Zapatista National Liberation Army

Activists allied with Mexico's Zapatista National Liberation Army rallied in Downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday to protest the multibillion-dollar U.S. loan guarantee program for Mexico approved Tuesday and the Mexican government's military deployment in the southern state of Chiapas.

Southern Mexico's Indian rebels agreed Tuesday to peace talks with the government, a month after their uprising began. "The conditions for negotiations have been met," stated a two-page statement distributed to local media and signed by "Subcommander Marcos," the name that has appeared on all communications from the rebels. The statement did not specify a time or place for the talks. Government peace negotiator Manuel Camacho Solis characterized the communication as "an important advance."

The government late Friday freed more than half of 70 prisoners held on suspicion of participating in a New Year's rebellion, saying the release was another step in its efforts to restore calm to southern Mexico. The 38 suspected guerrillas detained by the army walked out of the Cerro Hueco state penitentiary under "provisional liberty," said Gilberto Ocana Mendez, director of Chiapas prisons.

Peace talks between the government and Mayan rebels resumed Sunday after a 10-month break, bringing hope of progress toward ending the conflict that has smoldered for over a year. Interior Minister Esteban Moctezuma Barragan, perhaps the most powerful member of President Ernesto Zedillo's Cabinet, met with the rebels' most prominent leader, Subcommander Marcos, at an undisclosed location in the remote Lacandon jungle.

Thank you for the very touching and revealing "A Husband Lost, a Son Born in 'Dirty War' " (Dec. 15), about political activists who were "disappeared" in the 1970s in Mexico. Uncovering these past secrets of Mexico's "dirty war" is very important for improving human rights conditions there; however, we must also remember that these types of events are not isolated to the past--they are occurring right now. Over the past decade, Mexico has increasingly relied on its army to police its countryside.

A European fact-finding team pledged Sunday to be fair during its investigation of violence in Indian communities in southern Mexico. About 170 human rights activists and politicians are to begin their tour this week in Chiapas state, where 45 Indian villagers were slaughtered in a Dec. 22 massacre.

A single soldier, who later committed suicide, killed eight civilians at a government clinic during an Indian uprising in the southern state of Chiapas last year, according to a Mexican army investigation into alleged atrocities that was severely criticized Wednesday by a leading international human rights group.

Indian peasants were subjected to summary executions, disappearances and other human rights abuses by the army as it fought a New Year's rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas, Canadian investigators charged Saturday. And in the town of Ocosingo, forensic experts sent by the Mexican government's human rights commission on Saturday exhumed six bodies from a mass grave. At least three more bodies, wrapped in sheets from a government hospital, could be seen at the bottom of the eight-foot pit.

About 70 people marched outside the Mexican Consulate on Wednesday night to protest the government of Mexico and voice support for an Indian guerrilla movement in the southern part of the country. The demonstrators called for the government of Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to institute democratic reforms and help indigenous people in the southern state of Chiapas.

Who was that masked man? Fifteen years after his uprising shocked Mexico's status quo, and a year after he more or less dropped out of public view, Subcomandante Marcos had made a comeback appearance. At least, it seemed to be Marcos. He was, after all, wearing his trademark black ski mask. Followers were convinced.