archivos de los protestos globales
By JOHN RICE MEXICO CITY, March 11 (AP) - Fulfilling a vow in their declaration of war seven years ago, Mexico's masked Zapatista rebels led a march into the heart of Mexico City on Sunday to press their demands for Indian rights. Winding up a two-week tour of southern Mexico, the Zapatista leaders became the first rebel group to ride openly into the city since revolutionary leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata - the rebels' namesake - did it in 1914. The 23 masked rebel commanders and their leader, Subcomandante Marcos, rode a flatbed truck into the city's main plaza, to chants of “You are not alone” from an estimated 75,000 cheering supporters gathered there. Both new President Vicente Fox and the Zapatista National Liberation Army hope to benefit from the event. The rebels want to win support as a political force. Fox hopes it will help him achieve what two previous presidents failed to do: persuade the rebels to abandon their guns. But the arrival was not quite as the rebels envisioned it when they shocked the world by emerging from obscurity to seize several cities in the southern state of Chiapas on Jan. 1, 1994, the very day Mexican officials were celebrating enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Instead of “conquering the Mexican federal army,” the goal they set in their declaration of war, the 24 Zapatista leaders have found themselves touring the country in a bus caravan protected by federal police. Instead of “liberated ” Mexican civilians, they find themselves accompanied by hundreds of foreign supporters who see the Zapatistas as exemplars of the struggle against the global financial system. The “evil government ” against which they rebelled was toppled last year: not by armed leftist insurgents but peacefully, at the polls, by Fox, a former Coca Cola executive whose pro-market leanings the leftist rebels deeply distrust. Fox's welcome of the Zapatista march has been so effusive that Marcos has accused him of trying to turn it into a Fox march. “Welcome Subcomandante Marcos, welcome to the Zapatistas, welcome to the political arena, the arena of discussion of ideas,” Fox said in a radio address on Saturday. Fox said the rebel tour was proof of the new democracy ushered in when he broke the former ruling party's 71-year grip on the presidency. The Zapatistas used their bus caravan from the Chiapas jungle village of La Realidad to barnstorm for sweeping constitutional reforms that would grant Mexico's roughly 10 million Indians more local autonomy and guarantee them schools and radio stations in their own languages. They have also repeatedly expressed wariness of Fox. In an interview published Sunday with the magazine Proceso, Marcos said he and Fox were “diametrically opposed.” “We are part of the world moving toward recognizing differences, and he is working toward hegemony and homogenizing, not just the country, but the world,” Marcos said. But the differences may be negotiable. Speaking of himself, Marcos conceded he was “more of a rebel seeking social change ” than a revolutionary. Fox's first act in office was to send the Indian rights bill to Congress, and has freed scores of Zapatista prisoners and closed several army bases. But the rebels insist others be freed and more bases near their strongholds be closed before peace talks can start. The heavily publicized tour has apparently boosted the Zapatistas' popularity. On Wednesday, the Mexico City newspaper Reforma said a telephone poll showed that 45 percent of people had a favorable view of Marcos, up from 34 percent in February. The poll had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. That may be linked to the fact that other polls show increasing numbers of Mexicans consider the Zapatistas a political rather than a military organization - even though they are avowedly at war with the government. “They've haven't appeared as an armed force for quite some time,” said Antonio Leyva, 46, one of the thousands who gathered in the city's main plaza to see the Zapatistas. Leyva, a sociologist, welcomed the change, in a country with a long history of uprisings that were brutally repressed. “What they (the Zapatistas) are doing, and in part what the government is doing, is unprecedented.” The Zapatistas have roots in Indian peasant organizations, church activists and a Leninist guerilla group from northern Mexico. Their only significant military success was the seizure of the Chiapas towns. Fighting with the government lasted only 12 days before a cease-fire took hold. Peace talks with the government started in February, but have been stalled since 1996 in a dispute over how to guarantee Indian rights - the first of six subjects to be discussed with the government en route to a peace agreement.