MEXICO CITY -- Mario Villanueva, former governor of Quintana Roo state, has fled the country and is hiding out in Cuba, according to an intelligence report quoted Thursday by Reforma newspaper.

The report said Villanueva fled to from Quintana Roo to neighboring Belize on March 27, and then boarded a banana boat for Cuba April 1, four days before his term as governor ended and with it, his immunity from prosecution on charges linked to drug trafficking.

``It is certain, according to three of four informants, that [Villanueva] is in Catalina de Guines'' in Cuba, the paper said. In Havana, the Cuban Foreign Ministry said it had no knowledge that Villanueva had arrived on the island.

Rebel supporters seize disputed Chiapas town

SAN ANDRES LARRAIZAR -- About 3,000 rebel supporters, many of them women and children, reclaimed control of a town in the conflict-torn state of Chiapas on Thursday, a day after authorities seized it from rebels.

About 150 police officers who had been guarding the municipal offices of San Andres Larraizar withdrew as the crowd, nearly all wearing the trademark ski mask of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, hurled trash at them.

The officers had been deployed in front of the building on Wednesday, when Mayor Marcos Diaz marched into his office, which had been occupied for the past four years by the Zapatistas.

Copyright 1999 Miami Herald