Informant38

Two decades later, the disappearances continue. Over the last seven years, 123 members of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD,) Mexico's centre-left political party, have "disappeared" in Guerrero. Sixty political prisoners have been jailed on false charges. Though the military is blamed for most of the violence, nine cases of "disappearances" at the hands of the Guerrero State Judicial Police have been carefully documented. Today, ten to twenty thousand soldiers remain in Guerrero under the pretext of fighting the ten or so active guerrilla groups and drug traffickers. Local experience also suggests they are present to destroy political opposition.


"The army planted the drug crops first," says Miriam Hernandez, a political activist who worked in Guerrero but now lives in Canada. "It gave them the perfect excuse to keep fighting us." Army support for cattle rancher and drug trafficker Rogaciano Alba Alvarez, key figure in the PRI's political structure, is well known. Unlike the majority of Mexican states who voted to overthrow the PRI in the year 2000, Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas remain controlled by PRI political bosses cooperating with paramilitary forces and the Mexican army.


Home to some of the world's oldest growth fir and pine forests, illegal logging is big business in Guerrero.
One of the best known cases involved loggers working for the United States corporation, Boise Cascade, who were ripping out trees 24 hours a day in 1996.
When local ecologists Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera tried to stop them, they were arrested by the army on trumped up charges of illegal weapon possession and drug cultivation.