Pro-PRI Gangs Breed Fear, Potential Chaos in Chiapas

When he wants to worship, farmer Gustavo Hernandez sneaks out the back of a local grocery store and ducks into a dim storage room, where the Virgin Mary shares space with hundreds of ears of corn and a few scrabbling chickens.

The makeshift altar to the Virgin is only a short walk from this village’s imposing Spanish-colonial Roman Catholic church. But Hernandez won’t go near that structure.

“If we go to the church, they’ll surround it and kill us,” the 46-year-old peasant says softly.

Limar is one of several towns in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, that have in effect been taken over by pro-government vigilante gangs. Formed quietly since the 1994 Zapatista rebel uprising in the region, the groups gradually have turned Limar and other villages into islands of fear by their harassment of rebel supporters, especially leftist Catholics.

The Mexican government is desperately trying to curb such armed groups in the wake of the massacre of 45 Zapatista supporters, many at a prayer service, in another Chiapas village last month. But the conflict is so severe that it could be spiraling out of the government’s control.

Some Zapatista supporters have taken up arms against the pro-government groups, escalating the bloodshed. Many villages in northern Chiapas have split into opposing camps or, in some cases, have been “cleansed” of opponents.

The violence could make the area ungovernable for years--becoming a more intractable problem than the Zapatista guerrillas, who have abided by a cease-fire since 1994. “There’s no reconciliation now,” says Demostenes Perez, a church worker in Tila, the county seat, near Limar in northern Chiapas. “The thirst for vengeance is very strong.”

Right-wing vigilante groups began to appear in Chiapas in 1995. The left-wing Zapatista rebels had stopped shooting a year earlier, after 12 days of fighting that left at least 145 people dead.

But the Zapatistas’ influence continued even after the fighting ended. Inspired by the rebels and their charismatic Subcommander Marcos, Indian peasants began to seize land and proclaim support for the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD. Many fervently backed a local Catholic Church movement that demanded more rights for poor Indians. In some areas, they set up “autonomous” governments or occupied city halls held by the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Their aggressiveness was a direct challenge to the PRI bosses, large landholders and businesspeople who had long dominated the state. The reaction was not long in coming.

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Hernandez, a corn farmer who sympathizes with the Zapatistas, first experienced the terror of the new groups in September 1995. Local men from a pro-PRI group called Peace and Justice kidnapped him and took him to the graveyard in Limar, he says.

Holding a knife to his neck, they accused him of serving Zapatista and left-wing causes through his work as a lay Catholic catechist, he says. “They threatened to kill me if I didn’t stop working for the bishop and the pope,” says the gaunt farmer.

Today, Peace and Justice’s dominance is evident throughout Limar, a palm-shaded village of shacks whose dirt yards are carpeted with drying coffee beans.

The Catholic church, painted a striking robin’s-egg blue, has been padlocked since October. Outside, police have set up lean-tos protected by sandbag barriers.

“We closed it because that’s where all the problems began,” declares Diego Vazquez Perez, a local Peace and Justice leader. He claims that a church campaign to seek justice for Indians became radicalized, with calls for armed struggle.

The toll of the conflict in Limar and other villages is daunting. According to state officials, about 200 people have been killed by pro-government or leftist gangs--a higher death toll than in the 1994 Zapatista rebellion itself. Thousands of people have become refugees, many through a political “cleansing” of pro-Zapatista villages by armed government supporters. Farmers are now so afraid of being attacked that some no longer venture out into their fields. Without crops, they are becoming steadily poorer.

“A civil war has been created,” says Father Gonzalo Ituarte, the secretary of a Catholic group that has mediated government peace talks with the Zapatistas.

Catholic, leftist and Zapatista leaders charge that the Mexican army has created the pro-government groups. But although tens of thousands of troops have observed a wary standoff in Chiapas as peace talks have sputtered and stalled, so far there is no conclusive evidence that the troops have either armed or trained the groups.

Still, it is becoming increasingly obvious that state officials in Chiapas have tolerated, and even encouraged, the pro-government bands.

For example, the PRI-dominated state government recently awarded Peace and Justice $525 million to develop agricultural projects--despite dozens of cases recorded by newspapers and human rights organizations in which the group has allegedly intimidated, expelled and killed its opponents.

Chiapas’ assistant government secretary, Uriel Jarquin, shrugs off those reports. “The state government can’t demonize an organization just because it’s been accused of something,” he says.

The clearest indications of some kind of official support for paramilitary-style groups have emerged in the investigation into the Dec. 22 massacre of 45 Zapatista supporters in the village of Acteal. Federal authorities have arrested 47 suspects, among them the PRI mayor of the region, who is accused of arming the killers and letting them use county trucks.

A local state police commander charged with aiding the gunmen said he had been ordered by superiors to “leave PRI militants alone” if they carried illegal high-powered arms, the attorney general’s office said.

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The federal government’s own human rights commission found in an investigation that state authorities knew in advance about a planned Acteal massacre--but did nothing to stop it.

“They could have prevented the tragedy,” said a commission report leaked to local newspapers.

It’s not clear whether police in other towns also are helping the vigilante groups. But they seem to do little to stop them.

In Nuevo Limar, a small town next to Limar, Zapatista supporters tell a visiting reporter that they have seen local Peace and Justice members donning blue police uniforms and carrying high-powered weapons.

A state police officer denies seeing any such thing. But that doesn’t mean that Peace and Justice isn’t armed, he adds. “They’re armed, but they never take them out here,” says the officer, Jose Gonzalez. “They have camps like the military does, in the countryside.”

Recently, he says, his police unit discovered a Peace and Justice firing range, with wooden figures shaped like humans and pocked with bullets, in the nearby hills.

Asked how he knew it belonged to the group, he shrugs and responds: “Who else would it be?”

Peace and Justice’s spokesman, Samuel Sanchez Sanchez, says the group resorted to violence only after several of its members were killed by left-wing opponents.

“Members of Peace and Justice began to get together and to go avenge their victims,” the 43-year-old spokesman, dressed in blue jeans and a denim shirt, said in an interview at the state legislature, where he serves as a PRI congressman.

“They [Peace and Justice] went to avenge their victims, because the government didn’t intervene. If they found them [the alleged killers], there was a clash.”

Clearly, the bloody conflict in Chiapas is not one-sided. Members of left-wing groups, often supporting the Catholic Church, have assassinated their opponents as well.

Vazquez Perez, the Peace and Justice leader in Limar, hands a reporter photos of a blood-drenched, beheaded man and a slain baby girl, her eyes a milky white film. They are among 66 Peace and Justice members or relatives who have been slain in the conflict, according to the group’s figures.

It appears, however, that the left-wing groups are less organized and powerful than their opponents. The mass expulsions in Chiapas villages affected mainly Zapatista supporters, both sides say.

And only the pro-government groups appear to have received official support--which has ranged from money to preferential treatment by the justice system, human rights groups say.

“While clearly some groups or individuals target members of the PRI, we uncovered no evidence of institutional links to aboveground groups, such as the church and the PRD,” said a 1997 report by the Washington-based Human Rights Watch/Americas.

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The deaths on both sides have sown deep hatred in once-unified communities, a rancor that could endure long after the Zapatistas and government sign a peace treaty. Unlike the army and rebels, the vigilante groups do not appear to be disciplined units that can be easily controlled.

In Limar, for example, state judicial police recently began to crack down on Peace and Justice, says the local representative of the state attorney general’s office, who identifies himself as Abenamar.

But the pro-PRI group wouldn’t be reined in.

“Peace and Justice went after them,” forming a mob that drove the police out of town, Abenamar says. No police have dared enter the town since then, he says.

The pro-government groups appear to be growing increasingly bold. In November, gunmen in a Peace and Justice stronghold opened fire on a convoy carrying Samuel Ruiz, the region’s Catholic bishop and a key peace negotiator. He was not hurt.

What is perhaps most puzzling about the Chiapas conflict is that it pits poor Indians against other poor Indians from the same communities. In some cases, families seem to have continued long-standing feuds by joining opposing sides. But many observers say that the poorly educated Indians frequently are manipulated by political leaders into joining armed groups.

The violence has split not just towns, but families. At dawn one day this month, a terrified farmer, Cristobal Hernandez, fled Nuevo Limar with his family, clutching only a sack of clothes and a wet lump of tortilla meal as he boarded a truck, residents say.

A Zapatista sympathizer, he had been threatened with death by Peace and Justice, according to his nephew, Raul Hernandez. But the fleeing man’s own son-in-law belongs to the pro-PRI group, local residents say.

“We’re neighbors,” acknowledges a local pro-Zapatista peasant, Adolfo Lopez. “But they hate us.”