This fall, when scores of Mazahua Indian women took up arms and marched on Mexico City, they caught the country's imagination. "Women warriors fight for their rights," newspapers declared in 72-point type after the Mazahuas, rifles slung over traditional satin dresses, stormed Congress. TV crews swarmed this impoverished valley for the scoop.

Then last month, less than eight weeks later, the Mazahua Army of Women for the Defense of Water won millions of pesos and huge concessions from a government that had ignored their community's pleas - reparations for damage from a dam built in 1977 - for more 25 years.

"We won't rest until the government does everything it said it would do," says Victoria Martinez, the 31-year-old comandanta who is the face and symbol of the movement.

But what she doesn't say is that the movement is actually a shrewd public-relations ploy that succeeded where other tactics did not. Not only are the real decisionmakers in Valle de Allende men, but the majority of the beneficiaries from the stunning political victory aren't even Indians. As such, these women serve as a telling example of a grim reality in Mexico, where the legitimate pleas of millions go unheard unless they can find a novel way to catch the public's sympathies.

"There's nothing new about a bunch of farmers demanding justice," says Xochitl Galvez, director of the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples, which works extensively with the roughly 200,000 Mazahua Indians in Mexico State. "But by using Mazahua women, they realized they would get the media's attention."

While countless impoverished Mexicans spend years clamoring for attention, a select few have learned to corral the mass media to their advantage. Most famous are the Zapatistas of Chiapas, whose use of ski masks, guns, and a mediagenic leader - Subcomandante Marcos - won them adherents around the world and passage of Indian-rights legislation. And in 2002, poor farmers in Mexico State took up machetes and torches in a protest that drew thousands of reporters and successfully halted plans for a $2 billion airport.

In the case of Valle de Allende, what appears to be an authentic and unprecedented Indian women's movement is in fact the creation of press-savvy advisers brought in to resuscitate an ailing cause with a carefully measured dose of image manipulation. Indeed, government statistics show that more than two-thirds of the residents of Valle de Allende aren't even Indians.

A quarter century ago, Mexico's National Water Commission seized huge portions of this valley to build a massive reservoir that would eventually supply 30 percent of Mexico City's water. But residents say they were never paid for the land they lost and the growing artificial has lake flooded farmlands and crippled the economy.

Today, most households in the valley don't have running water. Periodic flooding has killed much of the surrounding pine forest, leading to erosion problems. And area groundwater has been contaminated by waste chemicals from the water-treatment plant at the mouth of the reservoir.

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