Reforms falter for Mexican Indians

Mexican President Vicente Fox boasted during his presidential campaign that he could solve the seven-year-old Zapatista Indian rights insurgency in the southern state of Chiapas "in 15 minutes."

But a recent setback has observers in this mountainous state, and analysts in Mexico, saying a settlement of the lingering conflict is further away than at any other point in Mr. Fox's nine-month-old administration.

As Fox called on legislators to join him in a national political accord and back wide-ranging reforms during his state-of-the-union address on Saturday night, he was reminded of his failure to keep his ambitious promise by legislators who held up a banner echoing a widely held sentiment: "I will Resolve the Chiapas Conflict in 15 Minutes, Bla, Bla, Bla."

Talks with the rebels and their enigmatic leader, Subcomandante Marcos, have completely broken down, and as a consequence, tension is rising again in troubled Chiapas. Rights activists allege the government has opened 12 new military posts in Zapatista areas in the past four months.

The break between the government and the Zapatistas has been caused by a package of constitutional reforms on indigenous rights that does not meet the expectations of the indigenous group. The reforms, drafted by the government's peace commission for Chiapas, were demanded by the Zapatistas as a precondition for negotiations, and Fox sent them to Congress two days after being sworn in last December - a major overture to the Zapatistas. Congress, however, feared the "Balkanization" of Mexico and watered down the reforms.

The original draft on indigenous rights, which Fox sent to Congress, would have granted indigenous people control over natural resources on their lands, the right to use traditional courts to resolve disputes, and some financial and political autonomy.

But Congress, concerned that the reforms granted too much power to indigenous groups at the expense of individual rights and national sovereignty, dramatically reduced the rights to be granted in the package. In a statement, the Zapatista's labeled the revised reforms a "call to war."

"The only thing this has accomplished is to push the Zapatistas and the government further apart," says Juan Carlos Paez, an official at the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center in Chiapas, which has been trying to broker peace virtually since 1994, when the Zapatista insurgency began with a brief occupation of this picturesque colonial city.

While analysts don't expect a fresh Zapatista offensive, they warn that other radical groups in the heavily indigenous states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, which had been following the Zapatista example, may become more active.

"The Zapatistas convinced other, more radical groups that there could be political solutions," says Andres Aubry, a historian and Zapatista expert in San Cristobal. "Now, maybe that strategy is losing credibility."

Mexico's 10 million indigenous people are among its poorest, and their mistreatment over the past 500 years is at the heart of the insurgency.

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