In a surprise dawn raid last Friday (May 1), 800 heavily-armed state police, backedup by 400 army troops, entered Amparo Agua Tinta, a Zapatista village close to the Guatemalan border, detaining at least 47 men, including six Guatemalan refugees, who were subsequently released.
The troops were accompanied by two busloads of women, part of a new force trained to confront women villagers who previously attacked army troops with sticks and stones. The women police fired tear gas, then threw the indigenous women to the ground and held them in choke holds, as male police attacked the occupants of the rebel council headquarters.
"This rebel government no longer exists," a smiling police commander told the Irish Times last Saturday, gesturing at the abandoned rebel council headquarters, now a police barracks. "We are here to make sure there is no more conflict." Amparo Agua Tinta is a small impoverished Mexican border village, where Guatemalans and Mexicans live side by side, eking out a living from meagre cornfields.
Several homes had the letters P-R-I painted on their walls, the initials of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, (PRI). The marked houses were untouched by the police, who stole work tools from other homes.
Local PRI loyalists also had giant satellite dishes in their gardens and shiny zinc roofs, evidence of the government's 'hearts and minds' campaign designed to wean villagers away from the Zapatista movement.
State governor Roberto Albores Guillen told journalists that police entered the village at the request of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, (ACNUR), to rescue a "kidnapped" Guatemalan refugee, locked up in the village prison.
"This is utterly false," said local ACNUR representative Carlos Zaccagnini, addressing villagers in Amparo Agua Tinta on Saturday morning, "It's not our job to tell the Mexican government how to conduct its affairs," he added.
The Guatemalan villager was locked up by Zapatista authorities for illegally cutting wood on community land.
"This happens all the time," said another ACNUR official, "people are locked up for a day or two then let go, it's never bothered the government before."
In a two-day trip to Chiapas last week, President Ernesto Zedillo told the local congress that he would "not soak his hands in indigenous blood" in response to Zapatista accusations of state terror applied in rebel villages.
Within 48 hours of Zedillo's speech, police shot two villagers in Amparo Agua Tinta, dragged dozens more from their homes and dismantled the autonomous rebel administration, set up by Zapatista sympathisers in 1994.
The Zapatistas had secured broad support for the parallel administration in one hundred local communities, recording births, deaths and marriages, resolving local conflicts and legislating through regional assemblies, where decisions were made by consensus, in line with traditional law.
"All we want to do is to govern ourselves," said Margarito Aguilar, a local, "but the government talks with guns, with blood". At least 80 women and children gathered under the shade of a tree in the centre of the village to give their version of the events.
"The women police held me on the ground while officers beat my father-in-law," said Lilia Vazquez. "He was covered in blood when they finished, then they threw him into the back of the truck, piled up on top of the other men, like animals."
The Mexican government is determined to dismantle all 32 autonomous rebel councils in Chiapas, as Zapatistas gain territory throughout the state, despite millions of state dollars spent on "reconciliation" work.
All over the conflict zone, government supporters have suddenly acquired gas stoves and brick walls for their homes, toys for their children, while Zapatistas make do with firewood, thatch and kites made from twigs and discarded plastic bags.
Taniperlas autonomous council was violently dismantled three weeks ago, as "troublesome foreigners" were blamed for riling up the "weak and manipulated indians." In Amparo Agua Tinta authorities falsely claimed that ACNUR requested state help to release an imprisoned refugee.
Next time there will be another pretext in another village, as a peaceful solution to the conflict is abandoned, leaving the sound of gunfire to fill the void.
ends.
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