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The Chiapas lawlessness, however, is simply a part of Mexico's wider emergency. Much of the violence stems from uncontrolled drug trafficking and the economic crisis of 1994, from which the country is recovering, but not fast enough. The erosion of the 70-year P.R.I. stranglehold on power is another big factor, similar to the crime wave that blossomed in Russia after the collapse of communism. Until Mexico's new democracy builds effective judicial institutions--and that may take a generation or more--thugs can run amuck. "Criminals were practically licensed under the P.R.I.," says Roy Godson, a national-security expert at Georgetown University. "The old rules have broken down."
Nowhere worse than in Mexico City. Crime in the capital has risen a staggering 30% or more for each of the past three years. Just one small district, Iztapalapa, saw 154 murders in 1997. Worse, a study has found that 90% of the city's crimes go unpunished, probably because police are committing so many of them. Just days after he took office last month promising to clean up the constabulary, Mexico City's first-ever elected mayor, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano of the left-center Democratic Revolution Party, had to dump his newly appointed investigative police chief because of his alleged ties to drug trafficking and torture. Police are suspected of heading a kidnapping boom that has grown into a billion-dollar ransom industry. Americans are by no means exempt. On Dec. 15, Peter John Zarate, 40, a real estate executive and father of four living in Mexico City, was shot and killed by taxi pirates in the posh Polanco neighborhood. Just days before, another U.S. businessman was savagely beaten after stepping into a taxi outside the Sheraton Hotel, next door to the U.S. embassy. A week earlier the U.S. manager of an Acapulco hotel was kidnapped by men wearing police uniforms.
Groping for solutions, Zedillo has put the military in charge of police agencies. The results so far have been disastrous. Last February the President had to order the arrest of his new antidrug czar for being in the pay of a major drug lord.
What can be done about it? Mexico finally has an organized-crime law on the books, allowing wiretapping and seizure of criminal property. And last month Zedillo proposed stringent new anticrime measures that make it easier to fire bad cops. But in an interview last week with TIME, Attorney General Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, a former human-rights ombudsman with little prosecutorial experience, conceded that "Mexico needs a new culture of legality." He plans to announce sweeping new provisions for international participation in the recruiting and training of all Mexican federal police, not just elite antidrug cops. But Madrazo's immediate concern is showing the terrified peasants of Chiapas that their attackers will go to prison for their alleged atrocities. If so, it will be something of a first.
--With reporting by Brendan M. Case/Acteal