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 Editorials | Issues | November 2006 
Mexican Investigators Allege that New Evidence Implicates Leftists in U.S. Journalist Shooting
 Associated Press
| | An activist has his face covered as he mans a roadblock near a university in Oaxaca November 14, 2006. Activists demanding the removal of the state governor stepped up their vigilance around the university they controlled today in fear of a police raid. (Reuters) |
The Oaxaca state attorney general said yesterday that an American activist-journalist killed while filming a gun battle during recent demonstrations was shot at point-blank range, indicating that the fatal shots came from nearby leftist protesters.
A spokesman for the protesters said officials were fabricating evidence to win the release of two local officials held in connection with the Oct. 27 killing of Bradley Roland Will.
“It seems a very clear fabrication and a stupid way of trying to blame the protesters,” spokesman Florentino Lopez said.
Will, 36, was filming a group of leftist protesters who clashed with a group of armed men in Santa Lucia, a working-class town on the outskirts of Oaxaca city. Both sides fired. It is not clear who shot first.
Will was shot twice in the abdomen and died on the way to hospital.
Police later arrested Santa Lucia town officials Abel Santiago Zarate and Orlando Aguilar in the killing. The men were allegedly part of group of officials and off-duty police officers confronting the protesters.
Oaxaca state Attorney General Lizbeth Cana said further investigations revealed that both bullets that killed Will were fired from the same gun and one of them was fired at point-blank range. The evidence signals that the leftist protesters whom Will was filming may have shot him, Cana said.
Will wrote dispatches for the Web site Indymedia.com that expressed strong sympathies for the leftist protest movement.
The protesters are calling for the resignation of Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz, who is Cana’s boss. They have accused Cana of using her office to support a corrupt governor. Cana, in turn, has called the protesters “urban guerrillas.”
The protests have led to at least nine deaths, mostly of leftists who have been shot dead by gangs of gunmen.
Protesters accuse Ruiz of rigging the 2004 election to win office and of using violence against his opponents. Last month, President Vicente Fox sent more than 4,000 federal police to quell the unrest.
Also yesterday, gunmen killed two members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico’s former ruling party, in the Oaxacan mountains, but it was not clear if their deaths were linked to the political unrest that has swept the state since May. |
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