By Philip True , Express-News Mexico City Bureau
SABANILLA, Mexico - Like Adam, Mateo Torres Perez was forced from Paradise.
Unlike Adam, Torres and several of his fellows, Mayan Indian members of the dissident Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), got in a few shots at their tormentors before retreating under heavy fire toward Calvary, a nearby hamlet.
Torres and the Mayans are locked in battle with state police and a secret army from the long- dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for control of this distant jungle of southern Mexico.
Now El Paraiso, a communal farming village in the spectacular wilds of north-central Chiapas, is closed, forbidden to outsiders by those who remain.
"It is not a good idea that you go there," Hermilindo Cruz Perez, a municipal worker here in Sabanilla, the countylike municipio in which Paradise and Calvary are located, warned a reporter last week.
"With all of the suffering caused by the problems there, those (PRIistas) who are left are so angry that they are likely to kill anyone they don't know," Cruz advised.
Three years after the Zapatista Army of National Liberation attacked four principal towns in Chiapas on New Year's Day 1994, snail's-pace peace talks between the rebels and the government have broken down.
The charismatic Subcomandante Marcos repeated concerns last week that hostilities could break out anew.
More than 150 died during 10 days of combat during the 1994 rising.
Often missed with the focus on the Zapatista peace talks in San Andres Larrainzar is that the rising uncorked pent-up rage in hundreds of thousands of dispossessed Mayan campesinos who sympathize but are not Zapatista guerrillas.
Land-hungry Mayan peasants have seized ranches, kidnapped their owners and stolen their cattle, occupied town halls for months, and barricaded main highways for days all over the state to press their demands.
The PRD, first formed in 1988, has emerged since 1994 as the champion of Chiapas' militant peasantry.
Overwhelmed, the PRI-dominated state government has lost control over much of its area. Ranking officials travel between cities in army convoys, while state police venture off main roads only in force.
In the reign of chaos, the killing goes on.
"The war here in Chiapas did not begin with the rising in 1994, nor did it end with the ceasefire," said Gonzalo Ituarte, vicar of peace and justice with the Roman Catholic diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas.
"Many more people have died since the ceasefire than during the rising," Ituarte said.
Chiapas, the Mayans' homeland for at least 1,500 years, is a verdant, natural paradise: vast forests; plunging canyons and soaring mountains; sparkling rivers and tumbling waterfalls. It contains important reserves of oil and natural gas and supplies much of Mexico's hydroelectric power.
Perhaps in the days before the Spaniards, the Mayans knew peace and fulfillment here.
But the Spanish, followed by other Europeans and Americans, seeking profit rather than a living from the green treasure house, took the Mayan lands and converted the people - for whom subsistence farming was a millennia-long part of their psycho- spiritual being - into a dispossessed underclass, hated for its truculence and backwardness, but indispensable for its labor.
Although the Europeans revolutionized the political economy of Chiapas, they did not break the back of Mayan character.
Mayan rage has smoldered and sometimes flared through nearly five centuries of exploitation and racism, said Manuel Gomez Moreno, a Tzeltal Mayan and the first mayor ever elected from the PRD in nearby Chilon.
But as so often with suppressed rage, when it explodes, fellow Mayans more often than Europeans or Mexican mestizos are on the receiving end.
There is a palpable tension underpinning village life here in the countryside, a sense that people who mask most of their emotions toward outsiders are wound up tight inside. Differences over politics or religion quickly heat to the verge of violence.
The violence often lacks rhyme or reason.
Under the cry of, "One religion and one party," Tzotzil Mayan Catholic PRIistas in San Juan Chamula have expelled and/or killed evangelical Presbyterian and Seventh Day Adventist neighbors, some of whom belong to the PRD, while Catholic PRD activists here in Sabanilla shout the same slogan in battle with Presbyterian and Seventh Day Adventist PRIistas.
"Maybe it is because that after 500 years of nothing, some of us feel like we have finally gotten a little bit of something as a part of the system," Chilo n's Gomez said. "But when the PRD or new religious orders come along and threaten that system, that pent-up rage boils over irrationally into the killing."
Anger and hatred are not confined to the Mayans.
Complaining that since the Zapatista rising too much attention has been paid to indigenous concerns, Elias Fidel Licona Jimenez, mestizo security chief to former Chiapas Gov. Javier Lo pez Moreno and now a restaurant owner in the important north-central Chiapas town of Yajalon, proposed a final solution.
"The hard-working immigrants in the United States did the right thing with the Apaches and the Blackfeet who opposed their colonization efforts," Lopez said. "They did away with the Indians."
Paradise is a case study of political violence in Chiapas.
Sabanilla is not casually reached.
Fifteen years ago, travelers walked for seven hours on jungle trails to reach the rich plantations formerly owned by German and American coffee planters. The 18-mile trip since has been cut to two hours in four-wheel drive vehicle on a muddy track.
The Mexican government expropriated the foreigners' holdings in land reform measures enacted after the Mexican Revolution. Now, Sabanilla is surrounded by communal farming villages of 500 to 1,500 people, solidly Chol Mayan in descent.
Lush swards of cornfields dot the mountain valley and hillsides, textured with thick tufts of upland jungle. Lacy streams fall down the slopes to a fast- running river, cocoa colored after heavy rains.
Sabanilla is an armed camp. Sandbagged fortifications manned with heavily armed state troopers ring the town plaza, while the Mexican army has a camp on the outskirts of town.
However, the troopers made it clear they would not let themselves or their fortified positions be photographed without permission from the capital at Tuxtla Gutierrez.
One trooper, who demanded identification from a reporter, pointedly asked him when he would be leaving Sabanilla.
At the same time the troopers are here, a clandestine army of armed PRIistas, known as Peace and Justice, reportedly patrols regional roads at night, terrorizing and killing suspected PRD supporters.
Last year PRD activists from outlying communities, including a contingent from Paradise, moved into City Hall for five months, preventing the PRI mayor and his government from their work.
"We did it because we heard that there was an order for Peace and Justice to begin assassinating PRD people in Sabanilla," said Marcelino Gomez Gomez. "We don't want that here."
Sabanilla municipal treasurer Jesus Juarez, a member of the PRI, likened the occupation to a visit from Attila the Hun.
"They came in and shot the place up, broke out the windows and stole the typewriters," Juarez recalled.
With the sandbags and troops in place, he added, "Now we are prepared to defend City Hall."
Juarez denied the existence of Peace and Justice vigilantes in Sabanilla.
"There are no armed PRIistas here. Those are just rumors picked up by the newspapers," he said. "Nothing but rumors."
While communities that are overwhelmingly PRD or PRI are relatively calm, others, like Paradise, Calvary or Buenavista, where loyalties are divided, live in virtual civil war, said Belisario Lopez Perez, a PRD activist from Buenavista.
"Where there is division, there are problems," Lo pez said.
He said he was picked up in the Sabanilla plaza by state police two weeks ago and questioned about armed PRDistas in Buenavista. During his questioning, he said, he was severely beaten and his head held under water.
State police officials in Sabanilla refused to talk to a reporter.
With a nearly 50-50 split between PRI and PRD, Paradise's problems began last year. Factional friction caused a PRI contingent to move out in June, but it returned in July, said Mateo Torres.
"They came back armed, and began firing their guns during the night," Torres recalled.
The pace of confrontations picked up during December and early January.
On Jan. 18, Torres said, somebody fired shots at a group of PRD people.
"The PRIistas came running and shooting at us, thinking we were firing at them. They broke into four of our houses and burned them down," he continued.
On Jan. 19, a woman who belonged to the PRI died in Paradise.
Torres said she died of a heart attack, but Juarez said she had been shot by the PRD.
Villagers went to Sabanilla to ask authorities to pick up the body, but PRI-affiliated judicial authorities refused to enter Paradise alone.
Two days later, they arrived with an armed escort.
"Two truck loads of state police came in, firing their weapons at anything that moved," Torres said.
The PRD evacuated their women and children to the bush, and sent a squad with hunting rifles and pistols to defend their communal store.
"We are not going to just let people come in and take away what is ours," he explained.
But hunting rifles are no match for automatic carbines, and Torres and some 500 supporters ultimately ran past Calvary for refuge in nearby PRD communities.
One PRD supporter was killed in the clash with state authorities.
Life is hard for the refugees, Torres said. They lack food, clothing, shelter and medicine. Their animals and goods have been plundered by PRI villagers in Paradise. No government authority has come to aid them.
Although politics or religion are usually blamed, most such conflicts are land based, said a highly placed Chiapas state official who spoke on background.
With an average birth rate of 3.5 children per woman between the ages of 25 and 30, the highest in Mexico, the rural Maya are geometrically outstripping the bountiful land's ability to feed them.
"If an ejidatario starts out with six hectares (15 acres) of land, and has five children, he can pass on a little more than one hectare to each," said Chilon's Gomez. "That leaves nothing for the grandchildren."
Chiapas has also become a kind of test tube for Mexican and foreign social experimenters, the state official said.
"In the 1960s and '70s, radical Maoists moved into the Sabanilla area and began telling the Indians they should take over the large plantations," the official said. "If you look at it, the Indian's greatest defenders, like (San Cristobal Bishop) Samuel Ruiz and (Subcomandante) Marcos are all from outside the state."
Left to their own devices, Chiapanecos could work out a statewide dialogue that would bring peace and prosperity to the state, he concluded.
San Cristobal vicar Ituarte laughed bitterly at that assertion.
"The dominant (largely mixed race or mestizo) class of Chiapas is precisely incapable of resolving the indigenous problem because they are the ones who have built the system and benefit from it," Ituarte said.
Mayan society, and most of Chiapas, is in a critical state of transition from its rural origins towards an as-yet unclear future, Ituarte argued.
Until that transitional crisis is resolved, he continued, activists like himself, Ruiz and Marcos will continue to ally with the Mayans to fight the age- old exploitation.
"We can't see what the future will be yet, but we think it could be very rich indeed," he concluded.
(c) 1996, San Antonio Express-News