Ochoa Defended Many Who Accused Military of Torture; Colleagues Threatened

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service

MEXICO CITY, Oct. 20 -- One of Mexico's leading human rights lawyers, who had been kidnapped and threatened in the past for her defense of clients alleging
torture by Mexico's military and security services, was found shot to death in her office.

Digna Ochoa y Placido, 37, a former nun, was found Friday with gunshot wounds to her face and legs. A note found beside her threatened activists at the Mexico
City organization where Ochoa had done much of her work, the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center.

"She was a role model for all human rights defenders," the Rev. Edgar Cortez, a Jesuit priest who runs the center, said at a memorial service today attended by more
than 100 people. "This act was a clear aggression against the entire human rights community."

Mexico has a grim record of human rights violations, especially involving the military. Human rights activists here generally work in an environment of harassment and
intimidation.

As a lawyer handling high-profile cases that often caught international attention, Ochoa had received numerous death threats and was kidnapped twice in 1999.

In one of the abductions, she was tied to a chair in her home for nine hours while her captors interrogated her about her clients and their possible connection to
guerrilla groups. They opened a canister of natural gas and left her to die, but she managed to free herself.

Perhaps Ochoa's best-known clients at the human rights center were Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, two ecologists from Guerrero state who have been
jailed since May 1999 on weapons and drug convictions.

Human rights activists say the two were arrested simply for challenging the government and powerful private logging interests. Montiel and Cabrera have received
several prestigious environmental awards while in prison.

Montiel and Cabrera say they were tortured for several days by Mexican soldiers. Ochoa was an outspoken critic of the military's history of torture, killings and
disappearances.

In 1999 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a resolution urging the Mexican government to protect Ochoa. Amnesty International and the American
Bar Association presented Ochoa with awards for her work.

Last year, facing more threats, Ochoa left the human rights center and moved to Washington, where she worked for the Center for Justice and International Law.

She returned to Mexico this year and was representing two brothers accused of planting bombs that exploded outside a Mexico City bank in August. The brothers
are suspected members of a small Marxist guerrilla group. Their first court appearance was scheduled for Monday. Ochoa's friends called the timing suspicious.

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