated by the nation's president.
Still, the younger Madrazo has been plagued by accusations of fraud. During his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, he was accused of spending $72 million, which he denied.
He was also accused of encouraging fraud and misconduct during elections for his replacement in Tabasco state. PRI candidate Manuel Andrade was declared the winner of elections in 2000, but the federal Supreme Electoral Tribunal later annulled the disputed victory. Madrazo had hoped a win would help him in his then unofficial campaign to lead the PRI.
Madrazo has promised to "recover the party" and make it more democratic after it lost its first presidential election ever to Vicente Fox of the National Action Party in July 2000.
He claims the PRI needs to restore the "social commitment" it abandoned in 1982 with a series of presidents who supported free-market reforms. But he has given no clear vision of how he would pay for new social programs, or in what way they would differ from those of Fox.
The PRI has struggled to find a new direction and keep supporters since losing the presidency to Fox, but it still has more state, local and federal posts than any other party in Mexico. [End]
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Monterrey, Mexico, Touted As Model--[Excerpt] When world leaders converge on Monterrey next week, Mexico will be presenting this industrial metropolis as the poster child for how to develop the third world.
Monterrey is playing host to the U.N. International Conference on Financing for Development, an unprecedented world summit on how to combat poverty and redistribute wealth around the globe. Fifty-two heads of state are expected to attend, including President Bush and Cuban President Fidel Castro.
U.N. spokesman Tim Wall said Mexican President Vicente Fox chose Monterrey to show world leaders its economic success "rather than a scenic place with great cocktails."
"Monterrey is not what you would call a great town for tourism, it's not a center of colonial architecture, it doesn't have a beachfront, but it's an economic powerhouse," Wall said. "It's the home of Latin America's first steel mill, it has manufacturing, trade, commerce, high-tech industries."[End Excerpt]
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