By Peter Gellert
MEXICO CITY — The government is stepping up attacks on Zapatista-led autonomous municipalities in Chiapas and is intensifying its war in the mass media against foreign observers.
In the early hours of May 1, a national holiday in Mexico, more than 1000 police and soldiers raided and violently dismantled the autonomous municipality of Tierra y Libertad, composed of 22 local villages. Fifty-two Indian peasants were detained; eight have been charged with rebellion and usurping authorities' functions.
The autonomous municipalities are Zapatista-led villages where residents have elected their own authorities according to local traditions. They have also resolved community problems, such as land distribution, in open assemblies by consensus. In the process they have ousted the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) officials.
Thirty-eight such municipalities are functioning in Chiapas.
Local residents charge that their homes were ransacked and destroyed in the operation, and that detainees were beaten. Homes with PRI insignia were left untouched.
For the first time, women police were used to fire tear gas on and attack indigenous peasant women, preventing them from repelling the troops and damaging the reputation of the government and army in the process. More serious allegations include five-year-olds being tortured by state security police, sexual attacks on women and teenagers and beatings of women and old people.
The government said it was responding to a petition from the UN High Commission for Refugees calling on authorities to intervene in favour of a detained Guatemalan citizen. In a subsequent communiqué, the high commission denied it had anything to do with the military's move.
The police and army raid follows similar attacks on Zapatista municipalities two weeks earlier.
There is now a real danger of further military attacks on the autonomous municipalities in the villages of Polho and El Bosque. Chiapas Governor Roberto Albores said authorities would apply the law in these areas, and no-one should be surprised by it.
Different views exist across the political spectrum about whether the Zapatista autonomous municipalities are contrary to the law, and indeed whether the government's recent actions are.
The federal government's representative in Chiapas, Emilio Rabasa, claimed that the autonomous municipalities are the greatest threat to democracy in Mexico.
This is a breathtaking statement considering the existence of right-wing paramilitary gangs in Chiapas which act with near total impunity; the widespread practice of torture and the phenomenon of the "disappeared"; electoral fraud; rampant corruption at all levels of government; and the almost complete absence of the most elementary trade union rights.
Rabasa has called on the Legislative Peace Commission to change the legal framework for dialogue with the Zapatistas. This is viewed by many as an attempt to test public opinion for a harder stance against the Chiapas rebels.
In a May 4 declaration, the indigenous and Zapatista communities accused the government of using the UN as a pretext for its war against the Indian population. "We will not surrender; we will defend our communities to the end", they declared.
On a related front, authorities are tightening the screws on foreign observers. The focal point earlier this month was the presence of 130 Italian observers, who were finally given restricted 10-day visas.
The Italian team defied immigration officials' refusal to allow them to visit the sites of the recent police-military operations, where hundreds of Indian women are being held hostage by armed PRI members.
In declarations that were immediately repeated in the media, and by PRI officials and business leaders, both in Chiapas and nationwide, interior ministry undersecretary for immigration Fernando Solis declared, "Mexico does not want revolutionary tourists or observer experiments".
He also accused the Italian observer delegation, which included parliamentarians, of being "adventurers, law-breakers and provocateurs" and announced that new regulations restricting international observers would soon be drafted.
These regulations would require complicated, time-consuming paper procedures to be followed, limit the size of observer delegations to 10, restrict the places they can visit, including all areas outside urban centres (preventing observers from visiting those areas where human rights violations most frequently occur), and require that they be backed by so-called representative and serious organisations in their home countries. In effect, the regulations would make foreign observer delegations virtually impossible.
Government officials also repeated threats to investigate the San Cristobal archdiocese for issuing credentials for foreign observers. The archdiocese is led by Bishop Samuel Ruiz, who is under intense attack for his role in the National Intermediation Commission, charged by authorities with being partial to the Zapatistas.
President Ernesto Zedillo also went on the offensive, attacking "progressives" who feel it is politically correct to attack Mexico as a country marked by oppression, mistreatment and injustice toward its indigenous inhabitants. The president told the foreign observers to study their own nations' colonial histories.
While non-government organisations and the left-of-centre Party of the Democratic Revolution have condemned the recent military moves and xenophobic government declarations, a mass response — the only force capable of detaining the government's murderous hand — has yet to emerge.