Zedillo Shares Tough Job With Mexico’s Congress : Chiapas: President hands legislators a role in ending the rebellion. But lawmakers may not be ready for the task.

Making good on promises to cede nearly seven decades of authoritarian executive rule, President Ernesto Zedillo officially deferred to the Congress the most urgent national security problem in this country: the military conflict in Chiapas.

After two months of failed attempts to neutralize the rebel movement through military force and political concession, he called on the Senate and House of Deputies to pass comprehensive legislation that his administration needs to offer the Zapatista National Liberation Army and its supporters peace with dignity in Mexico’s southern state.

But as legislators and senators on Thursday got mired in debate and what is expected to be days of delay, it was clear that members of the Congress were ill-prepared for the sudden, historic transition of power that Zedillo has said will be the centerpiece of a new democratic order.

“Unfortunately, we have made some mistakes,” Heberto Castillo, an opposition senator and key member of a special legislative commission now charged by Zedillo with solving the armed rebellion in Chiapas, declared on the Senate floor in an effort to explain anticipated delays. “But, unfortunately, when the work is democratic, it goes slowly. Democracy is much more difficult than dictatorship.”

On Thursday, legislators took the process further. They opened the debate to the public, drawing a stream of speakers--some clad in peasant garb, others in cowboy hats and still others in suits--each offering a different opinion at “The National Forum on Amnesty.”

Were it not for a race against time, this gathering simply would have given Mexicans a glimpse at watershed political change as it unfolds in this nation, which has been ruled for 66 years by a succession of presidents from a single political party. But wrapped up in the debate is also the Zapatistas’ threat--which increases by the day--of all-out guerrilla war.

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Opposition and ruling party legislators indicated that they will spend at least a week or more hammering out such delicate issues as:

* The extent of amnesty for the rebel force whose New Year’s Day uprising last year left at least 145 dead, most of them killed by the army.

* An accounting for human rights violations by the army.

* The morality of the army’s presence as a force in nearly two dozen villages and towns.

* And the logistics of negotiating with an armed, peasant-backed rebel group now pushed deep into an uncharted jungle.

Meantime, the Zapatistas have made it clear that they are preparing for war.

Armed guerrillas in their Lacandon rain forest strongholds told Mexican journalists this week that their squads are now deployed at “strategic points” near the army’s fixed positions in territory that the rebels controlled before Zedillo launched his military crackdown on Feb. 9.

“We are ready to move the moment we get the order,” one Zapatista “lieutenant” told a correspondent for Mexico City’s Reforma newspaper.

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Already, the tense standoff has led to bloodshed--and conflicting claims. The wife of a peasant killed this week near the Chiapas town of Ocosingo told reporters that soldiers had shot her husband in the head while he lay face down, with his hands bound behind his back. The government said the man was killed during a sniper attack on an army patrol.

The problem facing Congress goes beyond the complexity of the conflict in the south, where rebels are demanding for their poor, backward state the sorts of democratic reforms under way in the nation’s capital.

Lawmakers have been blindsided, in part, by the way Zedillo presented them with this issue. The process has led many analysts to conclude that Zedillo’s decision to select Chiapas for this experiment in power-sharing was driven as much by the president’s inability to solve the crisis as his desire for reform.

Zedillo had earlier vowed to present legislators with the draft of an amnesty bill designed to make negotiation possible.

But after a week of waiting, legislators were informed by Zedillo on Thursday that, instead of his draft, they should take the initiative on a comprehensive law that “would be granted and designated as a law of dialogue, reconciliation and dignified peace in Chiapas.”