Mexico, Zapatistas End Talks With No Progress

Given the initial insults and recriminations surrounding the first substantive meeting between Zapatistas and any Mexican authority in nearly two years, there were few hopes of a breakthrough for the rebels’ weekend meeting here with a congressional peace team.

But during a three-hour session Sunday night, even the reduced expectation of resuming regular contact was too much.

The two sides couldn’t manage to fix a date to meet again before the Zapatistas headed home from this colonial city to their mountain and jungle hide-outs.

Prospects for serious negotiations have rarely seemed so remote in the nearly five years since the guerrillas staged their bloody uprising in the southern state of Chiapas on New Year’s Day 1994.

A sullen cease-fire holds, but it is punctuated by periodic skirmishes. The simmering conflict retards badly needed economic development for the very poor indigenous Mayas of rural Chiapas, which was one of the demands that prompted the uprising.

Squabbling began during the opening meeting Friday night. The session lasted only 45 minutes, during which the rebels complained about poor food, old cots and inadequate security during the weekend talks. No sessions were held Saturday.

But legislators tried to put an optimistic face on Sunday’s meeting, which they said was cordial.

Some of the congressmen, who were trying to serve as an intermediary, accused the government of trying to get attention and casting the rebels in the role of spoiler. An Interior Ministry official tried to give the rebels a sealed envelope containing proposals for renewed peace talks. The Zapatistas say they won’t talk to the government until it fulfills several conditions, including making good on previous promises on indigenous rights.

Zapatista leaders had accepted an invitation by the congressional Commission for Harmony and Pacification to discuss ways to renew peace talks with the government that broke down about two years ago.

The Zapatistas scheduled the meeting to occur over the same weekend that about 2,000 rebel sympathizers were coming to San Cristobal for an “encounter with civil society” aimed at organizing a national debate over a disputed 2-year-old reform to recognize Indian cultural rites and traditions.

That meant the negotiations took place in an atmosphere of pep rallies for the Zapatistas: The talks were squeezed in between rebel discussion groups in an adjacent auditorium. The congressmen were marginalized by the parallel meetings, which the rebel leaders and their civic followers seemed to regard as more important.

The congressional committee is a multi-party body created to make contact with the rebels easier, but not to mediate directly. While it includes several leftists sympathetic to the Zapatista cause, the rebels appeared to view it as another arm of the federal government.

During Friday’s contentious meeting, rebel leader Tacho went straight to the civil society gathering next door and read a statement accusing the congressmen of being racists and colonialists.

The congressional panel, including Zapatista supporters, expressed deep offense at the rebels’ tone.

Sen. Carlos Payan of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party and former editor of the pro-Zapatista Mexico City daily La Jornada, railed at the rebels’ “anti-democratic” behavior.

“It is possible there won’t be any dialogue now because we argued about whether there was any soap in the soap dish,” he said.

Oscar Oliva, a member of a disbanded mediation commission, said Maya sensitivity to discrimination had exacerbated the dispute.

In the end, the two sides agreed to go ahead with Sunday night’s meeting, but the brinkmanship appeared already to have taken its toll.

Carlos Monsivais, a prominent Mexican social critic and a Zapatista sympathizer, said the clash was serious rather than just theatrics.

“But in the end, I believe it can be positive because it created such a level of tension that they realized they had to go forward,” he said.

The government has stepped up pressure on Zapatista strongholds in Chiapas this year, dismantling pro-rebel “autonomous villages” but also pouring resources into rural development projects in pro-government areas.

Zapatistas promise to dispatch members to every Mexican town to consult about proposed constitutional reforms to advance indigenous rights. That effort is expected to start in February or March.