On the road with the Zapatistas.

• Author: Benjamin, Medea
• Position: Mexican crackdown in Chiapas

It was about 10 P.M. on February 9 when a representative from the human-rights group CONPAZ called our hotel. Breathless, he informed us that his office was under siege. "Please come over right away," he urged our group of international visitors. This was the very day that Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo abandoned peace talks with the Zapatista rebels and ordered the police and the army to arrest suspected Zapatista leaders. It was the day all hell broke loose in Chiapas.

We found the CONPAZ office surrounded at every corner by police with automatic weapons. More ominous, however, were the hulking, plainclothes thugs in white pick-up trucks with tinted windows and no license plates. They were all-too reminiscent of the 1980s death squads in Central America. I shuddered to think that Mexico might succumb to the same fate, watching its most committed community activists whisked away in the middle of the night. I tried to speak to the plainclothes officers, but they refused to reveal who they were, why they were there, or why their cars had no license plates. My first gringa reaction was to call the police. Then I remembered--they were the police.

We took the CONPAZ folks back to our hotel where they would be safe for the night. Later that evening, without a search warrant, the police raided the CONPAZ office looking for evidence that would link the human-rights workers to the Zapatistas.

After knocking over files and rummaging through desks and closets, they left empty-handed. The raid was a sober warning that from now on it was not just Zapatistas who were under attack. Humanrights activists, development workers, and church officials with a history of social activism were also fair game. The witch hunt had begun.

The following day, one of the development community's most respected leaders, Jorge Santiago Santiago, was arrested at his home in Teopisca. The mild-mannered director of the Economic and Social Development Organization for Indigenous Mexicans was charged with terrorism, mutiny, and sedition. His supporters speculated that Santiago was targeted by the government because he was a personal friend of the controversial Bishop Samuel Ruiz (see sidebar, No Ordinary Bishop).

In the days and weeks that followed, attacks on the church, and the bishop in particular, escalated. On February 15, police raided the church in Ocosingo, supposedly looking for weapons. The demonstrations in front of the cathedral by the opponents of Bishop Ruiz...