After months of peaceful propaganda, the Popular Revolutionary Army is going on the offensive. Its killing of at least five soldiers in a week has prompted a statewide emergency in Guerrero.
Army troops in olive drab have stepped up their patrols along the isolated dirt roads criss-crossing the hill country of the southwestern state. Police in black uniforms crowd into pickup trucks to cruise the highways and look anxiously up into the mountains.Tensions are already high here in the weeks before congressional elections in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, could lose the congressional majority it has held for nearly seven decades.
Here in Guerrero, PRI leaders have increased their attacks on the center-left opposition, accusing it of ties to the rebels and drug traffickers.
The rebels say the army is responsible for the violence, which also killed four guerrillas.
"These clashes are the result of harassment of our units . . . and the militarization of the state," the rebels said in a statement Wed-nes-day.
"Given the persecution that continues against our units, it is possible that there will be more clashes, that there will be more casualties for both armies."
The two clashes - on May 24 and Tuesday - were the first substantial confrontations since the year-old rebel movement known by its Spanish acronym, EPR, launched a series of hit-and-run attacks across the country in August, killing 18 people.
The first broke out on a rural highway near the town of Petatlan in central Guerrero. The rebels say they were passing out political leaflets when soldiers surprised them. Two army sergeants and two rebels were killed.
On Tuesday, two dozen rebels ambushed a military patrol outside the small community of El Quemado, 35 miles west of Acapulco. Three soldiers and two rebels were killed in the firefight.
In a sign of how seriously the government is taking the new attacks, Mexico's defense secretary, Gen. Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, traveled by helicopter Sunday to inspect the scene of the first clash.
And the government convened a high-level security meeting in the state capital of Chilpancingo on Wednesday, the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada reported.