Date: Sun, 18 May 1997 13:28:21 -0600 (CST)
From: Sendic Estrada Jimenez <sestrada-AT-fcfm.buap.mx>
Subject: M-I: E;AP,Reut:PRD leads in Mexico City race - poll; Human rights , observers win, reprieve in Mexico, May 11 (fwd)


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Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 21:55:39 -0500 (CDT)
From: Chiapas95 <owner-chiapas95-AT-mundo.eco.utexas.edu>
To: chiapas95-AT-mundo.eco.utexas.edu
Subject: E;AP,Reut:PRD leads in Mexico City race - poll; Human rights , observers win, reprieve in Mexico, May 11


This posting has been forwarded to you as a service of 
Accion Zapatista de Austin.


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Date: Sun, 11 May 1997 16:18:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mauricio Banda <mbanda-AT-dch.mty.itesm.mx>
Reply-To: mexico2000-AT-mep-d.org
To: Multiple Recipients of List Mexico2000 <mexico2000-AT-mep-d.org>
Subject: [AP,Reut] PRD leads in Mexico City race - poll; Human rights observers win, reprieve in Mexico

Index:

   * Leftist PRD party leads in Mexico City race - poll
   * Eds: Contains items from Mexico and Peru
   * Japanese celebrate 100 chequered years in Latam
   * Police tensions rise in Mexico City
   * Mexico City mayor: Rebellious police should leave force
   * Human rights observers win reprieve in Mexico
   * Mexico says has acted against torture


* Leftist PRD party leads in Mexico City race - poll

   Reuters News Service 
   12:48 p.m. May 10, 1997 Eastern
   
   MEXICO CITY, April 10 (Reuter) - The leftist Party of the Democratic
   Revolution (PRD) has extended its lead among voters prior to a Mexico
   City government election on July 6, an opinion poll published on
   Saturday said.
   
   The poll, carried out by Guadalajara University's Centre of Opinion
   Studies on April 28 in Mexico City, said the PRD would win the support
   of 37.6 percent of voters questioned, compared with 34.8 percent on
   March 16, if the vote were held now.
   
   In second place was the conservative National Action Party (PAN), with
   26 percent support, down from 27.5 percent in March. Lagging was the
   ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), with 18.6 percent,
   down from 20.5 percent in March.
   
   The PRI has ruled Mexico for 68 years, and a defeat in the Mexico City
   race would be a major setback.
   
   The PRD's candidate for mayor, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, is a twice-failed
   presidential candidate who has traditionally enjoyed strong support in
   the capital.
   
   The poll, a sample of 1,200 voters with a margin of error of 2.83
   percent, showed Cardenas personally preferred by 36.6 percent of those
   surveyed. Behind him came the PRI's Alfredo Del Mazo, with 17.5
   percent, and Carlos Castillo Perazo of the PAN, with 12.5 percent.
   
   More than half of those polled said they believed the elections would
   be neither free nor fair, reflecting a deep-rooted scepticism about
   elections in Mexico because of the PRI's decades-long string of
   victories. 
   
   
   Copyright 1997 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.


* Eds: Contains items from Mexico and Peru
  
   By The Associated Press
   May 09, 1997  20:51 EDT
   
   MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexico's ruling party is distancing itself from
   disgraced former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari because his
   decisions in office benefited a rightist rival party more than his
   own.
   
   ``I have emphatically stated it and I reiterate: The vision of state
   of Carlos Salinas de Gortari had more in common with the National
   Action Party than with our own party,'' said Humberto Roque
   Villanueva, head of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or
   PRI.
   
   In comments to the Reforma daily newspaper published Friday, the PRI
   leader denied that his party had erred by supporting Salinas during
   his six years in office.
   
   Center-right Nation Action is Mexico's oldest and strongest
   opposition party and generally backed Salinas' free trade,
   pro-business policies.
   
   Salinas left office in December 1994, several weeks before the
   Mexican peso lost nearly 50 percent of its value overnight. Mexicans
   blame Salinas for the peso devaluation and subsequent recession,
   which threw millions of people out of work.
   
   The ex-president left Mexico and went into self-imposed exile in
   early 1995. He now lives in Ireland.
     

   (c) 1997, Associated Press

   

   

* Japanese celebrate 100 chequered years in Latam

   Reuters News Service 
   12:19 a.m. May 11, 1997 Eastern
   
   By Henry Tricks
   
   MEXICO CITY, May 11 (Reuter) - The beginning was inauspicious -- a
   bungled attempt by Japanese trail-blazers in 1897 to grow coffee in
   southern Mexico at sea level, rather than in the cool highlands of the
   Sierra Madre.
   
   Exactly 100 years later, overcoming bouts of culture shock,
   segregation, and hit-and-miss prosperity, the roots have taken hold.
   
   This weekend, celebrations started in Mexico marking the 100th
   anniversary of Japanese immigration to Latin America, a sumptuous
   affair slightly out of character for the discreet 10,000-strong
   Japanese-Mexican community here.
   
   The community of quietly prosperous dentists, doctors and other ``good
   citizens,'' was to be honoured by the visit of Japan's Prince Akishino
   and his wife Kiko, who flew to Mexico on Saturday to celebrate the
   centenary.
   
   Banquets were planned in the ritzy Nikko hotel and the city of
   Tapachula in Chiapas state, near where the settlers first arrived,
   planned to name a street after Akishino.
   
   The celebrations would have seemed ironic to those 35 settlers who
   sought to escape poverty, landlessness and overpopulation in Japan a
   century ago, only to find utter misery in Mexico.
   
   ``They bought a huge swathe of land because the government of Japan
   gave them funds. They settled, but they didn't know about the coffee
   plant,'' Manuel Murakami, head of the centenary committee, told the
   government's El Nacional daily.
   
   ``Technically, they knew about it, but they'd never seen it. They
   planted it at sea level when it needed height. Then they were
   decimated by tropical diseases. Many died and it was an absolute
   failure from an economic point of view.''
   
   Japanese officials in Mexico told Reuters the ensuing history in
   Mexico was one of slow integration, marred chiefly by Japan's blitz
   of Pearl Harbour in December 1941 after which the United States sought
   to persuade Mexico to send Japanese descendents to ``internment
   camps'' north of the border.
   
   Defensive of its sovereignty, the Mexican government refused, but it
   seized the land and property of Mexicans of Japanese descent living in
   the north of the country and forced them to move to Mexico City.
   
   Since then, taking a low profile in public life, Mexico's Japanese
   descendents have quietly adapted, speaking Spanish as a first
   language, adopting Catholicism and growing darker-skinned as a result
   of marriage with Mexicans.
   
   They have mostly withstood Mexico's economic woes, avoiding the
   temptation to migrate back across the Pacific during Japan's boom
   years of the 1980s with a typical Mexican antipathy to the rat race.
   
   ``In general, Japanese descendents live well in Mexico City. They have
   bigger houses and a more relaxed way of life,'' Yasuhisa Sazuki,
   cultural attache at the Japanese Embassy in Mexico City, told Reuters.
   
   
   ``Some of them send their children to study in Japanese universities,
   but they come back -- often because they want to find a Mexican
   girlfriend or boyfriend.''
   
   Their numbers remain small. Partly because of Mexican revolutionary
   turmoil during the height of the exodus from Japan in the early 20th
   century, the migrants found better luck further south.
   
   Some 790 Japanese immigrants who arrived in Peru in 1899 sowed the
   seeds of a community that now reaches 80,000 -- including President
   Alberto Fujimori, son of a Japanese tailor.
   
   Neighbouring Brazil is home to 1.3 million ``Nikkei,'' or Brazilians
   of Japanese descent. Its financial centre Sao Paolo has the largest
   Japanese community outside Japan.
   
   ``In Mexico, if a Japanese goes to a town, they look at him like a
   strange beast,'' Murakami, the centenary's organiser and a respected
   dentist, said. ``It is not widely known who the Japanese are in
   Mexico, except in the biggest cities. It's not that we are
   discriminated against, it's that the Japanese are withdrawn, they
   don't go to many places.''
   
   Professionally, however, they are doing fine.
   
   ``Go anywhere in the city and there's a Japanese dental clinic,'' he
   added proudly. 
   
   
   Copyright 1997 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.



* Police tensions rise in Mexico City

   Reuters News Service 
   06:33 p.m May 09, 1997 Eastern
   
   By Henry Tricks
   
   MEXICO CITY, May 9 (Reuter) - Mexican authorities on Friday pledged to
   forge ahead with controversial plans to give military training to
   police, despite protests that boiled over into pitched ``police versus
   police'' battles this week.
   
   With the army taking a growing role in law enforcement in Mexico,
   civilian police on Thursday clashed with colleagues in riot gear
   during a brutal protest over a programme to force them into military
   training.
   
   The graphic images showed bloodied heads, volleys of rocks and clouds
   of tear gas. More than a dozen police were injured in the clash, but
   there was little sympathy from the public, because of the notorious
   corruption among Mexican police.
   
   ``Those who don't want (the military training) know that they can
   leave the police force whenever they want,'' Mexico City Mayor Oscar
   Espinosa Villareal said on Friday, reflecting the hard line with which
   authorities have dealt with the crisis.
   
   Mexico City Police Chief Gen. Enrique Salgado, himself a military man
   drafted to reshape the police force, promised to continue sending
   civilian cops to military boot camp ``whatever it costs.''
   
   Since he took office last year to stamp military discipline on the
   slipshod police force, Salgado has faced rebellions from his men for
   instituting various crackdowns -- such as barring eating on duty --
   and forcing relocations of officers to different police districts.
   
   In one notorious incident, one of his officials reportedly punched a
   policeman who asked for a pay rise during a ceremony in which Salgado
   was present. Though reporters said they watched the incident, Salgado
   firmly denied it had occured.
   
   His tough tactics came into the spotlight again during U.S. President
   Bill Clinton's visit to Mexico City this week, when riot police and
   soldiers kept protesters far from Clinton.
   
   ``The sum of these incidents shows a perceptible repressive tendency
   by the institutions in charge of public order, a phenomenon that
   cannot be separated from the arrival of military officials in
   positions of command,'' La Jornada newspaper, a leftist daily, said in
   an editorial on Friday.
   
   It urged authorities to negotiate with the so-called ``dissident
   police,'' whose protests were sparked by the removal of policemen with
   low grades in the military training course to police districts far
   from their homes.
   
   In a separate incident, some 200 federal anti-drug police this week
   protested at the Attorney General's Office over efforts to replace
   them with army personnel. 

   
   Copyright 1997 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.


* Mexico City mayor: Rebellious police should leave force
   
   By BILL CORMIER
   Associated Press Writer
   05/09/97 09:25:01 PM
   
   MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexico City's mayor warned Friday that any
   officers resisting a major overhaul of the capital police should leave
   the force.
   
   In comments made a day after rebellious police officers clashed with
   riot squads, Mayor Oscar Espinosa told the government news agency
   Notimex that officers who refuse the retraining at a local military
   camp are not wanted by capital security forces.
   
   Hundreds of rebellious officers clashed with shield- and
   baton-wielding riot squads in the northern capital district of Gustavo
   Madero on Thursday, leaving 17 people injured.
   
   The officers had erected roadblocks on key highways, saying they
   feared they would lose their jobs following obligatory monthlong
   military training in firearms use, ethics and other police work.
   
   Key military officers who took control of Mexico City's police
   department last year amid an alarming rise in crime are trying to
   reduce corruption on the force. Police are notorious for taking
   motorists' bribes and committing other offenses.
   
   Espinosa told Notimex it was not unexpected that some police would
   resist the retraining plan.
   
   Recently, 300 public security officers in the southern district of
   Iztapalapa who completed the course learned to their dismay that they
   were being transferred to another district.
   
   But Espinosa said he was determined to continue the 31-month-long
   program he launched this year, and pledged to convert Mexico City's
   police into a ``disciplined and orderly force.''
   
   Thursday's violence generated front-page headlines in Mexico City
   newspapers and extensive television coverage.
   
   After running battles with tear gas and flying rocks, the riot police
   ultimately quashed the rebellion.
   


* Human rights observers win reprieve in Mexico
  
   Reuters News Service 
   10:22 p.m. May 09, 1997 Eastern
   
   SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico, May 9 (Reuter) - A group of
   European human rights observers said on Friday they had won a
   temporary reprieve from being kicked out of Mexico for their work in
   the strife-torn southern state of Chiapas.
   
   A little more than a week after the government said they should leave
   since they were involved in activities not allowed under tourist
   visas, a legal challenge will allow the 12 observers to stay for the
   time being, a lawyer for the activists said.
   
   The group took part in a demonstration on May 1 by local native
   Indians who back the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN).
   The demonstration was on a highway near the capital of Chiapas, Tuxtla
   Gutierrez.
   
   The National Migration Institute (INM) gave the human rights observers
   48 hours to leave the country, citing their tourist visas. The
   deportation was suspended temporarily due to the observers' legal
   appeal, Miguel Angel de los Santos, a lawyer representing the group
   said.
   
   Some of the observers have vowewd to stay in Mexico.
   
   ``We are not going to abandon the country because we have not
   committed any wrongs and have not taken part in any political
   activities,'' Spaniard Pere Gargallo Bozzo told Reuters.
   
   ``Our only wrong is that we are witnesses to what is happening in
   Chiapas because the government wants to hide the state of war that the
   native communities are living in,'' he said.
   
   Eight of the observers, from France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain,
   have since travelled to Mexico City.
   
   On Jan. 1, 1994, the Zapatista rebels rose up in arms in a brief but
   bloody protest agsinst the government. Peace talks have since stalled,
   and the rebels and the government have settled into an unofficial and
   uneasy truce. 
   
   
   Copyright 1997 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

   

* Mexico says has acted against torture

   Reuters News Service 
   12:11 a.m. May 10, 1997 Eastern
   
   MEXICO CITY, May 9 (Reuter) - Mexico's Foreign Affairs Ministry said
   on Friday it had acted against cases of torture, rejecting reports
   that torturers were going unpunished in Mexico.
   
   It said that cases of torture had been reduced in the last few years,
   and noted that 53 public servants had been punished for acts of
   torture, including 14 cases of homicide tied to torture.
   
   Human rights groups have long complained of acts of torture in Mexico.
   
   
   On Wednesday, in a private meeting with U.S. Secretary of State
   Madeleine Albright, Mexican human rights groups told her of what they
   said was an ``alarming'' rise in cases of torture, arbitrary arrest
   and disappearances in Mexico in the past few years.
   
   ``We must say Mexico has advanced in its fight against torture, has
   corrected the errors of the past, and has corrected the road when it
   was evident that the strategies that were followed did not lead to our
   goals,'' the government said in a statement released late on Friday.
   
   ``The positive results have been evident: acts of torture have been
   reduced in the last few years...,'' the ministry said. REUTER
   
   
   Copyright 1997 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.


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