Chiapas Mexico

Leticia Diaz awoke before dawn to the din of trucks and a bulldozer rumbling up the rutted dirt road that runs through this village of wood-plank huts in the southern mountains of the southern state of Chiapas. She ran down to where villagers had piled rocks waist-high in a makeshift barricade meant to stop authorities from passing through on their way to rout peasants who had occupied a coffee plantation farther up the road, demanding that the land be divided among them.

Mexico's Supreme Court ordered the release of 20 men convicted in the 1997 massacre of 45 Indian villagers in Chiapas state and new trials for six more, ruling Wednesday that prosecutors used illegal evidence. Paramilitary fighters with alleged ties to government figures attacked a prayer meeting of Roman Catholic activists who sympathized with rebels demanding more rights for Indians. Over several hours on Dec. 22, 1997, the assailants killed 45 people. The court cited irregularities such as the fact that suspects, largely speakers of the Tzotzil Indian language, were not provided with interpreters.

Clearing the way for the start of peace talks between the government and the Zapatista National Liberation Army, hundreds of rebel supporters left the negotiation site Friday night, driven away by a severe thunderstorm and the pleas of their leaders. After the village center was cleared, eight ski-masked rebel delegates to the talks told an open-air news conference that they had asked community coordinators to take their townspeople home.

Divers headed into a murky river Tuesday and rescue workers dug through mountains of earth in search of victims after a rain-soaked hill collapsed, burying homes in mud and sending up a wall of water that one official described as a "mini-tsunami." Two bodies were recovered and 12 people were reported missing. Animals helped save the lives of some of those in the Chiapas state hamlet of San Juan Grijalva: Cattle, apparently sensing the impending slide, fled to higher ground Sunday.

Try this for surreal nomenclature: The hamlet called Moises--that's Spanish for Moses--Gandhi is the capital of Ernesto Che Guevara township, not far from First of January and just northwest of 17th of November. But don't bother looking for these brazenly revolutionary names on any official map of Chiapas, the southeastern Mexican state where Maya Indians rebelled against the government Jan. 1, 1994.

Snipers have fired on army patrols in two incidents in Chiapas, shattering the tense military standoff in Mexico's southernmost state and giving a glimpse of what a guerrilla war threatened by the Zapatista National Liberation Army would be like. In a brief statement early Tuesday, Mexican Atty. Gen.

While guerrilla leader Subcommander Marcos hunkers down in his jungle hide-out, the gale of democratic change that roared through Mexico last month looks poised to reach even his southernmost stronghold today, raising hopes for peace here in the conflict-ridden state of Chiapas.

When he wants to worship, farmer Gustavo Hernandez sneaks out the back of a local grocery store and ducks into a dim storage room, where the Virgin Mary shares space with hundreds of ears of corn and a few scrabbling chickens. The makeshift altar to the Virgin is only a short walk from this village's imposing Spanish-colonial Roman Catholic church. But Hernandez won't go near that structure. "If we go to the church, they'll surround it and kill us," the 46-year-old peasant says softly.

Sitting on the steps of a national immigration office in Mexico City, waiting hour after hour for a special visa to enter the southern state of Chiapas, Lorena Flores had one thought running through her head: "What exactly don't they want us to see there?" Last week, she had her answer. In an Indian village, Flores and a group of fellow Cal State Northridge students and professors sat down with an old woman, who cried as she told of the day men ransacked her home, leaving her with nothing.

In a major step to resolve the ongoing conflict in the southern state of Chiapas, President Ernesto Zedillo on Saturday replaced his interior minister--considered his top political operator--and ordered a new peace strategy for the impoverished region.

A leftist candidate won the governor's race in Mexico's volatile southernmost state of Chiapas, edging out a rival backed by President Vicente Fox's party by nearly 6,300 votes, electoral officials said. The final results showed Juan Sabines Guerrero, of the Democratic Revolution Party, won 553,270 votes, compared with 546,988 for Jose Antonio Aguilar Bodegas, who was running with a coalition including the Institutional Revolutionary Party and Fox's National Action Party. An appeal is expected.

The exit polls were inconclusive, but both sides claimed victory anyway. The official count put one candidate ahead, but by just a fraction of a percentage point. On Monday morning, Mexico awoke to a new election drama that mirrors the divisions in the country's still undecided July 2 presidential vote. The result from Sunday's vote to elect a new governor in the southern state of Chiapas was too close to call.

Mexican police said they had broken up a vote-buying scheme in Chiapas on the eve of today's state elections, which will be closely watched amid national turmoil over the results of last month's presidential election. Four supporters of the Democratic Revolution Party were arrested Friday after authorities said they were caught telling residents they would not receive aid intended for Hurricane Stan victims unless they promised to support the party's gubernatorial candidate.

A vast stretch of greenery in southeastern Mexico, Chiapas is caressed by clouds that march across its mountains and slice over San Cristobal de las Casas, its reclusive mountaintop heart, a compact city with the cobble-stoned ambience of an old Spanish colonial town. But we are not here to ogle nature. This is a "reality tour," an adventure into being socially responsible and finding meaning in a foreign place.

Reflecting the mounting safety concerns plaguing Mexico's state-owned petroleum industry, the governor of Chiapas this week shut down a federally owned and operated oil well that he said posed a health and environmental hazard. It is believed to be the first time a state has shut down an installation of Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, an entity whose revenue funds more than 30% of the federal government's budget.

Scores of Zapatista rebel supporters seized an American-owned tourist ranch in the southern state of Chiapas on Friday, the owners and government officials said. Rebels denouncing foreign influence in Mexico have said they want to drive out the American owners of the Rancho Esmeralda, and since mid-December, residents of the rebel village of Nuevo Jerusalem have blocked roads leading to the ranch.

In an effort to salvage peace in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico's Congress voted to let Zapatista rebels speak before lawmakers to promote an Indian rights bill. Legislators passed a measure requiring at least 100 members of the 628-seat Congress to be present when the rebels make their pitch. Rebel leader Subcommander Marcos said the Zapatistas accepted Congress' proposal and would postpone their return to the jungle, which had been scheduled for today.

The oldest "basketball" court in North America has been discovered in Chiapas, Mexico. The Maya ball court dates from 1400 B.C., at least five centuries older than any previously discovered court, a team from the University of British Columbia reports in today's Nature. The game, which had religious significance, involved tossing a rubber ball up and down a long, alley-shaped court and attempting to get it through a hoop mounted on one of its walls. Losers were sometimes put to death.

Two state policemen, two municipal officials and a civilian were killed in a fierce gun battle Tuesday in Tres Cruces, Mexico, as police were attempting to catch suspects in a shooting that killed two civilians in the remote Chiapas state community Sunday, authorities said.

Police arrested at least 20 alleged members of a paramilitary group in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The Peace and Justice group has been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of people in clashes with supporters of the Zapatista rebels, who led a rebellion in the mid-1990s in the name of Indian rights. State Atty. Gen. Mariano Herran Salvatti said the men would be charged with homicide, cattle rustling and armed robbery.