Zedillo Proposes Peace Panel to Avoid War With Rebels in Chiapas : Mexico: Lawmakers from all major parties would participate. Zapatistas likely to refuse offer.

In a bid to maintain the shaky peace in Mexico’s southernmost state, President Ernesto Zedillo launched a peace offensive that he hopes will persuade armed rebels in Chiapas to halt plans to restart their guerrilla war against the government.

With the Mexican army and rebel units on high alert, and opposition leaders in Chiapas warning that war could start at any moment, Subcommander Marcos, self-styled leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, was expected to reject the proposal from his isolated jungle hide-out.

He has called similar past proposals unproductive attempts to negotiate with words rather than substance.

Zedillo, who took office two weeks ago vowing to govern through dialogue and end the threat of war in Chiapas, announced his peace plan in a nationally televised speech Wednesday night.

Declaring that the Mexican army remains committed to a unilateral cease-fire in the embattled state, the president offered as the centerpiece of his initiative a new peace commission made up of eight federal legislators representing all major political parties in the country. Their mission: to negotiate a political settlement with the Zapatistas that will address the major grievances of the Indian and peasant guerrillas and persuade them to lay down their arms.

“I propose that this commission make immediate contact with the Zapatistas, establish a dialogue, listen to the causes of the inequities and foster the necessary steps to become an active and actual mediating body,” a stern-faced Zedillo announced from his new presidential residence, stressing that he did not believe that there will be war in Chiapas.

But opposition leaders in the state said the president’s first decisive moves in the long-simmering conflict may be too little, too late.

A series of similar efforts to negotiate political settlements with the Zapatistas have broken down in the months since the Mexican army declared its unilateral cease-fire Jan. 12.

In his most recent public statement on the crisis, Subcommander Marcos said his guerrilla army was making final preparations to launch new attacks on the government. And just two weeks before the first anniversary of the Zapatistas’ New Year’s Day uprising that left more than 150 dead in two weeks, the mood in the impoverished and embattled state appeared more on the brink of war than of peace.

In his rambling communique earlier this week, Marcos declared: “War is imminent.”

He announced that his rebel units are on the move, advancing out of the territory they control in the Lacandon rain forest.

Taken together, Marcos’ pronouncements left most Mexican political analysts debating whether the rebel commander and his ill-armed, ragtag army were so committed to their ideals that they could commit almost certain military suicide.

At the same time the Zapatistas were threatening war, the Mexican army was deployed around the rebels’ jungle strongholds and Chiapas’ major towns, apparently in their largest numbers yet. Their positions remained defensive, but several Mexican opposition groups reported that the army was in a state of heightened alert.

“There are movements by both armies; both are currently on maximum alert. The confrontation could start at any moment, and even the slightest incident could light the spark that sets Chiapas ablaze,” declared a statement issued this week by the “Transition Government in Rebellion.”

The group’s title illustrates the deepening political turmoil in the state since last week’s inauguration of ruling-party Gov. Eduardo Robledo Rincon.

The day Robledo took his oath, opposition leader Amado Avendano declared himself the legitimate governor in a populist ceremony attended by thousands of indigenous Mexicans in the state capital’s town square. Avendano alleges that the ruling party won the August gubernatorial elections through fraud.

“Chiapas today is living through one of its tensest moments,” Avendano’s self-declared government said in its statement.

In a clear effort to bridge that political chasm, Zedillo said the proposed peace commission would include members of Avendano’s opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party. The president stressed that the multi-party makeup of the negotiating team would ensure its neutrality.