Poverty, Fear Abide in Area of Recent Mexican Uprising : Society: Tourists visit Chiapas state for its quaint traditions. Peasant revolts are the dark side of its history.

Wisps of incense drift up the pine-covered mountains toward the fog from a dozen street-corner braziers, fanned by men in black tunics and women wrapped in red wool shawls against the morning chill.

Gathered near small bands of violins, flutes and drums, they sway and chant in a modern Mayan dialect as they pass around a bottle of posh , the local moonshine. They are warming up for a pilgrimage through the town’s dirt streets to bless each house on the first day of Carnaval, a two-week celebration that roughly coincides with Mardi Gras.

At the main square, town elders wearing straw hats with multicolored ribbons radiating from the peak and waist-length chains dangling silver-dollar-size peso coins look on approvingly as the first group of pilgrims forms in front of the church.

Such beauty and ritual draw 132,000 tourists a year to Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. But those quaint traditions are intertwined with a culture of alcoholism, isolation and terror that has rendered entire villages immune to government anti-poverty programs.

Although Chiapas has been the largest recipient of funds from such programs, nearly one-third of the state’s 3.2 million inhabitants still do not have access to health care. Fifteen thousand die of curable diseases each year. A quarter of the mainly Indian population has no formal income, and one in six adults cannot read.

Desperation resulting from unremitting poverty led to a New Year’s Day uprising that left more than 100 dead before a government truce a month ago set the stage for peace talks. Still, the violence of both the revolt and the Mexican army’s initial response briefly focused international attention on conditions in the Chiapas countryside.

For people living here, the rebellion was another episode in a history of terror that usually passes unnoticed by the outside world. Chiapan Indians have revolted at regular intervals since the 16th Century, when the Spaniards arrived.

Between uprisings, the climate of violence is maintained by kidnapings, murders, torture and expulsions from communities. Acts of violence are so common that twice a year the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center in San Cristobal de las Casas fills a 60-page newsletter with new cases.

“Violation of civil rights is an evil endemic to our state, and violence has become epidemic,” the newsletter’s editors noted a year ago.

Sometimes the violence is random, the outcome of an explosive mix of machetes and posh. Just as often, the human rights center reports, the violence is used to maintain Chiapas’ feudal power structure.

The state’s fiefdoms are roughly divided among coffee plantation owners on the Pacific Coast, Indian chiefs or caciques in the highlands and cattle ranchers in the state’s denuded eastern jungle, although areas of influence overlap.

“The good business, the real fortunes have been made getting Indians drunk and sending them for generations to work on the ranches in the mountains or the plantations of the Soconusco,” the state’s premier coffee-growing region, anthropologist Fernando Benitez wrote 25 years ago.

Remarkably little has changed since then.

“Power in Chiapas historically has been exercised by families and landholding groups with (government) authorities on their side, who have continually frustrated the people’s efforts to reach slightly less unjust living standards and dignity,” according to a report from the human rights center, which is associated with the Roman Catholic Church.

Paved highways that wind through the mountains between Mayan ruins and colonial towns provide only a glimpse of the Chiapas that rose in revolt last month. Barefoot women in embroidered blouses and calf-length wrapped skirts trot along the roadside, stooped under bundles of firewood held by head straps.

They sometimes smile and wave at passing cars but reply with only a puzzled, impatient look when asked a question in Spanish. Even if they understand, they are too busy for idle chatter. Like millions of impoverished women throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America, they spend three to four hours every day searching for and hauling firewood and water.

Visitors who want to see more of Indian culture can board the air-conditioned buses that whisk tourists from the town square in colonial San Cristobal to Carnaval and Holy Week ceremonies in nearby towns, particularly San Juan Chamula.

At City Hall, visitors can buy admission tickets to the brightly painted colonial church, its floor covered in pine needles, where Indians kneel before rows of tapered candles to toast their favorite saints with posh. For an additional fee, outsiders may take pictures.

The tour buses usually leave before many Indians pass out on the town’s streets and plazas from the ritual posh . They do not stop at La Hormiga--the Ant--an eroding hill outside San Cristobal where 20,000 people are clustered. The people living there are Indian peasants who over the last two decades have been driven out of San Juan Chamula for choosing Protestant or standard Roman Catholic religious practices over the blended faith of posh and candles.

Each new expulsion brings stories of beatings and household burnings. But community leaders say religious converts endanger their culture.

Here in Tenejapa, local authorities are more tolerant of religious diversity, although residents and human rights organizations say that challenges to political power are repressed violently.

Every Sunday and Wednesday night, services are held at the hot-pink Presbyterian church at the edge of the county seat. Many residents are mestizos, people of mixed blood.

“The mestizos here are settled in; they were born here,” said Sebastian Lopez Luna, a high-ranking township official. “They participate in community activities and speak our language. There is no problem about them.”

But he acknowledged that mestizos are not allowed to hold political office. “Municipal positions are linked to traditional Indian offices,” he said.

While Lopez Luna considered that a logical explanation, mestizos gathered at the local dry goods store said they are angry at being locked out of local decision-making. The emphasis on drinking at town celebrations--which left many celebrants passed out hours before the Carnaval house blessing started at 2 p.m.--leads to an aggressive atmosphere that makes them feel like prisoners in their own homes, afraid to go out, they said.

They added that their complaints are answered by a Mayan version of “love it or leave it.”

Indians with a gripe do not fare much better.

Residents of Kotolte, a village of about 200 people, 10 miles up a rocky dirt lane from the county seat, joined protests against alleged election fraud when Sebastian Lopez Mendez, the local Pepsi bottler, became mayor two years ago. Lopez Mendez ran as the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that has ruled Mexico for six decades.

City officials said Lopez Mendez was out of town visiting villages, and Lopez Luna denied that city government officials were involved in any problems.

Witnesses, however, told human rights center representatives that the day after Lopez Mendez took office, his supporters began visiting outlying villages, rounding up people and sacking stores and houses.

In Kotolte, they stole more than 100 sacks of coffee, according to the human rights center report. Sitting on low chairs in the shade of coffee bushes, villagers recounted the confrontation two years ago.

“That first time, we fled to the mountains,” recalled Alonso Lopez Guzman. “They took our coffee and trampled our corn. Then we decided to organize ourselves to fight back. Why should we let them rob us? Better we should wait for them in our houses.”

When four truckloads of men rumbled into Kotolte one July morning, villagers were waiting.

“We had our machetes, and the women grabbed sticks,” said Lopez Guzman, flailing his arms in a re-enactment. “We did not let them in.”

Three hours later, the men were back--with guns. Dozens of villagers were injured in the resulting battle.

State authorities visited the village a month later to negotiate a peace agreement signed by townspeople and municipal authorities.

Such stories are repeated throughout the township, said Diego Mendez Santis, a former city official who does not like the way municipal government is being run. “There has been no peace, and without peace there can be no advancement,” he said.

Tenejapa’s problems are typical in Indian communities, according to human rights center reports. Pro-government peasant groups regularly expel members of independent organizations from their villages.

Municipal authorities routinely send the township police to arrest and beat up their enemies, reports say. People protest by occupying city halls and town plazas, but dissidents disappear when they speak out too often.

While Indian communities have been fighting for basic rights, other groups have taken advantage of the federal funds channeled to the state.

A decade ago, the adults at the Ejido Campet semi-communal farm were day laborers at Jorge Castellano Rivera’s cattle and coffee ranch. Most of them, like 53-year-old Maria Cristina Cruz, were born on the ranch, whose owner is a member of the Chiapas ranching oligarchy.

“Each of us used to have a trade, grinding coffee or whatever,” she said. “Now we are free.”

Cruz spoke as she spread cornmeal over a banana leaf and passed it along to her sister, who filled it with meat and sauce as part of a six-woman assembly line making tamales for that night’s festival.

Unlike Indian communities that have struggled for decades to get land, the 43 families of Campet got their 1,500-acre farm without a fight. When Castellano Rivera decided to sell off some of his land, he helped persuade the government to buy it, creating an ejido , land owned by the government but assigned to a group of farmers and their descendants as long as they work it.

No one seemed to know why he decided to sell or how much was paid for the land that lies two miles from the dirt road that connects Ocosingo and Altamirano, now on the edge of rebel territory. (On a recent visit, Castellano Rivera’s house appeared to be deserted; many area ranchers have moved into town since the uprising.)

Within two years, Campet had electricity and a cistern with hoses running to spigots throughout the town, conveniences beyond the dreams of many Indian villages. The primary school has four teachers.

Houses are modest, made of wood planks with thatched roofs and dirt floors. Villagers have obviously put their money into livestock, the peasants’ way of saving.

Cattle graze around the combination plaza and basketball court, a typical feature of Chiapas villages. With the help of a government anti-poverty program, townsfolk started a commercial pigsty last year, with 50 sows.

Their next project is to improve the rock-strewn lane that runs from the main dirt road to their village, he said. Villager Javier Lopez shrugged when asked to explain Campet’s prosperity in the midst of so much poverty.

“When we get loans, we pay them back,” he said. “We all work together. Just as the rich have, we are going to have.”

But that vision is rare in Chiapas. For most people, the struggle remains more basic.

“I’m tired of hearing about politics and parties,” said Kotolte resident Alonso Lopez Mendez. “I have done no harm to anyone. I am just a peasant. If we are all children of God, why can’t they leave me alone?”