Military Can’t Outflank Rebels in War of Words

The rebel response came not with bullets, land mines or grenades but as it always has in the 14-month uprising by the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas: delivered, by hand, in two neatly typed pages and a brief, impassioned videotape.

“I am ill. Perhaps I will die soon,” a wan Commander Ramona said from a Zapatista hide-out in the highlands of Mexico’s southernmost state in a tape that arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas late Sunday night.

Clad in a traditional Indian huipil, the well-known Zapatista leader, who appeared on the verge of collapse, sat at a simple wooden table. Before her was a Mexico City newspaper dated the previous day. Chickens clucked in the background.

“Many children, women and men also are ill,” said the key Zapatista ideologue, who identifies herself only as Ramona. “We have many illnesses. But the doctors, the medicines, the hospitals are not in our hands. We are hungry. Our food is tortillas and salt. We eat beans when we have them. We hardly know milk or meat.

“Our movement is indigenous,” she added in the rebels’ latest salvo. “It began many years ago to tell the world the peasants of Chiapas are suffering from hunger and illness. . . . We ask once again the people of Mexico not to forget us--not to leave us alone--that they help us to construct the peace that we all desire.”

Backed by the separately delivered military communique--signed by three Zapatista “subcommanders” and threatening all-out guerrilla war on the Mexican army if the government continues to “back us into a dead-end street of dying or fighting”--the videotape graphically illustrated how the Zapatistas, with only a handful of rifles, shotguns and grenades, fight the battle that is altering the face of the Mexican nation.

Theirs is a propaganda war. And as the Mexican army continued Monday to seal off the Lacandon rain forest where the Zapatistas’ militia core and their chief spokesman, Subcommander Marcos, presumably are holed up and cut off, the ailing Commander Ramona made it clear that the rebels can still hit hard in the war of words.

Through half a dozen sympathetic humanitarian agencies in Chiapas that distribute their communiques and are plugged into the worldwide Internet computer network, Zapatista leaders are matching each and every claim by the federal government with a counterclaim of their own.

Some are patently false--for example, allegations of widespread summary execution and brutal torture by the army. These reports sped around the world to universities and human rights groups on the Internet before the Mexican government had even heard them.

Others appear to be painfully true--reports from Commander Ramona and other Zapatistas of thousands of starving, ailing refugees at camps deep in the jungle; those reports were confirmed by returning European journalists late Sunday night.

But that the Zapatistas still can fight at all in the information battle bodes ill for the government--particularly if the rebels do launch their promised guerrilla war, analysts said.

They noted that the Zapatistas have brought the powerful Mexican army occupation to a stalemate, even though federal forces have retaken all key rebel-held towns and villages in Chiapas in a nearly bloodless operation; the ragtag guerrillas are on the run and military officials contend the Zapatistas can count on just 130 “professional” leaders and 500 ill-armed militia members.

But analyzing the propaganda ramifications of the standoff between the army and the rebels, Gabriel Zaid, one of Mexico’s most respected analysts, concluded that the Zapatistas are not as bad off--nor is the army as well-positioned--as the government portrays.

“That the Mexican army could retake the guerrilla-dominated villages so easily is not a great military victory that augurs a quick ending,” he said. “It is a change of rebel strategy. The Zapatistas cannot sustain a war of positions. . . . Now they have retreated to a war of movements, which they can sustain for years, slipping away and staging dramatic attacks almost at will.”

He said the government could take a “spectacular” step in the campaign if, among other measures, it could capture, then display, Subcommander Marcos. “But if Marcos is in charge of this realistic retreat, soon we will see him on all the world screens, mocking the government and once again becoming the center of world attention,” he said.

Since President Ernesto Zedillo ordered the launch of a military offensive against the Zapatistas on Feb. 9, his government has labored to counterattack the rebels in the image war too.

The president has supplied a steady diet of proclamations and appearances to bolster the official line that the government is ready to talk peace with the rebels and is sincere in its promise to develop Chiapas, the nation’s most impoverished state.

But behind the scenes, key officials conceded that the government will continue to close off the principal avenue to peace with the Zapatistas--the rebel demand that the army withdraw to its barracks as the only condition for future talks.

The Zapatistas’ communique, in response, shows just how they make the propaganda war work for them. They made an issue of how difficult, if not impossible, it is for them to talk peace with a congressional committee dispatched to Chiapas late last week because, they asserted, the Mexican government continues to press them deeper and deeper into the safety of the jungle.

“Despite having declared numerous times our willingness to dialogue, the federal army continues to corner us,” they said.

Times staff writer Juanita Darling in San Cristobal de las Casas contributed to this report.