Timing Helped Mexico Limit Rebellion’s Costs : Politics: Talks resume in a nation that, unlike its neighbors, had a relatively contained conflict.

In this nation, it took a dozen years and 75,000 lives lost before the government and the rebels finally sat down and reached a peace accord three years ago.

In Guatemala, it took 33 years and 100,000 deaths before the guerrillas and the government launched their latest round of peace negotiations last year.

In Peru, despite 15 years of combat that has claimed an estimated 30,000 lives, there still is no prospect for discussions of peace between authorities and rebel insurgents.

Throughout Latin America, getting governments and guerrillas to the negotiating table has often been a long, bloody process.

In Mexico, though, the government and the Zapatista National Liberation Army begin talks today to end their conflict, which, compared to other tumult in the region, has been relatively contained and less lethal than many.

In 10 days of fighting 16 months ago, fewer than 150 people were killed in the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas.

But that combat, arguably, has given a small force of poorly armed Indian peasants as much influence in Mexico’s national life as any guerrilla group in Latin America has achieved over its country’s destiny.

The Zapatistas are credited with being the conscience behind the electoral reforms that last year permitted the cleanest elections in Mexican history.

They have revived the call for land reform after the government declared flatly that there is no land left to redistribute.

And today, as rebel leaders sit down with government representatives on an outdoor basketball court in San Andres Larrainzar, a log cabin village near the Guatemalan border, Mexico’s attention is once again focused on impoverished Chiapas, whose problems were so long ignored.

These talks are the second attempt to find a solution to the problems of political reform and poverty that provoked the Zapatistas to take over several towns on Jan. 1, 1994.

A first peace agreement was rejected by grass-roots Zapatistas last year. Despite the lack of an agreement, or perhaps because of it, the rebels have continued to exert an enormous influence on Mexico.

“What took others a dozen years, they accomplished in a dozen days,” said one former Mexican activist, who participated in ill-fated political resistance movements in the 1970s.

The end of the Cold War, the lessons of other guerrilla movements and peculiarly Mexican attitudes--on the part of the government, the military and even the rebels--all contributed to make the Zapatistas an important political force with minimal bloodshed.

For the Mexican rebels, timing was everything, say diplomats, political analysts and historians in Mexico and Central America.

“There is a big difference between 1981--the end, and therefore, the most tense period of the Cold War--and 1994, when the question arose of governability in countries that had implemented free-market economic reforms,” said Hector Dada, a Salvadoran political analyst who spent a dozen years in exile in Mexico.

The Zapatistas were able to seize that moment and use it to their advantage.

“In the Cold War era, when the world was divided into blocs, any movement for change was seen as Soviet, Cuban or Nicaraguan expansionism,” said Ernesto Zelayandia, an adviser on regional issues to Ruben Zamora, who led the Salvadoran rebel movement’s political wing. “Even though a movement’s demands were about real problems, there was a tendency to see it as an instrument.”

As a result, in the 1980s, rebel movements and the armies they fought received massive international military aid.

That apparently has been missing in Chiapas.

The United States, for one, has looked upon Mexico not as a Cold War battleground but as a model for Third World development and a trading partner--a founding member of the North American Free Trade Agreement that took effect the same day that the Zapatistas debuted by taking control of several towns and generating headlines.

“That Pancho Villa image is not what Mexico wants,” one European diplomat said. “That is part of the reason why the Mexican government has been so quick to respond” to negotiation efforts. “(President Ernesto) Zedillo wants a quick and tidy solution.”

International pressures to avoid a military confrontation have fortified similar domestic pressures.

“The response of civil society to the Zapatistas has been enormous,” said Carlos Montemayor, author of an account of the Mexican guerrilla movements of the 1970s. “The proposals of (the rebels) have coincided with the demands of the entire country” for greater democracy and improved living conditions for the poorest Mexicans.

That national support has set the Zapatistas apart from earlier Mexican rebel movements.

“Before, there were no networks of human rights organizations, the church did not have the influence it does today,” Montemayor said. “Unlike other guerrilla movement in Mexico during the past 50 years, the (Zapatistas have) been able to penetrate the national and international media.”

Media coverage and national interest in the movement have made it more difficult for the government to deal with the Zapatistas by force. Besides relying more on publicity than on combat--using different tools than other movements--the Zapatistas also have aims that are distinct from other rebel groups.

“They are not proposing to take over the government as an insurgent army,” Montemayor said. “Rather, they are a military force that is demanding political reform and democracy in the country.”

Those demands, said Zelayandia, make negotiating with them far easier for the government.

“The Zapatista strategy was not to take power in an armed struggle but to use the armed struggle as a factor to force change,” he said. “They are not terrorists like Shining Path,” the violent Peruvian guerrillas.

He said the Zapatistas have also avoided the trap of being overtaken by events as the Colombian M-19 guerrillas have been.

“The progressive 1988 constitution has left them (Colombian guerrillas) isolated,” Zelayandia said.

The willingness of the government and rebels to negotiate has been helped by the attitude of the Mexican army.

Unlike the prewar Salvadoran army, for example, the Mexican military shuns an active political role and has for six decades.

While military factions in Guatemala and El Salvador pressed to end conflicts in their nations by defeating rebels in combat, the Mexican army has supported the government decision to negotiate, even though soldiers are confident that they could beat the Zapatistas.

That willingness to talk--on the part of the government and the rebels--is in part a result of what both sides learned from the experience in the Central American conflicts, which Mexico helped resolve by providing a location for talks and encouraging both sides to resolve their differences, observers said.

“Mexico helped provide a remedy for a sick society like ours,” Zelayandia said. “Now that Mexico has fallen ill, they have to follow the same prescription.”