Mexico: Not Every Uprising Is a Revolution : Salinas must emphasize negotiation, not repression, in Chiapas revolt

Mexico is a nation with a population of more than 92 million, the third-largest in the Western Hemisphere, and with a strong economy poised for a major leap forward under the North American Free Trade Agreement. As the rebellion rages through Chiapas, the nation’s southernmost province, it is crucial that the size and character of Mexico as a whole be borne in mind.

SENSE OF PROPORTION: Why? Because only then can the enormous difference between the Chiapas uprising and guerrilla movements, superficially so similar, in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador be appreciated. The legitimate grievances of the rebels in those three countries aside, their rebellions were vastly more threatening because the countries in which they occurred were geographically and demographically so much smaller than Mexico. El Salvador has a population of 5.6 million. Its capital, San Salvador, can be and has been threatened by guerrilla uprisings in its border provinces; its land area is so small that no province is ever very far from the capital. Mexico’s capital, the largest city on the planet, is not the city it was when Emiliano Zapata occupied it 80 years ago. Only a major invasion could threaten it today.

Accordingly, the relative restraint that official Mexico showed in its initial response to the violence unleashed by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas is a restraint that the country easily could afford. The stock market has almost certainly overreacted: Mexico as a whole is simply not threatened by this provincial rebellion. For that very reason, we can only deplore Wednesday’s gratuitous strafing and aerial bombing of civilians in the area. Mexico can and should abhor any tactic that criminalizes the population as a whole. The vast majority of the indigenous people of this province are and should be treated as innocent bystanders. Protecting them is ultimately more important than capturing the last guerrilla.

The path back to peace can only be the path of negotiation; and we applaud President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s declared willingness to negotiate. The shadowy Zapatista leadership has shown no such willingness, and one reason may be its wish to remain shadowy. Salinas and his administration will rightly seek to learn with whom they are dealing. But they should not bar any good-faith participant from the meeting table, certainly not someone like Bishop Samuel Ruiz of San Cristobal de las Casas. Ruiz is not in good odor with the administration, but peace will not be restored without a bold gesture or two. And though this uprising is on its face a domestic disturbance, the involvement of Guatemalan refugees, perhaps of Guatemalan-trained or -supplied guerrilla leaders and certainly of a cross-border, international drug trade may dictate a later broadening of the discussion to include Guatemalans as well.

THE OUTSIDER QUESTION: As Alan Weisman shows in an article that will appear in next Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Magazine, the abuse of peasants by international drug lords is not a problem that affects Chiapas and the Lacandon Indian peoples only. Comparable abuses affect the Tarahumara people in the province of Chihuahua. Indigenous peoples are, in fact, victimized by the drug trade in many remote, tropical areas around the world. Their problems cannot be considered in isolation.

Official Mexico may have been unwise to deny the existence of the Zapatista guerrilla movement for so long. NAFTA would most likely not have been jeopardized by timelier candor, for the abuse of the Indians and of the poor in Chiapas, grievous as it may be, is far from definitive of the Mexican economic reality.

Containment of this rebellion should be easy. Full suppression of it may be impossible. To seek the latter would be to widen a conflict that no one wants widened. Mexicans remember, far better than Americans do, what violent revolution can be in the life of a nation. Mexico badly needs a vigorous, multi-party political system; but to say that is to call for reform, not for revolution.