<i> Campesinos’</i> Struggle Over Land Rights Is Widespread

The Indian rebels who staged the New Year’s uprising in Mexico’s Chiapas state are far from the only group seeking redress in the country’s impoverished and conflict-ridden south.

Deep in the vast rain forest known as the Chimalapas, between Chiapas and Oaxaca states, a protracted and sometimes violent battle over land rights has spawned a vigorous, mostly Indian peasant movement.

Although the movement here has no direct link to the current rebellion farther east, the underlying causes of discontent--notably the regionwide inequity of land distribution--are similar to those cited by guerrillas of Chiapas’ so-called Zapatista National Liberation Army.

Here, peasant leaders are pushing a unique, nonviolent remedy: the creation of a Campesino (Peasant) Ecological Reserve to protect the area from Chiapas-based timber-cutters, ranchers, drug traffickers and others who have already ravaged much of the Chimalapas and other Mexican forests. Peasant settlers claim ownership of the entire zone, based on a Zoque Indian purchase from the Spanish crown in 1687--a sale recognized by several Mexican presidents, most recently in 1967.

“We have shown that we, as campesinos , know how to manage and preserve our forest,” said Roque Antonio Guillen, a Chimalapas peasant leader. “This is our home.”

Under the plan, the 15,000 or so peasants residing in the area seek formal recognition of their ownership. They have also requested military assistance to expel wood-cutters, ranchers and the drug traffickers who have cleared stretches of forest to sow marijuana plants and opium poppies, moving their dope via clandestine airstrips.

Environmentalists have strongly backed the novel reserve concept, which has achieved a following among conservationists, human rights activists and artists in a nation still coming to grips with its plundered natural heritage. Many believe that the forest conceals extensive ruins of a civilization linked to the Mayas, in addition to its greatly varied flora and fauna.

“The peasants who live in the forest have a real interest in preserving their land,” said Homero Aridjis, a poet who heads the Group of 100, an environmental group in Mexico City. “Too much has been lost already.”

But timber, ranching and other powerful interests based in Chiapas are vehemently opposed to peasant control of the rich region, Mexico’s largest remaining rain forest, encompassing about 1.5 million acres (more than the state of Delaware). About 1,100 species of animals and plants are found here--more than in most nations--including the jaguar (the Americas’ largest cat), the monkey-devouring harpy eagle (the world’s most powerful), and the garishly plumed quetzal bird.

Development, backed by powerful and sometimes violent interests, threatens the remaining stretches of rain forest here in the heart of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which slices between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Settlers say pistoleros, or hired gunmen, have killed and kidnaped peasants, burned their homes and otherwise tried to force them out and discourage grass-roots organization and conservation.

“We live in fear here,” said Constantino Garcia, a 34-year-old Chinateco Indian who is mayor of this jungle clearing. “But we’re not giving in.”

The heated dispute is illustrative of the bitter conflicts that have long pitted mostly rural Indian inhabitants of southern Mexico against wealthy landed interests of predominantly European and mixed-race origins. Violent land clashes and forced expulsions of peasants are entwined in the region’s dense fabric.

Here, human rights activists say, it is as though the bloody Mexican Revolution--fought largely to guarantee land and equal rights for dispossessed campesinos --never took place.

Land conflicts are particularly chronic in Chiapas state, which is often said to be more akin to neighboring Guatemala--with its huge indigenous population and stark concentration of wealth among a mostly white elite--than to industrialized northern and central Mexico.

“Anyone visiting Chiapas must feel as though they’ve traveled back in time,” Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the activist Roman Catholic prelate of San Cristobal de las Casas, said in a recent interview.

Leading the opposition to the peasant-reserve effort is Chiapas’ most powerful son: Patrocinio Gonzalez Blanco Garrido, the former Chiapas governor who now sits as Cabinet-level secretary of government, in charge of the nation’s internal security.

The former governor dismisses the peasant plan as a land-grab by Oaxacans. (In a long-running dispute, Oaxaca and Chiapas officials both claim the southeastern third of the Chimalapas region.) Gonzalez is equally suspicious of the communal land claims, questioning the validity of the Indians’ colonial-era acquisition.

While critics call Gonzalez a guardian for loggers and ranchers, he describes himself as a rain forest champion. He takes credit for halting the destruction of the Lacandon rain forest farther south, now officially protected but already largely denuded by development.

“We cannot allow to occur in the Chimalapas what happened in Amazonia, what happened in the Lacandon,” Gonzalez said in a recent interview.

Gonzalez favors a conventional protective scheme: the creation of a Chimalapas ecological reserve, operated by the federal government. “Authorities cannot abdicate their responsibilities,” he said.

But conservationists and peasants point out that the plunder of Mexico’s natural resources has seldom abated because of officially protected status.

Although the peasant reserve notion only surfaced two years ago, grass-roots activism here dates back more than two decades.

Indeed, in 1986 villagers detained the brother of the then-governor of Chiapas, who was accused of illegally cutting wood and growing coffee on communal land. (Over the weekend, the Chiapas rebels reportedly seized the former governor himself, Absalon Castellanos, a former army general, from his ranch.)

Here in San Francisco la Paz, a quiet riverside hamlet of 400 named after a saint of peace, an incongruous aura of fear hovers above the tidy village of thatched-roof huts at the edge of the towering forest canopy. Villagers say hired gunmen from neighboring Chiapas often threaten inhabitants, who overwhelmingly back the peasant reserve plan.

“They want to force us all out and be free to cut down the forest,” said Angela Mendez, a beleaguered mother of seven. Her late husband founded the settlement in 1960 after walking eight days through the jungle.

One of her sons, Sigilfredo Escobedo, 39, says he narrowly survived an attack by a knife-wielding intruder who broke into his home on a recent evening. Another son, Baldemar Escobedo, a 33-year-old father of three, was kidnaped and “disappeared” along a forest path last year.

Across the rushing Rio Uxpanapa, in the settlement of San Pedro Buena Vista, Andres Gomez Castellano says his wife and two young children disappeared in July, 1992, while walking along a jungle path. Searchers found their bodies two days later; they had been beaten to death, he said. He suspects that the slayings, to date unsolved, were acts of retribution for inhabitants’ support of the reserve plan.

Ironically, Gomez and about 40 other Tzotzil Indian families came to the jungle four years ago seeking a respite after being evicted from their ancestral homes in the village of San Juan Chamula, in the cool pine forests of southern Chiapas. Like thousands of others, they were expelled in a religious dispute after converting to a Protestant sect from their Catholic faith.

“We came looking for land and a place where we wouldn’t be persecuted,” Gomez said. “But now our new village is stained by blood.”