Mexico's Fox Gambles on a Crackdown

Mexico's months-long political crisis took a precarious turn Saturday when President Vicente Fox sent special federal forces into the impoverished and violence-torn southern state of Oaxaca, after an American journalist and a local teacher were killed there on Friday.

As Federal paramilitary police were flown into Oaxaca City, the state's capital, Mexicans worried over whether Fox's action would restore calm or simply fuel the social polarization exacerbated by last summer's hotly contested presidential election. "We've been held hostage here by radical groups," Freddy Alcantar, a Oaxaca hotelier told TIME by phone Saturday morning. "Finally the President is imposing the rule of law." But a protester who called himself only Florentino, representing the leftist Popular Assemby of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), told TIME that until Governor Ulises Ruiz resigns, he and other militants — who are believed by many to have the backing of a small-scale Oaxaca guerrilla force from the 1990s that reappeared in the summer — would "reinforce our barricades and call in help from the mountains, valleys and coasts."