Teacher's death prompts investigations

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 13, 1995 by John (American tribal leader) Ross

OAXACA, Mexico -- When the battered body of Professor Cesar Guzman Vargas was found last spring deposited across a lonely country road just outside this remote mountain town of 35,000, the discovery stirred bad memories. Eighteen years ago, the victim's father, Daniel Guzman, also a rural teacher, was gunned down in his doorway by unknown assailants. The family still blames the local cacique, or rural boss, Melchor Alonso, and the structure he commands, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI.

At least 86 rural teachers, called "maestros," have died violently in Oaxaca during the past decade, according to Section 22 of the National Education Workers Union, SNTE, a maverick local that is often in conflict with the SNTE's national leadership. Because maestros are considered "social promoters" in the remote Oaxaca communities they serve, the teachers have often come in conflict with caciques like Alonso.

The absence of resolution in the deaths of the two Guzmans, nearly 20 years apart, is a measure of the lack of advancement in the administration of justice in rural Oaxaca -- and in rural Mexico as a whole. The cases represent a microcosm of widespread judicial corruption, the human rights abuses that result-and the price paid by some who dare to challenge the status quo.

Indeed, when, in 1985, Amnesty International compiled its first-ever report on the state of human rights in rural southern Mexico, the human rights monitor fingered a malevolent justice system, operating under Alonso's thumb, as the source of killings in Triqui Indian communities for which the municipality of Putla is the administrative center. Little has changed in the 10 years since the report was issued.

In 1995, the Alonso family continues to prosper, dominating fruit and coffee production in this distant, fertile valley. Alonso, who holds Putla's beer and Pepsi franchises, still wields considerable political clout. His daughter is the voice of local radio, and he is said to have orejas -- "ears" -- everywhere. When Putlecos pronounce his name, they inevitably lower their voices.

Stood up to the Alonsos

Cesar Guzman first stood up to the Alonsos during a 1985 land fight in the community of Zafra in which three farmers were killed. He returned to Putla at the beginning of the 1990s to teach in the local colegio, or state prep school. "Cesar believed that change would come through the young people," said fellow teacher Maria Lucia Cid during a recent meeting with members of an independent binational human rights commission. Guzman showed his students videos of the continuing rebellion of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in neighboring Chiapas state, an effort that was criticized by PRI teachers on the faculty.

But, unlike his father, who was the town's token communist before being gunned down in 1977, Guzman was not an ideologue. "He believed in doing things, not talking about them," Cid said.

Guzman, rather than taking up radical politics, focused on saving the wounded ecology of his valley. The group he enlisted to do so challenged talamontes -- wood poachers -- and those who damaged the region's once-pristine rivers. As a result, conflicts with Alonso flared anew. In January 1994, Guzman and his ecology group tried to stop the cacique from dredging gravel from the Copala River for his own private use. A year later, hostilities heated up when Alonso sought to divert river water to a private tank. At a fiery town meeting just six weeks before his death, Guzman was the last to speak and his words carried the day -- the Alonso project was shut down. There was talk of running Guzman for municipal president, a proposal endorsed by the local branch of the left-center opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD.

PRD-PRI relations in Putla are not cordial. About 100 votes separate the two, and elections are scheduled for November. One conspicuous PRI lock on power: the public justice ministry. In January, PRD militants took over City Hall and imprisoned judicial police in their offices for five days.

Putla in the Nahua language means "place of mists," and just as the thick mists drape this far-off valley morning and night, what precisely happened to Guzman before dawn on April 23 remains cloaked in the fog of mystery.

The police version, as detailed in the official dossier, says Guzman was struck and run down by one or two unidentified vehicles. (Two separate judicial police investigations differ as to the number and the direction in which the vehicles were headed.)

The independent investigation, carried out by an international commission of lawyers and human rights observers from California, Mexico and El Salvador during the first week in September, questions whether the death was accidental. Guzman was buried immediately, with no close family members present, and an autopsy nine days later proved inconclusive. Putla physician Rogelio Rodriguez, who viewed Guzman's body immediately after his death and later filmed the exhumation, observed that the maestro's injuries were not consistent with an auto accident. Rodriguez thinks Guzman was killed elsewhere and his body then cast into the roadway.