MEXICO CITY -- The unsolved killing of human-rights lawyer Digna Ochoa features all the elements of a tense Costa-Gavras political thriller like State of Siege or Missing. Ochoa, an ex- nun who often went to court in her Dominican sisters‘ habit to defend poor farmers and accused guerrilleros, was tortured......
Quebec City is the new battleground in the movable class war between those who advocate the corporate takeover of the planet and the ragtag, polyglot army of “globalphobes” that waged the Battle in Seattle. This time around the face-off has a Latin flavor, with the heads of 34 countries gathering......
MEXICO CITY -- When rebel martyr Emiliano Zapata and his ragtag campesino army marched into Mexico City in December 1914, at the apogee of the Mexican Revolution, the denizens of this capital were not crazy to greet him. Big, black newspaper headlines decried the smoldering-eyed Indian leader as an ”Attila“......
MEXICO CITY, JULY 4 -- As preliminary results from Mexico‘s most hotly contested presidential election ever began to roll in Sunday evening, July 2, thousands of railroad workers and their families gathered in the giant parking lot of the long-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) bunker in northern Mexico......
TEMOAYA, MEXICO -- As the tightest presidential election in Mexican history hits the homestretch for July 2, the front-runners are beating the bushes for every vote they can get. The nation’s 10 million to 20 million Indians (depending upon whose numbers are accepted) -- a constituency ordinarily ignored when it......
Calef BrownMEXICO CITY -- WEARING A T-SHIRT INSCRIBED "Who's Afraid of Y2K?" in blazing red letters, Juan José Sanchez, a 27-year-old kitchen worker, settled back in his airplane seat for the flight home from New York City to his native Puebla state. "So you're not afraid of Y2K?" -- the......
SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS CHIAPAS — The Mexican government’s stiff-necked resistance to international human-rights intervention borders on the xenophobic. In recent years, the administration of President Ernesto Zedillo has tossed hundreds of independent human-rights observers from a dozen nations out of Mexico and implemented tough new visa requirements that......
Photo by Marco Ugarte, AP/Wide World MEXICO CITY — Flapping from the splattered doors of the School of Philosophy & Letters on the barricaded campus of Mexico’s strikebound National Autono mous University (UNAM) is a set of jocose instructions for what to do when and if the military shows up:......
OCOSINGO, CHIAPAS, MEXICO — Recent government antics in Chiapas seem more to resemble jungle vaudeville than they do a serious effort to settle with the rebel Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in that conflict zone. On March 29, apparently in response to the EZLN’s highly successful (3,000,000 votes) national......
EL PASO, Texas — During the first days of the rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in January 1994, Captain Jesus Valles, then stationed at the 30th military zone just across the Chiapas line in Villahermosa Tabasco, was ordered by his commanding officer to take no prisoners......