Democracy’s Growth Could Benefit Chiapas

ACTEAL, Mexico —  While guerrilla leader Subcommander Marcos hunkers down in his jungle hide-out, the gale of democratic change that roared through Mexico last month looks poised to reach even his southernmost stronghold today, raising hopes for peace here in the conflict-ridden state of Chiapas.

If opinion polls prove accurate, the incumbent Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, will lose its first governorship in what has been the party’s solid south--the eight poorest states in Mexico, which have been a bastion of PRI support for seven decades. That would be a sharp slap in the party’s face so soon after it lost the presidency to center-right candidate Vicente Fox on July 2.

A victory in Chiapas by opposition candidate Pablo Salazar also could improve prospects for resuming long-deadlocked negotiations with Marcos’ Maya guerrillas, who staged a brief but bloody uprising in 1994 demanding greater Indian rights. The rebels walked away from peace talks in 1996, accusing the PRI-led government of bad faith.

Supporters argue that if Salazar’s eight-party rainbow coalition defeats the PRI today, that will deny Marcos any excuse for avoiding talks.

Most Chiapans agree that the state has never faced such an open, competitive election. In addition to an independent state electoral authority, about 4,000 Mexican and foreign observers will monitor voting at 4,001 polling stations, where 2.1 million people are eligible to cast ballots.

Even if PRI candidate Sami David pulls off an upset, many believe that the strength of the democratic process itself augurs well for the rise of stable, legitimate institutions in a state long dominated by political fiefdoms and patronage.

Still, the winds of change could prove turbulent if the legendary fraud and sporadic violence that scarred past elections resurface today. In 1997, Zapatista rebels burned more than 200 ballot boxes, and the legacy of PRI-orchestrated electoral fraud has discouraged voters in the past, leading to some of the lowest turnout levels in Mexico.

Uncertainty Ahead of Elections

The campaign has been heated. PRI candidate David, a federal senator who has made conciliatory appeals for harmony, suffered a nasty bruise from a metal pipe thrown by opponents at a rally earlier this month.

In an Internet communique before the July 2 presidential vote, Marcos said his Zapatista National Liberation Army, or EZLN, would not interfere with the balloting--and the election was remarkably peaceful. Yet despite the president-elect’s appeal for a face-to-face meeting to try to restart peace talks, Marcos has been silent since Fox’s victory, adding to uncertainty ahead of today’s vote.

Nowhere is Chiapas’ volatile mix of past violence and future hope more vivid than in the mountain village of Acteal, site of the bloodiest single incident in the 6 1/2 years since the uprising. On Dec. 22, 1997, a squad of PRI supporters from nearby Chenalho swooped into this village and massacred 45 people, mostly women and children.

Eighty-seven people were convicted in the case, including the former Chenalho mayor. The victims were members of Las Abejas (The Bees), a pacifist Roman Catholic group that supports the Zapatista rebels’ goals but not their methods.

The 700-strong Abejas community of Acteal, many of them refugees from PRI-controlled villages, has decided to take part in today’s balloting, as it did July 2.

“We hope that there will be a change in Chiapas, that there will be a dialogue and peace,” Lazaro Arias, a leader of the group, said Friday just a few yards from the bare concrete-and-brick shed where the 45 victims of the massacre are entombed.

He said people will vote even though the electoral institute rejected appeals to set up a special ballot box in the village. That means voters will have to trudge three to four hours to return to potentially hostile home villages to cast ballots.

All will vote for Salazar, Arias predicted, because “the PRI governments don’t care about the indigenous communities. They don’t listen to our demands. If Pablo wins, the dialogue will resume.”

Another Abeja--who gave only his first name, Lorenzo--said Catholic and Protestant communities in the area have begun negotiating settlements to old disputes in anticipation of a victory by Salazar, who would be the first Protestant governor of Chiapas.

“We are never going to achieve anything if we keep quiet,” said Lorenzo, a 29-year-old peasant farmer with two acres of coffee plants under cultivation. “The Zapatistas are just waiting for a war to begin to resolve the problems of the people.”

But two miles down a twisting, potholed mountain road, a different view of the election emerges--one that suggests the complexities ahead in Chiapas even for a non-PRI government.

The self-proclaimed autonomous rebel village of Polho, housing as many as 6,000 pro-Zapatista refugees, will again boycott the vote, said a community leader who identified himself as Santana.

“There is an agreement not to vote,” Santana said at the village gate. “We don’t trust any candidate. We know the attitudes of the candidates.”

Of prospects for peace under Fox, Santana declared: “We still need to see it and believe it.”

After the first outbreak of rebel violence, in January 1994, about 130 people were killed in 10 days of fighting before a cease-fire was brokered. Scores have died since in conflicts involving land and religion in the conflict zone of Chiapas, stretching from the central mountains north of the regional city of San Cristobal de las Casas to the eastern Lacandon jungle bordering Guatemala.

Gov. Roberto Albores Guillen, a bullish PRI political operator, was appointed interim governor in January 1998 after the Acteal massacre. Since then, Albores has charged ahead with a range of initiatives, often unilaterally and with a vocabulary that has openly sought to co-opt the guerrillas’ call for better treatment and greater opportunities.

“Rather than combat the movement of 1994, we have taken up the legitimate demands and made them our own, in the best sense of the word, addressing them with government programs,” Albores said in an interview last week. “We have said that the state government represents the social insurgency.”

Albores has created seven new municipalities and plans seven more before leaving office in December, indirectly challenging the Zapatistas’ “autonomous rebel towns” by making local government more accessible. He also has created 19 local courts of reconciliation and peace to resolve minor disputes using Maya communal customs, reflecting one of the rebel demands in the stalled San Andres accords of early 1996. These new tribunals, he says, have unclogged the formal courts and brought justice closer to the people.

“The best thing that could happen to the current government of Chiapas is to deliver to whoever wins a state in peace and calm,” he said. “If these elections are credible and legitimate, as we are promising, the winner will be a valid mediator.”

Heriberto Velasco, press officer for Albores in San Cristobal, said Saturday that Albores had summoned all 111 PRI mayors in the state Friday to order them not to try to interfere with the balloting.

While the state’s handling of local security and social issues is vital to the climate for peace talks, the negotiations are a federal issue, and one that Fox has promised to address early in his administration.

Fox Seeks Meeting With Zapatistas

Meeting with reporters Friday, Fox said he had sent messages seeking a meeting with the EZLN.

“I want to do everything on our part to reestablish the dialogue,” he said. “Things have changed radically for the Zapatista army.”

Noting that the rebels had declared war against a government that was not democratic, seeking democracy, Fox said: “This we have achieved.” He vowed that his government will respect the history and autonomy of indigenous peoples and added, “This takes away another obstacle.”

Marcos, a pipe-smoking guerrilla who has become the modern-day symbolic equivalent of Che Guevara for much of the world’s left, wrote in June of the rebels’ “respect for this form of civil and peaceful struggle.”

But he added: “Election time is not the time of the Zapatistas--above all because of our search to find a new form of doing politics that has little or nothing to do with the current system. We want to find a politics that goes from below to above.”

Marcos’ skepticism is shared by some Chiapans who note that Salazar himself was a PRI senator until he broke from the party in early 1998. He was embraced as the candidate for the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and later by virtually every opposition party in Chiapas, including the National Action Party, or PAN, in an unusually broad coalition.

Even though the PRI won the presidential vote in Chiapas, the combined anti-PRI vote will be hard to beat if it gels today as Salazar’s supporters hope. The polls give Salazar an edge of 9 to 13 percentage points over David.

Juan Carlos Cal y Mayor, a young state legislator for the PAN campaigning for Salazar, said: “The significance of the election is much greater than simply winning an election. It will lead to the unemployment of Marcos. He will practically have no pretext for remaining a belligerent if the authoritarian system falls on Sunday.”

But Cesar Chavez, a former PRD federal legislator who is coordinating Salazar’s campaign, said an opposition victory “is a necessary condition, though not sufficient on its own,” to solve the Chiapas conflict. He said Fox will need to offer concrete signs of change, such as reducing the number of troops in Chiapas and offering constitutional reforms guaranteeing Indian rights.

“What is at stake in Chiapas is the transition of a system,” he said. “The Zapatistas played a role in encouraging the electoral reforms of the 1990s, and on July 2 we showed that the electoral reforms work. If we win Sunday, we will be creating conditions for the peace talks to resume.”