Rebel Attack May Erase Postelection Optimism

The fusillade of automatic-weapons fire that ripped through patrol cars, wounded a policeman and left a station house here riddled with bullet holes Sunday night was a wake-up call for Mexico.

The attack, later claimed by the Armed Revolutionary Forces of the People, was the guerrilla group’s first assault since Mexico’s July 2 election. It came as most Mexicans basked in the afterglow of peaceful polls that will bring to power their first opposition president in 71 years.

A communique from the rebel group a day after the attack was directed at President-elect Vicente Fox himself: a clear message that the rebels have no plans to disappear along with the presence of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in the presidential palace.

“A neo-authoritarianism came out of the elections,” declared the group, known by its Spanish acronym, FARP.

It predicted that Fox, a rancher and former Coca-Cola executive, will run Mexico like a capitalist enterprise that will benefit a few and bankrupt the majority. The FARP called on all “revolutionary forces” in the country to redouble a battle that had long targeted Mexico’s ruling PRI.

“We want to make it clear that we do not agree with the country’s move to the right, to the establishment of a conservative regime,” the communique declared. “We will fight with all the force and measures within our reach.”

When the FARP first surfaced in a mountainside Mexico City suburb in April, Interior Ministry officials described it as a spinoff of the leftist Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, which emerged in 1996. The EPR has staged attacks that have left at least 60 people dead, primarily in impoverished Oaxaca and Guerrero states.

An Interior Ministry spokesman concluded in April that the FARP is “not a threat to social peace in the country.” And Federal Police Commissioner Wilfrido Robledo said Tuesday on television, “I don’t think there should be concern.”

But the timing of Sunday’s assault and its message were a startling reminder that Mexico’s postelection euphoria may well be short-lived.

Fox, who will not take office until Dec. 1, already has extended olive branches to the country’s most potent insurgents--the leftist Zapatistas, whose New Year’s Day uprising in 1994 in the southernmost state of Chiapas shocked the nation. The guerrillas, led by a middle-class intellectual calling himself Subcommander Marcos, battled the Mexican army for several days before agreeing to a temporary truce that has largely held.

But Chiapas faces crucial state elections next month. And although the Zapatistas don’t appear to be directly linked to the FARP, Sunday’s attack has raised fears in the state.

Although largely peaceful, Chiapas remains unstable. Confrontations between police and the state’s indigenous people are commonplace. The Mexican army is still out in force. And Subcommander Marcos’ forces remain armed in “autonomous territories in rebellion.”

All major opposition parties have united behind one gubernatorial candidate for the Aug. 20 polls, and the region’s PRI governors have thrown full support behind theirs, in a campaign that the opposition casts as war versus peace.

There are, however, signs of hope. Fox told a group of Mexican columnists this week that he is “very positive” about the chances for ending the 6-year-old conflict, and the leader of his National Action Party said Fox is prepared to meet with Marcos.

Before the presidential election, the guerrilla leader had pledged that his forces would respect the vote. Unlike the FARP, however, he has yet to react to the result.