Chiapas Woes Linger Long After Uprising

Antonio Hernandez, an Indian peasant and supporter of Mexico’s Zapatista rebels, was ready to die.

The hated Mexican army had just returned from a few weeks’ absence and had taken up positions outside this village in Chiapas. Once again, the troops were camped all around the Catholic cemetery. Remembering how soldiers had recently humiliated him there, insisting on searching the casket holding the baby grandson he was about to bury, Hernandez decided to act.

He donned the black ski mask of the Zapatista rebels and marched with hundreds of other peasants to the camp to expel the troops.

“We said, ‘If you want to kill us, kill us. We’re ready to die. It’s better to kill us, because you’ve just gone way too far,’ ” recounted the aging farmer.

After an angry, two-day standoff--in which the Zapatista supporters taunted the soldiers and slapped at their guns--the villagers retreated.

But the incident last month is a vivid illustration of the tension gripping Mexico’s southernmost state. Nearly four years after the masked rebels, led by the charismatic Subcommander Marcos, seized four cities and the attention of the world, Chiapas’ problems are unresolved, and some say the situation is deteriorating.

There has been none of the full-scale fighting between rebels and troops that erupted in January 1994, killing at least 145 people. But frustration is running high.

Villagers complain about the thousands of troops intruding on their lives. Towns are so polarized that several have competing pro-rebel and pro-government administrations.

Most seriously, scores of people have died in bloody clashes in northern Chiapas that often pit groups inspired by the Zapatistas against groups loyal to the country’s longtime rulers, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. “If this continues, there will be an explosion,” said the Rev. Gonzalo Ituarte, member of the Roman Catholic Church-led National Intermediation Commission, which mediates in the Chiapas crisis.

To pressure the national government for progress, more than 1,000 Zapatistas and their supporters set off Tuesday on buses from Chiapas to hold their first major demonstration in the capital, where they are expected today. They are demanding that the government withdraw its troops and carry out an accord on Indian autonomy reached early last year. Peace talks with the Zapatistas have been stalled for a year.

“The people are fed up,” declared Hernandez, the farmer, who was planning to attend a rally for the demonstrators on their departure from the city of San Cristobal de las Casas, about 30 miles south of this village.

The Zapatistas, in their brief 1994 uprising, succeeded in focusing the world’s attention on the poverty, exploitation and racism suffered by this country’s Indians. But, since then, the rebels have achieved few concrete gains, and even the witty, pipe-smoking Subcommander Marcos has largely faded from newspapers.

Poorly armed, the Zapatistas are considered no match for the Mexican army. There are, at most, several thousand rebel fighters, plus tens of thousands of supporters.

The army, in contrast, has poured troops into Chiapas. While the official count is only about 5,000, human rights groups put the total at 40,000 soldiers. According to the mediation commission, security forces have added 16 new bases or posts in the state this year, bringing the total to 209.

The soldiers have committed few blatant violations, human rights groups acknowledge. And they have helped keep peace in a volatile area. But villagers complain about troops monitoring them and trampling everything from their cornfields to their dignity.

The mediation commission, in a recent report, blamed the increased military presence for a rise in alcoholism, prostitution and depression in Indian communities, and said that in some cases soldiers were camped out in schools or health clinics.

With the buildup, “the possibilities of dialogue and a political solution become more distant, while the risk grows of bigger incidents and confrontations with the population,” the report said.

To Hernandez, the military’s main abuse in San Cayetano was digging in around the Catholic cemetery. The soldiers, he said, had defiled “our holy ground” by bringing in prostitutes and knocking over crosses. They also alarmed local peasants with their drunken sorties in the village, he said.

At the makeshift base, 20 tents pitched along a brilliant green hill, a senior military official denied that the troops had searched caskets or damaged the cemetery at the foot of the camp.

If anything, he said, the soldiers were the victims. At the recent demonstration, he said, the Zapatista supporters had declared they were ready to die--but that they would kill the troops too. “Every day we receive messages [from other local people]. They don’t want us to leave,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

More serious than the friction with the army is the wave of violence in northern Chiapas, outside the Zapatistas’ strongholds. In the north, many poor Indian groups were emboldened by the rebels’ fight and began to seize property, say church and human rights workers. Many of the protesters are linked to Mexico’s left-wing Democratic Revolution party, or PRD.

In 1995, a mysterious new kind of armed peasant group emerged to confront the newly aggressive leftists. Bearing names like Peace and Justice, the loose-knit groups generally include supporters of the long-ruling PRI. More than 100 people have been killed in clashes between the two sides, and thousands more have been forced from their villages, according to the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center in San Cristobal de las Casas. The state government says it has records of 43 dead.

In some cases, the disputes have become interwoven with old feuds over land or religion. The state’s deputy interior minister, Uriel Jarquin, denies that the fighting is generally politically motivated.

“It’s not one group against another. There are many groups,” he said in an interview.

But human rights and Catholic Church workers say the Mexican police and army have trained and supported Peace and Justice. A recent probe by the respected Human Rights Watch/Americas group failed to confirm that but found the justice system and security forces did favor the PRI group.

“The government has shown through action and inaction that it is more than just permissive of the violent actions of Peace and Justice,” the Human Rights Watch report said. Jarquin denied the allegation.

Church and human rights workers are urging that negotiations on the Zapatista uprising include an effort to resolve the violence in northern Chiapas. But the peace talks have been stalled for a year, since the government tried to change the accord on Indian autonomy.

The Zapatistas hope that their march this week, and a greater presence of opposition parties in Congress following July elections, will force the Chiapas issue back onto the national agenda.