Zapatistas endure a decade of struggle

OVENTIC, Mexico -- In the heart of Zapatista rebel territory, barefoot Indian women lugged bundles of firewood through the freezing mist. Men dressed in shabby trousers and combat boots cleared mud from a barren hillside to make way for another tin-roofed shack in this town, which residents have declared autonomous from government control.

Ten years after the Zapatista Army of National Liberation declared war on the Mexican government, the Mayan rebels are a long way from achieving their goal of improved conditions for the country's 12 million Indians. In the Zapatistas' stronghold, spanning about two-fifths of the impoverished southern state of Chiapas, their followers are in many ways worse off today than before the Jan. 1, 1994, uprising.

In protest of the government's failure to implement reforms laid out in the 1996 peace accords, tens of thousands of Zapatista supporters have renounced all government aid. They eke out a living, relying on international donations and subsistence farming on land they have seized from cattle ranchers across the state.

Despite their continued poverty, the Zapatistas say they have achieved other gains in their fight to redress centuries of discrimination at the hands of the country's mestizo majority, who are of mixed Indian and Spanish descent. They cite the creation of 30 self-declared autonomous municipalities, where the Zapatistas' Mayan supporters are implementing ancestral forms of government, communal land ownership, indigenous education, and traditional medicine.

"With our autonomy, the people have found their piece of land. Not a big one, but somewhere to work," said Jose Luis Hernandez, a Tzotzil Mayan farmer who sits on one of five regional councils, called Committees for Good Government, in Morelia, another autonomous village about 70 miles east of the tourist town of San Cristobal de las Casas.

The rebels' spokesman, Subcommander Marcos, announced in August the creation of the governing system to administer justice and distribute international aid for the Zapatista communities, which extend from the state's central highlands to the Lacandon Rainforest along the Guatemalan border.

"Our demands were for health, education, infrastructure. We've managed it all with autonomous municipalities, and we're very proud of that," Hernandez said in a recent interview at the regional headquarters for seven highland communities.

Outside the concrete compound, several dozen lanky youths in ski masks played soccer or strummed guitars, ready to alert their leaders to the approach of army convoys or government spies. Several foreign observers are stationed in each autonomous municipality to report potential aggression by the army to the Fray Bartolome Center for Human Rights in San Cristobal. The center, run by the former bishop of San Cristobal, Samuel Ruiz, forwards the reports to Zapastista commanders.

Since fighting ended on Jan. 12, 1994, no armed clashes have occurred between the rebels and the army. But the Zapatistas are not taking chances.

"When the government attacks us, we will respond with arms," said Commander Moises, one of a dozen rebel leaders who were overseeing the work of a new civilian council in Morelia.

In February and March 2001, Moises helped lead a caravan from Chiapas to Mexico City to rally support for an Indian rights bill, which had the backing of President Vicente Fox. A watered-down version passed in the Mexican Congress in 2001, but it was rejected by a majority of the country's indigenous groups as well as several state congresses, who said it did not go far enough to guarantee Indians control over their natural resources and systems of government.

Since then, the Zapatistas have largely disappeared from the public eye. Their anniversary celebrations, which included concerts and other cultural events nationwide in November and December, went largely unnoticed in mainstream Mexican society.

About 2,000 supporters, about half of them foreigners, gathered Wednesday night in Oventic for the main celebration, which included all-night dancing and the reading of a communique from the Zapatista leadership.

"The armed rebellion is the most important part of our great history as indigenous peoples because it is when the Zapatistas declared war against the abandonment, discrimination, the sacking of our natural resources, exploitation, oppression, and all kinds of injustices that we, the original peoples of these lands, have been suffering for more than 500 years," Daniel, a Zapatista member who gave only one name, read to the crowd gathered in this mountain village about 25 miles northeast of San Cristobal.

Subcommander Marcos, who inspired an international cult following with his poetic letters from the jungle, has since lost support because of his long silences and diatribes against Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon. He has criticized Garzon's efforts to outlaw Herri Batasuna, the political wing of the Basque separatist group ETA, which is on the US government's list of terrorist groups. Marcos has defended the Basque movement, comparing the group's fight to break from the Spanish government to the Zapatistas' struggle for greater autonomy.

But even if the Zapatistas have achieved little in the way of concrete changes, many observers credit them with putting indigenous rights on the national political agenda. The Mexican Congress last year approved the creation of a National Council for Indian Peoples, quadrupling the annual budget earmarked for improving infrastructure, health care, and education in Indian communities to $320 million from $80 million. The government also has spent millions since December 2000 in resolving land conflicts, many of them in Indian communities.

"Fox has a clear commitment to work toward the socioeconomic development of the indigenous people," said Xochitl Galvez, an Otomi Indian who heads the National Council for Indian Peoples, during an interview in her Mexico City office. Galvez is hopeful that Congress will reopen debate on indigenous rights and address Indian demands for greater autonomy. "I don't see any risk in granting autonomy, nor that it could fragment the country," she said.

Symbolic advances also have been made. "The Indians are reclaiming their dignity. They are becoming more conscious of their history," said Felipe Arizmendi, the Roman Catholic bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, who has been closely aligned with the Zapatista movement. "They are now promoters of their rights. But Mexican society has also become more conscious that they exist and that they are people with rights." Others close to the Zapatista conflict say the rebels' main contribution has been in advancing democracy. They credit the rebels' demands for social justice with creating the conditions that led to Fox's election in July 2000, ending 71 years of autocratic one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

"The nonindigenous people benefited more than the indigenous people . . . because the Zapatistas were forced to confront the racism that still exists in Mexico," said Jan de Vos, a Belgian historian living in Chiapas, who has written several books on the conflict.

The Zapatistas say they are prepared to continue their struggle until all their demands are met.

"How long can we hold out? The real question is, how many years can the government keep it up?" said Hernandez, the Zapatista civil representative. "It depends on Fox, not us."