The war of words between the government of President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon and Chiapas rebels ended last week, and real warfare resumed. In Nuevo Momon, a village in the southern state of Chiapas near the Guatemalan border, sniper fire rained down on a force of Mexican soldiers, killing two of them. Near the town of Cacalomacan, about 50 miles west of Mexico City, 250 police and soldiers surrounded a group of militants and flushed them out of a farmhouse after a two-hour gun battle. In other strongholds of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, or E.Z.L.N., hundreds of heavily armed soldiers made house-to-house searches for rebels and their leaders.
All across Mexico, security forces were on the lookout for the mysterious rebel spokesman known as Subcomandante Marcos. Last week the Chiapas leader, who has always been masked in public appearances, was revealed by Zedillo to be Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, 37.
In a nationally televised speech, Zedillo announced the issuing of arrest warrants for Guillen and four other E.Z.L.N. leaders, who were, contrary to public belief, “neither popular, nor indigenous, nor from Chiapas.” The charismatic rebel spokesman and his fellow rebel leaders, the President charged, were former members of a 1970s student revolutionary group. Government aides added that Guillen had grown up in comfortable circumstances in Tampico. He attended private religious schools and the Autonomous University of Mexico, and later taught communications at another university before disappearing in 1983. According to press reports, Guillen lived for several years in Nicaragua, where he worked with the Sandinistas.
The government’s show of force ended a 12-month cease-fire that began after the Jan. 1, 1994, Zapatista insurrection left 145 dead and shattered Mexico’s modernizing image. The crackdown also came as Zedillo’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party faced a difficult Feb. 12 election in the central state of Jalisco. That was a suspicious coincidence to some analysts, but Zedillo said his moves were triggered by fears of expanded Zapatista military action.
Government sources had hinted for weeks that Zedillo would undertake some strong action to try to rebuild credibility after the peso’s disastrous devaluation. That the Zapatistas should be the target was logical: their activity inspired the erosion in investor confidence that ultimately led to financial panic. But Zedillo’s evidence for a spreading Zapatista insurrection was sketchy. Arms caches that authorities discovered held little more than a handful of firearms and several dozen grenades.
Now the President has staked much of his dwindling authority on the military offensive. As a Mexico expert in Washington put it, “If Zedillo’s military plan works quickly, fine. Markets will be happy, and everyone can get on with business.” But if Zedillo is wrong about the narrow base of support for the Zapatistas, he might spark a guerrilla war lasting for years. And further gore a presidency that has more than five long years to run.
–Reported by Ronald Buchanan/San Andres Larrainzar and Laura Lopez/ Mexico City
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