MEXICO CITY – Mexican federal authorities found a group of 17 people after an environmental activist in the southern state of Guerrero had reported them as missing, an official told Efe.

Agents with the Attorney General’s Office and army soldiers found the relatives of Ignacio Salto Villa in “perfect condition” Thursday in the village of El Porvenir, the government spokesman in Guerrero, Arturo Martinez, said.

He added that the 17 people were found after Salto Villa, who had filed an abduction complaint with the Guerrero state Attorney General’s Office, received a telephone call from individuals informing him they were in that hamlet.

El Porvenir, located in the Guerrero municipality of Petatlan, is three hours by car from Cerro Verde, the highland village where the group was allegedly abducted last weekend by armed assailants, he said.

The official added that investigators were still trying to determine whether or not the people were kidnapped.

The group of 17 are currently receiving medical and psychological care and have been given the chance to give a complete statement but thus far have decided not to, Martinez said.

Salto Villa, secretary-general of the Hermenegildo Galeana Free Front peasant environmentalist group, told the Guerrero state AG’s office that a group of gunmen abducted his family members Sunday in Cerro Verde, located in the Costa Grande region.

The activist told a radio station Thursday that he learned of the abductions from an individual who phoned him and offered to release his relatives in exchange for information about associates of environmental activists Eva Alarcon and Marcial Bautista, who were kidnapped in Guerrero on Dec. 7 while en route to Mexico City.

Salto Villa said he refused to heed the caller’s request.

Since Bautista worked to protect woodland areas through his Organization of Peasant Environmentalists of the Sierra de Petatlan, the kidnappers of “my relatives figured we may have information on them because we were involved in the same thing,” he said before his family members were located.

Bautista and Alarcon also are affiliated with the nationwide Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, or MPJD, founded by prominent poet Javier Sicilia to press for an end to the drug war that has claimed 50,000 lives in Mexico since December 2006.

Another environmental activist, Javier Torres Cruz, who had sought to protect highland forests in Guerrero from drug traffickers wanting to clear land for opium crops, was killed in April in Petatlan.

Guerrero is being fought over by several drug cartels that covet its Pacific coastline and mountains where marijuana and opium poppy are grown. EFE