"I want there to be democracy, no more inequality -- I am looking for a life worth living, liberation, just like God says." -- José Perez (EZLN militiaman, captured at Oxchuc, Jan. 4, 1994)

On January 1, 1994, 3,000 members of the mostly indigenous Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) captured the city of San Cristobal, Mexico, the capital of Chiapas, one of the country's poorest states. On the border with Guatemala, 50 to 90 percent of the people here speak a Mayan language, making it "Mexico's Indian heartland," according to Harvard's John Womack, Jr., author of Rebellion in Chiapas (The New Press, 1999).

While 14,000 Mexican troops forced a Zapatista retreat from Cristobal on January 2 and by January 12 a ceasefire had been declared, many say that peace has never been reached and that the Zapatista rebellion has shaped the region.

According to Womack, the cause of the rebellion is "an age-old problem," with the wealthy using all the power available to it "to squeeze every bit of labor and every bit of money it can out of the poor people who are the great majority there and who also happen to be of Mayan descent."

A long history of poverty

Chiapas covers almost 29,000 square miles and has a population of over 3.2 million. Of all of Mexico's states, it is the most agricultural, with coffee and cattle as its major crops. A poor state, the average per capita annual income is $2,000-$3,000, compared to $5,000 nationally and $30,000 in some northern states. Fifty-four percent of the people in Chiapas are malnourished.

The infrastructure of Chiapas is also severely lacking. While 55 percent of Mexico's electricity is generated from Chiapas, only about 20 percent of homes in Chiapas have electricity.

Chiapas also has the worst education in the country -- 72 out of 100 children do not finish the first grade. More than half of the schools offer only a third-grade education. Half of the schools have only one teacher for all the courses offered. In 1989, there were 16,058 classrooms in Mexico, and only 96 were in indigenous zones.

The poverty of Chiapas has roots that go back to the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The conquest led to the mass enslavement of Indians, even though slavery was technically illegal.

By the 19th century, great haciendas of sugar and sisal -- a cactus-like plant whose fibers are used to make rope, rugs and other goods -- employed thousands of pauperized workers, most of whom remained bound to wealthy planters by unpayable debts.

Rebellion in Chiapas also has a long history. In 1545, the first Catholic bishop of Chiapas, Bartolome de las Casas, protested the exploitation of the native population. In 1712, indigenous people tried to overthrow the hacienda system. From 1810-21, Mexicans fought to win their independence from Spain. Then, 100 years later, Mexicans fought again, waging the Mexican Revolution, which overthrew a dictatorship and promised liberal reforms that would eliminate poverty and provide education, health care and land for all, but, according to Womack, these promises went largely unrealized. Inequality and poverty remained, especially among indigenous peoples.

Nevertheless, an article of the Mexican Constitution (adopted in 1917, after the revolution) did change the shape of Chiapas. Article 27 recognized villages as corporate bodies entitled to tenure in agricultural lands and guaranteed grants of federal or expropriated private lands -- ejidos -- to villages that needed them. This article inspired many to move into the jungles of Chiapas to form villages.

Groups of landless neighbors would find grantable land, occupy it, secure the perimeter, and declare a community. They would fight to protect the land and petition for official recognition. Once recognized, they would petition for an ejido.

By 1960, the jungle was transformed with new remote villages which largely functioned with political autonomy. They ruled themselves through town meetings and village assemblies. However, they failed to achieve economic independence. Without a real plan, most newly formed villages grew coffee or raised cattle, and so remained subject to the large export markets.

Continued poverty and inequality contributed to widespread popular unrest.
January 1, 1994: NAFTA and Zapatistas

Tensions and repression increased in 1994 in response to two crises, crises from which Chiapas -- and perhaps Mexico as a whole -- has not recovered.

The U.S., Mexican and Canadian governments initiated the first crisis. It came in the form of economic policy -- the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This agreement, which took effect January 1, 1994, removed all agricultural tariffs. This effectively lowered the price of Mexican crops and lowered both payments to Mexico's poorest producers and wages to the country's poorest workers. The value of corn, for instance, fell dramatically. Even worse for Mexican farmers, U.S. corn can be sold in Mexico at 60 percent of the cost of the Mexican crop. NAFTA also paved the way for abuse of the environment. Logging corporations, such as Boise Cascade, now have unregulated access to exploit the forests.

But most controversial of all was Mexico's repeal of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, the article making communal lands -- ejidos -- available to villagers and protecting communal land holdings from privatization.

The second crisis of 1994 was, say many, precipitated by NAFTA. That was the rebellion on January 1 by the Zapatistas. When 3,000 armed members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) descended on Chiapas' capital of San Cristobal, they declared war on the Mexican army. Their aims, clearly stated in their declaration, were to overthrow the Mexican government. A key reason for this action, they explained, was to implement land reform. The leaders were largely indigenous and fought for a better life in Chiapas. For this reason, their cause was seen with general sympathy throughout the country.

The fact that the Zapatistas were extreme underdogs may also have led many to view them with sympathy. The invasion came as a surprise to the Mexican government, but within 24 hours, 14,000 Mexican troops forced a Zapatista retreat. By January 12, a ceasefire was declared and peace talks began.

The peace negotiations centered on what has come to be called "the Indian question," not the attempted government overthrow. While the EZLN may have wanted to take over Mexico, they soon realized that this goal was unrealistic.

In 1996, about one-and-one-half-years after negotiations began, an agreement was reached -- the San Andres Accords -- which committed the government to giving Indian communities more autonomy. But the Mexican congress never ratified the agreement.

Military occupation -- and faith-based resistance

Instead, the government has waged low-intensity warfare in Chiapas. The bulk of the army -- a total of almost 80,000 troops -- has gradually moved into the state, three times the level of occupation at the beginning of the conflict. Chiapas contains a combined total of 300 barracks, camps and checkpoints.

"In Chiapas, there are 20 to 25 military vehicles that pass through different roads where I live and control all the means of transportation," says Manuel Hernandez Aguilar, an indigenous Mayan from a grassroots faith community called El Pueblo Creyente (People of Faith). "When we go out, they ask us for ID and treat us as if we are foreigners in our land -- but we are the ones who are the original people of this land."

Aguilar presents an example of the kind of leader and the kind of movement that had been building in modern Chiapas since the 1960s. El Pueblo Creyente is an organization of Catholic lay people who gather to share common experiences, and to oppose repression of local indigenous Mayan communities.

"My principal work," explains Aguilar, "is to wake our people up to what's happening. We want people to reflect on what the Gospel means to them. This is not just a spiritual evangelism, though. We also deal with human needs -- and how Jesus worked hard to meet the needs of the poor and change their situation.

"We carry out our work so that people aren't left behind and forgotten. We want our church to be alive, not dead. Our church announces the good that happens and denounces the bad.

"Our work has much to do with poverty, because there is a lot of poverty. You can't talk about the Gospel without addressing people's miserable poverty."

Aguilar also works with a group of organizations that are independent from the church, ARIC (the Rural Association of Collective Interests). As he explains, "These are independent and democratic, and put into action the reflections that we do in our faith groups. ARIC is looking for an end to this poverty. But this work is not looked upon well by government authorities."

Aguilar continues, "Because we carry out this work, our diocese is persecuted. Our Bishop Samuel Ruiz was threatened with death and there was an attempt on the lives of many leaders for the work we do with the living Gospel."

Since 1995, government authorities backed by the ruling PRI party have closed 35 churches and chapels in Chiapas. In 1998, Mexico deported Thomas Hansen of Pastors for Peace and Miguel Chanteau, a French Catholic priest. Chanteau, who worked in Chiapas for 30 years and was a close associate of Ruiz, had criticized the Mexican government for its violence toward indigenous people.

Paramilitary violence: the Acteal massacre

In addition to the army, Chiapas is plagued with numerous paramilitary troops, organized by both the cattle barons and the army. The paramilitary has been reportedly responsible for numerous human rights abuses, from searching homes without warrants, to stealing livestock and food, to erecting arbitrary roadblocks, to rapes and murders.

A year ago, Asna Jahanjir, a United Nations official assigned to monitor the status of human rights in Chiapas, reported that "extra-judicial executions are widespread and ongoing. Entire communities are forced to flee to makeshift refugee camps."

One of the worst incidents to take place since the 1994 rebellion is the Acteal massacre, in which 45 civilians were killed on December 12, 1997.

Kerry Appel, director of the Human Bean Company, a fair-trade coffee company based in Denver, was in Acteal at the time of the massacre and witnessed the killings. He has been traveling to Mexico for 30 years, buying coffee directly from producers in Chiapas and then selling it in the U.S. Because he eliminates the middleman, or "coyote," he pays producers about $1.50 a pound for their coffee instead of the usual 40 cents. Acteal is a Tzotzil Indian village where the coffee for the Human Bean Company is grown.

"Women and children fled down the steep mountain path toward the valley, as armed men shot them from behind," Appel recounts. "Some who reached the underbrush by the river below were discovered by the assassins when the babies' cries gave them away. ... The assassins cut open the stomach of a young pregnant woman, tore her unborn baby out and cut it up. A baby less than one year old survived because her mother covered her with her own body and received all the bullets. One baby was shot in the head at close range.

"The massacre went on for almost five hours ... while dozens of armed civil guards stood on the road above and did nothing.

"In the end, 45 of Human Bean's coffee producers had been massacred and as many as 5,000 were refugees in the Tzotzil community of Pohlo."

Later, Appel learned that there was no coffee available for him to buy. "The same Mexican-government-backed paramilitary groups that had committed the massacre ... then stole the coffee of the dead and the refugees to sell it," he says.

The coffee processing plant in Acteal -- where Human Bean coffee is processed -- was then occupied by the Mexican army, an action that would have been unthinkable when the Mexican constitutions' autonomy-promoting Article 27 had been in effect. Dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the government had become aggressively intolerant of the independent villages of Chiapas, villages that had been independent, in some cases, since their founding.

Election defeats for the PRI

The decision of the PRI to crack down on those who seek autonomy may have ultimately led to its defeat in the latest round of national elections.

In last July's presidential elections, opposition candidate Vicente Fox defeated the PRI favorite--the first time in 71 years that the PRI lost its hold on the presidency. Likewise, the PRI lost the governorship of Chiapas to opposition candidate Pablo Salazar, an independent representing an alliance of parties including Fox's National Action Party (PAN) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution, which supports the Zapatistas. Salazar helped negotiate the 1996 peace accords.

Fox says he is willing to respect the San Andres Accords. During his campaign, he also said that he could resolve the Chiapas conflict in "15 minutes." He promised to withdraw the army to its pre-1994 positions.

But very quickly Fox seemed to be having second thoughts. In October 2000, he suggested that "an army pullout might not happen prior to an accord," and would happen only when "law and order" have been established.

As Womack puts it, "I don't think elections solve very much, but they do something. The fact that the PRI lost the election in Chiapas doesn't mean that all the bad guys are gone and only good guys will run things, but the wealthy have lost some of the official leverage that they used to have. They haven't lost property by any means -- but things have changed."

Still, he continues, "the people in Mexico need to continue what they have been doing for many years: figuring out what really are the obstacles to their own popular organizations and trying to organize around those obstacles, to undermine them. They need to put together formal organizations in the economy as producers, consumers, credit cooperatives -- develop their own material base and use that base to develop formal political organizations that can provide them protection. This can happen only from local places and spread from each local place. It can't be dictated from above. It has to come from popular organizing -- and that is the work of a lifetime."

Camille Colatosti is The Witness' staff writer.