Rebels’ Plight in Chiapas Gets Boost From Activist

Tourists gawked, schoolchildren listened attentively and passersby continued about their business Friday as Cecilia Rodriguez made a fervent plea to boost public awareness of a bitter conflict that seemed far away from Olvera Street and the skyscrapers of Downtown Los Angeles.

“We have to change people’s consciousness,” Rodriguez said in her soft voice, seated in front of an image of the ski-masked Mexican rebel leader known as Subcommander Marcos. “Public pressure is the only way to change things.”

Rodriguez, a longtime immigrants’ rights activist from El Paso, is engaged in an impassioned, if quixotic, effort to elevate Southern Californians’ concern about the unrest in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas.

On Friday, Rodriguez began the ninth day of a public hunger strike in historic La Placita in Downtown Los Angeles, near the site where, more than 200 years ago, settlers founded El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles.

Specifically targeted in her campaign is Los Angeles’ huge population of Mexican immigrants and others of Mexican ancestry. Rodriguez carries a letter identifying her and her group--the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico, USA--as the official U.S. representatives of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, as the Chiapas rebels call themselves.

The commission seeks the creation of a solidarity front of Mexican immigrants in support of the rebels, similar to the way Central American exiles have organized here to support change in their homelands.

“The tremendous social problems in Mexico are the reason people emigrate,” explained Rodriguez, a bespectacled, 40-year-old mother of three with flowing black hair flecked with gray. “Most Mexican Americans have families in Mexico. To believe this problem is going to remain isolated to Chiapas is not really realistic.”

The hunger strike will continue, Rodriguez vows, until public awareness of the Chiapas conflict has noticeably broadened and there is some motion toward peace.

Los Angeles, capital of the Mexican diaspora, was deliberately chosen as the protest’s Ground Zero, although parallel efforts are under way in other cities nationwide. A cellular telephone, beeper and portable computer set up in the gazebo in La Placita keep Rodriguez in touch with her international network.

“Los Angeles has a very symbolic status, and it’s very important for the Mexican and Chicano communities to undertake this as one of their issues,” said Rodriguez, an El Paso native of Mexican ancestry. (Her father, she says, was among the many U.S. citizens illegally deported to Mexico during the 1930s.) “This is the mecca,” she said. “If you can make it in L.A., you’ve made it, as far as el mexicano is concerned.”

Just as the rebel strategist Marcos has been a master of public relations, Rodriguez and her colleagues hope to steer U.S. opinion in their direction. Allies are also pressing their case before Congress, the United Nations, the Organization of American States and other agencies.

Rodriguez’s unabashed aim is to fan opposition in the United States to the Mexican government’s actions in Chiapas and to the $50-billion U.S.-brokered aid package to Mexico. The loan guarantees, she and her group maintain, should be suspended pending an investigation into allegations of rights abuses by Mexican authorities in Chiapas.

“We know that one hunger striker is not going to stop anything,” acknowledged Rodriguez, who said she was feeling weak but lucid after more than eight days of drinking only water and Gatorade. A physician, Dr. Jack Kent, is monitoring her condition. “But public action can make a difference.”

The urgency of matters, she says, has dictated brisk action. “We wanted to find a way to pry the door open and say: ‘Look, this is a crisis. We need your support.’ ”

So far, public interest has been fleeting. The organizers voiced hopes that a rally scheduled for 1 p.m. Sunday will jar the apathy. Rodriguez said she was disappointed but not surprised at the initial lack of response.

“It’s difficult for people to understand the connection between what’s happening there and what’s happening here,” she explained, adding her analysis: “In Mexico, it’s the Indians who are blamed for the economic problems. Here, it’s the immigrants.”