Protesters Rally Against Mexico’s Military Intervention in Chiapas : Foreign affairs: Outside consulate in L.A., demonstrators express sympathy with Indian rebels in the rural state.

More than 2,000 miles from the battle front, protesters Monday marched outside the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles demanding an end to the Mexican military advance in Chiapas and a return to negotiations with leaders of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.

The demonstration was the latest in a series of protests at Mexican consulates in the United States and Europe aimed at putting international pressure on Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo to reverse himself and reject a military solution to the Indian rebellion in the southeastern Mexican state.

“Zedillo wants to have a massacre,” declared one of the marchers, Fortunato German Vazquez, who, like a number of other protesters, is affiliated with Mexico’s leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party.

The Mexican president has called the military advance a police action designed to prevent the spread of violence, accusing the Zapatistas of conspiring to spread their revolution throughout Mexico.

Under a steady rain, fewer than 100 marchers attended Monday’s demonstration outside the Mexican consulate, across from MacArthur Park. Most were citizens of Mexico and Mexican-Americans, but representatives of various pro-immigrant groups and other organizations also participated. All appeared to sympathize with the fight of the Zapatistas, who say they represent the grievances of Chiapas’ rural poor, mostly Indian population.

Protesters called the government’s move a provocative offensive that threatens to unleash a cycle of violence, further undermining the stability of a nation already battered by an economic crisis, political assassinations and fraud-tinged elections.

The protest once again demonstrated how events in Mexico--from elections to the peso devaluation to assorted calamities, natural and man-made--reverberate in Los Angeles, home to the largest concentration of people of Mexican ancestry outside of Mexico City. Organizers said they were contemplating a mass protest, but that it was still in the planning stage.

Protesters repeatedly chanted “We are all Marcos,” a reference to the ski-masked rebel leader who is now being hunted down in the Lacandon rain forest, where guerrillas have retreated from advancing federal troops. Many marchers also hoisted likenesses of Marcos, who has come to embody the uprising and whose exploits as a rebel strategist and widely published missives have won him fame worldwide.

“They’ve put a $50-billion price on Marcos’ head,” said Manuela Frausto, who was among the marchers.

Here, as in Mexico, critics have labeled the government’s decision to send troops into Chiapas a concession to the wealthy U.S. and Mexican interests behind a $50-billion loan guarantee program that has helped stabilize Mexico’s tottering peso. Mexican authorities say there is no connection.

Monday’s march was the latest in an almost daily series of protests outside the consulate since Zedillo ordered the arrest of Marcos and top rebel leaders last week, leading to the military advance after a more than yearlong cease-fire.

Demonstration organizers view strong public pressure--both in Mexico and here--as the only way to prevent a blood bath in Chiapas.

It was widespread press coverage of the bloodshed during fighting in January, 1994, that helped persuade former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to declare a cease-fire, march leaders noted.

“We hope the Mexican government will respond to international repudiation of these acts in Chiapas,” said Carlos Ugalde, a professor of Latin American studies at Glendale College. Ugalde is affiliated with the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico, the group that organized Monday’s march.

The demonstrators marched outside the consulate for more than an hour before the Mexican consul general in Los Angeles, Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, arrived and agreed to meet with about a dozen protesters.

After the meeting, Pescador agreed to send a copy of the protesters’ demands--including an immediate cease-fire, a retreat from Chiapas and a rescinding of all arrest orders in Chiapas--to the office of Zedillo.