Mexican Government, Rebels Start Talks to End Conflict in Chiapas : Politics: Indian spectators leave before negotiations begin. Rebel leader Subcommander Marcos is not present.

Negotiations to end the smoldering conflict in Chiapas started Saturday after two days of delays--but without the hundreds of Indian spectators who had crowded around the talks site and without the charismatic Subcommander Marcos.

Three hundred military police with nightsticks guarded the perimeter of the site. The Indians in brightly embroidered blouses and beribboned hats--who had camped in the security zone, holding up the talks since Thursday--had left. Marcos never appeared.

“Everyone is asking, ‘Where is Marcos?’ ” Commander Tacho, one of the eight rebel delegates, said during a news conference Friday night. “Well, Marcos is where the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee (the rebel commanding body) has told him to be.”

Marcos has been identified by the government as the son of a middle-class furniture store owner in northern Mexico, not one of the indigenous peoples the rebels represent. His absence was a clear effort by Zapatista National Liberation Army leaders to refute President Ernesto Zedillo’s charges that their movement “is neither Chiapanecan nor indigenous.”

But it was also an indication that the talks will take place without the overshadowing personalities who dominated negotiations that produced a failed peace agreement last year.

Not only is Marcos gone, but the government negotiating team is composed of low-profile bureaucrats--a sharp contrast to last year’s flashy peace commissioner, Manuel Camacho Solis, who had been considered a strong contender for the ruling party presidential nomination.

In the final days of his administration, former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari said privately that his two biggest mistakes were “M & M, Manuel and Marcos.”

The peace agreement they produced, with the mediation of Samuel Ruiz, the controversial bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, was rejected by grass-roots Zapatistas.

Ruiz is part of an eight-member mediating commission in the current talks, but his profile is lower. He rarely speaks publicly on the commission’s behalf.

Even the setting is far less dramatic: a temporary building constructed in two days over a basketball court, compared to the majestic colonial cathedral of San Cristobal de las Casas.

The hope is that what these talks lack in the glamour of well-known personalities and an impressive setting they will make up for in substance, finally resolving the decades of conflicts that drove Indian peasants to take up arms Jan. 1, 1994.

The current series of talks will be much more laborious than last year’s 12-day session. The first round is expected to last three days and produce an accord on ways to diminish tensions, which could mean anything from an extension of a truce to the removal of soldiers from formerly rebel-held zones.

Last year’s talks were mired in suspicions: that Camacho would use them as a platform to launch an independent presidential bid, that Marcos and the Zapatistas were part of this Byzantine political plot, that Ruiz was really a Zapatista leader who was about to be removed from his diocese by the Vatican.

As a presidential candidate, Zedillo accused Camacho of lying about having reached an agreement, thereby destroying what was left of the popular former Mexico City mayor’s political career.

Ruiz, a longtime defender of Indian rights, was told to report to the Vatican, but apparently no action was taken against him. He also was the target of riots by San Cristobal de las Casas conservatives who demanded his removal.

In an apparent effort to keep animosity toward him from prejudicing the current talks, Ruiz has been a relatively quiet member of the mediating commission.

But the most direct effort to subordinate personality in order to focus on issues has come in the case of Marcos. The appearance of the tall, light-skinned military chief among the darker rebels fueled racist-tinged beliefs that Indians would never have risen up on their own.

“Many people say that, before Marcos appeared, we were content in our misery,” said Commander David, coordinator of the rebel negotiators. “Those people lie. We were in the struggle long before that. Many say that we are directed by Bishop Samuel or by priests and nuns. We are capable of organizing ourselves and directing our own destiny.”

The Zapatistas are bent on driving that point home, particularly after the government issued arrest warrants Feb. 9 for half a dozen alleged rebel leaders, none of them Indian.

“From the beginning, we were accused of being foreign,” Tacho said. “Those of us who head this movement are Indians. We are fighting not only against poverty, but for liberty and democracy.

“We do not have college degrees,” he added, “but we know there is injustice in this country.”