Mexican Human Rights Official Visits Area : Immigrants: The consulate in Oxnard says it has recorded nine allegations of abuse since October.

Mexico’s top human rights officials plan to discuss with U.S. authorities a score of alleged human rights abuses against Mexican nationals, including a case in which Oxnard police officers shot a drunk farm worker 18 times after he fired at them.

Rosario Green, executive secretary of Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights, visited Ventura County this week to discuss the alleged abuses with local officials.

Mexican officials have been gathering evidence of abuses against its citizens in the United States since last November, when U.S. President George Bush and Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari released a joint statement urging both countries to work toward ending violence on both sides of the border.

Representatives of both countries are scheduled to meet in Washington next month to develop a strategy aimed at curbing abuses against Mexican immigrants, said Martin Torres, press attache at the Mexican General Consulate in Los Angeles.

Torres said the Mexican Consulate in Oxnard has recorded nine cases of alleged human rights violations against Mexican citizens in Ventura County since October. Torres, who accompanied Green to the county this week, said Green did not discuss specific cases with area officials during her visit.

“We do not want to jeopardize the upcoming round of conversations with our U.S. counterparts in Washington, D.C.,” he said.

Torres said Mexican authorities were particularly disturbed about the shooting of unemployed farm worker Heliodoro Montero by three Oxnard police officers last October.

In that incident, the officers went to the working-class Latino neighborhood of La Colonia in response to a call about a suicidal man who threatened “to take a few people with him.”

The officers were met by Montero, 47, who fired his handgun at the officers before they answered with a 44-shot fusillade that killed him, according to an investigation by the Ventura County district attorney’s office. One of the officers fired two full clips--31 shots--at Montero, the district attorney’s report said.

The investigation concluded that the officers were justified in using force and that Montero, who was legally drunk at the time, posed a threat to the officers and civilians at the scene.

“The district attorney absolved the police officers, but we still have our doubts,” Torres said.

During her 6-hour visit to Ventura County, Green met with immigration-rights representatives, Oxnard’s Mexican Consul Zoila Arroyo de Rodriguez, Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn and Joe Parra, an aide to Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ventura).

“Her mere presence in Ventura County underscores the importance the Mexican government is placing on the rights of immigrants who have come to live and work here,” said Flynn, who presented Green with a proclamation by the Board of Supervisors naming her an honorary citizen of the county.

“An undercurrent of racism remains in this county, and every immigrant group has experienced it through the years, and Ambassador Green reminded us of that,” Flynn said. “I was very impressed. She is the highest-ranking Mexican government official I have ever met.”

After lunch, Green met with Armando Garcia, coordinator of the Immigration Rights Project at El Concilio, a Latino advocacy group.

Garcia said he gave Green several examples of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service harassing Mexican and Mexican-Americans, including an instance last October in which INS officers allegedly raided a Santa Paula residence without a search warrant.

Garcia said he also reported complaints of harassment by the owner of a laundry in the La Colonia neighborhood. “The owner was complaining that his business was being raided every week for no good reason,” Garcia said.

INS officials denied the allegations Thursday. “We don’t enter homes without search warrants, and we don’t raid Laundromats because we feel like it,” said Agent Mike Malloy, head of the INS office in Camarillo.

“We drive by areas where we know people hang around, and we act when we see somebody who looks suspicious based on . . . facts,” Malloy said.

After visiting El Concilio, Green held a closed-door meeting with local representatives of the California Rural Legal Assistance, a statewide legal-rights group for the poor.

“We had a frank discussion about how to improve our contacts with the Mexican government,” said CRLA attorney Marco Antonio Abarca.

“A lot of times we need to track somebody down in a rural town in Mexico with no phones, and we need the Mexican government’s help,” he said. “We are the human rights people this side of the border, and we need to increase our relationship with our colleagues in Mexico.”

Green will end her trip today with a visit to migrant labor camps along the Mexican border in San Diego County, Torres said.