Networking Among Rebel Groups Troubles Mexican Government : Revolt: Chiapas rebels’ call to arms is answered by a shadowy peasant union that has operated in country for two decades.

Southern Mexico’s Indian rebels did not have to wait long for a reply to their call early this month for other organizations to join their struggle: The next night, a car bomb exploded in a shopping center here.

The rash of subsequent bombings and bomb threats in the capital and other cities bore the mark of the Revolutionary Worker Peasant Union of the People Party-Party of the Poor, a shadowy urban guerrilla group that has operated in the country for the two decades since the last rural insurgents were destroyed.

The peasant union is the patriarch of the country’s guerrilla groups, descended directly from the schoolmaster-turned-rebel-hero Lucio Cabanas, who led the army on a seven-year chase through the hills of southwestern Mexico until he was killed in December, 1974.

Since then, the peasant union has pulled off sporadic feats of urban terrorism, such as the bombing of IBM Mexico headquarters and a McDonald’s restaurant two years ago, providing a constant reminder that Mexico may not be quite as stable or as friendly to foreign capital as its leaders portray their country to be.

The emergence of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas, on the southern border, is a call to arms for the peasant union and other rebel groups, suspected to be scattered throughout the country.

Reports of armed groups have grown frequent in parts of Hidalgo and Veracruz in the east, as well as Oaxaca and Guerrero in the south, states with traditional ties to the peasant union’s urban guerrillas. Many of those rural bands are thought to be defense groups that Indians and peasants formed to protect themselves against gunslingers hired by local ranchers.

The independent news weekly Proceso reported that last spring, 80 people from the town of Paso de Aguila on the Tehuantepec Isthmus in the south bought guns and took to the hills. Gunmen from a local ranch ransacked the Indian village four times in four months, convincing townsfolk they had to defend themselves.

A little farther north, the Eastern Mexican Democratic Front Emiliano Zapata--named for the same revolutionary hero the Chiapas guerrillas chose to honor but otherwise seemingly unrelated to them--has also taken up arms.

“For more that 40 years, we asked for help from the Agricultural Reform authorities without getting a solution,” representatives of the group wrote in a letter to Amnesty International. “For that reason, we decided to form an independent organization to defend the interests of our people.”

The group claims to have recovered more than 80,000 acres--communal lands they accuse rich ranchers of having stolen.

These kinds of organizations can easily switch from defensive to offensive tactics, fast becoming guerrillas, said Jose Luis Moreno, a researcher at the Center for Studies of Armed Movements, a small think tank of former rebels who study Mexico’s resistance movements. “If people are being killed, they organize to defend themselves,” he said of the armed peasant groups.

He suspects that the Zapatistas in Chiapas began as a self-defense group and then turned to aggression when they grew frustrated that their peaceful protests brought no results.

Moreno and his colleagues at the center are clearly impressed by the size and discipline of the Zapatista forces. “It goes for beyond anything we were ever involved in,” said Moreno, who served two years in prison for his participation in kidnapings and bank robberies when he was part of the Sept. 23 League, a guerrilla organization. His sentence was cut short by a 1977 amnesty for rebels.

Experts at the center also said they were impressed by the ties in other states, besides Chiapas, that allowed the Zapatistas to claim responsibility for destroying two electrical towers in central Mexico.

The networking among rebel groups appears to be among the biggest worries for the Mexican government as it awaits the Chiapas guerrillas’ reply to proposals for peace talks.

According to reports from the Interior Ministry, the peasant union and the Zapatistas already are in contact with each other, raising the threat of a network of violent underground groups that could disrupt the country indefinitely.

The peasant union is the product of a merger between urban and rural guerrillas. After the army killed Cabanas, a group of his followers led by his brother, David, went underground. They were committed to continuing the struggle but had lost both their tactician and commissar when Cabanas died. “It was a difficult period, mainly because nearly all of us lacked a theoretical base,” David Cabanas said in a 1991 jailhouse interview.

By 1976, the Cabanas group--the Party of the Poor adjunct to the organization’s name--had made contact with the peasant union. It was founded in 1964 from the remnants of a guerrilla movement in the northern border state of Chihuahua, and in the 1960s and early 1970s was another set of initials in the alphabet soup of rebel movements that robbed banks and kidnaped politicians and industrialists throughout Mexico.

But shortly before contacting the Party of the Poor, the peasant union hit on a strategy not previously tried in Mexico: the war of attrition. “Their trademark became bombings,” Moreno said. Shopping centers, banks and government offices were the usual targets. Then there was the statue of the soldier in a prominent intersection of Guadalajara.

The group would bomb the concrete statue, leaving the figure crooked. City officials would restore it and a few months later, the guerrillas would bomb it again. Moreno and his colleagues tell this story with humor but stop short of discounting the group as a force.

“Their practices are different from what we attempted, the creation of an army, “ Moreno said. “The truth is, they are into their strategy and we are out of circulation.”

Laughing at the urban guerrillas, or even criticizing them, is dangerous. In 1984, Francisco Fierro Loza won third prize in a contest for essays about the history of the state of Guerrero. His theme was the Party of the Poor. In July of that year, he was found murdered. A communique from the peasant union stated that he had been “judged” for falsehoods.

Three years ago, two security guards at the left-leaning newspaper La Journado died when a bomb delivered by peasant union partisans exploded.

Interior Ministry officials refused repeated requests for interviews or information about the urban guerrillas.

As for the peasant union, no one is sure how large or how strong it is. “That is part of the advantage in being clandestine,” Moreno said.

What is certain is that authorities have consistently underestimated the urban guerrillas. The government has declared the group vanquished various times: when David Cabanas was arrested in 1990; after Felipe Martinez Soriano--the former rector of the University of Oaxaca, who denies any ties to the group--was imprisoned as the mastermind behind the deaths of the newspaper security guards.

Each time, the guerrillas have staged another assault. The group has attacked police stations to steal arms or planted another of its trademark bombs.

After this month’s bombings, eight people were arrested, all of whom deny membership in the group. Proletarian, the group’s newspaper, which is distributed secretly at centers such as public universities, also denies that the jailed suspects are guerrillas.

In a measure of how the government is now treating rebel groups, though, after the latest bombing arrests, officials offered no new claims of having destroyed the peasant union.

“There are still a lot of people underground,” said Moreno, who noted that poverty and desperation encourage others to join armed movements, whether in the hills or cities. “To the extent that people propose change peacefully and change does not come about,” he said, “armed struggles will erupt--as many times as is necessary.”