Mexico reevaluates group behind latest bombings

MEXICO CITY — Facing the latest sabotage of the country's energy grid, Mexican leaders and analysts are reconsidering a tiny militant group that many had presumed to be inconsequential.

This week's bombings of pipelines feeding natural gas and petrochemicals to the country's industrial heartland caused an estimated $220 million in lost production and were claimed by the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR — a family-based movement. The group also said it carried out similar attacks in July.

"Until now the government thought it had them well located in terms of geography and military capacity," said Jose Luis Pineyro, a national security analyst in Mexico City. "But if it was the EPR (who attacked the pipelines), their military capacity is greater than we thought in terms of skill and the number of members."

Just who are these these militants? What do they want? What exactly are they capable of?

Officials and analysts say the EPR is basically a three-family enterprise headed by one Francisco Cerezo, a Mexican baby-boomer whose real name is said to be Tiburcio Cruz Sanchez.

The group might have fewer than 100 active militants and scant civilian support, Pineyro reasons. "They are a closed group, a family group," he said.

Cerezo and his wife, both longtime leftist militants, have been in hiding since the 1970s. Three of Cerezo's sons were arrested in 2001 following the bombings of Mexico City banks. Two remain jailed.

Members of the family deny involvement with the EPR. They accuse the government of inventing charges against the jailed brothers and of harassing family members still free.

Cerezo's brother, identified as Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sanchez, is one of two militants who the EPR claims was detained in Oaxaca City in May and is being held by state or federal agents.

EPR leaders say they attacked the pipelines to force the release of the two men, but Mexican officials deny holding them, and they portray the bombings as gangster-like attacks on Mexico's economy. With repairs ongoing, Monday's attacks are causing an estimated $150 million a day in lost industrials production, according to a leading business group.

"Today the enemies of Mexico seek to affect the development of our nation," President Felipe Calderon said Friday at a ceremony commemorating heroes of Mexico's war with the U.S. 160 years ago."We must protect our families from those who threaten their peace."

In contrast to other Latin American countries, Mexico hasn't had an armed uprising that seriously threatened the nation's stability since the defeat of the Cristero rebellion of devout Roman Catholics 80 years ago.

The Center for the Documentation of Armed Movements, which tracks rebel groups throughout Latin America, lists more than 40 insurgent organizations active in Mexico. But many of those groups seem comprised of little more than a catchy name, fanciful rhetoric and an Internet account.

A gathering of Mexican guerrillas today might not fill the pews of a mid-sized church, analysts say. In comparison, after more than 40 years of civil war Colombia's leftist rebel armies muster about 15,000 fighters.

"People confuse guerrilla cells with guerrilla movements," Pineyro said. "There has never been a guerrilla movement in Mexico that has managed to achieve the strength of that in Colombia."

Mexican security forces, including clandestine death squads, dealt harshly with leftist guerrillas in a so-called "dirty war" during the 1960s and 1970s, kidnapping and killing several hundred. Soldiers opened fire on protesters in downtown Mexico City in October 1968, killing hundreds.

Although their bloody rebellion in January 1994 stunned Mexico, the Zapatista rebels of southernmost Chiapas state always posed more a moral threat to Mexico's rulers than a military one.

The mostly Maya Indian rebels shamed many Mexicans for their society's treatment of both its indigenous minority and its rural poor.

After a few days of combat, the Zapatistas retreated to their remote villages encircled by the army. They've spent the past 13 years talking about revolution instead of fighting one.

Spurred by the Zapatista rebellion, Cerezo, his wife and other survivors of the guerrilla campaigns of the 1970s buried their differences to forge the EPR.

Sporting crisp uniforms and new automatic weapons, EPR militants first appeared in June 1996 at a ceremony marking the massacre by state police of 17 protesting farmers near Acapulco.

Later that summer, the EPR launched coordinated but failed attacks on the beach resort of Huatulco and other towns in Oaxaca and neighboring southern states.

In response, government forces raided Zapotec indian communities near Huatulco, arresting local officials and scores of others. Following the arrests, the EPR's feuding factions split again. And the group all but disappeared after June 1998, when army troops killed 11 peasants attending lectures by one of those splinter groups.

Today's whittled-down EPR, whose name is sometimes translated as the People's Revolutionary Army, has been only sporadically active and largely ineffective in the past nine years. But it started gaining notice again last year amid the popular protests against Oaxaca's governor. that paralyzed the tourist industry in the state's picturesque capital.

The EPR's leadership argues that Mexico's poor majority — fed up with economic inequality, favoritism of the rich and political corruption — needs just a spark to explode in rebellion.

"For an important segment of our people there is historic and concrete justification for organizing and promoting a new revolution," says a message issued by the group on Thursday. "Today everything indicates that a social explosion is possible."

Noting the EPR has never pulled off more than small bombings of closed banks and government offices, analysts expressed surprise at the EPR's ability to simultaneously attack crucial points in Mexico's 30,000-mile pipeline system.

Some question the logic of targeting Pemex, the government petroleum monopoly that has been a bedrock of Mexican pride since the government nationalized the oil industry here 69 years ago.

EPR leaders detailed their thinking Thursday in a sometimes rambling statement.

"Only in the formal sense is Pemex the property of the nation and the people," the statement says. "In fact it's at the service of the national and foreign oligarchy."

"The surgical actions against the Pemex pipelines are a variation of the political and military self-defense measures against the aggression we have suffered."

Though the communique, like others, has been widely assumed legitimate, its authenticity cannot be verified. And, this being Mexico, conspiracy theories abound about both the attacks and the EPR.

Some argue the bombings might be the work of the government, of right-wing groups, of drug traffickers or even of U.S. spy agencies. Such a plot would aim to discredit all protest movements or justify a crackdown on Mexico's left.

"How to explain that from one day to the next the EPR reappears with an efficient, coordinated and surprise operation," Jorge Luis Sierra, a national security analyst, asked in a Friday column published by Mexico City's El Universal newspaper.

"No hypothesis should be discarded," he said.