Introduction
The brutal massacre of 45 indigenous sympathisers, mostly women and children, of the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army) in a refugee camp near Acteal in the south-eastern state of Chiapas, Mexico, last December 22, at the hands of paramilitary death squads linked to the PRI (Party of the Institutionalised Revolution) government served to remind world opinion that the "Rebellion of the Forgotten" of January 1994 has moved from a low to a high intensity conflict. The success of the Zapatistas in mobilising Mexican and international "civil society", particularly through the Internet, in a common struggle against the disastrous human and environmental consequences of neoliberalism, globalisation and "free trade" and for increased autonomy for indigenous peoples has forced the PRI regime, under the instigation of its US government and World Bank masters, to adopt a much more violent and politically far riskier strategy of repression through state terror. This has effectively ended the phase of negotiations which led to the signing of the San Andres Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture in February 1996, which the PRI regime has since refused to implement, so provoking the present intensification of the conflict. As in Bosnia and Rwanda, the war is not being fought so much against the armed guerrillas of the EZLN, but rather the civilian population of the Zapatista "base support communities". The PRI regime's aim is to exterminate and expel the Zapatista communities, so depopulating huge areas of the oil, water and mineral-rich Lacandona Jungle, an area even more biodiverse than the Brazilian rain forests. In this way not only will "the fish have no water to swim in", but the path towards the greater exploitation of the area's human and natural resources by mainly US-based transnational corporations (TNCs) will have been greatly smoothed, as was always the intention of the NAFTA free trade agreement.
The Acteal Massacre has been cynically used by the PRI regime to step up the repression and harassment of the indigenous Zapatista communities by both the army and PRI paramilitary groups who, despite some token arrests following the massacre, now enjoy ever greater impunity and support from the Mexican Federal Army and the Chiapas state police force. The Zapatista communities have fought back by accelerating their own implementation of the San Andrés Accords, setting up some 32 "autonomous municipalities" under the terms of the agreement. The PRI regime is now attempting to bulldoze its revised and heavily diluted version of the accords through the Mexican Congress. Meanwhile, it has launched a campaign of violent repression against the main autonomous municipalities such as Taniperlas and San Juan de la Libertad, where on June 10, eight Zapatistas and two policemen were killed during an attack involving a 1,000-strong column of soldiers, police and paramilitary forces, supported by tanks, helicopters and artillery. Hundreds have been imprisoned or forced to flee into the mountains, leaving women, children and old people at the mercy of the Mexican army and the MIRA (Revolutionary Anti-Zapatista Indigenous Movement), a PRI-linked paramilitary organisation Which now rules Taniperlas and other repressed communities by terror with the open co-operation of the security forces.
In order to intensify its repression of the insurgent Zapatista communities, the PRI regime has had to forcibly remove one of the main obstacles to this course of action, namely the presence of large numbers of foreign human rights observers many of whom stay in "peace camps" inside Zapatista communities in order to provide some sort of protection from state terror. Over 200 such observers have been deported in the last year as the PRI regime has whipped up a crude xenophobic campaign in the press, blaming the Chiapas conflict on meddling by foreign political activists and local Catholic Church priests of foreign origin. Some 40 Italian human rights observers were permanently expelled from Mexico in May, the most extreme deportation order , which before this year had only been used once in the last 15 years.
There can be little doubt that the PRI regime's use of state terror in Chiapas enjoys the tacit support of the US and EU governments, the latter of whom signed a free trade agreement with Mexico last December, despite its first clause making its implementation dependent on respect for human and democratic rights. Despite its "ethical" foreign policy the New Labour presidency Of the EU has failed to criticise President Zedillo's policy of state terror in Chiapas and the British press have ignored the issue. A possible explanation could be that Britain is the EU's second largest investor in Mexico and the fourth in the world. It has also emerged that the Labour government continues to grant export licences for the sale of weapons to the Mexican Army [1]
