Mexico City – Federal officials dismissed here Wednesday a suggestion that guerrillas are behind protests in the southern state of Oaxaca.
Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said he was aware of no evidence that armed irregulars are involved in growing unrest on the part of teachers and activists seeking the ouster of Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz.
“At this moment, the attorney general’s office has no element that implicates the participation of groups that are subversive or which could be described as destabilizing,” he told a press conference in Mexico City.
The disorders in Oaxaca, he said, constitute “some criminal deeds, which in the great majority are within the jurisdiction of state authorities.”
He said his office will investigate the takeover of several radio and television stations by activists from the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, or APPO, a coalition of grassroots groups that back the state’s striking teachers in their battle with Gov. Ruiz.
Cabeza de Vaca’s comments came one day after state Attorney General Lizbeth Caña said the occupation of broadcast outlets and the blocking of roads in and around Oaxaca city were “acts of destabilization” consistent with an “urban guerrilla” strategy.
Appearing alongside Cabeza de Vaca at Wednesday’s session with reporters was presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar, who said the federal government is cooperating with state authorities and touted “dialogue and accord” as the way to resolve the crisis in Oaxaca, which began in May as a walkout by teachers to demand higher pay.
The spokesman also denied President Vicente Fox’s administration is allowing the situation in Oaxaca to deteriorate with the hope of forcing out Ruiz, a member of the main opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has ruled the southern state without interruption since 1929.
Meanwhile, APPO’s Florentino Lopez said the assembly will soon begin internal discussions on the latest proposal from the federal interior ministry aimed at jump-starting negotiations in Oaxaca.
Two people have died in the unrest associated with the strike by 70,000 Oaxaca teachers for higher pay.
The latest fatality occurred Tuesday, when more than a dozen men traveling in three cars approached one of the radio stations taken over by APPO and riddled the building with bullets, leaving one man dead.
Reporters Carlos Leyva and Miguel Luna said they were accosted Tuesday by masked men riding in a pickup truck.
Luna required seven stitches to close a cut on his head after being struck with the butt of a gun, according to Leyva.
The transformation of the teachers strike into a movement to oust Ruiz dates from June 14, when police used force to break up a sit-in by strikers in the main square of Oaxaca city, the state capital.
Ruiz, who is accused of having rigged the 2004 gubernatorial election, last year dispatched thugs to trash the offices and printing plant of a newspaper that had offended him.
