Mexico Bárbaro #104
April 13, 2000
by John Ross

MEXICO CITY (March 20th) - National security penetration of a high-ranking guerrilla cell late last year yielded startling hints of an alleged plot to disrupt Mexico's July 2nd presidential elections by a coalition of 16 little-known armed groups. The purported conspiracy came to light after two top commanders of the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent Peoples (ERPI) - Comandantes "Antonio" (Jacobo Silva) and "Aurura" (Gloria Arenas) - were run to ground by Mexico's new super police in Guerrero and San Luis Potosi states.

An October Federal Preventative Police (PFP) raid on an ERPI safehouse in a down-at-the-heels Chilpancingo Guerrero suburb secured computerized evidence of the plot which is supposed to have included urban guerrilla groups working in coordination with a indigenous front code-named the TAGIN or "National Indigenous Guerrilla Triple Alliance". National security documents reported by Proceso magazine calculated that this new front included 167 distinct organizations with a combined constituency of 30,000. Although the brains of the coalition was said to be operating from the Sierra Maestra of Chiapas state, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) was not a member of the reputed "triple alliance." The precise nature of the possible disruptions were not elucidated.

Despite Under-secretary for national security Jorge Tello Peon's denial of the guerrilla threat, sketchy details of the plot were included in a Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN) advisory circulated to the National Electricity Commission (CFE) November 15th and subsequently leaked to the media. Soon after the disclosure, Francisco Labastida, the front-running presidential candidate of the long-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) moved his campaign headquarters to the party's fortified Mexico City bunker where he is now protected by a reported hundred members of the presidential military guard or "Estado Mayor." Reporters have noted frequent deliveries of automatic weapons to the PRI compound since Labastida established his offices there.

Further indication that the guerrilla factor is afoot in pre-election Mexico came March 16th when the previously unheard-from "Villista Revolutionary Army of the People", said to be based in Puebla state, sent e-mails to various media taking credit for two mortar attacks on Federal Preventative Police headquarters in the wake of the PFP's February 6th occupation of the national university (UNAM) to end a ten month-long student strike. Although the PFP has refused to confirm the attacks, two children were seriously wounded by live grenades March 15th near the federal police buildings in southern Mexico City.

Similar rumors of a new guerrilla uprising garnished the 1994 presidential election, a violence-spattered year in which the EZLN rose up in Chiapas and the PRI's front-running candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated, a killing that paved the way for the candidacy of substitute Ernesto Zedillo. Zedillo's manipulation of the "vote of fear" of fresh bloodshed is considered by many political analysts to have cinched his triumph over the right-center National Action Party (PAN) and the leftish Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) whose then-candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a repeat in 2000, was branded by the PRI as an advocate of violent change.

Zedillo's "fear" vote in the '94 campaign got a big boost just weeks before the election when sources inside the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) told Mexican newspapers that an illicit shipment of 20,000 AKA-47 automatic rifles was en route to rebels in Guerrero. Although reporters could never run the rumors down at the time, the weapons eventually materialized in 1996 after the guerrilla Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) went public - confiscated EPR arms caches, purchased with a reported record $30 million USD ransom of the nation's number one banker, matched the BATF reports.

The ERPI is a split-off from the Popular Revolutionary Army which first came to light in 1998 and is thought to have absorbed the EPR's entire Guerrero section. In the past, both the EPR and the ERPI have endorsed elections as one form of popular struggle and indeed have called truces during federal and state balloting - only threatening to retaliate if the PRI were to win by fraud. Despite the warnings and banners hung from public bridges proclaiming imminent response, neither the ERPI or the EPR took any reciprocal actions following fraud-marred February 1999 gubernatorial elections in Guerrero.

In local elections last October in that state, hooded "ERPI" fighters invaded a rally for the PRD's mayoral candidate in Acapulco - the PRD, which won the port, later accused PRIistas of masquerading as the insurgents.

Unlike their counterparts in Guerrero, the EZLN does not play the electoral game. Mistrustful of the political parties, the Zapatistas have organized autonomous municipalities which select their authorities by traditional Indian assemblies that bind those elected to carry out the will of the community.

The rebels' history of participation in official elections is checkered. Although the EZLN permitted the installation of voting stations in their zone of influence in the 1994 presidential race, turning out a big vote for Cardenas and a gubernatorial candidate who supports their cause, a shady vote count state-wide handed victory to the PRI and sparked a new rebel offensive in December 1994 that Zedillo would cite as the cause of the nation's sudden economic collapse that year.

In 1995 and 1998 municipal elections, EZLN base communities refrained from participation, damaging PRD efforts to win many townships - the PRI now rules county seats throughout the conflict zone. In 1997 federal midterms, Zapatista bases, enraged because Zedillo had failed to honor an Indian rights accord his own representatives had signed, actively attacked precincts, burning down polling places and torching ballot boxes.

More of the same is on the agenda for 2000. Despite Cardenas's pledge to abide by the Indian Rights agreement signed February 16th, 1996 at San Andres in the Chiapas highlands, the EZLN has thus far refused to allow the installation of voting precincts in their communities. The rebel's reluctance to cast ballots will have a more profound impact on Pablo Salazar, the opposition coalition candidate for Chiapas governor, than it will have upon Cardenas whose third try for the presidency seems doomed.

Salazar is a former PRIista and one of the founding members of the legislative commission (the COCOPA) which negotiated the San Andres accords. He subsequently became disillusioned with Zedillo's turnabout on the agreement and is now running neck-and-neck with a PRI machine candidate, the moderate Sami David, for the governor's slot - the loss of tens of thousands of votes from the conflict zone could tip the election to the ruling party.

Despite the threat of continued PRI domination for the next six years, the EZLN has not flinched in its steely opposition to the electoral process. "It is not our government that is being elected" the headman of the Zapatistas' autonomous municipality of Polho once explained to this reporter.

The possibility of what PFP director Admiral Wilfrido Robledo describes as "a guerrilla surprise" next July 2nd has tightened security around the candidates - only Cardenas rejects government protection. In public pronouncements, the three candidates have generally skirted the guerrilla threat. Cardenas remains committed to reconciliation and his victory, dim as it seems from here, would certainly bring the EZLN back to the bargaining table - and could even neutralize the armed ambitions of the ERPI-EPR axis. Both groups have repeatedly pledged to defend PRD advances.

The probable victor, the PRI's Labastida, displayed a fierce hand as Zedillo's Interior Secretary, sabotaging the San Andres accords and sending federal troops against Zapatista autonomous municipalities. His dripping-with-sarcasm messages to Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos who he never fails to address by the name of the man the government insists is the guerrilla leader's real handle ("Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente") does not instill much hope for settlement.

Nonetheless, for the past six years, the Zapatista conflict has been largely Ernesto Zedillo's problem and his successor may choose to put the rebels behind him - either by acceding to the Indian Rights accords or crushing the EZLN in a final military offensive.

Labastida's most formidable opponent, the PANista Vicente Fox, has pledged to end the conflict "in 15 minutes" (sic) and recently claimed he would order the military to pull back from the Chiapas conflict zone, a move that could trigger bitter army resistance in the first days of any possible Foxista regime.

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