Date: Tue, 18 Apr 1995 10:51:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: Rex Wockner <rwockner@netcom.com>
Subject: GUADALAJARA MAYOR DEFAMES GAYS 


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      * Copyright (c) 1995 Rex Wockner and affiliates. *
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              NEW GUADALAJARA MAYOR DEFAMES GAYS
                       by Rex Wockner

TIJUANA, Mexico -- The new National Action Party (PAN) mayor of
Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city, is defaming gays in
newspaper and broadcast interviews.

	In one such instance, Cesar Coll Carabias said: "And what do
I say to homosexuals? Well, the great majority of us are normal
people. Homosexuality occurs in people who are not normal. They
are like the least-valued whom we now call disabled; like the
deaf or the blind, they are not normal people."

	Coll Carabias is also saying that AIDS is a moral problem
not a public-health problem.

	According to the Tijuana newspaper Frontera Gay, Coll
Carabias' actions mark "the first time in Mexico that a candidate
for popular election based his campaign on attacks on
minorities."

	A newly elected PAN government is also attacking gays in
Mexico's third-largest city, Monterrey. Police closed four gay
bars and have extorted up to $900 each from men who frequent
cruising areas, threatening to out them to family and the press.

	Monterrey gays have fought back by opening new bars and
launching the city's first gay group and first gay newspaper.

	"The PAN party simply does not have any sympathy for gay
people," a Monterrey gay man said in an e-mail interview.

	Mexico's dominate party, the Partido Revolucionario
Institucional (PRI), is not particularly gay-friendly either,
but, unlike the increasingly popular PAN, it rarely singles gays
out for abuse.

	Mexican gay leaders say the PAN clearly has embraced a
"family-values" political ideology similar to that of the U.S.
Republican party's Christian right wing.

	Monterrey is located 146 miles south of Laredo, Texas.
Guadalajara is in the middle of the country, 472 miles southwest
of Monterrey.

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