Since the first of the year, the Mexican government has dramatically increased its harassment of foreigners in Chiapas. This week, authorities in the state have begun deportation proceedings against over forty people.
The new outbreak of hostility towards foreigners is of grave concern to those who care about human rights in Mexico. The international presence in Chiapas has played a critical role in helping to protect indigenous communities from military repression and human rights violations. The Mexican governmentıs coordinated campaign against foreigners threatens to remove this protection and dangerously escalate the conflict in Chiapas.
The recent rise in tensions in Chenalho, after a pro-government gang harassed a group of 29 Zapatistas supporters, provides just one example of the continued tensions in Chiapas that make an international presence so invaluable.
As we have documented in our report "Foreigners of Conscience" the expulsion campaign also is clearly illegal and violates the civil liberties guaranteed to international citizens under Mexican and international law. Today, we published a letter to the editor in La Jornada (also available on our website) which outlines in detail how the current citations violate Mexican law.
To voice your concern over this recent wave of deportations, please contact the Mexican Ambassador Jesus Reyes Heroles, 202.728.1696, fax 202.833.4320 and the US Embassy in Mexico City, 011.525. 211.0042, fax 011.52.5.207.6287. Urge the Embassy to take action on behalf of the over thirty Americans who were given citations.
Below we have included five articles discussing the recent events :
1. Los Angeles Times, "Mexican Officials Seek to Deport 43 Foreigners Latin America," Jan. 7, 2000.
2. Reuters "Mexico defends crackdown on tourists in Chiapas," Jan. 6, 2000.
3. New York Times, "Mexico Expels 2 U.S. Supporters of Zapatistas Who Visited Chiapas," Jan. 6, 1999.
4. La Jornada, "A US citizen is the first person expelled from Chiapas this year," Jan. 5, 2000.
5. AP, "Mexican Rebel Supporters Threatened", Jan. 6, 2000
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Mexican Officials Seek to Deport 43 Foreigners
Latin America: Those targeted, who include 34 from U.S., joined New Year's events marking '94 Chiapas rebellion.
Los Angeles Times January 7, 2000 By James F. Smith MEXICO CITY--To cries of dismay Thursday from human rights activists, the government has brought deportation proceedings against 43 foreigners, including 34 Americans, who joined New Year's celebrations to mark the sixth anniversary of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. Immigration officials said 12 of the foreigners have been told to leave the country. Hearings are still pending in the remaining 31 cases.
Mexican immigration chief Alejandro Carrillo Castro told reporters Thursday that none of the cases involved formal expulsion from Mexico. He argued that officials were invoking a milder form of mandatory departure that allows a person to reapply for a new visa--but only after a ban of several years in some cases.
Still, this week's action forms part of a sustained campaign waged by the government since early 1998 against foreign Zapatista sympathizers in the troubled southern state, where Maya Indians staged their uprising Jan. 1, 1994.
Foreign supporters have long flocked to Chiapas to support the rebels and their poetry-prone leader, Subcomandante Marcos.
The Mexican Constitution forbids the involvement of foreigners in domestic politics, and Mexican leaders are extremely sensitive to perceived foreign interference.
Critics attacked the latest clampdown on foreigners as a fresh sign of the Mexican government's unwillingness to allow international scrutiny of events in Chiapas.
"It does send a shiver," said Jason Mark, a spokesman for the Global Exchange human rights group in San Francisco, "and it underscores that, while Chiapas has dropped off the public map, there is still a great deal of tension down there."
In a separate incident Wednesday, pro-government villagers near the municipality of Chenalho surrounded and harassed 29 pro-Zapatista residents until the military intervened and defused tensions, according to local media reports. Chenalho includes the village of Acteal, where paramilitary soldiers killed 45 rebel supporters two years ago in the worst outbreak of violence in Chiapas since a cease-fire ended open hostilities in mid-January 1994.
The citations for visa hearings were issued Tuesday to foreigners who had attended a pro-Zapatista New Year's celebration in the self-proclaimed autonomous municipality of Oventic.
Peter Brown, a San Diego teacher who was expelled permanently from Mexico in 1998 for organizing the construction of a school in Oventic, said many of the foreigners targeted this week had journeyed there aboard an "educational caravan for peace" in support of the school. The government regards the pro-Zapatista school as unconstitutional because it was built without official sanction.
Speaking from his home in San Diego, Brown said that whatever distinctions Mexican authorities might draw between types of expulsion orders, "it would seem to be just as egregious if someone is being chucked out simply for visiting folks the government doesn't want them to visit, which seems to be the nature of the beast here."
Mario Patron, a lawyer for the Miguel Agustin Pro Human Rights Center in Mexico City, said his organization has brought a legal challenge against the government's tightened restrictions on human rights observers. He said the new rules, issued in October 1998, limit human rights activists'
stays to 10 days and require them to apply at least 10 days in advance, among other strictures. "We have always attached great importance to the presence of foreign observers in Mexico wherever there are human rights violations," Patron said. "For the government, the cost of having foreign observers is that they convey the real facts of the situation, and this undermines the whole lobbying effort of the government. For this reason they try to limit foreign observers."
Joel Solomon of New York-based Human Rights Watch said: "We don't deny the Mexican government's need to regulate who enters and leaves the country through a system of visas. That's not in question here. The question is the Mexican government's intentionally blurry interpretation of what is tourism and where does tourism stop."
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Mexico defends crackdown on tourists in Chiapas
Reuters By Adolfo Garza January 6, 2000 MEXICO CITY, Jan 6 (Reuters) - Mexican officials on Thursday defended the government's crackdown on foreign tourists who engage in what it considers ``political activism'' while visiting the strife-torn southern state of Chiapas.
``Foreigners are free to enter Chiapas, that's not a problem,'' Immigration Commissioner Alejandro Carrillo told a news conference. ``All that we demand is that they abide by the appropriate immigration regulations.''
Most foreign tourists visiting Chiapas are sympathetic to the state's pro-Indian Zapatista rebels and are often suspected of violating their tourist status, which prohibits them from interfering in Mexican internal politics.
Last Sunday, the Mexican army and immigration officials detained 43 U.S., Argentine, French, Italian and Portuguese citizens who attended a New Year's celebration that also marked the sixth anniversary of the Zapatista rebellion.
The tourists were summoned for further questioning. Of the 12 tourists who had been questioned as of Thursday, four have been ordered out of the country, Carrillo said.
Last year alone, officials ordered 79 foreign tourists out of Mexico after they had visited Chiapas, a tactic that critics charge is aimed at hiding the plight of Mexico's impoverished Indians from the rest of the world.
One of the tourists recently ordered to leave the country, Kerry Appel of Denver, Colo., also was banned from returning to Mexico for the next three years due to alleged visa violations.
Appel's lawyer, Jose Antonio Montero, said his client has refused to leave and is appealing his expulsion in Mexican courts. He has also denied any prior visa violation.
Montero said immigration authorities had deprived his client of his constitutional right to challenge the expulsion after only being given 24 hours to leave Mexico even though Mexican law gives defendants 15 days to appeal.
Immigration officials ``act arbitrarily and systematically violate the rights of foreigners,'' Montero said in a telephone interview.
The crackdown by the administration of President Ernesto Zedillo has prompted criticism from international human rights organisations.
``This is a coordinated effort to prevent the international community from seeing the human rights violations that are going on, and to intimidate people from going to Chiapas, whether they're tourists or human rights observers,'' said Rebecca Charnas, spokeswoman for San Francisco-based human rights group Global Exchange.
The Zapatista rebels launched their rebellion on Jan. 1, 1994, demanding improved rights for Mexico's 10 million Indians. Peace talks broke down in 1996, and the army currently surrounds rebel areas with tens of thousands of soldiers while a ceasefire holds.
In the parts of Chiapas where support for the Zapatistas runs high, foreigners are welcomed as a potential human shield against suspected military aggression.
The crackdown on tourists has been accompanied by tough new rules on granting visas to international human rights observers, which rights activists say are a serious impediment to proper investigations.
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Mexico Expels 2 U.S. Supporters of Zapatistas Who Visited Chiapas
The New York Times January 6, 2000 By Sam Dillon
Mexico City, Jan. 5 -- Mexico has ordered Kerry Appel, 48, a coffee importer from Colorado who attended a New Years' celebration in a rebel-controlled village in southern Chiapas state, to leave the country immediately. The order, issued on Tuesday, bars Mr. Appel from visiting here for three years.
Another American who spent New Years' in Chiapas was interrogated and given a week to leave. The authorities identified him as Greg Ruggeiro, 25, an editor from Brooklyn.
Mr. Appel and Mr. Ruggeiro were among 40 American, Argentine, French, Italian and Portuguese tourists, sympathizers of the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, who attended the same celebration in Chiapas. Immigration authorities have called in most for questioning. Mr. Appel and Mr. Ruggeiro's were the first expulsion orders. But human rights lawyers who are following the situation said they expected that other foreigners might be ordered out.
Today, the immigration office in San Cristo'bal de las Casas in Chiapas was filled with foreigners, some accompanied by lawyers, waiting to be interrogated. At least 79 foreign tourists were ordered out of Mexico last year after trips to Chiapas.
After a visit to Chiapas in January 1996, Mr. Appel was ordered to leave, but was not barred from returning.
Immigration Commissioner Alejandro Carrillo Castro told reporters here on Tuesday night that Mr. Appel had broken the law by traveling to Mexico last month with a tourist visa, ignoring the terms of the previous order, which required him to request a special visa from the Mexican consulate in Denver . Mr. Appel asserted in an interview today, however, that the authorities had never shown him the order and had repeatedly assured him after the deportation that he faced no special restrictions. He said his Mexican lawyer was appealing the new order.
Mr. Appel said he established his coffee importing business in Denver, the Human Bean Company, in 1996. He purchases coffee from Chiapas cooperatives run by indigenous farmers and markets the beans, as well as native weavings and video documentaries that he has produced about Chiapas through a Web site, www.thehumanbean.com.
In 1997, Mr. Appel videotaped an interview with the rebel leader, Subcomandante Marcos. In an introduction to that interview, which is on the Web site, Mr. Appel described his deportation, saying: "I was told that I had no business discussing economic, social or political subjects with the indigenous peoples of Mexico. I was told by the Mexican government that if I wanted to see Indians, I could see them in the markets or the museums. Then they kicked me out of Mexico."
At the celebration, in Oventic, for the new year and the sixth anniversary of the onset of the insurgency, Mr. Appel talked, played basketball and danced with the Indians, but did not offer political advice, he said.
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A US citizen is the first person expelled from Chiapas this year
La Jornada January 5, 2000 by Juan Balboa
*41 people under investigation for the construction of a school in Oventic,
San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas. Today the National Institute of Immigration (INM) reported that the American Appel Kerry Andrew became the first American to be expelled from Chiapas in the year 2000, having engaged in activities which had not been sanctioned by the Secretary of State, among which was participation in the celebrations of the sixth anniversary of the Ejercito de Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional's uprising.
The INM questioned 41 foreigners, the majority of whom were Americans, about their relationship to the Zapatistas and their participation in the construction of a rebel school in the community of Oventic, as well as other activities which were "not authorized" on their Mexican entry visas.
With the help of the Mexican Army, agents of the National Institute of Immigration have detained 38 American citizens in the San Andres Larrainzar checkpoint along with three French citizens two Italians, one Argentine and one Portugese. All of the above were required to make statements in the offices of the INM in San Cristobal.
In a special operation implemented 15 kilometers from the Zapatista community of Oventic, troops from the Sixth Infantry Battalion and agents of the San Cristobal INM office detained foreigners on their way out from the center of the San Andres Larrainzar municipality.
Because of the decision against him, Kerry Andrew will have 24 hours to abandon the country or risk violating the General Law of Population.
INM authorities notified Kerry Andrew that he will not be allowed to return to Mexico for a period of three years, until the year 2003, and that after this period he will be required to obtain special permission from the Secretary of State to enter Mexico.
In an interview, Kerry said that the INM authorities of Mexico had set a trap for him because all of the activities that he undertook in Chiapas were legal.
Jose Montero, a lawyer from the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Center for Human Rights, confirmed tonight that the INM's decision will be appealed, and he added that the decision has no basis in the law.
Functionaries of the INM, presided over by the San Cristobal de las Casas delegate Genaro Perez Fraga, questioned Kerry for four hours when he was detained along with the other forty foreigners at the San Andres Larrainzar military checkpoint, presumably while they were on their way back to the Zapatista community of Oventic.
The interrogation session covered Kerry's work in the community of Oventic as well as his immigration history. He was previously detained, fined and expelled from Mexico on the 3rd of January, 1996 and should only have entered the country on this occasion with special permission from the Secretary of State. [His attorneys refute that he needed special per mission to enter into Mexico]
The lawyer from the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Center reminded those present that, in January of 1996, the INM had issued a decision with regard Kerry in which it asserted that he had committed acts which were different from those allowed by his visa. Subsequently, the INM gave Kerry five days to leave the country. However, said the lawyer, Kerry was never notified by the INM in writing but only verbally.
Today at dawn, another American, Greg Ruggeiro, was also presented with an order to abandon the country by the 11th of January, the date on which his current visa will expire. Functionaries of the INM cancelled Roggeiro's visa and delivered a paper to him that indicated the exact date on which he must leave Mexico. However, he will not be prohibited from returning to the country.
In four days, the INM has matched its numbers from 1999
The INM has already matched its number of apprehensions of foreigners for 1999 in the state of Chiapas. In only four days, from the 1st to the 4th of January, 2000, the INM have detained almost the same number of foreigners as all of those who were questioned during the year of 1999 for alleged participation in civil activities of the EZLN as well as their presence in Aguascalientes and other autonomous Zapatista communities.
To this date, at their San Cristobal de las Casas offices, immigration authorities have questioned 41 foreigners: 34 Americans, 3 French, 2 Italians, 1 Portuguese and an Argentine. One of them has already been expelled from the country.
In 1999, the INM detained 44 foreigners from diverse countries, among them the USA, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Cuba, France and Spain, at various Mexican Army military checkpoints installed in Chiapas' conflict zone.
Of the 44 detainees, 19 were expelled from the country.
Translated by Noah Arthur Bardach
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Mexican Rebel Supporters Threatened
The Associated Press January 6, 2000
MEXICO CITY--A pro-government gang harassed a group of 29 supporters of the leftist Zapatista rebel movement in a region of Mexico's southern Chiapas province that was scene in 1997 to the massacre of 45 Indian villagers. The rebel supporters were some of the hundreds of Chiapas Indians who fled their homes after the December 1997 massacre in the hamlet of Acteal, and who rarely venture out of refugee camps, mainly to work or harvest their fields.
The rebel supporters were trying to harvest their coffee fields on Wednesday when they were surrounded by pro-government villagers from the town of Chenalho, where prosecutors say the 1997 massacre was planned. Both those charged in the massacre and the group involed in Wednesday's standoff support the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Army troops intervened to end the standoff and took the 29 rebel supporters to a nearby army base, arresting three of them on outstanding warrants for killings that occurred before the massacre.
"The PRI supporters wanted to fight with us, but we didn't pay attention to them," Pedro Gomez Perez, one of the rebel supporters. "Then the soldiers and police came and took us to their base. They said it was in order to protect us."
The Zapatistas staged a brief armed uprising in 1994, demanding greater democracy and Indian rights. Peace talks between the government and rebels are stalled, but a truce remains in effect.
_________________________________________________________________ Global Exchange http://www.globalexchange.org From: Ted Lewis <tedlewis@globalexchange.org>