Troops Seal Off Chiapas Border to Isolate Rebels

Tightening the government’s grip on the embattled southernmost state of Chiapas, the Mexican and Guatemalan armies closed their border and Mexican troops moved to surround half a million acres of unexplored jungle Sunday in their hunt for fugitive leaders of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.

Witnesses reported that guerrillas were fleeing deep into the vast Montes Azules Reserve. The Mexican army has not entered the nature reserve during the simmering 13-month Zapatista rebellion, and a rebel retreat into the rugged region signals the potential for a prolonged deployment and manhunt.

In the rebels’ first official communique since the government operation began last week, they confirmed their retreat and decried the army deployment as a “circle of death.” They accused the government of human rights abuses, including bombing civilian targets--a charge that Mexico’s attorney general “categorically denied” as “totally false” Sunday night.

While the army has yet to report the capture of a single rebel in Chiapas itself, the government crackdown is already changing the balance of power in the state. Emboldened peasants who had laid claim to land owned by wealthy ranchers are beginning to worry whether they will have to fight to keep it.

With a military stalemate beginning to take shape in Chiapas, President Ernesto Zedillo and his long-ruling party faced a more immediate political test on the national front Sunday as voters went to the polls in the strategic west-central state of Jalisco, which includes Mexico’s second-largest city, Guadalajara.

Election officials reported a large turnout of the state’s 3 million registered voters in critical elections for governor, a state legislature and 124 mayors; the latest opinion polls indicated that the conservative opposition National Action Party (PAN) was far ahead of Zedillo’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Late Sunday night, the first of three unofficial “quick count” exit polls showed that the PAN was winning by a large margin. Official returns will not be final until Tuesday or Wednesday, election officials said.

The Jalisco vote is the first of four state elections during the next few months that will test the popularity and presence of the party that has governed Mexico continuously for 66 years. Sunday’s elections also were a test of the president’s ability to implement sweeping electoral reforms that dilute the ruling party’s power and seek to prevent traditional election fraud.

Amid threats of massive post-election protests by both leading parties if Sunday’s elections are seen as fraudulent, the government and independent poll watchers are scrutinizing the process, hoping to make it a model of fairness in a new era of Mexican democracy.

Similar post-election disputes led to a two-day street rebellion against the government by Zedillo’s own party last month in the southern Gulf state of Tabasco, where local members of the PRI feared that the president was giving in to opposition demands to replace a governor whose election was tainted by fraud charges. The same charges have fueled the armed conflict in Chiapas, where the opposition is still demanding that ruling party Gov. Eduardo Robledo Rincon resign.

Opinion polls published Sunday in the capital appeared to bode ill for the president in Chiapas as well.

A random survey of 400 residents of Mexico City by the independent daily newspaper Reforma after Zedillo identified the Zapatistas’ ski-masked leader, Subcommander Marcos, as a leftist revolutionary named Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente indicated that 59% still viewed Marcos as a leader. Just 22% saw him as the criminal Zedillo described.

The poll also indicated that 50% of those responding did not even believe Guillen Vicente is Marcos, although 43% accepted Zedillo’s identification of the mercurial and long-mysterious guerrilla spokesman.

A mass rally supporting the Zapatistas drew more than 100,000 people to Mexico City’s downtown plaza known as the Zocalo late Saturday night. The demonstrators--chanting “We are all Marcos!”--represented dozens of leftist and populist peasant groups that marched to the square from throughout the city and remained there until after midnight.

Similarly, here in Bachajon, where peasants inspired by the Zapatistas took back their ancestral lands last spring, few believe that Marcos is really Guillen Vicente. And even if he is, they say, it does not matter.

“Marcos is not the movement,” said one shopkeeper who asked not to be identified. “Nor are the people in the jungle the movement. The movement is in Ocosingo (the county seat), it is here, it is all over.”

That sentiment contrasted sharply with the hope expressed by government officials that Zedillo’s strategy of seeking to decapitate the Zapatista leadership and using the army to restore a semblance of order in Chiapas had begun to succeed.

“What was important was to disassociate the rebel leaders from social leaders, indigenous leaders and even the people of Chiapas,” said one senior official who asked not to be named. “These are now criminal people who are on the run. The important thing now is that we are committed to go back to the real roots of the problem in Chiapas--poverty and inequity--and resolve it.”

But in Bachajon, as in scores of small communities throughout Chiapas, the Zapatistas have been an inspiration to Mexicans to solve those problems for themselves. Since the uprising, peasant farmers have invaded hundreds of ranches and coffee plantations, the traditional Mexican method of laying claim to disputed farmland.

“There was not enough land for our generation,” said Juan Vasquez, a 25-year-old member of the semi-communal farm here. “Our grandparents remembered that some of our land had been stolen. They did not have any idea of how to recover it then. But thanks to the government, we had schools and are better educated.”

The farmers began legal actions to recover their land in 1990. For four years, nothing happened. Then, after the Zapatistas rose up Jan. 1, 1994, and took several county seats, people here decided they could take back their land.

Now they have built modest shacks along the green hillsides and are harvesting their first corn crop.

Such stories have been repeated all over Chiapas during the past year, much to the disgust of ranchers and coffee-plantation owners who say they have worked to keep their businesses afloat during hard times.

On Zedillo’s inauguration day 10 weeks ago, coffee-plantation owners in the southern tip of the state whose land had been occupied by peasants hired gunmen to recover it, anticipating that the new president would take a harder line with the rebels and their supporters.

Their belief appeared to have been confirmed when Zedillo ordered the arrest of Marcos and four other alleged guerrilla leaders and sent troops into rebel territory last week.

Late Sunday, Zedillo’s closest Cabinet member issued a communique declaring the military-backed operation a success for having returned a federal government presence to the region for the first time in nearly 14 months. He indicated that the Mexican army will deploy no farther into the jungle.

“In less than 72 hours, the attorney general and the Mexican army have completed taking the towns considered indispensable to ensure the re-establishment of the rule of law,” declared Interior Secretary Esteban Moctezuma Barragan, Zedillo’s de facto national security chief. “In the future, the Mexican army will concentrate on security operations to prevent violent acts in this zone.”

Darling reported from Bachajon and Fineman from Mexico City.

* RELATED STORIES: D1