As Mexico gears up for its 2000 presidential elections, opposition politicians in Guerrero state claim a new counterinsurgency campaign is underway to wipe out political dissidents. Spearheading it is the newly-created Federal Preventive Police (PFP) to which President Clinton recently offered FBI training and assistance. PNS correspondent Kent Paterson is a freelance reporter based in Albuquerque.

ACAPULCO -- Less than a year after President Clinton praised Mexico's newly-created Federal Preventive Police (PFP) as a step forward in that country's fight against drugs and delinquency, opposition politicians here are worried that the 5,000-member force is spearheading a renewed dirty war against political dissidents.

The pretext for the war, according to critics like Octaviano Santiago, is that guerrilla groups based in Guerrero are gearing up to destabilize Mexico's 2000 Presidential elections. Santiago, who fought with rebels as a young man in the 1970s, was jailed, and survived an epoch that witnessed hundreds of dead and disappeared persons, now represents the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in the Guerrero state legislature.

The trouble, Santiago says, began on the morning of October 4 in Acapulco, where a four party opposition coalition spearheaded by the PRD was celebrating a victory in the municipal election over the long-ruling Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI). On his way home after a long night, PRD Acapulco city councilman-elect Marco Antonio Lopez Garcia was ambushed along with his family. Lopez Garcia survived the assault, but his 21-year-old son died from gunshot wounds. Both Lopezes were active in the PRD's "cazamapache" or "raccoon-hunting" brigades. Set up by grassroots activists, the brigades denounced and halted instances of alleged election law violations during the October 3 state contest. Observers consider the brigades a key element in the opposition's Acapulco win and a possible model for citizen activists who will monitor the 2000 presidential race.

Several days after the ambush, two PRD members, Virginia Montes and Guillermo Martinez, were arrested for the Lopez murder in a crime authorities initially claimed stemmed from an intra-party PRD feud. At a subsequent press conference, the state Attorney General's Office displayed materials allegedly linking the couple to the guerrilla Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI). Founded as an offshoot of the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) in 1998, ERPI claimed credit for an ambush of Mexican soldiers south of Acapulco in late September.

Although PRD leaders have long rejected any connection with the guerrillas, some pro-PRI election propaganda tied the groups together. Guerrero state PRD leaders were outraged that the state attorney general was doing the same.

Before they were isolated from the media, Montes and Martinez claimed they were tortured and forced to confess to a crime they did not commit. In November, the couple was moved along with four other prisoners to a maximum security prison in Jalisco state. Lawyers and supporters of the "Acapulco 6" charge the prisoners were moved in violation of a court stay, threatened with Argentinian-style falls from a helicopter and tortured. All six have ties to the PRD or social movements in Guerrero.

Earlier, another PRD-EPRI connection was made when the attorney general's office announced that four EPRI members, including top leaders Jacobo Silva and Gloria Arenas, had been arrested by the PFP in a poor neighborhood founded by the PRD in the state capitol of Chilpancingo. According to numerous eyewitnesses and the guerrilla leaders themselves, they were picked up by the PFP in Mexico City and San Luis Potosi, respectively, and tortured before being locked down in the maximum security Almoloya de Juarez prison outside Mexico City.

The timing of the EPRI leaders' capture was uncanny. Only days before, the Mexican weekly magazine Proceso ran interviews with EPRI leaders in which the guerrillas threatened to take up arms in 2000 if an election fraud were committed. Simultaneously, pro-government Mexican newspapers reported on the alleged existence of numerous guerrilla groups in Guerrero and on the EZLN in Chiapas, suggesting that they posed a threat to the 2000 elections.

In early December, Diodoro Carrasco, Mexico's Secretary of the Interior and the man in charge of the PFP, traveled to Guerrero to meet with the governor and other high level authorities. Upon leaving the meeting, he was quoted as saying that the government would take a hard line against the EPRI and EPR guerrillas and not permit a disruption of the presidential election. Carrasco has ample experience in such matters. As governor of the neighboring state of Oaxaca during 1996-97, Carrasco oversaw a counterinsurgency drive against the EPR that resulted in charges of human rights abuses against his state police.

As opposition leaders point out, neither the EPR nor EPRI have the capability of overthrowing the Mexican government. Nevertheless, the guerrillas are acquiring a symbolic role in the 2000 election year that is far more important than their numbers. While the 1994 uprising of Chiapas' Zapatistas challenged the notion that Mexico was on the verge of entering the First World, the very existence of the Guerrero rebels in 2000 tests whether the country will carry out a peaceful transition of power or backslide into another cycle of repression and retaliation.