Rebels May Have More Support Than Believed Residents Of Town Attacked By Leftist Guerrillas Blame Mexican Government For Unrest

Down the winding road from the opulent hotels that dot this Pacific resort town, a taco vendor’s widow Friday mourned his death at the hands of rebels, but the mother of five blamed the federal government for her family’s loss.

“It’s terrible my husband had to die like this, but those rebels are poor and desperate like us,” said Carmela Vasquez, 38, inside her closet-size apartment occupied by her husband’s casket and the stench of formaldehyde.

“The government should give them what they want because it is the just thing to do. They should return Mexico to the people,” Vasquez said.

Unable to afford a funeral home and frightened by the loss of the family’s main breadwinner, this illiterate Oaxacan woman still supported the leftist guerrillas who attacked her town in bloody rampages on three Mexican states Wednesday night that killed 13 and injured at least 21.

Though President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon’s government continued insisting Friday that the guerrillas have little popular support, those like Vasquez saw things differently: viewing the leftist rebels, not Zedillo, as their ticket to a better life.

Zedillo will deliver his annual State of the Union address today.

The Mexican stock market, which fell 2.23 percent on Thursday after Wednesday’s rebel attacks, took a dive in the morning Friday but rallied to close only 0.88 percent down. The peso slid 4 centavos to 7.58 pesos to the dollar.

Meanwhile, Zedillo ordered hundreds of soldiers to comb the mountainsides in the southern states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, where the rebels were believed to be hiding.

A handful of suspected members of the well-armed, new rebel force calling itself the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) were detained and being questioned in Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas.

Until Wednesday, the government dismissed EPR’s members as thugs and petty criminals. But now federal officials were saying the EPR was a branch of a leftist group active in the 1970s known as PROCUP, or the Clandestine Workers’ Revolutionary Party. They are believed to have trained in guerrilla warfare in the mountains in Chiapas.

Taxi drivers and a doctor who were taken hostage by EPR rebels in Huatulco described many of them as having Mayan features and speaking an Indian dialect common in Chiapas. The majority appeared to be in their late teens, the hostages said Friday.

In prior interviews, EPR leaders said their group derived much of its funding from kidnap ransoms and bank robberies, which afforded them weapons and plentiful supplies.

Mexico’s Interior Undersecretary Arturo Nunez called EPR’s actions “acts of cowardice” and appeared on television Friday assuring the public that the government was in control.

But the civilians, who were abducted by the guerrillas in the shopping area about five miles from Huatulco’s popular stretch of hotels and beaches, said they feared their town was vulnerable to future EPR attacks because of insufficient government protection. About 70 police officer and 33 navy soldiers normally guard the city, which is built along a rocky stretch of the Pacific coast and has about 7,000 permanent residents.

The town has 20 hotels and six more under construction. It is visited by about 150,000 tourists annually - many of them from the United States and Canada.

Formerly an impoverished Mayan fishing village, Huatulco is now referred to by locals as “the next Cancun” because the government has spent millions since the early 1980s building a top-notch tourist destination.

The uprising did not target tourist areas. Only military barracks, police offices and naval command posts were singled out.

Nine people died locally, including Carmela Vasquez’s husband, Gabino Castillo, 30, who was refueling his taco truck when he was shot. Police said Castillo was at a gas station near navy barracks Wednesday night when he was hit by a stray bullet fired by a guerrilla.

“Mr. Castillo was one of two unfortunate civilian victims of this attack,” said Guillermo Ramirez Falcon, a Oaxacan police official. “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The guerrillas said all along that they didn’t want to hurt the common people. But they clearly can’t control who they hit with their bullets.”

As a result of the uprising, many tourists in Huatulco returned home early, others had not come at all, said Erica Fernandez, a tourism official in the town. Shop owners, who depend heavily on tourists’ business, were concerned that the uprising would permanently mar the reputation of their quaint village, nestled among thousands of acres of thick forests and mountains.

“If their goal was to give Mexico a black eye so that it doesn’t look appealing to tourists, they have certainly achieved that,” said Efrain Ceballos, manager of El Sabor de Oaxaca restaurant, a popular tourist spot in La Crucecita.

Red Cross Dr. Ernesto Estevez Gallardo, 30, who was taken hostage by masked rebels in Huatulco, said they were well-organized, calculating and disciplined. He was driving a marked Red Cross car when they stopped him near the center of town late Wednesday and demanded that he board one of several taxis they had commandeered.

The doctor was driven to the outskirts of town - past the golf course and the Club Med resort - and instructed by a masked guerrilla commander - calling himself Aguila Uno (Eagle One) - to treat three of his injured men. The doctor said the commander spoke in well-polished, big-city Spanish and had light brown eyes.

“I believe he was white, but he also spoke a Mayan dialect with his people,” Estevez said.

Estevez stitched up two men’s gunshot wounds and urged the commander to take a third who was shot in the stomach to the nearest hospital. That man was seriously injured and near death, Estevez said.

The doctor watched over him as the 60 rebels traveled in a caravan of stolen vehicles, taxis and a truck to a small town at the foot of the forest, east of Huatulco. There they gave the four taxi cab drivers and the doctor copies of a 25-page manifesto, calling for the overthrow of the government, a new constitution and land reforms, and departed on foot and in the truck into the mountains.

“It’s been the worst night of my life,” Estevez said Friday, sitting in the Red Cross offices after being questioned for hours by Oaxacan state police. “They treated me with respect, but they were rebels. So I didn’t know whether I would make it back alive.”