RIGHTS-MEXICO: From Safe Haven to Battleground

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, May 8 1998 (IPS) - Ten years ago, Mexico was a safe haven for foreign observers wishing to visit Central America, the scenario of civil wars and human rights violations at that time. But the roles seemed to have been inverted today.

Deportations, official warnings and nationalist and xenophobic declarations are part of the climate observers visiting the southern state of Chiapas find today, similar to what they ran into years ago in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

In the 1980s, Mexico allowed observation tours to Central America to be organised here, and it even urged neighbouring governments to authorise such trips, arguing that “human rights have no borders.”

Today, that past seems to be charging its price. Submitted to close international scrutiny due to the conflict with the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, Mexico authorises visits by observers, but the government limits the movements of those it describes as “revolutionary tourists.”

It has also warned that “foreigners must not meddle in national affairs,” and says it will never allow international mediation in its conflict with the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), a group that has won sympathy in a number of countries since its appearance in January 1994.

This week a group of around 100 observers from Italy, including several legislators, visited the poverty-stricken state of Chiapas. Canadian lawmakers are also planning a visit.

The Italians, who defied government orders to only visit certain places and openly expressed their identification with the rebels, were harassed by indigenous groups with ties to the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has been in power for nearly 70 years.

Since January, immigration authorities have expelled around 20 foreign nationals from Chiapas.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say the military and police regularly violate human rights in the counterinsurgent fight, and that impunity reigns.

Since President Ernesto Zedillo took office in December 1994, the army’s presence in Chiapas and the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca, where the People’s Revolutionary Army (EPR) operates, has soared.

Opposition parties call the government’s resistance to visits by foreign observers and people it labels “leftists” a sort of “boorish flag-waving,” which seeks to conceal human rights violations.

“He who owes nothing has nothing to fear,” said the president of the centre-left opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution, Manuel Lopez, after urging the government not to set limits on observers.

From the 1920s to the 1980s, Mexican governments gave refuge to revolutionaries like Fidel Castro’s Cuban rebels, and tolerated their political activities. A discourse of tolerance and pacification became part of a diplomatic tradition, and Mexico became a safe haven for peace talks, such as in the case of El Salvador and Guatemala.

The government says that tradition has not changed, but adds that it will not allow foreign nationals “to defy law and order” or groups like the EPR to act with impunity.