ustxtxb_obs_1993_09_03_50_00024-00000_000.pdf

Postmaster: If undeliverable, send Form 3579 to The Texas Observer, 307 W. 7th St., Austin, Texas 78701 POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE EARLY LINE. Rick Perry, the Democrat who turned Republican to run the race that unseated Jim Hightower in 1992, may face a Republican-turned-Democrat next year in the race for Agriculture Commissioner. Marvin Gregory, a Sulphur Springs dairy farmer who was Hopkins County Republican chairman until he rejected Reaganomics in the early 1980s, is making the rounds of Democratic leaders in preparation for a race. Rep. Pete Patterson of Brookston also is said to be interested in the ag post against Perry, who was recognized by only 18 percent of repsondents to a recent Texas Poll. Among the potential Democratic challengers against U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison are former Attorney General Jim Mattox, who is expected to start the race in earnest after Labor Day; U.S. Rep. Mike Andrews of Houston, a protege of Lloyd Bentsen, who also sounds serious about the race; Richard Fisher, the Dallas financier and Perotista who finished with 8 percent of the vote in the special Senate election last May; and others who have been making less overt moves, including U.S. Rep. John Bryant and U.S. Rep. Martin Frost, both of Dallas, and U.S. Rep. Jim Chapman of Sulphur Springs, whose vote against President Clinton’s budget may have undermined his chances in a Democratic primary. In another high-profile race, San Antonio voting rights attorney Rolando Rios is said to be interested in challenging freshman Republican U.S. Rep. Henry Bonilla of San Antonio if state and national Democrats are willing to make a serious financial commitment to the race. Carlos Guerra of the San Antonio ExpressNews reports that Republican operatives have indicated the GOP is willing to drop a million dollars or more to re-elect Bonilla, who they see as a potential wedge into the Mexican-American Democratic vote in South Texas. JENNIFER NARBURY;the Texas lawyer who backed the Guatemalan government into a corner in a protracted campaign to find her “disappeared” husband, succeeded on Aug. 17 in witnessing the exhumation of the grave where the Army reported her husband, a commander in the Guatemalan guerilla army, was buried. This was Harbury’s second visit to the cemetery in Retalhuleu \(See ment of holding her husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, in a clandestine prison, she was told her husband had killed himself after he was wounded in a confrontation with the government. But two other guerillas told international human rights workers that they had seen Bamaca in prison after the army had reported him dead. Harbury obtained permission from the government to exhume the body and was accompanied to the gravesite by Austin civil rights lawyer James C. Harrington and Houston lawyer and human rights activist Frances “Sissy” Farenthold. The first exhumation, in the spring of 1992, was stopped by the government just before the body bag was lifted Jennifer Harbury out of the grave. Since then, Harbury has traveled through the offices of newspaper editors and members of Congress, telling her story and showing her documents to anyone who would listen. Her resolve got her a second exhumation order from the government. According to reports from Guatemala, three graves were exhumed before a body with the same wounds the army said had caused the Bamaca’s death and dressed in a uniform like Bamaca’s was disinterred. A forensic specialist at the site, however, verified that the body was not Bamaca’s. Harbury, who has served as a law clerk for federal Judge William Wayne Justice of Tyler and worked for Texas Rural Legal Aid, has filed an action against the Guatemalan government with the Organization of American States, asking that her husband be presented alive before a public tribunal in Guatemala. On Sept. 6 an OAS delegation will arrive in Guatemala to investigate Harbury’s allegations and look into other claims about clandestine prisons. GREEN GRIPES. Former Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe will serve as chair of a four-month-old environmental organization that was started because “common sense is losing out in the environmental arena,” according to Texas Agriculture, the publication of the Texas Farm Bureau, an insurance and tire sales company and agribusiness advocacy group headquartered in Waco. Ag Commissioner Rick Perry made his pitch when the group presented its agenda to the East Texas Landowners Conference in Crockett. “We hear the emotionalism and we see the sensationalism on a daily basis,” Perry said of the environmental movement: Hewarned that millions of people’s thinking could be tainted by the activism of extremists like Jeremy Rifkin, an author and activist who has waged a campaign against the cattle industry. Those influenced by the environmental movement, Perry said, “don’t understand the concept of private stewardship of the land … of having a piece of property. … My biggest concern is the alphabet agencies and the regulations that are coming down, almost like a hailstorm, almost like a deluge. That’s what worries me more about agriculture today than anything else,” Perry said. BUDGET CUTTERS’ BLUES. Kay B. Hutchison campaigned to slash federal spending and voted against the Clinton economic plan because it did not contain enough spending cuts. But on the Senate Armed Services Committee she voted to spend $100 million over five years for a new group called the American Metalcasting Consortium. According to Knut Royce of Newsday, the $20 million a year would fund research and development for the troubled metal-casting and foundry industry, but, “Unlike other research programs financed partly by the federal goverment to help U.S. companies compete globally, this grant would not require Continued on pg. 18 CARMEN GARCIA 24 SEPTEMBER 3, 1993