Colombia has asked Mexico to investigate ties between Mexican citizens and the FARC guerrillas after four Mexicans were found among the dead in Colombia's March 1 strike on a rebel camp in Ecuador. In disclosing the request, Mexico's Exterior Secretariat said the government had opened a probe into whether the country harbors FARC collaborators. "The Mexican government is worried that Mexican citizens might be involved with an organization like the FARC," the secretariat said in a statement.

One Mexican at the camp, university student Lucia Morett, survived the attack. She told reporters from her hospital bed that she was with several other Mexicans for academic study. Mexico condemned the attack as a violation of Ecuador's sovereignty, though it considers the FARC a criminal organization. In 2002, Mexican authorities ordered closed what they called a FARC office at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). (Reuters, March 14)

On March 4 the Mexican Prosecutor General's Office (PGR) opened an investigation of the four dead Mexican students and the one surviving Mexican, Lucia Morett Alvarez, for possible links to the FARC. Some Mexican media have also suggested links to drug trafficking.

In a Mexico City press conference on March 14, family members denied that the students were members of any armed group. Morett's aunt, Maria Alvarez Moctezuma, said her niece, who is hospitalized in Quito for treatment of her injuries, was on a visit to the camp to carry out "interviews that would enrich her researches." Morett's parents have noted that Mexico failed to issue a complaint against Colombia for the attack on five unarmed Mexican citizens. (La Jornada, March 15 via Weekly News Update on the Americas)

See our last posts on Mexico and its indigenous guerilla movement, and Colombia and the FARC.