[PEN-L:4842] CSIS spying on Canadian solidarity workers

[D Shniad <shniad@xxxxxx>]

CSIS UPSETS HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

By Linda Diebel
Toronto Star

MEXICO CITY -- Efforts by Canada's spy agency to
interview human rights workers about Mexico have
created questions about the agency itself.
   Human rights workers said calls from Canadian
Security Intelligence Service agents raise concerns
about their personal safety, as well as that of
Mexican colleagues and contacts.
   Marc Xuereb, of the Global Community Centre
based in Waterloo, Ontario, said a CSIS agent
phoned him last week, asking to interview him and
two staff members.
   "We are very worried about what's going on,"
Xuereb said.
   "It's even scarier to us that we are being so
closely monitored when we have two Mexicans with us
here in Canada," he said.  "Their lives could be in
danger."
   Xuereb, who refused the interview, is concerned
CSIS is sharing information with the Mexican
military intelligence as a result of the North
American Free Trade Agreement.
   That has implications, he says, for the safety
of two Mexican colleagues from the Emiliano Zapata
Workers Organization who are in Canada on an
exchange program.
   Xuereb said it struck him as strange that the
agency would have had the names of co-workers who
have a very low profile and are not known to the
public.
   "It is very insidious.  We're not talking about
solidarity with the (Zapatista Army of National
Liberation).  We're talking about helping ordinary
campesinos."
   It also has been learned that CSIS agents last
year contacted another human rights group in
Montreal, the Solidarity Committee for the Mexican
People.
   Montreal human rights lawyer Stewart Istvanffy
said Canadians should be concerned.
   "I think that Canadian security is basically
supporting the Mexican security forces in their
efforts to maintain a one-party system in Mexico,
in place of democracy," he said.
   In Ottawa, Solicitor General Herb Gray implied
CSIS is looking into whether Mexico is interfering
with Canadian human rights activists who have
visited Chiapas, where Zapatista rebels began a
rebellion in January, 1994.

  -- Reprinted in The Vancouver Province
    April 26, 1995

Sid Shniad