Associated Press
August 27, 2001
By Alejandro Ruiz

VILLA FLORES, Mexico -- One day after he offered to talk with Mexico's rebel groups, President Vicente Fox toured rebellion-plagued Chiapas state with a message that focused on self-reliance and development, not on uprisings.

Fox launched a rural-development scheme aimed at helping Chiapas's corn and coffee farmers, but he asked them to begin helping themselves, rather than looking to the government.

"No more paterna government is to make opportunities available," Fox said, "but it is up to everyone, citizens and their families, to take advantage of them."

Speaking before a cheering crowd of straw-hatted farmers in Villa Flores, about 50 miles to the south, Fox held up northern Mexican cities like Monterrey as an example of industrial and educational development for poor southern states like Chiapas.

Fox has visited Chiapas several times since taking office Dec. 2, but has yet to achieve direct talks with the Zapatista rebels based in the mountainous eastern part of the state.

He did not mention the rebels directly, but called for "peace, harmony, and coexistence in the state."

On Sunday, Fox offered to sit down for talks with Mexico's other guerrilla groups, "a handful of armed leftist bands much smaller than the Zapatistas," after lashing out at them in previous days.

"I hope they know that the doors are open," Fox said of such groups, while noting that "the path of violence resolves nothing, and neither do street protests and pressures."

The Zapatistas, who staged a brief armed uprising in January 1994 to demand greater democracy and Indian rights, have rebuffed Fox's offers to meet with them.

They have also fiercely criticized Fox's "Puebla-Panama Plan," which aims to bring infrastructure and industrial development to a corridor running from southern Mexico to Central America.