Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

MEXICO: Rebels Open Fire on Political Left as Elections Draw Near

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Aug 10 2005 (IPS) - Leaders of Mexico’s leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which looks set to win next year’s presidential elections, accused the Zapatista guerrillas of being "disloyal" and "failures", after the insurgents called them "shameless scoundrels" and "traitors".

Both the PRD, which was founded in the late 1980s, and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which burst on the scene with a two-week armed uprising in January 1994, claim to represent the true left while they vie for agreements and alliances with "civil society", which both sides consider their ally.

The battle between the political left and the indigenous rebel group has been unleashed once again, "which means politicians on the right and in the centre must be happy," political scientist Iván Anaya told IPS, pointing to past disputes between leftist factions around the world.

The EZLN fired off the first volley in July, when it accused the PRD of being "the left hand of the right," and called Andrés López Obrador, the party’s likely presidential candidate and the front-runner in the polls, "ambitious and sinister."

"Whoever is with López Obrador cannot be with the EZLN" the guerrilla group’s leader, "Subcomandante Marcos", said early this month in the southern state of Chiapas in his first public appearance since 2001.

Marcos issued his warning at a meeting to which the Zapatistas invited leftist and civil society organisations that do not take part in elections, with which it hopes to strike up an alliance.

On Tuesday the insurgent put out a communiqué that had even harsher words for the PRD, which he accused of "betraying" its commitment to support the struggle for indigenous rights.

He also complained that representatives of municipal governments in the hands of the PRD in the impoverished state of Chiapas have opened fire on Zapatistas for refusing to become "their accomplices."

"These shameless scoundrels of the PRD are also frauds. They pretend to be indignant over the things we say, but they don’t take their eyes off the polls as they breathe a sigh of relief. Marking their distance from the Zapatistas has always been an obsession for them," Marcos wrote.

In 2001, PRD legislators joined together with other parties in Congress to pass a modified version of a law on indigenous rights to which the Zapatistas were opposed.

PRD president Leonel Cota, a close friend of López Obrador, said that "after he clearly failed through the armed route," Marcos is now attacking the party, thereby playing into the hands of politicians on the right and in the centre.

The leader of the PRD, which was created by former members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and groups together social democrats, socialists and communists, recommended that Marcos participate in politics "in an open, rather than disloyal, manner" as he has done until now. "Marcos has always been ungrateful towards the PRD," complained Cota.

López Obrador, who the Zapatistas consider a mainstream politician who does not represent the left, stepped down as mayor of Mexico City in July to run in next year’s elections.

The EZLN, in the meantime, which refuses to take part in the elections, has been holding meetings with leftist groups in Chiapas while organising a nationwide tour in search of what it describes as alliances with the "true" left and civil society groups in order to come up with a "new way of doing politics."

But López Obrador has also called on social groups and leftwing politicians outside of the PRD to join his political campaign.

In addition, Cota said that in next year’s elections, when lawmakers will also be selected, his party would name representatives of civil society as candidates.

"The left is an expert in infighting," said Anaya, a professor of political analysis at several private universities in Mexico. "That is happening right now between different factions within the PRD, and has surely also happened, and is happening, within the EZLN."

In his view, "the left almost always suffers short-circuits of intolerance" when it comes to assigning blame for defeats, or whenever it finds itself close to winning political power.

When the EZLN rose up in arms on Jan. 1, 1994, the PRD applied heavy pressure on the government of Carlos Salinas (1988-1994) to get it to call a ceasefire and invite the rebels to engage in peace talks.

PRD spokesman Gerardo Fernández said his party would not respond in kind to the EZLN’s recent verbal attacks and would not enter into a confrontation with the guerrilla group, which it will respect if it is elected to the national government next year.

But the EZLN, whose origins date back to the National Liberation Front, a Marxist-Leninist group that broke up in the early 1980s, seems to have no qualms about voicing its criticism of the PRD.

The PRD’s politics "are neither revolutionary nor democratic, much less leftist," said Marcos.

In May, the EZLN broke several years of relative silence to relaunch its fight against the neoliberal free-market economic model and announced that it would organise a "global meeting" and a countrywide tour to seek alliances with the "true left".

The group thus returned to the limelight when the political scene is heating up ahead of the 2006 presidential elections.

As in the past, this atypical guerrilla group’s actions do not involve weapons and have the consent of the government of Vicente Fox, which welcomed the EZLN’s new political activism.

The Zapatistas burst out of the jungle on Jan. 1, 1994, engaging in less than two weeks of skirmishes with army troops before the Salinas administration declared a unilateral ceasefire. Since then the barely-armed rebel group has not fired a single shot.

The EZLN was among the first organisers of the global struggle against neoliberalism and globalisation, holding an international gathering in the jungles of Chiapas in 1996, which drew prominent international figures like U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone and human rights activist and former French first lady Danielle Mitterand.

The group’s last public action was a highly-publicised visit to the capital by its leaders in 2001 to urge Congress to pass the original version of a bill on indigenous rights and autonomy that was based on the only agreement to emerge from the peace talks between the EZLN and the government of Ernesto Samper (1994-2000), which stalled in 1996.

After four years of keeping a low profile, the EZLN has jumped back into the fray, this time taking verbal aim at the PRD and López Obrador.

"In 2006, we will know whether the reappearance of the Zapatistas was strategically a good idea, or whether they suffered another defeat, along with the PRD," said Anaya.