Gilberto López y Rivas
La Jornada, 5/12/98

The recent events occurring in the communities of Taniperlas and Amparo Aguatinta should induce serious political reflection about the state of the suspended dialogue process between the EZLN and the federal government, the increasingly dangerous situation in the conflictive regions, and to take actions towards preventing an imminent, all-out war in the state.

The government's behavior towards Chiapas shows that malevolence and rancor have become state policy, sweetened of course, by the freeing of economic resources and by pre-election promises, which, rather than offering fundamental solutions to the miserable situation of the vast majority of Chiapans, instead apply the old tactic of the carrot and the stick.

How else can one interpret the president's claim that they have started to spend 1.5 billion pesos of federal resources on social development in Chiapas, just now, while the government's offensive is being carried out on all fronts.

The problem has become aggravated since the massacre at Acteal, particularly by the intensification of a counter-insurgency strategy focused on the political and military defeat of the rebels, the discrediting of intermediation authorities, and by severely impeding international observation.

We are speaking of duplicitous discourse from the highest levels of power, of an authoritative, repressive and anti-democratic reality that persistently refutes the official rhetoric and jeapordizes the integrity and peace of the entire nation.

The power of the state is now being used against the indigenous people. They have deployed 72,000 federal soldiers in their communities, covering 63 municipalities of the state in 209 fixed locations, and many other mobile ones; the communities are held hostage day and night with plane and helicopter fly-overs that keep watch over and terrorize the Zapatista sympathizers, attempting to resolve an eminently political problem, such as the installation and functioning of the autonomous municipalities, through repressive police tactics whose results are: more prisoners in Cerro Hueco, theft of community funds, tools and people's belongings; the destruction of homes and community buildings, attacks and violations of the human rights of those attacked, the fabrication of informers, the stimulation of polarization in the communities, the use of the army and the security forces for the benefit of local members of one party, the deployment of armed forces that are seen as repressors of the indigenous, like an occupation army that subjugates communities inhabited by Mexicans, the manipulation of an international organization such as the United Nations High Commission on Refugees to justify a military action.

The policies of the executive branch are heading down a failed path. Each step is followed by the further decomposition of the conflict, an increase in the size of forces involved, and a decreasing capacity to create a viable environment for peace.

The autonomous municipalities are the political expression of a revolutionary process, of a rebellion that the Congress has recognized as based on a just cause, of a movement of mostly indigenous Mexicans who were unsatisfied with the government of the republic.

Those who demand respect for the "rule of law" don't seem to realize that not even one paramilitary group, or as they are so euphemistically called by the PGR, Presumably Armed Civilian Groups (PCPA) has been disarmed or dismantled in all these years. On the contrary--the members of these groups serve to point out those sympathetic to the rebles, they are the eyes and ears of the armed forces. These groups are used so that "indians kill indians", to lend credibility to the thesis of intercommunity confrontation, to require the presence of the armed forces, to control those sympathetic to the insurgents, to prevent the development of independent indigenous or campesino groups, including neutral ones like those massacred in Acteal. These groups enjoy impunity, passing through the communities, showing off their weapons that, for sure, are reserved exclusively for the armed forces; they form an integral element of the "state of law" that Mr. Albores wants to institute by blood and fire.

The only solution that we can foresee that is actually constructive in this conflict is that which advances the positions of democracy, of pluralism, and considers the opinions of all the forces involved, obviously including the zapatistas. But what is democracy if not a manner of social co-existence, whereby conflicts are resolved in a manner in which the parties yield and produce new space for conciliation, like the autonomous indigenous municipalities.