The Roots of Rebellion : The current land revolt in southern Mexico involves a mysterious guerrilla army, a divided church and a nervous government. A journey on the rebels’ road in Chiapas.

Two days after an uneasy cease-fire began, tension gripped Las Margaritas, a usually tranquil coffee and ranching center 25 miles north of the Guatemalan border. Government soldiers eyed all movement warily, emptying vehicles and patting down men for arms. Hundreds of dazed refugees wandered through the neat zocalo, or central plaza, their next destination unknown. Officials were overwhelmed, lacking food, blankets and other necessities for the evacuees; some were housed in a hall where a mural of Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary icon, presided over their troubled repose. War had come to this drowsy place, and no one quite knew what to make of it. “We don’t know if we’ll ever go home again,” lamented Roselia Mendez, a shop owner whose hamlet was in the battle zone. “What will become of us? “

The lives of most everyone in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, had been abruptly jarred. In a stunning New Year’s Day offensive, a scruffy peasant army of perhaps 2,000 fighters launched a surprise attack and caught security forces off guard, ultimately seizing three major towns, including Las Margaritas, and the city of San Cristobal de las Casas. The rebels invoked the legendary name of Zapata, whose cry of Tierra y Libertad! stoked the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17. The insurgents, their show of force accomplished, had since retreated to their strongholds in the Lacandon forest and environs.

For 10 days, the army had mounted a bloody offensive against the retreating rebels, sweeping through villages and arresting scores of peasants, most of whom protested their innocence. Helicopter gunships launched rockets and sprayed machine-gun fire on rural enclaves. A column of some 2,000 troops, backed by tanks and aircraft, had moved through Las Margaritas, intent on delivering a deathblow to rebel bastions in the jungle beyond. Official estimates put the death toll at about 100, though many believe it to be much higher--the evidence is concealed in common graves throughout the region. The Mexican army, it appeared, was emulating the scorched-earth tactics so popular among nearby Central American regimes.

“We don’t understand why this happened,” said Manuel Sanchez Perez, a 65-year-old grandfather from San Antonio de Los Banos, a pine-shrouded Tzotzil Indian village in the hills above San Cristobal de las Casas. Speaking in front of his palm-roofed adobe hut, Sanchez gestured toward his adjoining cornfield, now seared black from bombing. But crops were not his only loss: Governmetn troops, he said, had taken away his son; he hadn’t heard from him since. “The soldiers say there are bad people around,” the disbelieving man explained in broken Spanish.

But as national and international condemnation of military abuses arose, the Mexican government opted for conciliation, at least for now. A tense cease-fire took hold on Jan. 12 and the army beat a hasty retreat. authorities announced that they would negotiate with the guerrillas who presented a long list of grievances--economic, social and political.

The rebel offensive--Mexico’s most serious insurgency in two decades--shocked a nation whose leaders prided themselves on political stability and their unwavering march to modernity. Some say the revolt triggered Mexico’s gravest social crisis since the Revolution. Yet relatively little was known about the rebels, their roots, the underlying upsets that had led an army of Mayan peasants to take go to war with rifles and machetes. The clues were to be found in the hardscrabble mountain and jungle villages where this insurgency was born and nurtured.

Past the final army checkpoint, heading northeast from Las Margaritas toward the guerrilla heartland, there was scarcely anyone on the gravel road. Most homes were abandoned. Deep potholes remained where the retreating rebels had gouged out trenches, attempting to slow the pursuing troops. Military debris--Tootsie Roll wrappers, foil packaging of Made in U.S.A. rations--littered former army campsites along this principal route to the the Lacandon region. Spray-painted black graffiti on a wall demanded: “Stop evictions of indigenous communities.” The plea echoed the many long-ignored cries that had spurred this conflict--the latest chapter in a bitter, centuries-long tradition of Indian revolts in Chiapas, one of Mexico’s states. Woven into the dense social fabric of the state are violent land feuds and forced relocations of villagers--usually at the bidding of cattlemen, political bosses or religious rivals responding to fierce tensions between the Catholic Establishment and Protestant evangelists.

Americas Watch, the human rights group, noted dryly about Chiapas in a 1990 report: “Evictions are frequently accompanied by warrantless arrests of large numbers of community members, often on trumped-up charges, and without regard for what will become of the persons being evicted.” Though home to only 3 1/2 million people in a nation of 92 million, Chiapas accounts for more than a quarter of land disputes pending before Mexico’s notoriously corrupt agrarian reform ministry. Police, soldiers and landowners’ private militias ruthlessly enforce the will of cattle barons and other powerful interests--not infrequently including drug traffickers. As Mexico hurtles toward the millennium, Chiapas is mired somewhere in a feudal past.

As the gravel road ascended into the pine forests, the parched, rocky landscape of Las Margaritas yielded to a cooler environment. In the valleys below lay expansive fincas (estates), now mostly gone to ruin amid an intractable slump in coffee prices. This was the domain of the Castellanos clan, old-style hacendados who, for generations, counted on the Tojolabal Indians--descendants of the Mayas, like all the state’s dozen or so indigenous groups--to provide cheap and plentiful labor.

The Castellanos legacy became a kind of metaphor for the entire uprising. The rebels had entered a nearby family ranch and kidnaped Absalon Castellanos Dominguez, a 70-year-old retired general and stalwart of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has ruled Mexico for more than six decades. Castellanos had earned a singularly brutal reputation as an enforcer for the landed gentry who had long treated the state as their personal finca. Despite post-revolutionary bans on amassing properties, the wealthy, critics say, retained and expanded their vast holdings through disguised ownership. Zapata’s revolution, which radiated from the north, never made it this far south.

In 1980, Gen. Castellanos’ troops were accused of massacring more than a dozen Tzeltal Indians who had sought restitution of their lands. Two years later, the PRI bestowed upon el general its gubernatorial nod, ensuring his election in a state where 90% of ballots are routinely cast for the ruling bloc. When 11 Tzotzil Indians were killed in a land dispute during Castellanos’ first year in office, the ex-general vowed: “We will take the pertinent measures”--a refrain repeated after subsequent, equally unfulfilled demands for justice.

In abducting Castellanos, the rebels extracted a measure of retribution, convicting him of sundry crimes: “violation of Indians’ human rights, robbery, evictions, kidnaping, corruption and murder.” He was sentenced to “earn his bread” during a life term of hard labor among indigenous communities. (After six weeks in captivity, he was freed in exchange for the release of suspected rebels.)

Clinging to a steep mountainside rising from the tropical lowlands below was the near-abandoned village of El Nuevo Momon, a community of about 100 families housed in wood and mud-brick homes amid pine and banana trees. A cluster of a half-dozen unarmed lookouts took note of everyone’s comings and goings; many rebels had traded in their red bandannas and olive khakis for less conspicuous garb. White flags sprang from still-inhabited dwellings. The tense cease-fire was holding, but revolutionary passions were high.

“Our parents, our grandparents, suffered for years working for the Castellanos hacendados, “ said Jorge Vazquez, 36, a slim, severe peasant who spoke of his forefathers’ humiliations as though the events were recent. He told a story oft-repeated here: Almost half a century ago, the Castellanos family promised more than 7,000 acres to peasants in exchange for clearing a jungle tract and establishing a new sugar cane plantation. The cane was soon plentiful--but the people ended up with a fraction of the pledged property. When residents protested, pistoleros burned their homes and threatened them with worse. Today, mountains and private estates hemmed in the area’s fast-growing families. “Now there is no place for us,” said Vazquez. “Our people were fooled, deceived.” Such anguish--here and duplicated in scores of other rural communities--helped shape the uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, whose Spanish acronym, EZLN, is now part of the national lexicon.

The rebels’ demands for justice--both economic and political--have awakened long-suppressed grievances nationwide, crystallizing peasant and even urban frustration, and exposing the failure of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s much-touted anti-poverty initiative, Solidarity. The uprising has altered Mexico’s economic and political landscape virtually overnight, just months before August’s presidential elections test the ruling party’s hegemony. And the disturbing martial images from the south shattered the president’s finely crafted vision of a nation poised on the cusp of modernity.

“Everything changed overnight,” wrote Elena Poniatowska in the Mexico City daily La Jornada. “In 1994 we woke up in a new country, a country where we have to live in a different way, in confusion, sadness, anxiety, desperation, bursts of machine-gun fire, la guerrilla .”

It was by design that the rebellion exploded on Jan. 1, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement--the centerpiece of Salinas’ economic blueprint--kicked into place. Campesinos in the south and elsewhere never shared the NAFTA euphoria evident in the industrial hubs of northern and central Mexico. Small farmers feared that cheap, mass-produced U.S. foodstuffs would overwhelm their meager production of corn and beans. Already, critics said, the Salinas administration had undermined the hallowed ejido system--a post-revolutionary form of quasi-communal ownership--by allowing peasants to lease out their tracts, thereby encouraging U.S.-style agribusiness and new latifundios , the vast private holdings outlawed by the revolution.

In short, the Mayans of Chiapas can be said to have risen up in rejection of global markets, privatization, a New World Order and what they view as its corollaries: ever-more concentrated wealth, destruction of indigenous peoples, theft of their lands. “TODAY WE SAY ENOUGH!” the rebels proclaimed in their Declaration of War, emblazoned with the familiar mustachioed image of Zapata.

Monsignor Samuel Ruiz Garcia, bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, was holding forth to the press about injustice. The cease-fire had not yet been declared; outside his residence, tanks rumbled down the narrow streets of the quaint colonial city, long popular with backpackers and exotica-seeking tourists -- a place where cappuccino machines coexist seamlessly with Indian merchants. Now, edgy troops toting M-16s and the not-too-distant sound of army shelling jarred the town’s habitual serenity.

“What has happened here cannot be comprehended without understanding the social context,” the baldish, bespectacled Don Samuel intoned in his signature baritone. “Of course we condemn violence . . . but we recognize that a great injustice has been done to our indigenous communities.” The state’s great natural resources--land, water, petroleum, hydroelectric power--are concentrated in few hands, the bishop noted, leaving much of the population impoverished, illiterate and lacking electricity and running water. “Time has stood still” in Chiapas, Ruiz declared during an interview, shortly before celebrating a wedding at the cathedral. “It appears like a historic anachronism.”

In his 34 years as bishop, this native of central Mexico has mastered four indigenous languages and earned a reputation among Mayans as a tatic , or honored one, for his efforts on their behalf. Taking his cue from reformist church doctrines, Ruiz, 69, has emerged as the modern-day heir of this diocese’s most celebrated bishop, Bartolome de las Casas, the 16th-Century “Protector of the Indians” who denounced the Spanish Crown’s abuse of the native population, enraging colonial viceroys. When Indians protested the 500th anniversary of the Spaniards’ arrival by toppling a statue of San Cristobal’s founding conquistador, the mayor was quick to blame Ruiz. Like Fray Bartolome, Don Samuel has never hesitated to censure the powerful or break ranks with Mexico’s conservative church leadership.

Last year, in a pastoral letter sent to Rome, the bishop adopted the Indians’ viewpoint: “More and more, the people feel the weight of scarcity, of unemployment, of injustice and growing misery. There is malnutrition and illness provoked by poverty. We don’t have land to work to get our food. . . . The applications we make for land receive no response, and it’s very expensive to buy; meanwhile there are some who have a lot of land and don’t farm it, or use it for cattle.”

The Mexican government is widely believed to have pressured the Vatican last year to oust the bishop, whom large landowners view as a renegade liberation theologian inciting a holy war. The church hierarchy appeared to be pushing Ruiz out last fall, demanding that he respond to reports of ecclesiastical misconduct, including Marxist analysis of social conditions. But scores of religious leaders, peasant organizers and human rights activists--some of whom have nominated Ruiz for the Nobel Peace Prize--rose to the defense of Don Samuel. The bishop, not about to abandon a life’s work without a fight, denied the insinuations and hung on tenaciously. And he was here when the Zapatistas marched into San Cristobal, thrusting his social agenda into international prominence.

Reeling Mexican authorities, attempting to explain this astonishing turn of events, soon found a scapegoat: the Roman Catholic Church. The powerful Ministry of the Interior, which controls the nation’s security apparatus and oversees elections, placed blame for the rebellion largely on catequistas. These lay Catholic workers, authorities contended, along with Central American revolutionaries and disenchanted leftists who have drifted here since the 1970s, disseminated subversion in the troubled hinterlands, “This is not an Indian movement nor a peasant action,” the ministry declared. Vicious stories were planted: Ruiz was the Zapatistas’ “supreme commander,” a mass-circulation weekly blared beneath a photograph of the bishop celebrating Mass, a crucifix in the background.

Ultimately, the campaign against the Catholic Church and Bishop Ruiz backfired. Much of the effort was reportedly orchestrated from Mexico City by former Interior Secretary Patrocinio Gonzalez Blanco Garrido, the Cambridge-educated lawyer who had earlier succeeded Castellanos as governor of Chiapas. As governor, critics say, Gonzalez expanded on Castellanos’ legacy of repression--jailing priests, persecuting peasants and harassing human-rights workers. As Interior Minister, Gonzalez had always downplayed persistent rumors of a burgeoning guerrilla force in his home state. But the war exposed the inadequacies of his governance; the red-faced Gonzalez was soon forced to resign from his Cabinet position, as was Chiapas’ governor, a Gonzalez protege.

An ashen President Salinas turned to his long-time confidante, Manuel Camacho Solis, ex-mayor of Mexico City, whom he named as “Commissioner of Peace and Reconciliation” in Chiapas. For Camacho, the high-profile appointment amounted to a stunning turnaround. His career seemed to have come asunder in November, when Salinas passed him over for the ruling-party’s presidential nod and instead named his chief rival, Social Development Secretary Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta.

Camacho’s forte has long been negotiation and compromise--skills that don’t endear him to ruling-party apparatchiks, who fear he is too cozy with the leftist opposition. Pointedly, Camacho has chosen the path of dialogue with the Zapatistas. Amid a cease-fire and army retreat, the presidential envoy promptly recognized the “grave conditions” of poverty and racism that afflict the Indian population.

“It would be a grave error to convert the Church into a public enemy,” Camacho told reporters after arriving in Chiapas, Bishop Ruiz, the official mediator, by his side. “I say with clarity that the bishop is a friend of peace and an important factor in advancing the process that begins today.”

The Chiapas Mayans weren’t the first rebels to hoist Zapata’s banner anew. In the ‘60s, authorities crushed the storied rebellion of Ruben Jaramillo, who, in Zapata’s home state of Morelos, took up the cause of los de abajo, the rural underclass. Later, two now-legendary schoolteachers, Lucio Cabanas and Genaro Vazquez Rojas, went underground in western Guerrero state, where conditions of poverty resemble those in Chiapas. Hundreds died or disappeared and entire villages were uprooted as part of a “dirty war” against guerrillas in Guerrero and elsewhere during the 1970s. Those historical antecedents, however, unfolded against a markedly different backdrop. Today, internal and international pressures have forced Mexico’s leaders to pay some lip service to long-suppressed demands for democratic reform. And scrappy independent newspapers and magazines are now quick to report military abuses in Chiapas.

The EZLN movement took shape deep inside the remote Lacandon forest, helped by the rugged terrain, lack of official presence and existence of numerous independent campesino groups that had sprung up here since the 1970s. The peasant organizations provided both recruits and a ready-made organizing network. How the rebels financed their activities and obtained guns and other equipment for thousands of troops remains an open question. The Zapatistas say all funds came from peasant sources, but there opponents speculate that kidnapings of rich Mexicans and other crimes bankrolled the rebellion.

While the Zapatistas operated in secrecy, many believe that authorities knew that an insurgency was germinating in the bush, although officials likely underestimated the threat. For reasons that remain obscure--some see a disinclination to upset delicate free-trade talks--no concerted enforcement operation was launched, even after the military stumbled upon a rebel training encampment near the town of Ocosingo last May. Instead, Mexico City funneled millions in anti-poverty funds to Chiapas, hopeful of buying off discontent; the federal largess enriched the political bosses and their cronies, but seldom trickled down to the peasants.

The entire Lacandon region has long been a caldron of unrest. Early in this century, timbermen kept Indian loggers in chains to ensure that they would not flee the brutal conditions in the mahogany camps. Years later, authorities pushed the losers in the state’s chronic land wars into the long-neglected area, ever-farther from sight and mind. In recent decades, hundreds of thousands of homesteaders, mostly Indian peasants from the highlands, have staked out collective claims here, joining loggers, ranchers and, later, drug traffickers.

As the population swelled, the native Lacandon Indians were soon a tiny minority facing near-extinction. Intensively farmed tracts lost their fertility and there was less room to expand. Ownership claims were often ill-defined; inevitably, corrupt officials sided with ranchers and other influential overseers in property battles. The government’s decision in the 1970s to create a vast jungle preserve severely constricted further settlement; subsequent bans on tree-felling narrowed employment possibilities. And the collapse of coffee prices in 1989 pushed people toward desperation. Finally, Mexico City’s enfeebling of ejido safeguards and the prospect of free trade apparently prompted many to take up armed rebellion.

Adding to tensions, tens of thousands of Guatemalan refugees arrived in Chiapas during the 1980s, fleeing brutal repression and a guerrilla war in their adjoining homeland. The Guatemalans, themselves Indians who often speak little Spanish, have watched developments with trepidation. On an isolated path near Poza Rica, a major refugee center in the Lacandon region, two apprehensive Kanjobal Indians from Guatemala were quick to disassociate themselves from the rebellious goings-on. “We’re not Zapatistas,” one of the men offered, unsolicited. Their machetes were for cutting corn and coffee, he pointed out, not for warfare.

Beyond Poza Rica, an eerie sense of desertion had overtaken the zone; most residents had fled. Those left behind were disposing of animals at giveaway prices. Horses, chickens, cows and other beasts ran wild; dogs howled in vain, mourning their departed masters.

“I can understand people’s fears, but I cannot condone leaving one’s animals to the elements like this,” said Luis Arturo Maldonado, former president of the cattlemen’s association in Las Margaritas.

Don Luis, as he is known, has resisted the exodus of his fellow ranchers from Zapatista territory. Unlike most cattlemen, Maldonado, 36, is well-respected by area peasants. Rejecting the imperious stance of his colleagues, Maldonado has intervened with agrarian authorities on behalf of nearby ejidos and has long ferried campesinos and their goods in his battered, 20-year-old truck. He denounced the government with a vehemence matching that of the Zapatistas. For years, he noted, politicians have vowed to pave the main road to the nearest city, Comitan de Dominguez, now five hours away on a treacherous dirt route.

“We’re all tired of promises from the government,” said Maldonado, seated on his front porch during a light rain, gazing toward the lush mountains beyond. For years, he suspected that radicals--encouraged by missionary priests--had organized paramilitary training deep in the forest. While virulently opposed to the rebellion, the rancher sympathizes with the fight against a government that deceived and exploited its poorest citizens, seldom delivering on its promises. “Officials always help the biggest cattlemen,” said Maldonado, who, with about 210 acres and 80 head of cattle, is a relative small-timer.

Unlike fellow ranchers who have threatened to launch a private war to recoup their lands, Maldonado prefers accommodation (though he does carry a pistol these days). If the guerrillas demand one of his herd as a “war tax,” he plans to comply. “I’m afraid we’ll have to get used to la guerrilla here,” Maldonado said. “If anything good comes of this disaster,” he added, “I hope that someone will finally do something about the terrible, paralyzing corruption that has plagued this country.”

From Maldonado’s ranch, A two-hour horseback ride on narrow, muddy mountain tracks, through streams and down precipitous drops, leads to Caracol, a village identified in government documents as a rebel training and communications center. Recent visitors were met on the path by men in their late teens and 20s, dressed in tattered civilian clothes and rubber boots. They were unarmed except for machetes, but some wore the hand-stitched green caps of Zapatista fighters. Suspicious, they nonetheless sat down to talk.

“Would we go to war if we had alternatives?” asked the apparent leader, perhaps 25, who seemed genuinely tormented by recent events. “Would we go to war if we could have decent clothes, not these rags that we wear? If we had a proper education for our children?” He was soon virtually shouting. “If we had a clinic and people didn’t have to die because of a lack of care, like our parents and grandparents did? If we had our land. . . . That’s why there’s a war. . . . Maybe now, finally, they’ll listen to us.”

He and others recounted their ejido’s troubled history: For three generations, the men said, they and their Tojolabal ancestors--who founded the settlement--fought in vain to legalize their property claims. Today, they remain squatters in the eyes of the law. Villagers had made numerous trips to Las Margaritas and the state capital and hosted agrarian functionaries--even bribed them, hoping the plots would finally be theirs. “We sold all our animals to give them money, and we were left with nothing!” another man exclaimed.

They spoke of other frustrations: government promises of better roads, a clinic and school that never materialized. Teachers seldom arrived; those who did left after a few weeks. “Any of us who know how to read learned on our own--not because of any help from the government,” noted the leader, who, like the others, declined to give his name. “What chance do our children have? They are condemned to ignorance, like we were.”

Medical care is two hours away on horseback. “The only time they attend to us quickly is when we ask about family planning,” the leader noted with a caustic laugh. “Then they’re happy to help us. They want us to be fewer.”

After 90 minutes of angry conversation on the roadside, they were asked if they were part of the Zapatista column that took the town of Las Margaritas. “All I can say,” responded the spokesman, “is that our hearts are with these fighters. We see that there is finally a battle for justice in our country, and we support that fight. We feel this is long overdue. If someone doesn’t do something now, there will never be a change in this place.”

Asked about Emiliano Zapata, the men shook their heads. They had heard of the man, but didn’t know much about him.

From their jungle hide-the Zapatista leadership has successfully managed to convey its viewpoints via communiques secreted to the eager press corps in San Cristobal. Most comunicados are the handiwork of sub-comandante Marcos, who rapidly acquired a kind of cult cachet: a latter-day Che Guevara in a ski mask. He has penned witty, brash and detailed correspondence, spicing political dogma with references to films, soap operas and books. Although he acknowledged that the Zapatistas cannot defeat the army in a military faceoff, Marcos vanquished the government on the propaganda front.

Marcos appealed to U.S. audiences to cut off aid to Mexico’s “dictatorial government.” Elaborating on the rebels’ calls for land reform and social justice, he demanded the resignation of an “illegitimate” President Salinas and the formation of a transition government to guarantee free elections--explicitly linking democratic reform with an economic restructuring. “In summary,” Marcos wrote, “we want peace with dignity and justice.”

The rebellion, he asserted, was 10 years in the making, and emerged largely as a function of self-defense against ranchers’ hired militias. During this formative decade, Marcos added, the rebels had unsuccessfully pursued peaceful avenues toward change--while, he charged, thousands of Indians died of curable diseases.

“The economic and social plans of the federal, state and municipal governments . . . are limited to giving us handouts during election time,” Marcos thundered in another letter. “But the charity does not help for more than one moment. . . . If we die now, it won’t be with shame but rather with dignity, like our ancestors.”

The light-skinned Marcos says he is of mixed-race, like most Mexicans--and Zapata himself. Conversant in history, politics and current events, Marcos was evidently one of the radical activists who came here from northern and central Mexico during the 1970s and ‘80s seeking a cause and a base, drawn by the region’s upheaval and potential for organization.

The Zapatistas stress their indigenous origins. Their demands include some kind of autonomy for Mexico’s Indians, who now account for less than 10% of the nation’s population. Marcos, subordinate in the rebel hierarchy to a clandestine indigenous committee, assailed the perception of Indians as an “anthropological object, touristic curiosity, or part of a ‘Jurassic Park.’ ”

The rebels’ ideology is still amorphous. But notably absent are the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and yanqui- bashing that are pro forma in Latin American leftist tracts. Rather, the EZLN embraces a kind of peculiarly Mexican Indian nationalism, more closely related to Zapata’s populist exhortations than the oratory of Marx and Mao. “They follow a very Mexican form of socialism,” said Andres Aubry, a French anthropologist who has worked in the region for 20 years.

In an extensive interview with Mexican reporters deep in the jungle, the poncho-clad Marcos--sporting his trademark black ski mask, red bandanna and belts of scarlet shotgun shells--returned to the rebellion’s seminal preoccupation: la tierra . President Salinas’ revision of constitutional safeguards protecting the ejido system and its guarantees of land to peasants in need, he told them, was a “powerful catalyst” for the events of Jan. 1. “The companeros say land is life, that if you don’t have land you’re dead, so why live?” Marcos explained. “Better to fight and to die fighting.”

FROM THE RAIN FOREST TO the highlands, la tierra is indisputably the central preoccupation in the Chiapas countryside. “There is no more land for our sons,” said Olivio Hernandez, an 80-year-old great-grandfather who pondered the matter outside his home of wooden slats in El Nuevo Momon, a white flag rising from the roof. “Our sons want to work, not fight. Our people have always worked the land.”

Nearby, remaining residents gathered in front of Nuevo Momon’s looted government store. Belisario Jimenez Lopez, a 40-year-old agricultural union leader from the nearby ejido of Cruz del Rosario, was urging them not to abandon their lots.

“Our land is not allowed to grow, but of course our families do,” said Jimenez, a father of eight who represents the Union of Ejidos of the Forest, one of the region’s many independent organizations. Most of his fellow unionists resisted Zapatista entreaties to join the armed conflict, Jimenez said, because they opposed violence. Nonetheless, like others here, he sympathized with the rebels’ complaints. “The men in our village who went with the Zapatistas are the ones who have the most severe land problems. It’s as simple as that.”

An allied unionist, Mario Hernandez Juarez, also called the Zapatistas’ cause a just one, while disapproving of violence. “I must admit a certain amount of admiration,” he noted as he recounted the events of Dec. 31, when columns of Zapatistas arrived here in hijacked trucks, bound for Las Margaritas. “These are campesinos like us, ready to die and take a stand for what they believe in.”

Now, with uncertainty and warfare gripping the valley, the 24-year-old father of three was hopeful that something good would arise from the tumult. “We want peace and tranquillity,” Hernandez said. “But this time, officials should be forced to keep whatever promises they make. The government cannot be allowed to break their promises this time.”