Zapatista Army Of National Liberation

The faithful who attend Mass at the Cathedral of San Cristobal de Las Casas, a small, picturesque town on the Chiapas highlands of southern Mexico, are used to hearing Bishop Samuel Ruiz speak about politics. So they were not taken aback last month when Ruiz used one of his Sunday sermons to publicly announce his resignation as the mediator between the government and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). Ruiz blamed the Mexican government for his decision. This was not surprising.

Mexico is a nation with a population of more than 92 million, the third-largest in the Western Hemisphere, and with a strong economy poised for a major leap forward under the North American Free Trade Agreement. As the rebellion rages through Chiapas, the nation's southernmost province, it is crucial that the size and character of Mexico as a whole be borne in mind. SENSE OF PROPORTION: Why?

We have a very powerful weapon, which the government does not have. That weapon is called dignity. With this weapon no one and nothing can defeat us. They can kill us or jail us. But they will never defeat us. They will never get our surrender. --EZLN communique, Sept. 12 The Zapatista march to Mexico City last week contained many moments filled with history, with the rescue of history and its revitalization.

The Mexican state of Chiapas, home to the left-wing Zapatista revolt of the mid-1990s, is now eager to join a most capitalist enterprise: California's upcoming cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions . Chiapas Gov. Juan Antonio Sabines Guerrero and California Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Linda Adams are making the rounds of the global climate talks in Cancun, touting a deal: California companies will pay Chiapas to protect its...

MEXICO CITY - Here they were again, marching through the dark and the rain - the preppies from private universities, the hipsters in fat-lace skater sneakers, the young intellectuals with faces framed in wispy Che Guevara beards, the regular kids with backpacks and smartphones. They pooled by the thousands on Avenida Chapultepec in front of the headquarters ofMexico'smost powerful broadcaster, brandishing signs and banners, trailed by an opportunistic band of hot dog and taco vendors.

Laying out his government's new emergency plan to stabilize the plunging peso, President Ernesto Zedillo looked pale and fragile.

Four days before the new governor of Chiapas takes office in Tuxtla Gutierrez, two men are expected to claim the seat: the Institutional Revolutionary Party's governor-elect, Ed uardo Robledo Rincon, who officially won 51% of the vote last August, and maverick newspaper publisher Amado Avendano Figueroa of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, who garnered 34% but insists that fraud committed by the PRI robbed him of his victory.

"Poor Salinas de Gortari," goes a recent joke at the expense of Mexico's president. "On Dec. 30, he went to bed thinking he was North American. On Jan. 1, he woke up knowing he is Guatemalan."

If there ever was a reason NAFTA was a bad deal, we are looking at it now as Mexico flounders. President Clinton's decision to provide financial backing through the U.S. Treasury makes sense, if only because the near-meltdown in Mexico will affect the U.S. economy far worse than anything NAFTA could have done directly. Even with the $50-billion bailout, the peso crash represents tremendous losses--more than $10 billion in U.S. investor funds alone, plus $10 billion in U.S. export revenues.

The wooden rifles borne by some of the Tzeltal Maya militants of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation are more than crude simulacra of AK-47 or Galil automatic weap ons fashioned by desperate Indians unable to obtain the real thing. The dummy rifles are poignant symbols of the indigenous peasants' 500-year-old history of defeat and humiliation by the West; they are also cultural artifacts that connect the insurgents to their origins.