Chiapas Rebels Deploy Forces in Southern Mexico

Armed Indian rebels and militant peasants seized town halls, barricaded highways and erected banners proclaiming liberated zones in the southern state of Chiapas on Monday, in what rebel leader Subcommander Marcos called their first major military action since his group suspended its bloody New Year’s Day uprising 11 months ago.

There were no reports of armed clashes, and Marcos stressed that the Zapatista rebels are under orders to avoid armed confrontation with the estimated 40,000 federal troops deployed in the state. The army also appeared to be maintaining a unilateral cease-fire.

As the barricades--made with fallen trees--and banners went up and at least one major city hall fell to the rebels early Monday morning, Marcos announced at a news conference at his jungle headquarters that “thousands” of his Zapatista National Liberation Army fighters had broken through an army cordon around their rain-forest stronghold. Along with peasant sympathizers, he said, they had peacefully occupied 38 towns and villages throughout the state to “fortify” them against future attacks by the Mexican army.

State and federal officials in Mexico City and the state capital, Tuxtla Gutierrez, sought to downplay the day’s events in the embattled state, which included the armed seizure of the City Hall in Simojovel, about 30 miles from San Cristobal de las Casas.

Army officers indicated that they had no orders to respond militarily after the Zapatista rebels fanned out from their jungle positions near the Guatemalan border. And the state’s newly installed administration characterized the banners and blockades as more of a peace offensive than a military operation.

“It would be a gigantic error to think that this is the beginning of a conflagration,” the state’s interior minister, Eraclia Zepeda, declared on national television.

In Mexico City, a government spokesman confirmed the rebel takeover in Simojovel, where 20 armed peasants seized the center of local government, but he added that the roadblocks on eight major highways in the state were the work of just 600 peasants, none of them armed.

“Without doubt,” the spokesman declared, “this is not (a replay of) Jan. 1.”

But the pipe-smoking rebel leader, who uses only the nom de guerre Subcommander Marcos, asserted that his fighters are preparing for war.

Wearing his trademark black ski mask, Marcos flatly rejected President Ernesto Zedillo’s eleventh-hour proposal to create a peace committee, made up of opposition and ruling-party legislators, to talk rather than fight. Zedillo’s proposed commission would be authorized to negotiate a permanent cease-fire with the Zapatistas and satisfy demands that include equal rights for the indigenous people in the state.

On balance, most analysts concluded that Monday’s rebel troop movements sharpened the potential for more bloodshed just under a year after the Zapatistas launched a New Year’s Day offensive by occupying Chiapas’ major cities. The uprising provoked a shooting war with the Mexican army that left nearly 150 people dead in 12 days.

In asserting that his rebels were merely fortifying communities that sympathize with the Zapatistas, Marcos offered reporters no evidence of government troop movements, and there was no indication that the Mexican army plans to attack those towns in the near future.

His claims came less than a week after Marcos publicly declared that an 11-month truce with the government had ended. “War is imminent,” he declared last week. And reports from the Chiapas countryside indicated that many of the militants who staged Monday’s operations were, in fact, members of the Zapatista rebel army.

Among those who erected banners proclaiming “Welcome to Zapatista territory” and “In this free, rebel territory, we prohibit the entrance of military personnel, security forces and police” were armed men dressed in the Zapatista’s bandannas, ski masks and brown fatigues.

Marcos also called Zedillo’s peace plan “insufficient,” asserting that the Zapatistas decided to break the cease-fire after the Dec. 8 inauguration of ruling party Gov. Eduardo Robledo Rincon, which Zedillo attended with a bearhug and best wishes for the new governor in spite of opposition allegations that he won the office in August through fraud.

Only through Robledo’s resignation and the mediation of the sympathetic bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, Samuel Ruiz, could the conflict be resolved peacefully, Marcos said.

Reacting to Monday’s unrest, Bishop Ruiz began a hunger strike, because the day’s events “showed our state and our country sliding down the slope to war and irreversible violence.”

Yet even the rebel leader indicated that the potential for violence may be somewhat less immediate than appeared on the surface Monday.

“The general command of the Zapatista army has ordered its troops to avoid as far as possible contact with troops of the federal army, and (the Zapatistas) pledge not to attack, for now, the (army’s) current positions,” Marcos said.

Monday’s operation was designed “with the aim of avoiding armed clashes,” he said. “There were no clashes, in strict compliance with the cease-fire, which is being maintained with regard to these troops.”