mexnews: Mexico Human Rights Lawyer Killed (AP) Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Milt Shapiro Mexico Human Rights Lawyer Killed By Traci Carl Associated Press Writer Saturday, Oct. 20, 2001; 3:05 p.m. EDT MEXICO CITY -- A prominent human rights lawyer who has defended Zapatista sympathizers was killed after receiving several death threats, and a note left with her body warned that the same could happen to others, Mexico City's attorney general said Saturday. Digna Ochoa was found dead Friday after being shot in the head and leg, Attorney General Bernardo Batiz said. She was working at the office of two fellow human rights attorneys when her body was found. A note, directed at Ochoa's Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center and presumably left by the killers, warned: "If they continue, this will also happen to another. You have been advised. This is not a trick." Batiz's office was investigating previous death threats Ochoa had received. But Edgar Cortez, the center's director, said the investigations weren't sufficient. Although Ochoa had received protection in the past, Cortez said, she left the country for work and was not given government guards when she returned in April. Ochoa had often defended rebel sympathizers in southern Mexico, including those jailed for supporting Zapatistas who led a 1994 uprising in Chiapas state. "This was a person who never shied away from taking on the toughest and most sensitive cases," Daniel Wilkinson, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in New York, said in a telephone interview from New York. "She broke ground on using the Mexican legal system for defending human rights victims." He criticized prosecutors' past investigations into death threats, saying: "This failure to investigate creates an environment in which people think they can get away with killing human rights advocates like this." Ochoa's cases included those of anti-logging activists Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera Garcia, who were sentenced in August 2000 to six years and 10 years, respectively, on drug and weapons charges. Ochoa argued the drug and weapons charges were fabricated, and that her clients were really arrested for blocking logging roads to protest clear-cutting in old-growth forests near the Pacific coast. She didn't have any specific clients at the time of her death, Cortez said, but she was helping out on several cases, including those of two brothers accused of being members of a guerrilla group and detonating tin cans with explosives outside branches of Banco Nacional de Mexico, or Banamex, which was recently purchased by Citigroup. The Aug. 8 bombings were claimed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People, known by its Spanish initials of FARP. It is believed to be an offshoot of the People's Revolutionary Army that appeared in 1996 with a wave of attacks on police and army posts, many in the southwestern states of Guerrero and Oaxaca. Critics complain that most of Mexico's banking industry has now been sold to foreigners after Mexican taxpayers spent billions in cleaning up bad loans made by the banks. (c) Copyright 2001 The Associated Press ================================================================= 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-10.22.01-18:33:30-18779