13 KILLED, 23 HURT IN GUERRILLA ATTACKS IN 4 MEXICAN STATES.

Byline: Sam Dillon The New York Times

Armed members of a newly emerged guerrilla organization attacked police and military posts in four Mexican states late Wednesday, leaving 13 dead and 23 wounded in nearly simultaneous strikes that were the bloodiest outbreak of insurgent violence in Mexico in nearly three years.

The frontal assaults on police stations and army posts, which appear to have been coordinated, came in towns stretching across a broad swath of southern Mexico in the states of Mexico, Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas.

Government officials Thursday attributed the actions to the Popular Revolutionary Army, which became publicly known only in June, when masked gunmen appeared at a political demonstration in Guerrero and fired automatic rifles into the air.

In the weeks since, the group - which has called for a popular movement to depose the government and set up a socialist regime - has carried out some small ambushes, killing a handful of police officers and soldiers. But it had been derided by government officials as little more than a ``pantomime,'' limited to parts of one state.

In Wednesday's surprise actions, however, the group deployed scores, perhaps hundreds, of troops and took few casualties. Army troops Thursday occupied the towns that were attacked and began combing the mountains, crisscrossing southern Mexico in pursuit of the rebels.

The attacks came four days before President Ernesto Zedillo's state of the union address Sept. 1, the government's most important annual political ritual. They seemed intended to upstage Zedillo's speech and give an impression of a widespread guerrilla presence in Mexico.

The Popular Revolutionary Army says it has no direct ties with the better known Zapatista rebels, who first appeared in the southern state of Chiapas in 1994 and are now engaged in protracted peace negotiations.

Some 50 masked guerrillas slipped into this mountain town of 35,000 people in Oaxaca state, 75 miles west of the state capital, at 10 p.m. They opened fire on a police barracks and killed two officers before driving out of town in a truck, hours before the arrival of army reinforcements. The rebels suffered no casualties, the police said.

The rebels left Tlaxiaco's whitewashed walls covered with graffiti, signed with their Spanish initials: ``Long Live the Popular Struggle! Long Live the EPR!''

An hour or so after the attack here, 80 men stormed the center of a village to the east in Santa Maria Huatulco, a beach resort in Oaxaca that is one of Mexico's prime tourist destinations. In a half-hour gunbattle, state officials said, nine people died: five police officers and soldiers, two Mexican civilian passers-by and two rebels. No tourists were hurt.

The state government of Guerrero reported armed attacks in four widely separated towns.

A grenade assault destroyed half of a police station on the outskirts of the tourist mecca of Acapulco and left one policeman wounded. Six army soldiers who were cleaning the street outside their barracks were wounded in a drive-by attack in the town of Ciudad Altamirano. In all, two police officers were killed and six soldiers and policemen wounded in Guerrero.

In Chiapas, guerrillas set up a roadblock and distributed pamphlets on an important highway. Government officials said three people were wounded in an attack in the state of Mexico, which borders on Mexico City.

Government officials in Mexico City on Thursday sought to play down the significance of the attacks, pointing out that they were relatively small and took place far from Mexico's major cities. They insisted that the Popular Revolutionary Army is a small group that has planned its actions to attract press coverage and magnify its strength.

Arturo Nunez, undersecretary of the Interior Ministry, confirmed in a news conference that the attacks were carried out by the EPR, which he called ``clearly terrorist.'' He said that the rebels had acted ``with cruelty and cowardice, seeking to confront the minimum possible risks,'' and that the government would pursue and prosecute them for the killings.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO Carmela Altamirano Vazquez, center, waits to identify the body of her husband, a street vendor killed during a rebel attack.

Associated Press