State of Semi-Siege

Since World War II, Mexico has been an island of stability and increasing prosperity in Latin America, a model of an underdeveloped, peasant society's coming peacefully into the modern world. No more. The country is not only showing the common strains of inflation--now running at about 30% a year, or about triple the U.S. rate--but is also troubled by terrorism and guerrilla warfare. In the past year, several prominent Mexican industrialists and politicians and a U.S. diplomat have been kidnaped by the terrorists. The diplomat, Terrance Leonhardy, consul general in Guadalajara, was later released after his abductors' demands were met.

Other victims were not so lucky; the army is continuing a massive search for the government's candidate for governor of Guerrero State, who was kidnaped last May.

The incident that is most embarrassing to the Mexican government, however, occurred last month when Jose Guadalupe Zuno, the 83-year-old father-in-law of President Luis Echeverria Alvarez and one of the most powerful men in Guadalajara, Mexico's second city, was kidnaped. Four armed men stopped Zuno's new blue Galaxie as it slowed to make a turn, disabled the chauffeur with Mace spray, and pulled Zuno into another car. His family warned that Zuno, a former governor of Jalisco State, and a political kingmaker, suffers from diabetes and might die unless he was given a special sugar-and salt-free diet.

A group calling itself the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People, which kidnaped Leonhardy, claimed responsibility for kidnaping

Zuno. It had even produced a photo of the old man in captivity, standing in front of a poster of two crossed submachine guns and looking disheveled, and a tape recording in which he supposedly agreed, `a la Patty Hearst, with his captors' aims. "He is a bourgeois and represents the exploiting class," said the kidnapers' proclamation. "We social fighters are obliged to use revolutionary means." The group demanded $1.6 million in ransom and the release often political prisoners, all leftists. Both requests were officially ignored by the government. Then last Saturday he was released, but it was not disclosed what--if anything--his kidnapers got in return.

Echeverria was criticized last year for supposedly encouraging kidnaping when he released 30 leftist prisoners in exchange for Leonhardy's life. He has since vowed never to give in to blackmail, a decision that he said he would not revoke, even in the case of his own father-in-law. "Neither in this nor any other case shall we accede to the demands of kidnapers," said Echeverria.

"Public order is not negotiable and the people and the government will not come to terms with criminals."

Zuno's eldest son Vicente, 48, a lawyer who shares his father's leftist politics, not only blamed the kidnapers but also lashed out at an improbable target, the U.S. "This is an act of environmental pollution," he said, "because our environment is attacked by foreign interests born from imperialism, particularly North American imperialism."

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People is only one of several groups aiming at the overthrow of the government. The most powerful organization is the 23rd of September Communist League,* which is believed to be based in Guadalajara. Last spring, it dynamited factories and monuments and held up banks and businesses all over Jalisco State, of which Guadalajara is the capital. Another group, the Armed Forces of National Liberation, has also carried out a campaign of bank heists and kidnapings, while the Spartacus Leninist League last year murdered Monterrey's industrial patriarch, Eugenic Garza Sada, 82. Yet a fourth group, the Party of the Poor, led by a former schoolteacher, Lucio Cabanas, operates from the rugged mountains of Guerrero State near Acapulco, where it is successfully eluding 10,000 army troops. None of the guerrilla groups are believed to number more than a few score members.

Irritating and embarrassing as they are, the guerrillas and terrorists are so far not a real Castro-like threat to Echeverria or to his party, the P.R.I.

(Partido Revolucionario Institucional), which has ruled Mexico for the past 45 years. They are, however, a symbol of the profound discontent that is increasingly surfacing from beneath the P.R.I.'s outdated revolutionary slogans. Though the economy has grown at a rate of over 7% a year in recent times, it has become obvious that most of the workers and the peasants are being left behind by policies that favor the rich and the upper middle class. Added to that is one of the highest population-growth rates (3.5%) in the world; in the past 25 years the population has more than doubled, from 25 million to 58 million. Despite booming factories at home, unemployment and underemployment are still high (about 40%), and 7.5% of the work force tries to cross the border illegally every year in search of work in the U.S.

Echeverria, who still has two years remaining of his six-year term, thus far has had little luck in reforming the system. His liberal, populist speeches have alarmed the rich and the conservative politicians and businessmen whose support he needs to make real reforms. Yet he has been unsuccessful in winning over the left, which considers his rhetoric hypocritical, since he has done little to bring about the social reforms that he so eloquently calls for. No one expects much change before his term expires, if then. Those who consider themselves potential kidnap victims--the rich and the powerful--are already hiding themselves behind walls at night and bodyguards during the day, resigned to an indefinite state of semi-siege.

* The name is taken from an abortive 1967 guerrilla attack on a Chihuahua army post.

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