Chiapas massacre internal affair, Mexico tells foreigners

Mexico has rejected as unacceptable interference certain representations by foreign governments and organisations over the massacre in the southern state of Chiapas in which 45 peasants died on Monday.

Notimex news agency quoted a Foreign Relations Secretariat communique on Wednesday as "rejecting any remarks by spokesmen or officials of foreign governments or international organizations 'demanding' that Mexico make or 'urging' Mexico to make decisions that are of Mexico's sole competence".

"This constitutes unacceptable intervention in Mexico's internal affairs, a country which has been marked by its unbending respect for the principle of non-intervention," the communique said.

"When criminal actions, even more serious than those we decry today, have taken place in other countries, our government, in strict compliance with the principle of non-intervention in other countries' internal affairs, has purposefully refrained from demanding actions on problems whose solution is solely the competence of local authorities," the Secretariat said.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.