TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=94TT0054> <title> Jan. 17, 1994: Zapata's Revenge </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Jan. 17, 1994 Genetics:The Future Is Now </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> MEXICO, Page 32 Zapata's Revenge </hdr> <body> A bloody uprising in one of the country's poorest states serves as an embarrassing reminder that Mexico has not quite joined the First World's industrial club By Michael S. Serrill--Reported by Adrienne Bard/Mexico City and Kieran Murray/San Cristobal de las Casas The last fireworks had fizzled and the New Year's celebration had just about come to an end when the people of San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, were treated to an even more dramatic spectacle. Into the town square marched 300 armed peasants, most of them wearing army fatigues and the bandanas that have become the trademark of Latin American revolutionaries. On this opening day of the traitorous North American Free Trade Agreement, their leaders announced, the neglected and exploited Indian people of Chiapas were declaring war on the Mexican government. Then they attacked San Cristobal's town hall, breaking down its heavy wooden doors and hurling computers and other equipment out of the windows before setting the first floor of the building ablaze. In three other towns--Ocosingo, Altamirano and Las Margaritas--over the next few hours, hundreds of guerrillas armed with machine guns, hunting rifles and in some cases toy pistols ransacked government buildings and sent local police into flight. Before the episode was over as many as 2,000 guerrillas had occupied San Cristobal and six other towns in the highlands of Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico and one of its poorest. They took at least a dozen police, ranchers and a former state governor hostage before melting into the mountains, with the Mexican army in hot pursuit. In four days of sometimes furious gun battles between soldiers and rebels, more than 100 people died. The Mexican army was praised at first for its restraint, but before the fighting was over, there were charges that captured rebels had been executed and that soldiers had needlessly endangered civilians. International and Mexican human-rights groups are investigating. The outburst was the first serious left-wing violence Mexico has seen in 20 years. As the rebels had planned, the uprising came at a most embarrassing time for the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. With the implementation of NAFTA on Jan. 1, Salinas had pronounced Mexico on its way to status as a modern, industrialized nation. The Chiapas uprising highlighted a fact brought out in the NAFTA debate: vast sections of rural Mexico that have been left out of Salinas' modernization drive may be fertile ground for future instability. U.S. financial experts insisted the rebellion would have little effect on plans to invest in Mexico, partly because Chiapas was never viewed as a prime area for economic development. But some political analysts believed the uprising might be a harbinger of further troubles. While Mexico's growth rate is impressive, says Peter Hakim, president of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank and forum for exchange among leaders in the hemisphere, the gap between haves and have-nots is wide, and inequity and discrimination are rife. "With those kinds of abuses--alienation, disaffection, isolation, exploitation," says Hakim, "the prospect of some kind of uprising is always there." What amounted to a violent takeover of a swath of highland Chiapas came with surprising ease and swiftness. The insurgents met little resistance as they swept into the old colonial city of San Cristobal de las Casas and other towns and occupied some of them for as long as three days before the government was able to organize its counterstrike. Calling themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army, after Emiliano Zapata, the legendary hero of Mexico's 1910 revolution, the rebels said their goal was to stop the "genocide" of the region's Indians. Indians from Morelos state played a strong role in Zapata's famous Liberation Army of the South. Most of Chiapas' 3.2 million people have some Indian heritage; 250,000 are full-blooded Maya who speak Spanish, if at all, as a second language. The rebels, apparently led by a man known only as Comandante Marcos, issued a communique from the occupied towns. "The war we declare is a final but justified measure," the statement said. "We have nothing, absolutely nothing. Not a dignified roof, nor work, nor land, nor health care, nor education." As they departed from San Cristobal, the insurgents painted their goals in black on a wall in the main square: "Mexicans: Gone to Rancho Nuevo, then to Tuxtla," the state capital. "There will be no rest from now on." They then launched an audacious attack on the Rancho Nuevo military prison, freeing 178 inmates before being driven off by troops backed by helicopter gunships. The worst casualties came when a public-transport minibus was seized by seven or eight rebels, and the vehicle was riddled with bullets by an army patrol, killing 14. The fiercest battle took place in Ocosingo, where rebel units tried to hold the town against an assault by overwhelmingly superior government forces. About 30 guerrillas were killed. In the central market, scene of the heaviest fighting, reporters found the bodies of six rebels. Their hands had been tied, and each had been killed with a bullet in the back of the head, apparent victims of a summary execution. The guerrillas pulled out of most towns before the army arrived and headed back into the highland forests from which they had emerged. Government forces rained bombs and bullets on their path of retreat from planes and helicopters, then sent tanks and armored personnel carriers after them. An estimated 12,000 men were engaged in the operation. Hundreds of peasants fled their mountain villages for fear they would fall victim to errant air and artillery strikes. On one occasion, journalists in clearly marked cars came under air attack on the outskirts of San Cristobal, an incident senior Interior Ministry official Eloy Cantu later declared to be "very regrettable." No one was injured. Military operations were complemented by an international propaganda siege whose principal aim seemed to be to downplay the Chiapas uprising by attributing it to outside agitators. In one statement, the Interior Ministry said disaffected Chiapas citizens had been been "manipulated" and even forced to participate in the rebellion by "violent factions" from neighboring Guatemala and El Salvador. Cantu went so far as to point out to the press that Comandante Marcos had green eyes and blond hair and spoke four languages, the suggestion being that only a foreigner could have such attributes. Soldiers claimed to have captured a Guatemalan fighting with the insurgents, but all evidence points to an indigenous uprising fueled by frustration with Chiapas' economic and social stagnation. The government last week made a belated effort to address Chiapas' grievances, sending in 20 tons of food and promising a $1 million advance on Chiapas' 1994 allocation from Solidarity, Salinas' much ballyhooed public works program, which in the past four years has contributed $11 billion to rebuilding Mexico's crumbling infrastructure. The government also sent in a team to discuss the many land claims by peasants against the region's ranchers and coffee growers. As the insurgency wound down, Salinas' concerns were twofold: that the Chiapas fighting would discourage new investment and that it would give a boost to opposition presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in elections scheduled for August. Cardenas came close to defeating Salinas five years ago and unseating the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.) from power for the first time since its formation in 1929. But he is given little chance this time, in part because Salinas' handpicked P.R.I. candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, will benefit from the public exposure he got as administrator of Solidarity. Nevertheless, political pundits argue that the uprising will profoundly change the character of the election debate. "Chiapas will be something no one can forget," says writer and political scientist Federico Reyes Heroles. "After this, social policies will have to be the most important theme, not one of 10 on the list." As for the investment climate, financiers do not expect the events in Chiapas by themselves to spoil the gold rush. In the country's volatile financial markets, the initial reaction to the rebellion was panic. On the Monday after New Year's, the Bolsa de Valores, Mexico City's stock market, registered its largest one-day drop ever, falling 100 points. In the following days, the market more than made up for Monday's losses, with much of the buying by U.S. and British institutional investors. "This incident is obviously unfortunate, but I don't think it will have any impact at all on the interest of U.S. business in pursuing a strong relationship with Mexico in NAFTA," said Everett Briggs, president of the Council of the Americas, which represents about 200 U.S. companies with investments in Latin America. "Mexico is a very big country. You can have an outbreak of trouble in one place without a big effect elsewhere." Yet the prospect of a renewed rebellion is very much alive in Chiapas, where most of the insurgents and all their leaders have escaped into the mountains, where they can redraw their strategy and prepare to fight again another day. </body> </article> </text>