A-Infos (en) Analysis: Chiapas and Mexico's Crisis of Morale

[Tom Burghardt <tburghardt@igc.apc.org>]

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     ANALYSIS: CHIAPAS AND MEXICO'S CRISIS OF MORALE
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     By LESLIE CRAWFORD, The Financial Times. Distributed by
     Scripps Howard News Service.
 
     MEXICO CITY (February 14, 1998 01:18 a.m. EST) -- It's a
scene that has been repeated countless times in the weeks since
the December massacre of Maya Indians in the highlands of
Chiapas:
   
     An army commander struggles uphill with his troops to
confront a wall of stone-faced peasants. As he approaches the
crowd, he begins reading from a prepared script: "Mexicans,
brothers, we have come in peace! We are here to protect you."
   
     The speech is met with a torrent of abuse. The villagers,
supporters of the Zapatista guerrillas, don't want the army in
their midst. Though many are hungry and homeless after fleeing
pro-government death squads, they refuse food and blankets
proffered by the army.
   
     The commander shrugs off the rejection, and within hours his
squadron has set up camp outside the hamlet of Xuyep,
establishing another foothold in Zapatista "territory."
   
     Xuyep is not a rebel stronghold in the military sense. The
Zapatista National Liberation Army has been confined to a remote
jungle area on the Guatemalan border, more than a hundred miles
away from Xuyep, since an army offensive in early 1995.
   
     But in the intervening three years, the ideals espoused by
Zapatista rebels -- of self-government, land reform, and a new
charter for Indian rights -- have won tens of thousands of
converts in the dirt-poor and predominantly Maya state.
   
     To contain the Zapatistas' influence, President Ernesto
Zedillo deployed 40,000 troops, nearly one-third of the Mexican
army, in Chiapas. The army was needed to protect strategic oil
and uranium reserves and to prevent the turmoil in Chiapas from
infecting neighboring Oaxaca and Guerrero, which have large
indigenous populations and their own incipient guerrilla
movements.
   
     The containment strategy had a heavy cost on the military.
   
     "The army was sent to solve problems created by corrupt
politicians, and it is soldiers who are footing the bill," says
Luis Garfias, a retired general and former congressman who quit
Zedillo's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) last year.
   
     The heavy military presence among hostile communities has
sapped morale, Garfias says. Accusations of human rights abuses
have also tarnished army prestige.
   
     Since the massacre of 45 Maya Indians on Dec. 22, however, a
far graver accusation hangs over the army and its commander-in-
chief, Zedillo.
   
     Mexican human rights groups and the Roman Catholic Church in
Chiapas have accused members of the army and the state police of
training and supplying weapons to the paramilitaries who
perpetrated the brutal killings in the village of Acteal, in the
Chiapas highlands.
   
     "We have evidence that members of the PRI belong to
paramilitary groups, that members of the army are training these
groups and that local police allow these groups to operate with
impunity," says Gonzalo Ituarte, a Dominican friar and spokesman
for a church-led group which mediated in peace talks -- now
stalled between the government and Zapatistas.
   
     "What we cannot prove," Ituarte says, "is that this reign of
terror forms part of a deliberate government plan."
   
     Even before the Acteal massacre, reports of violent killings
were commonplace in Chiapas. Human rights lawyers denounced the
proliferation of paramilitary groups led by caciques (local PRI
chiefs) who felt threatened by the rise of pro-Zapatista Indian
leaders in their communities. Still, police and military
authorities took no action.
   
     According to Ituarte, armed groups forced more than 11,000
peasants to flee their homes in 1997; 84 people were murdered.
   
     "What is happening in Chiapas is political cleansing,
similar to the ethnic cleansing that took place in Bosnia,"
Ituarte says.
   
     Military analysts agree.
   
     John Saxe-Fernandez, interviewed by Proceso magazine, says:
"The strategy in Chiapas closely resembles the counter-insurgency
tactics used by the Guatemalan army in their own civil war. It is
a scorched-earth policy, where community leaders are murdered,
their homes and crops are destroyed, and where paramilitary
groups are trained in the techniques of state terror to deny
guerrillas their social support."
   
     In Mexico City, however, an adviser to Francisco Labastida,
Zedillo's third interior minister in three years, denies any
links between the armed forces and paramilitary groups in
Chiapas.
   
     "We know these armed groups include members of the ruling
party," the adviser says, "and that they have been armed and
trained by local police officers and former members of the armed
forces. But there is no link between active members of the armed
forces and these groups."
   
     Labastida has pledged to disarm all paramilitary groups in
Chiapas, and to redeploy the army to more neutral ground, if this
helps relaunch peace talks with the Zapatistas.
   
     The interior minister's peace offensive, which got under way
two weeks ago, also included the release of 300 prisoners and the
announcement by Zedillo of a $100 million cocoa development
project for Chiapas.
   
     Like many government propaganda blitzes, however, the fine
print revealed a different story.
   
     According to human rights lawyers, no Zapatistas were
included among the prisoners granted early parole. In addition,
the $100 million venture with Callebaut-Barry, the Swiss-owned
chocolate maker, included a cocoa-processing plant in the state
of Veracruz, an industrial chocolate plant "near Mexico City or
on the border with the U.S." thousands of miles from Chiapas and
"infrastructure already created by the Agriculture Ministry."
   
     The only investment earmarked for Chiapas, he said, appeared
to be "a cocoa collection and selection center."
 
     Copyright 1998 Scripps Howard News Service. All Rights
     Reserved.
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