A conservative lawmaker Thursday blamed the government for death threats made against a prominent critic, and warned there could be ``a violent reaction'' if human rights abuses by police are not curbed. The death threats directed against Jorge Castaneda, a prominent journalist and intellectual, have provoked an uproar. Castaneda has been an outspoken critic of the economic and political policies of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. The city council of Mexico City has demanded an investigation of the threats. The U.S.-based Committee for the Protection of Journalists wrote a letter to Salinas that said it is ``profoundly worried'' about the threats. Cesar Coll, a federal lawmaker from the right-of-center opposition National Action Party, said the government was trying to intimidate Castaneda because he is one of its most prominent critics. ``The government is to blame for these threats,'' Coll told a news conference. ``If it doesn't gain control over the police, there could be a violent reaction.'' On Wednesday, the executive committee of the Institutional Revolutionary Party condemned the threats against Castaneda. It issued a statement calling them ``repugnant'' and adding that the case would be a good test for the government's new human rights commission. Earlier this week, Salinas called Castaneda from Tokyo, where the president was making a state visit, to express his ``solidarity in the face of this unacceptable incident.'' Salinas also made public a letter he wrote to Castaneda saying the threats go ``precisely against what I have maintained as an invariable norm of conduct for my administration.'' Last Friday, Castaneda's secretary said she was stopped by four armed men, interrogated at gunpoint and warned that her employer would be killed if he continued his activities. On Monday, she identified one of the men who threatened her as a member of the Mexico City judicial police. On her way home from the prosecutor's office, she said she was again threatened by an armed man. Castaneda said he holds the government responsible for his safety and that of his family. The incidents follow the release earlier this month of a report by a human rights monitoring group that sharply criticizes abuses by the police and security forces in Mexico. The report by the New York-based Americas Watch _ ``Human Rights in Mexico: A Policy of Impunity'' _ said violent human rights abuses have become institutionalized. ``This pattern of excessive violence and abuse can only mean that either the Mexican government has adopted a policy of tolerating such behavior, or it has lost control over its police, security and prosecuting agencies,'' the report said. ``Torture and extra-judicial killings by federal and state police and the country's security forces are disturbingly frequent in Mexico,'' it said. Americas Watch cited several cases in which journalists had been intimidated, kidnapped or murdered. The most notorious is the 1984 assassination of the outspoken columnist Manuel Buendia. The Salinas administration has indicted the former head of the Mexican equivalent of the FBI in the slaying. Castaneda has written for Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and the Mexican magazine Proceso. He also coauthored the recent book on U.S.-Mexico relations, ``Limits to Friendship,'' with Robert Pastor of Emory University in Atlanta. Castaneda, the son of a former Mexican foreign minister, is a supporter of leftist opposition leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, leader of the Democratic Revolutionary Party. Cardenas ran a strong second to Salinas in the 1988 presidential election. Mexico's government and ruling party have long been accused inside Mexico of using threats and violence to intimidate opponents and election fraud to maintain the Institutional Revolutionary Party's 61-year-old grip on power. The Castaneda incident coming on the heels of the Americas Watch report has focused international attention on allegations of human rights abuses. In the past, Americas Watch said such allegations had been overlooked, saying this was ``more a testament to the Mexican government's careful cultivation of its pro-human rights image than its care to ensure that individual human rights are respected.'' Other government critics have reported receiving death threats. Norma Corona Sapien, the head of a state human rights commission in the west coast state of Sinaloa, received similar threats before she was gunned down on a street in the capital of Culiacan May 21. Salinas, who has pledged to end corruption and strong-arm tactics by the ruling party, created the National Human Rights Commission after the Corona slaying.
