Visitors Now: | |
Total Visits: | |
Total Stories: |
Story Views | |
Now: | |
Last Hour: | |
Last 24 Hours: | |
Total: |
A peasant leader in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca was gunned down Tuesday, but the motive for the killing has not been determined, prosecutors said.
Inocente Maximino Cortes Garcia was killed in the city of Miahuatlan de Porfirio Diaz, the Oaxaca Attorney General’s Office said.
Cortes Garcia’s body had “several gunshot wounds,” the AG’s office said in a statement.
Six bullet casings were found at the shooting scene, prosecutors said.
“No line of investigation has been ruled out,” the AG’s office said.
Cortes Garcia was coordinator of the council members at the last meeting of the Miahuatlan city government, the AG’s office said.
The 59-year-old Cortes Garcia, who was a peasant activist in the Sierra Sur mountains of Oaxaca, was murdered while heading to the bus terminal for a trip to Oaxaca city, the state capital, the El Universal Web site reported on its Web site.
Oaxaca is one of Mexico’s poorest states and the state with the largest Indian population, in terms both of absolute numbers and as a proportion of the total inhabitants.
Most of Mexico’s roughly 11 million Indians – representing slightly more than 10 percent of the country’s population – are concentrated in southern states such as Oaxaca, Veracruz, Chiapas and Guerrero.
Sixteen of Mexico’s 62 surviving indigenous languages are spoken in Oaxaca.
Published in Latino Daily News