Digna Ochoa y Placido, 38, who had left the country temporarily after being
                 repeatedly attacked and threatened, was found shot to death Friday evening in her
                 Mexico City office in what authorities called a politically motivated slaying.

                 "In the context of Mexico's transition [to democracy] an act like this is the most
                 savage attack yet on the rights movement," Emilio Alvarez Icaza, president of the
                 Mexico City rights commission, told a news conference. "If the case is not
                 investigated, we send a very powerful message of impunity."

                 Ochoa had defended imprisoned Zapatista rebels from Chiapas state as well as two
                 peasant ecologists widely viewed as political prisoners. Recently she was assisting
                 in the defense of two brothers accused of exploding homemade bombs outside a
                 Mexico City bank in August, linked by authorities to armed Marxist insurgents.

                 "There is no doubt the motive was political," city prosecutor Bernardo Batiz told a
                 news conference.

                 A letter found with her body threatened members of the Jesuit-run Miguel Agustin
                 Pro Juarez human rights center where Ochoa had worked until about a year ago,
                 when she left the country for her safety and to study, Alvarez said.

                 She returned to Mexico in April and joined a private office working with other
                 human rights lawyers.

                 Ochoa had received many death threats in the past three years and was twice
                 kidnapped in 1999. The second time, armed men allegedly broke into her home, tied
                 her to a chair, opened a gas canister and left her to die, but she was able to free
                 herself.

                 The London-based human rights group Amnesty International last year awarded her
                 its Enduring Spirit Award for continuing her work despite years of threats and
                 violent attacks.

                 The Inter-American Human Rights Court in 1999 ordered measures to protect
                 Ochoa and her co-workers, including assigning them body guards.

                 Rights leaders including Edgar Cortez, who heads the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez
                 rights group, expressed concern over efforts to solve Ochoa's killing, saying
                 authorities had made no progress investigating earlier attacks against her.

                 "In more than a year there has been nothing, which makes it difficult to have
                 confidence in this investigation," Cortez told local radio.

                 At the time she was kidnapped, Ochoa was defending two ecologists imprisoned in
                 the southern state of Guerrero, among the most controversial human rights cases in
                 recent years.

                 They remain in prison on drugs and weapons charges, though the National Human
                 Rights Commission said that the evidence against them was fabricated.

                    Copyright 2001 Reuters.