JOHN ROSS ON PEMEX

On July 11th, newspapers in Mexico City began receiving a series of communiqués under the rubric of the "Military Zone Command of the Popular Revolutionary Army and State Committee of the Party of the Popular Democratic Revolution"

In documents distributed to the press, the EPR identified itself as a Marxist-Leninist military organization composed of 14 little-known guerrilla "focos" that seemed to revolve around an alliance between a clandestine clique of Maoists with a predilection for bombing - the PROCUP - and the Party of the Poor, founded by the long-dead guerrilla martyr Lucio Cabanas along Guerrero's Costa Grande in the 1970s.

the arrest of two top EPR comandantes May 24th in Oaxaca when Eduardo Reyes Amaya and "Raymundo Rivera Bravo" AKA Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sanchez were taken into custody in a hotel in the city's market. Cruz Sanchez is described by guerrilla historian Carlos Montemayor as a 30-year veteran of clandestine armed movements in Mexico and is thought to be the brother of Tiburcio Cruz Sanchez also known as Francisco Cerezo, a maximum EPR leader and patriarch of a clan that includes three activist sons, two of whom are serving long prison sentences for bombing banks in 2001.

According to the Oaxaca daily Noticias, which the hated governor Ulises Ruiz has tried to shut down repeatedly,

But whether the attack was a

• government ruse to reign in social discontent, induce terrorist paranoia as a tool of control, and underscore the need for opening up PEMEX to private investment or a

• legitimate initiative by the armed resistance, the bombings have spiced up a pot already over boiling with upheaval.

... and the mysterious religious right formation "El Yunque" which has had so much influence in both the Fox and Calderon administrations.

Others such as the left-leaning daily La Jornada analyst Carlos Fazio scoff at the bombing as a "hoax."

What surprised Felipe Canseco, a former leader of the PROCUP and uncle of the Cerezo clan was how long it took the EPR to respond to the disappearance of its leaders in Oaxaca on May 25th. "When I went down, he comrades took action the next day," he recalls. Canseco, who served eight years for guerrilla activities, estimates that there are 30 armed groups operating in 22 out of Mexico's 32 states.

One of the hottest pirate DVDs on the Mexican street these days is "The Violin", which depicts the military's "dirty war" in Guerrero in the 1970s in brutal detail. ... those terrible years when an estimated 650 Cabanas supporters along the Costa Grande were forcibly disappeared and held in secret lock-ups where they were tortured and eventually killed and thrown into the Pacific Ocean from Mexican air force planes near Acapulco.