Ochoa's murder mars Mexico's "new" democratic image Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Milt Shapiro Ochoa's murder mars Mexico's "new" democratic image Andrea Sosa, DPA 10/25/2001 MEXICO CITY - Not many years ago, political assassinations were commonplace in Mexico. In 1994, an election year, the ruling party's presidential candidate was shot dead at a rally, and a few months later, another top ruling party politician was murdered in downtown Mexico City. Those deaths fit in with the way politics played out in Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which, after 71 years in power, lost the presidency last year to Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). Today, Mexico under Fox has once again had to face a past it had thought was gone. On Friday, human rights lawyer Digna Ochoa was shot to death in her Mexico City office. Ochoa, 37, was head of the legal department at the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez center, a Jesuit human rights organization. She had received death threats connected to her legal defense work in controversial cases since 1995. She acted as legal counsel for imprisoned Zapatista rebels, two indigenous environmental activists held in Guerrero state and most recently two brothers charged with placing explosive devices in bank offices in Mexico City. Authorities don't yet know who committed the crime, but Mexico City Attorney General Bernardo Batiz said that "without doubt", it was politically motivated. Ochoa's murder has stained the image of the "new" democratic Mexico born after last year's elections and projected by the PAN administration since it took office in December through media campaigns and in countless speeches by government officials. The assassination "takes us back several years to the most barbaric part of our political and social reality", political analyst Roberto Blancarte wrote in a column Tuesday in the Milenio daily. "During the PRI regimes, it was a given that these kinds of crimes automatically were filed away in the cabinet of impunity," the Reforma newspaper said in an editorial. "Now, however, it is obligatory that it be totally clarified." Ochoa's murder, which some civic groups attributed to the Mexican army, sparked protests in Mexico and was condemned by the United States government, Human Rights Watch and UN Human Rights High Commissioner Mary Robinson. It was considered even more shocking because it occurred not only in Fox's Mexico but also in the Mexican capital, a stronghold of the center-left opposition, which, especially during the 1988-1994 administration of former PRI president Carlos Salinas, has itself lost many of its members to political assassination. And it is the Mexico City attorney general's office, headed by Batiz, which will be in charge of the investigation. A note was found lying next to Ochoa's body that, worded in extremely foul language, threatened other members of the Miguel Agustin Pro with death if they continued their human rights work. Fox has offered the full support of his government to investigate Ochoa's murder. "With the loss of this fighter, the country and Mexicans lose," he said. But last November, an investigation into the death threats Ochoa had received was completed and came up with nothing. The consequences of her murder remain to be seen. But both the investigation and the protection that will be given to the other human rights activists threatened will constitute a test for authorities. National Human Rights Commission chief, Jose Luis Soberanes, said the murder has the weight of being "the first political crime" that takes place in the current administration. But, furthermore, it is also the first assassination, allegedly politically motivated, of the new era after the end of the PRI regime. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcamer-10.27.01-05:14:44-17193