Chiapas Villagers Say They Fled Army Brutality : Mexico: Residents of one hamlet describe soldiers sticking guns in teen-agers’ mouths and threatening to cut off a man’s hand.

After 13 months of rebel rule, this former guerrilla village is now an army-held town. But like scores of villages across the territory once occupied by the Zapatista National Liberation Army, it is a ghost town.

Villagers slipped into the outskirts of the hamlet Saturday--after a week in the jungle, surviving on two cups of gruel a day--just long enough to nervously tell a reporter about human rights abuses they say drove them from their homes.

They claimed that Mexican soldiers demanding the location of rebel leader Subcommander Marcos put gun barrels in teen-agers’ mouths and threatened to cut off one man’s hand and hang him from a bridge--allegations the government has denied.

“If the government wants peace, send the army back to the barracks,” said one of the community leaders, who gave his name only as Hector.

That message was being delivered to President Ernesto Zedillo on Saturday as it became clear that the army’s continuing deployment--combined with an amnesty-for-weapons bill the government is preparing--is a major obstacle to new peace talks. Congressional debate on the bill is scheduled for Monday in Mexico City, but the Zapatistas have said they will not lay down their arms before the army is withdrawn. The government refuses to do so.

Ground troops continued to advance into territory once held by the rebels, despite a chorus of demands from civic groups that the army withdraw. Military convoys were seen from the air moving deeper into the jungle, and reporters traveling over land said soldiers were entering more villages, scaring residents into the hills.

Editorial pages in the capital framed the impasse as a critical challenge for Zedillo.

“The dilemma that is facing the president of the republic is very simple: He must keep the army in the zone of conflict to maintain the rule of law, or he must withdraw it to encourage negotiations with the Zapatistas,” observed political commentator Jaime Sanchez Susarrey in the independent daily Reforma.

A congressional commission dispatched to Chiapas on Thursday to try to restart talks was scheduled to meet Zedillo behind closed doors this weekend.

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The commission failed to make contact with the rebels, who have fled to the jungle in fear. After touring the military-occupied zone Friday, the federal senators and members of the Chamber of Deputies declared it “heart-rending”--particularly the scenes in pro-Zapatista villages turned overnight into ghost towns.

“It looks like the Old West,” declared one commission member, opposition Sen. Heberto Castillo of the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party.

The rebels reportedly fled in advance of the military deployment 10 days ago, avoiding a confrontation, local residents said.

But residents of Ibarra said the two dozen families in their village ran to the hills because soldiers mistreated them. The government has repeatedly denied that any human rights abuses have been committed during the military operation.

“We had not planned to leave,” said Gustavo, one of the community leaders. “We saw the helicopters circling, but we stayed because the government said soldiers would not harm civilians.”

When the soldiers landed on the morning of Feb. 11, they went looking for Gustavo, who said he was named as a rebel leader in army intelligence reports.

The information reportedly came from refugees who left Ibarra in September because they could no longer tolerate the Zapatista presence there. During the time the rebels occupied the zone, they blocked footpaths and roads, subjecting anyone who traveled them to searches and delays. They also drove stakes into airstrips and rolled tree trunks across them, preventing access.

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Gustavo said the soldiers found him at home, blindfolded him and demanded that he tell them where Marcos was. Showing a two-inch cut across his wrist, he said they threatened to cut off his hand.

“I have no idea where Marcos is,” he said.

Gustavo was released when Hector and seven other village men came back from working in the fields. According to villagers, the soldiers herded the new arrivals into a one-room house, put guns in the mouths of 16-year-old Gilberto Aguilar and a 13-year-old and said they would kill them unless the men confessed where Marcos was.

Afterward, the soldiers told the villagers to go back to their houses, they said. At sunset, they came looking for Gustavo again, he said, and offered him 50 pesos (about $10) to talk to a commander at a makeshift headquarters at the airstrip. He refused the money, he said, but they took him anyway.

“I was sure they were going to kill him,” said his wife, Oralia. “The children were crying, and I was terrified.”

Gustavo said he was taken by horseback and then by truck to the army stronghold at La Sultana, about eight hours away over rutted dirt roads.

“The funny thing was that the soldiers were cursing the bad roads all the way,” he recalled. Better roads have been high on the list of rebel demands. At a bridge outside the town, Gustavo said, soldiers threatened to hang him over the river until he told them Marcos’ location.

The government has claimed that its primary objective in entering the rebel-held territory was to restore order, not to find the elusive Marcos or to deliver a warrant for his arrest under the name of Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente.

However, Ibarra villagers said soldiers were insistent on finding the ski-masked leader.

An officer was finally convinced that Gustavo did not know Marcos’ whereabouts and ordered him sent home by helicopter. He returned to a deserted village. A few young men going for water found him and took him to their hiding place.

“I had received orders to take everyone back into the jungle,” Hector explained. There they have remained, even though the army has moved on to neighboring villages.

The villagers’ dirt-floor huts are still in disarray from the army search, and two mules have died, apparently from thirst, because the only source of water is an underground cave the animals cannot reach.

“That is where we are staying until the army leaves the jungle,” Hector said. “You know that I am a Zapatista, but we do not want to fight. If the government, as it says, does not want death, does not want blood, why is the army here? We want to dialogue with the government, not the army. If the government wants peace, the army must go.”

Darling reported from Ibarra and Fineman from Mexico City.