Mexican Troops Step Up Drive to Crush Revolt

Army troops conducted house-to-house searches here Wednesday while the air force bombarded suspected rebel strongholds in a push to crush a 6-day-old Indian revolt that has left scores dead and posed an embarrassing challenge to the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

As the rebels appeared to continue withdrawing toward the jungle-covered hills of southern Mexico, government aircraft circled above on search-and-destroy missions. Panicked residents fled their villages, and the government offered to negotiate with the rebels--but only if they first surrender.

In Ocosingo, scene of some of the heaviest fighting earlier this week, bodies lay in the streets as troops hunting rebels kicked in doors and rummaged through the town’s lone Roman Catholic church.

The insurrection--the deadliest rebellion in this country in decades--stunned Mexican authorities, who now appear embarked on efforts to demonstrate they can regain control.

For years, the Salinas government spent millions of dollars in a tireless campaign to hone the image of Mexico as a blossoming democracy, a country poised on the horizon of economic greatness, a reliable trading partner. In a few short days, Mexican analysts say, that image was shattered by armed Indians demanding the most basic of concessions: land, a decent wage, humane living conditions, social equality.

The “New Mexico” was suddenly reminded of its ancient reality, of the millions of Mexicans who still live in abject poverty, of the plight of the descendants of the once-great Maya who have been left behind in Mexico’s quest for progress.

“Mexican reality fell brutally on top of the imaginary country of the Salinas government,” wrote columnist and economist Raymundo Riva Palacio in the financial newspaper El Financiero. “The public appearance of an armed movement is a serious wake-up call for a regime that has used decrees to make change.”

Salinas is now faced with the daunting mission of repairing the image of Mexico that he worked so hard to cultivate. He appears intent on reassuring American politicians and investors, and on downplaying the violence as an isolated incident by people the government-controlled media refer to as “transgressors.”

The challenge to Salinas’ authority comes just as the ruling political party seemed guaranteed of an easy victory in this year’s presidential elections, and it effectively upstaged the official Jan. 1 starting date of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the centerpiece of Salinas’ policies.

The Mexican air force fired rockets into the rugged hillsides surrounding the picturesque town of San Cristobal de las Casas, according to witnesses and reporters. Armored personnel carriers rolled in after the air strikes.

Truckloads of troops rumbled through Ocosingo and over the winding roads here in Chiapas state, while others were used to evacuate frightened civilian residents.

At last official account, 95 people have been killed since the rebels swept into six towns on New Year’s Day, but the final toll is expected to be much higher.

An estimated 12,000 troops--one-fifth of Mexico’s armed forces--were participating in the attack. The rebels are thought to number between 1,000 and 2,000.

One of the rockets fired Wednesday fell within yards of a crew for the Spanish-language television network, Univision. Members of the crew, who were not injured, said their van was clearly marked as belonging to the press, and the government promised to investigate.

Salinas’ government Wednesday laid out conditions for peace talks with the guerrillas, who call themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army in honor of revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata.

Eloy Cantu Segovia, an Interior Ministry official appointed to represent Salinas in Chiapas, said in a communique that the rebels must agree to an immediate cease-fire, release any hostages and identify their leaders before talks can begin. They must also surrender all weapons and 3,000 pounds of dynamite they allegedly stole from the state oil company.

Chiapas, a lush but impoverished state that borders Guatemala, has witnessed years of conflict between the Mexican army and Indian peasants, who have long complained of economic and political isolation. Chiapas is controlled by political bosses, often accused of corruption, who are loyal to Salinas’ Institutional Revolutionary Party. Reports of human rights abuses, in which Indians are victims, have increased in the past six months.

Government-controlled television Wednesday sought to emphasize the failure of the uprising to attract broader support from the residents of Chiapas state, but few analysts believe the problems exposed so dramatically by this week’s events can be easily put aside.

The government maintains that while inequities continue to exist, Chiapas has not been neglected and in fact received $750 million in aid last year, about 8% of the budget for social programs. Still, Chiapas remains the country’s poorest region, where 30% of the adults cannot read and 59% earn less than the meager minimum wage of just under $5 a day.

Many analysts said the recent emphasis on NAFTA only underscored to Mexico’s most downtrodden that they have been marginalized. The uprising seemed to raise questions about the true efficiency of the government’s social works program, a cornerstone of the ruling party’s staying power.

“(Salinas) was leaving office unscathed, going down as the great modernizer of Mexico, and then Chiapas shows that his whole strategy may have been flawed,” Mexican political scientist Denise Dresser said in an interview.

“Salinas was creating a two-tiered country of the haves and have-nots. I think he made the conscious decision to propel half of Mexico into the First World, even if that meant propelling the other half into the Fourth World. . . . Now he’s confronted with his Achilles’ heel.”

The violence flies in the face of the picture that Salinas has painted in trips the world over, a picture that clearly distinguished Mexico from the remainder of insurrectional, unstable Latin America.

“Just when the government and the modern sectors it favors were proclaiming the transformation of Mexico into a member of North America, from Chiapas came the resounding voice of armed insurgency, to remind us just how Central American we are,” wrote columnist Miguel Angel Granados Chapa, a frequent critic of the government, in the newspaper El Norte of Monterrey.

The Mexican stock market fell sharply when the Chiapas uprising was first reported, but it rallied Wednesday in a sign that foreign investors had not lost confidence in the Salinas government.

“For those who naively thought that in the aftermath of NAFTA, Mexico was free of problems and challenges, this is a sobering reminder of significant social and economic challenges,” David Beers, a senior credit analyst with Standard & Poor’s, said in a telephone interview from New York.

“We haven’t seen this in Mexico for a while, and whether it portends a more serious and persistent challenge to the government is something that remains to be seen.”

Darling reported from Ocosingo, Wilkinson from Mexico City.