Date: Sat, 30 Nov 1996 02:09:26 -0800
Subject: M-G: Report links Mexican rebels to Peru 




Friday, 29 Nov 1996
HEADLINE: Report links Mexican rebels to Peru
  	  				 
	LIMA, Nov. 29 (UPI) -- A newly formed Mexican guerrilla group may
be linked to Peru's Shining Path rebels, according to a report published
Friday by a Lima daily newspaper citing Peruvian intelligence sources. 

	Mexico's Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, reportedly received
advice and support from the Shining Path, the Peruvian guerrilla
organization that nearly overran Peru in the 1980s. 

	The Lima newspaper El Comercio said members of Peru's
anti-terrorist police -- known as Dinacote -- handed the report to Mexican
officials at a recent international conference on terrorism held in Lima.
It said the link between the two groups dated back to 1991. 

	El Comercio said the EPR, which first appeared in southern Mexico
in June, received advice from Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman, who was
arrested in September, 1992 and is currently serving a life sentence in
Peru. 

	Officials at the Mexican Embassy in Lima and Dinacote offices
would neither deny nor confirm the existence of the report. 

	The report was said to be based on Shining Path documents seized
by Peruvian police during raids in the early 1990s that dismantled the
guerrilla group's top leadership. 

	According to El Comercio, a document seized in a March, 1991 raid
described contacts between the Shining Path's Political Bureau and a group
identified as the Communist Union of Mexico, a possible precursor of the
EPR. 

	The document says the Mexican group agreed to establish a
``Mexican Support Committee for the Popular War in Peru.''

	The Mexican government has said in recent months that the EPR is
not a new guerrilla organization, but rather a merging of various leftist
groups, some of which have existed since the 1970s. 

	The EPR first appeared in the southern state of Guerrero on June
28, 1996. Between June and September, the group staged nearly two dozen
attacks on Mexican police and military targets in which more than 20
people were killed. 
  	   	
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