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Title: Mexico: Rumors of War
Author: Christopher Day
Date: 1998
Language: en
Topics: Zapatistas, Mexico, Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation
Source: Fall 1998 issue of L&R. Retrieved on 2016-06-13 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160613044919/http://loveandrage.org/?q=node/16

Christopher Day

Mexico: Rumors of War

Talk of Peace... “If you want peace” the bumpersticker reads, “prepare

for war.” The Mexican corollary to this bit of back-country wisdom seems

to be “If you want war, make proposals for peace.” March was a month of

peace proposals in Mexico with three major “peace initiatives” following

in rapid succession. The first was from the newly-appointed Governor of

Chiapas, Roberto Albores Guillen of the PRI (the Revolutionary

Institutional Party that has ruled Mexico for 70 years). The second was

from the right-wing PAN (National Action Party). And the third came from

President Ernesto Zedillo, also of the PRI.

In spite of all the hype, none of these plans has even the remotest

chance to bring peace to Chiapas, where a government-sponsored

“low-intensity war” continues to maim, kill, and terrorize indigenous

peasants in spite of international outrage at the massacre of 45 unarmed

people by government-sponsored paramilitaries in the village of Actéal

on December 22, 1997. Instead, the “peace initiatives” all seem to have

been carefully crafted for rejection by the Zapatista National

Liberation Army (EZLN)—so that the government could portray the

Zapatistas as “intransigent” and “unwilling to negotiate” and prepare

for a military offensive against them.

After 12 days of fighting in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas in

January 1994, the Zapatistas agreed to participate in negotiations with

the Mexican government. All the while the EZLN express profound

skepticism about the sincerity of the government’s desire to resolve the

social problems that were the cause of the Zapatista uprising. That

skepticism has proven to be well founded. In February, 1995 the Mexican

Army launched a military offensive against the Zapatistas and an

unsuccessful manhunt for the EZLN’s military leader and chief spokesman,

Subcomandante Marcos. In spite of this treachery the Zapatistas returned

to the negotiating table shortly after the government offensive. In

February of 1996 the EZLN signed an agreement (the San Andres Accords)

with the government for changes in the constitution and federal laws

that would establish a significant degree of autonomy for Mexico’s

indigenous communities in the areas of education, language rights,

self-government and control of natural resources. Half a year later the

government had done exactly nothing to carry out the changes called for

in the San Andres Accords. The Zapatistas then announced that they were

withdrawing from any further talks until the government implemented its

side of the agreements.

In the intervening year and a half the government has claimed that the

Zapatistas need to come back to the negotiating table to approve

specific legal language required to implement the agreement, even though

the Accords are quite explicit in their content and specific legal

language has been proposed by the Commission for Conciliation and Peace

(COCOPA)—(a multi-party body established by the government in 1994 for

the purpose of negotiating with the Zapatistas). Broader and broader

sectors of Mexican civil society have progressively become convinced

that it is the government and not the Zapatistas who have been

intransigent. The new “peace initiatives” are really just another

attempt to turn this situation around and prepare the ground for another

government offensive against the Zapatistas.

Governor Albores Guillen’s “peace plan” is perhaps the most blatant in

its disregard for what a real peace in Chiapas demands. Guillen was

appointed Governor in January after the previous appointee, Julio Cesar

Ruiz Ferro, was forced from office in the wake of the Actéal massacre.

The Zapatistas have insisted from the first days of their uprising that

they did not view their grievances as confined to the state of Chiapas

and accordingly have insisted on negotiating only with the Federal

Government. The two key elements of Albores Guillen’s plan seem to be

the carrot and the stick: a $3 billion investment package that would

undoubtedly enrich Chiapas’s already bloated economic elite, and the

outright prohibition of marches and other forms of political protest.

The proposal also calls for disarming the right-wing paramilitary groups

that the government has been arming and training since 1994, but

includes no specifics on how this will happen and almost nobody

seriously believes that the state government has any intention of

actually making it happen. A related initiative by the Governor in which

he promised to release Zapatista prisoners proved to be a farce when

none of prisoners released turned out to be Zapatistas.

The PAN and Zedillo initiatives propose changes in the constitution on

the questions of indigenous autonomy. They are basically gutted versions

of the San Andres Accords. They formally recognize the rights of

indigenous peoples to some sort of autonomy but do not include the most

substantive expressions of that autonomy found in the San Andres

Accords. The Zedillo initiative recognizes the right of indigenous

people to the use of natural resources but not in the collective form

agreed upon in the San Andres Accords. Similarly the provision for

autonomous indigenous control of television and radio stations

recognized in the San Andres Accords is rendered toothless by

subordinating that control to the licensing authority of the Federal

Government. The provision in the San Andres Accords for the bilingual

education of indigenous children is stripped of the sections in the San

Andres Accords that provide for its actual implementation.

If there had been no Zapatista uprising and no San Andres Accords the

PAN and Zedillo initiatives would be small steps forward for the rights

of indigenous peoples in Mexico. But understood in their larger

political context they are actually an attack on the indigenous movement

that was energized by the Zapatista uprising. By making unilateral

proposals that modify the San Andres Accords the PRI and PAN are

effectively abandoning the negotiating process begun in 1994 that

produced the Accords. The PAN and Zedillo initiatives are more or less

the same in terms of political content. If anything the PAN proposal is

even emptier than Zedillo’s. What is most significant about the PAN’s

initiative is that it effectively ends their participation in COCOPA and

ruptures the broad united front of opposition parties on both the left

and right that has blocked the PRI’s power in the lower House of

Deputies. The PAN has basically handed the PRI the freedom to impose its

solution on Chiapas without any effective legislative opposition.

Acts of War

The true nature of the government’s strategy is to be found not in their

pious declarations for peace but in the daily waging of a dirty

counter-insurgency war against the indigenous communities of Chiapas

that are the Zapatistas’ primary bases of support. The December 22

Actéal Massacre momentarily focused the world’s attention on the Mexican

government’s use of paramilitary organizations against indigenous

communities. That strategy has not changed in the months following the

massacre. It has merely been supplemented with increasingly direct

military action against the Zapatista communities by the Army and the

police.

Every day continues to bring new reports of attacks on indigenous

communities by either the Army, the state police, or the paramilitaries.

On February 25, ten PRI members and 26 state police evicted 17

households from their lands around Agua Blanca Serrania that they had

reinhabited in December after a previous eviction. On February 28 while

Albores Guillen was announcing his “peace plan,” four peasant Zapatista

sympathizers, Vincente Lopez Alvarez, Abelardo Perez Alvarez, Felipe

Molina Perez, and Andres Gomez Perez were wounded in an ambush by

paramilitaries at the entrance of the town of Benito Juarez Simojovel.

On March 3, 120 soldiers entered the community of Monteflores in the

municipality of Las Margaritas and threatened the peasants who had

occupied the lands in the vicinity. On March 10 a group of

paramilitaries protected by the state police sacked and burned two

houses in the community of Chimix in the municipality of Chenalhó. On

March 14 Trinidad Cruz Perez, a Zapatista supporter from the town of

Roberto Barrios, was macheted to death by members of the PRI. On March

15, soldiers and police officers fired shots in the air in Actéal,

forcing women in the refugee camp there to flee. Later that night state

police and paramilitaries fired shots in the air in the vicinity of

Polho, where many of the survivors of the Actéal massacre still remain.

And this is just a sampling of reported events from a two-week period.

Increasing US Involvement

Through constant attacks on the indigenous communities that support the

Zapatistas the Mexican government hopes to drive a wedge between the

EZLN and their bases of support. Systematically instilling terror among

indigenous Chiapanecans, particularly through the use of

government-supported paramilitary gangs is a cornerstone in the very

conscious strategy of low-intensity warfare. Strategies of opposing

peoples’ movements were cultivated by the US in Viet Nam based on the

experiences of the British Army in Ireland, Africa and Asia.

“counter-insurgency warfare” was put to the test in the 1980s in

Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala and is now taught to Latin American

military personnel in the School of the Americas at Fort Benning,

Georgia and in counter-insurgency training in Fort Bragg, North

Carolina. Fort Bragg is the home of the First and Second Battalions of

the First Special Warfare Group and the Seventh Special Forces Group.

The Seventh Special Warfare Group has a particularly illustrious career

ranging by their own account from “advising the South Vietnamese Army in

1961,” to having “drafted the initial plan for US Military trainers in

El Salvador,” and playing “a critical role in helping the Salvadoran

military grow … to a counter-insurgency force of 55,000 men under arms.”

In 1996 Mexican troops began training at Fort Bragg. These troops are

destined for placement in Mexico’s Special Forces Airborne Group (GAFE).

According to Special Warfare magazine out of Fort Bragg, a “particularly

heavy emphasis is being placed on those forces that will be located in

the states of Chiapas and Guerrero, where ‘special airborne forces’ will

be set up.”

According to the December 29, 1997 New York Times, 3000 Mexican soldiers

will have been trained by the US military as of next fall. Of these, 328

officers are receiving special training so that they can “in turn train

air-mobile special forces units” in Mexico. In addition to Fort Bragg

and Fort Benning Mexican soldiers are getting trained at more than ten

other military bases in the US according to the Spanish daily, El Pais.

As Mexican law prohibits the training of whole military units outside of

Mexico, so troops are taken from different units in Mexico and

officially regrouped in special elite units only upon their return.

Ninety Mexican military officials are also currently undergoing

intensive training with the CIA under the pretext of forming a new

anti-narcotics force.

In an ominous first step toward more direct US military involvement in

Mexico, the School of the Americas has also begun training Mexican

military officers in Mexico through the Personnel Exchange Program.

According to a Defense Department report acquired by Nuevo Amanecer

Press, 59 Mexican officers took the course in 1996. US Embassy officials

have also acknowledged to the Mexican daily, La Jornada, that US

“defense attachés” have made periodic and routine visits to “all parts

of Mexico, including Chiapas.”

Sales of US military equipment to Mexico has also increased

dramatically. According to the March 15 La Jornada, government sales of

US military equipment to Mexico increased by 600% last year to $28

million and commercial sales are expected to triple again over the next

year to roughly $47 million. These sales are on top of “excess”

equipment that the Pentagon has provided to the Mexican military for

free. Last year these transfers included, for example, 73 Huey

helicopters which are likely to be very useful in counter-insurgency

operations in Southern Mexico.

Getting Rid of the Witnesses

The Mexican government has welcomed the flow of US intelligence

officers, US-trained military personnel and US weapons. But toward US

citizens and other foreigners in Chiapas who have contradicted official

government accounts of events, its hostility is growing. Anti-foreigner

agitation by the government is nothing new, but the most recent

incidents have been particularly severe. On February 13, a white Mexican

military helicopter landed in the strategic Zapatista community of La

Realidad carrying Lola De la Vega, a TVAzteca reporter married to a

PRI-affiliated Mexican Senator. The helicopter ripped the roof off the

community’s school and wounded two children. International observers who

stay in La Realidad’s international civilian peace encampment to monitor

military actions against the Zapatistas and deter human rights

violations confronted De la Vega and asked her to identify herself. Two

days later on her news show “Hablemos Claro” (Straight Talk) Ms. De la

Vega claimed that the foreigners were giving the Zapatistas orders. In

the days and weeks following this incident the government carried out a

series of high profile expulsions of foreigners from Chiapas and

dramatically increased the level of repression against international

observers.

Maria Darlington from North Carolina was among the first to be expelled.

She was followed by Tom Hansen, former director of Pastors for Peace and

Robert Schweitzer. Tom Hansen’s deportation began with his being

kidnapped by unidentified Government agents; it included a stay in a

shit-covered jail cell and ended with his being put on a flight to Miami

despite a court order barring his deportation. Michel Henri Jean

Chanteau, a French priest who had worked for 32 years in the

municipality of Chenalhó, which includes the village of Actéal, was

next. On March 12 Massimo Boldrini, an Italian photographer, was

kidnapped by members of Los Chinchulines, a paramilitary organization,

who handed him over to the regular Army before he was finally released.

On March 16 three more international observers were ordered to leave the

country: Jennifer Pasquarela of the US, Claudia Meyer of Switzerland,

and Helen Kapolnek of Germany.

The Mexican Government has justified a number of the expulsions on the

basis that the people in question were acting as human rights observers

while carrying tourist visas. At the same time they have made the

already difficult process of obtaining an FM-3 visa (the kind used by

Non-Governmental Organizations) effectively impossible for anyone going

to Chiapas. The Mexican Government is now demanding that applicants for

FM-3 visas provide a detailed itinerary including the names of everyone

they intend to interview. Such a requirement makes any serious human

rights investigation impossible. The government has also announced that

they will now only grant visas to Non-Governmental Organizations

recognized by the United Nations, a tiny fraction of the groups that

work in Chiapas.

The campaign against foreigners has two objectives. The first is to play

on the racist belief that the indigenous people are incapable of

creating a movement as effective as the EZLN and therefore must be being

manipulated by somebody. The second, and more obvious, purpose is to

clear Chiapas of the inconvenient witnesses who have been able to focus

the world’s attention on the struggle there and to expose the lies of

the government. This was effectively admitted when the Interior Ministry

deported Father Chanteau because “he has publicly expressed that the

massacre of Actéal was a government plan to destroy the bases of support

for the Zapatistas.” Repeating an obvious truth is in this manner

transformed into the crime of interfering in the internal political

affairs of Mexico.

Showdown?

It seems that the Mexican Government is preparing the ground for some

sort of offensive against the EZLN. With its “peace initiatives” it is

seeking to portray the Zapatistas as uncooperative. With its continued

support for paramilitary operations it is trying to break the Zapatistas

from their supporters. With its campaign against foreigners it is

attempting to eliminate potential witnesses to whatever crimes it is

planning. With its massive weapons purchases and elite military training

in the US it is preparing for war. And with all these things rumors of

war spread like pinkeye in preschool. Accusations that the Mexican

Government is paving the way for war are coming from many quarters and

many forces are in motion to resist that drive.

The fourth Congress of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution

(PRD) issued a strong condemnation of the government’s moves and then

called on “members of the armed forces to not become involved in an

irresponsible strategy of confrontation between Mexicans promoted by the

governing group and its allies and to comply with article 129 of the

constitution.” Article 129 explicitly states that in times of peace, the

military should be confined to military bases outside of populated

areas. With the PRD’s direct appeal to the rank and file of the armed

forces over the heads of the PRI (if only for the army to remain

neutral) the struggle over the San Andres Accords becomes an open

struggle for state power between the PRI and the PRD. On its own the PRD

doesn’t have the power to impose its will. The question facing Mexico is

whether other forces, ranging from the new independent union

federations, to campesino organizations, to armed organizations like the

EZLN and the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) see in this moment the

same opportunity to strike against the PRI and assert their own demands.

There lies the potential to build real power to the people from below—in

the urban barrios, the countryside, in the factories and on the

campuses. For this reason revolutionaries around the world need to be

watching Mexico.

Perhaps most important among the independent forces is the National

Indigenous Congress, a broad umbrella of indigenous organizations from

all across Mexico who have called for an “uprising for peace” in the

form of a national indigenous march on Mexico City in opposition to the

government’s moves on April 10, Emiliano Zapata’s birthday. While the

Zapatistas have inspired broad sectors of Mexican civil society to

support their demands and to struggle for themselves, that inspiration

has been most powerful among Mexico’s 56 indigenous ethnic groups. For

them the Zapatista uprising and the promises of indigenous autonomy

raised by the San Andres Accords clearly represent something worth

fighting for. And the indigenous have little to lose by fighting.

Mexico has appeared on the brink of a major showdown more than once in

the past four years; each time a nation-wide confrontation has failed to

materialize. But previously the government has offered some sort of

concession. They have held out the hope that the demands of the excluded

would be heard primarily in their willingness to negotiate with the

EZLN. The powers that be no longer seem willing to tolerate the

continued presence of the EZLN as a major player on the national

political stage. The question now? When will the long-suffering

audience—Mexico’s downtrodden majority—demand to be part of the show

themselves.