The World : A Dispute Over Who Is Governor May Bring Chiapas Back to a Boil

Four days before the new governor of Chiapas takes office in Tuxtla Gutierrez, two men are expected to claim the seat: the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s governor-elect, Ed uardo Robledo Rincon, who officially won 51% of the vote last August, and maverick newspaper publisher Amado Avendano Figueroa of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, who garnered 34% but insists that fraud committed by the PRI robbed him of his victory.

Robledo and Avendano have rallied their followers to fill plazas and provoke clashes in Tuxtla, Comitan and San Cristobal de las Casas. Aligned with Avendano, who is still recovering from injuries incurred when his campaign vehicle was struck head-on by a trailer truck last August, a collision he claims to have been a veiled assassination attempt, are the PRD’s defeated presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Behind Robledo is the PRI’s powerful party machine and conservative cattle ranchers.

If Robledo takes office this Thursday, huge, statewide protests could make Chiapas ungovernable, and President Ernesto Zedillo, who insisted in his inauguration speech that the electoral results in Chiapas must be respected, may heed the rising clamor from his party’s right wing and call on the thousands of army troops stationed in Chiapas to enforce constitutional order. If Avendano succeeds in blocking Robledo’s inauguration, the results could be equally explosive.

In the Lacandon forest, which remains encircled by army troops since a cease-fire with the Zapatistas was negotiated last January, Subcomandante Marcos has emerged to reclaim leadership of his movement after being stung by allegations that his bellicose rhetoric and posture had scared many of his sympathizers into voting for the PRI. Two weeks ago, he was presented by his followers with the staff of command, consisting of the national and the Zapatista flags, a rifle, a bullet, blood and fistfuls of corn and earth. The staff, which he last received preparatory to the Jan. 1 uprising, signals the Zapatistas’ renewed commitment to armed resistance.

Although the election of Zedillo as president by nearly 50% of the vote has temporarily muted militant opposition in most of Mexico, the root causes of the Zapatista uprising keep the pot boiling in Chiapas. In the Highlands, a counterpart of the Zapatista army, calling itself the Francisco Villa Popular Peasant Union, has seized several German-owned coffee plantations; the Mayan campesinos threaten to take over thousands more hectares unless their demands for land are heeded by the government. Insurgent groups have sprung up in other parts of Chiapas, among them the Emiliano Zapata Peasant Organization, which last week freed six of its members from a jail in Tapachula, on

the Guatemalan border. Mass demonstrations have also broken out in the neighboring oil state of Tabasco and in southern Veracruz, where the PRD has denounced voting irregularities in gubernatorial and mayoral elections.

The fissures in the Institutional Revolutionary Party created by the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio have been aggravated by the murder of PRI Secretary General Francisco Ruiz Massieu and by the resignation of his brother, Deputy Atty. Gen. Mario Ruiz Massieu, who accused a nucleus of high-ranking party officials of conspiring in his brother’s murder to block democratic reform. The charge that drug dealers from the Gulf coast state of Tamaulipas participated in the plot against Massieu also resonates in Chiapas, whose coastline has become a staging area for the transshipment of Colombian cocaine from neighboring Guatemala.

Zedillo’s political skills will be tested

during his first week in office. On the positive side, his new Cabinet includes, as secretary of agriculture and natural resources, Arturo Warman, a member of the national human-rights commission and a skillful negotiator with campesino groups in Chiapas. On the other, the new president appointed the old-guard PRI President Ignacio Pichardo to his Cabinet, whom Mario Ruiz Massieu has accused of obstructing justice in the assassination of his brother.

In spite of the olive branch he extended to the Zapatistas, and his promise of social justice for Chiapas’ landless campesinos , an inexperienced Zedillo, already hobbled by the power struggles within his party, may lack the foresight of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his mediator, Luis Camacho Solis, who staved off all-out civil war in Chiapas by making key concessions in the peace negotiations. After the elections, Salinas claimed he had defused the Zapatista threat by encircling them militarily, then socially, a boast that ignited Marcos’ angry charges that Salinas had grown psychotic with power lust. The vast infrastructure of patronage that permitted the PRI to co-opt voters with last-minute handouts will not work in Chiapas, which has never reaped the fruits of Mexico’s revolution.

This past week, Camacho Solis’ replacement, Jorge Madrazo, resigned his post in light of the Zapatistas’ return to a war footing. Another outbreak of violence in Chiapas would be more difficult to contain, because of the proliferating rebel groups and the rising frustration of the peasants. Marcos may have lost some of his media glamour and loquacity, but he has not lost his historical sense. His latest proclamations from the jungle reflect his pique with the fickle media and President Bill Clinton’s nomination of Salinas to head the World Trade Organization. But Marcos comprehends the depth of the despair of the campesinos in Chiapas and, beyond them, of the 40 million impoverished Mexicans who will derive scant benefit from the North American Free Trade Agreement or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

After Cardenas paid Marcos a return visit in his jungle stronghold three weeks ago, and urged him to lay down his arms and join his cause, Marcos remarked to a reporter: “Cardenas is in the same struggle as the Zapatistas, but he relies on the ballot and peaceful means, while the Zapatistas rely on violence.” As to his disaffection with the media, much of which has turned downright hostile, Marcos warned sullenly, “If the paper war is over, we still have our arms, and if the media once helped to prevent war, now they will provoke it by denying us a forum.”

With a PRI intent on cannibalizing itself and with a new president who lacks the political instincts of his mentor Salinas or of the still mourned Colosio, Chiapas appears certain to remain explosive, and a catalyst for continuing unrest in the republic.*