WRECKER SERVICE: Men were sent to dismantle the Falun Gong parade float by local powerbroker, Hector Lopez, who said his order was a “suggestion” by the Chinese Embassy. (Miguel Mendoza Castro/The Epoch Times)

When the Chinese Embassy in Mexico City had a local powerbroker in Chinatown wreck a Falun Gong parade float two weeks ago, they couldn’t have guessed it would backfire as badly as it did. Attempting to make the group invisible, the action instead gave Falun Gong national prominence and sympathy.

The occasion was a Chinese New Year celebration, and Hector Lopez did not want it marred by the presence of a group that is opposed both by Beijing and the Chinese Embassy in Mexico; as a representative for the businesses in Chinatown, he is beholden to and works closely with the latter.

Onlookers watched agog as a team of burly men—later found to be local government employees—tore apart the bright yellow parade float. The camera of a journalist from La Razón newspaper was rolling, and the story spread through YouTube and the Mexican press.

After a primetime expose of the incident by famous journalist Denise Maerker on her Starting Point program on Mexico’s major national station Televisa, officials from Cuauhtémoc district, where Chinatown is located, admitted there had been “excesses.”

Many Mexicans had never heard of Falun Gong—a Chinese spiritual practice with five meditation exercises and a focus on the principles truthfulness, compassion, forbearance—and its persecution in China, before they saw Ms. Maerker’s program.

Mexicans were astonished at the way the Falun Gong group was treated, and troubled at the implications: “Which law do we follow here: Mexico’s or China’s?” asked Ms. Maerker pointedly at the end of her report.

Mr. Lopez holds the answer to that question. On that late night political analysis program Mr. Lopez explained that, as far as he is concerned, since Falun Gong is banned in China, practitioners are unwelcome in Mexico’s Chinatown. “I asked him if they [the embassy] pressured him, and he said ‘Ahhh… they suggested it,’” Ms. Maerker said in an interview with The Epoch Times.

“But he wouldn’t commit to tell me this on the camera, would he.” He later regretted admitting that, even though it was off camera, she said. Ms. Maerker did not include this remark in her broadcast because the Chinese Embassy would not give her an interview where she could corroborate the claim.

The Epoch Times called and sent emails to the Chinese Embassy in Mexico seeking comment, but they did not respond.

On other occasions Mr. Lopez revealed his relationship with the embassy to others. On Feb. 5, the day the float was dismantled, he explained to Gerardo de la Concha, a political commentator and supporter of Falun Gong who was on site, that his job is the “intermediary” between local merchants and the embassy, and that he “represented” the embassy’s interests in the area. The embassy made it clear that a Falun Gong presence was ill wanted, he said. The Chinese Embassy often wields strong influence over the Chinese Diaspora and Chinatowns, particularly in Latin American countries.

The video of the Feb. 5 incident shows Mr. Lopez’s conspicuous presence: he was standing next to the float in a black Chinese jacket emblazoned with a dragon, smoking a cigarette, watching his men take it apart.

In an interview with The Epoch Times Mr. Lopez justified the float’s demolition: “They come to introduce a meditation practice that is banned in China, and everyone here is Chinese. So, they are not welcome. … They were again prevented from participating on Sunday because they had no permission and no authorization to come to practice their meditation.”

Two years previously he had said the same thing to Rosaura Pliego, the Falun Gong practitioner who organized the float, and she and her peers were ejected from Chinatown. They had gone to the area during the Chinese New Year celebrations to teach their exercises and hand out flyers about the practice and the persecution.

After what happened two years ago, before the Chinese New Year Ms. Pliego contacted Mexico’s Human Rights Commission this time. It should have been an unnecessary step, but she wanted to take precautions.

Ms. Pliego was informed that they had as much right as anyone else to be there, because they were simply exercising their constitutional rights, and needed no permission slip to do so. They were advised to call if any problems eventuated. As a surety, the Human Rights Commission sent a letter to the Cuauhtémoc District emphasizing that Falun Gong practitioners were not to be harassed. But that letter was ignored.

On Feb. 5 Mr. Lopez cited the absence of a permission slip from the Human Rights Commission as the reason that the float should be dismantled. After the video was put online and the issue blew up in the media, he dropped that argument and instead said that Falun Gong practitioners were simply unwelcome in Chinatown.

“If you throw a party at your house and I’m not invited but I come anyway; with good cause you are going to throw me out or you are going to stop me from coming in. … They are the ones starting things with us,” he said in the interview with The Epoch Times.

The case is a microcosm of the battle being fought by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) against Falun Gong in China, and reflects the same dynamics that play out between Chinese Embassies and consulates and Falun Gong practitioners around the world.

In China, practitioners are persecuted by being arbitrarily imprisoned or put into labor camps where they may be tortured, sometimes to death. After an intensive anti-Falun Gong propaganda campaign for the first few years from July 1999, when the persecution began, little mention is now made of Falun Gong in the Chinese media. As practitioners seek to tell the populace about the persecution against them, Chinese authorities try to shut them up.

In Chinatowns around the world, street parades are strictly a political matter for Chinese diplomats, whose job it is to make sure that Falun Gong practitioners stay out.

But if the intentions of the embassy were to silence Falun Gong in Mexico, their execution in this case backfired badly.

The incongruous images of a team of men pulling apart a traditional Chinese-themed parade float represented to many a distasteful level of foreign interference in Mexico’s local affairs. The story prompted bad press for China and dissatisfaction from the public.

“When Will China’s Berlin Wall Fall?” ran the headline of a piece by Mr. Concha in La Razón ; “Repression Against Chinese in the Federal District” ran another in the daily El Arsenal , which rounded out the editorial by discussing the “monstrous cruelty” of China’s system of re-education concentration camps.

In the video of the Feb. 5 incident, some Mexicans can be seen agape as the float is dismantled; others yelled for them to stop; others approached practitioners afterward to express their support, emphasizing that Mexico is a country that respects freedom of belief, expression, and assembly, according to Ms. Pliego.

“Now that the media and some politicians in Mexico have become aware of this aggression, it has caused great indignation in Mexican society,” Ms. Pliego says. “The result has been completely contrary to what the CCP seeks to do. Many people in the country now know about Falun Gong and the terrible persecution. These events have now multiplied, and only assisted our efforts to help people understand how the Chinese regime persecutes Falun Gong.”

Additional reporting by Carlos Guzmán, Oscar Nicolas Suárez Luna, Marta Pederoche, and Jose Rivera.

To view the original article and video footage, click here.