MEXICO CITY : Chiapas Talks Resume

The Mexican government and the top leadership of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army will reopen peace talks Thursday in the southern state of Chiapas. This round of talks between President Ernesto Zedillo’s government and the peasant-backed guerrilla group that rose in armed rebellion on New Year’s Day, 1994, is expected to last for several weeks at least.

Although the ragtag rebel group has posed no real military threat since it broke off a 12-day rebellion that left at least 145 people dead in January of last year, Zedillo ordered the arrest of its leaders and deployed the army to hunt them down after a one-day Zapatista insurrection helped detonate the nation’s worst economic crisis in more than a decade last December.