wfn.org | Church Leaders Seek to Mediate Murderous Conflict in Chiapas

[PCUSA.NEWS@pcusa.org]

15-January-1998 
98018 
 
    Church Leaders Seek to Mediate 
    Murderous Conflict in Chiapas 
 
    by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky.-Protestant and Roman Catholic church leaders are training 
mediators in local churches in hopes of deterring more violence in Mexico's 
convulsive southern state of Chiapas. 
 
    "It is a very slow process. [There] are very profound wounds and there 
are strong feelings of revenge on both sides, where people do not want to 
hear words of peace," said Abdias Tovilla, director of the Human Rights 
Office of the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico in Chiapas' capital of 
San Crist¢bal. "To continue with this violence ... will just make this 
[already complicated situation] worse." 
 
    That's why church leaders among the Presbyterian, Baptist, Seventh Day 
Adventist, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic traditions agreed to work to 
diffuse centuries-old religious hostility in the grinding struggle for 
political and economic control of Mexico's southernmost state and to 
mediate the ideological debate as well.  The strife has, by some estimates, 
displaced thousands of indigenous farmers and killed 400 since 1994. 
 
    Forty-five unarmed villagers - including 36 women and children - were 
the latest victims, gunned down during mass by a pro-government indigenous 
paramilitary force in the Chiapas highlands just three days before 
Christmas.  Already displaced, the massacre victims were sympathetic to 
land and social reforms sought by the Zapatista Front of National 
Liberation (ZFLN), though opposed to violence and not part of the armed 
struggle. 
 
    The Zapatistas led an armed uprising in Chiapas in 1994 that led to 
negotiations with the Mexican government that are now stalled.  The 
conflict also led to a more surreptitious buildup of military forces in 
indigenous areas of the south, including private and state-sponsored 
paramilitary groups that target civilians suspected of supporting the 
guerrilla movement. While the Zapatistas have not technically been 
disarmed, North American observers say the guerrillas have not used 
violence for several years - though unconfirmed Mexican sources say 
otherwise. 
 
    The latest killings have been closely tied to several officials in 
Mexico's dominant political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party 
(PRI). 
 
    The governor of Chiapas, Julio C‚sar Ruiz Ferro, resigned Jan. 7 after 
church and opposition leaders blamed him for ignoring mounting tension in 
the region. He was also accused of abetting already serious divisions by 
authorizing a $50,000 grant for a pro-government organization accused of 
financing paramilitary groups.  Further, the mayor of the municipality, a 
state police commander and 23 other members of the PRI were arrested for 
supplying weapons used in the massacre. 
 
    National PRI officials deny any tie between the party and the killings. 
 
    "This is a political struggle between the haves and have-nots," said 
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Year with Latin Americans coordinator Peter 
Kemmerle, who lived in Chiapas in the late 1980s, when murder and forced 
land expulsions escalated.  "Certain of the have-nots are willing to lend 
themselves to violence against other have-nots. ... 
 
    "When a community is under such pressure, where does it burst?" said 
Kemmerle. "Where it is weakest. 
 
    "And where is it weakest? Where communities are divided over religion 
and tradition," he said, citing religious divisions that go back to the 
Spanish conquest of Latin America, when Catholicism collided with Mayan 
religious practice. 
 
    That tension is only exacerbated by the influx of Protestant 
evangelicals, who are intent on proselytizing and who now reject the older 
traditions that were once a source of communal unity. 
 
    Tovilla said Presbyterians are now trying to organize elders and 
pastors for training to serve as mediators in Chiapas' conflict zones in 
hopes of beginning to reduce religious suspicion and hostility and to 
reduce the violence.  He said the church hopes to put mediators even where 
ideological - not religious - tension dominates. An ecumenical dialogue 
last fall led to a statement calling for "collaboration" among the churches 
in the "eradication" of hatred and violence.  Tovilla said Presbyterians 
intend to start dialogue with other Protestant groups at the parish level 
and then reach out toward Catholic priests and laypeople, beginning in 
communities with the lowest risk. 
 
    "In spite of [the massacre] in December," said Canadian journalist Jim 
Hodgson, who covers religion in Mexico, "there's still a lot of hope.  And 
it can move outward from the churches into other levels of the conflict. 
They need to take a model of dialogue ... and bring it to the grassroots, 
so that local pastors [and laypeople] can talk to each other. 
 
    "That's flying in the face of a long history of religious division and 
a lot of mutual suspicion between Catholic and Protestant groups and among 
Protestant groups," said Hodgson, who said ecumenism is a relatively new 
idea even within Mexican church hierarchies. 
 
    What is not a new idea politically is the "divide and conquer" 
approach, what the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico's 
spokesperson, Margaret Swedish, calls "one of the oldest strategies" in the 
world used to block communities organizing for social reforms such as 
health care, education and land rights.  "Religion is just one of the 
[pressure points]," she told the Presbyterian News Service. 
 
    "It is a mistake to call this a religious conflict," said Swedish, 
"even though those tensions exist." 
 
    Religious divisions, according to North American analysts, are simply 
exploited in a tense political setting like Chiapas to drive wedges deeper 
into already pressurized poor communities.  The real problem is poverty, 
they say.  With much of Mexico's property kept in the hands of a few 
landowners, already overpopulated indigenous communities are confined to 
the same small tracts of land they've occupied for generations.  Sometimes 
they are expelled from property they've always lived on without legal 
deeds. 
 
    "The fundamental problem in Chiapas," said Joe McIntyre of the 
International Service for Peace, "is land ... security for families, food 
for children.  These people simply have a helluva hard time growing the 
amount of corn they need for their own diets. 
 
    "They're really stuck.  They can't argue because these guys [landowners 
and their mercenaries] have guns. ... The guns out there are in the hands 
of paramilitaries, not the campesinos, not in the poor farmers' hands." 
 
    One source - who asked not to be identified - said the government 
appears to take advantage of existing conflicts, even provoking conflicts 
in order to send the military and the state police into an indigenous area. 
It then controls what kinds of organizing and dialogue go on among 
indigenous people.  Such low-intensity warfare is similar to what religious 
activists say they saw in Central America in the 1980s. 
 
    "It is," said Kemmerle, "your basic Central American scenario.  Any 
peasant group that is organizing itself is basically subversive to the 
status quo. Whether they're armed or not, they're a perceived threat to the 
established order." 
 
    A Jan. 12 article in the "New York Times" seems to substantiate some of 
those charges.  It said that the army is conducting house-to-house searches 
for weapons in villages in southern Chiapas, where residents' Zapatista 
sympathies are well known.  But in pro-government areas where paramilitary 
members live, soldiers are reportedly restricting their searches to highway 
roadblocks. 
 
    The outcome, the "Times" reports, is "sharpened tensions that the 
searches were supposed to calm." 
 
    "It is very unfortunate that the government seems to be targeting one 
group and not others,"  said McIntyre. "Not landowners.  Not 
paramilitaries." 
 
    But Tovilla contradicts that data, says he's heard reports that 
insurgency violence has killed more than 200 people in northern Chiapas in 
the last two months.  The Presbyterian News Service was unable to confirm 
that report by press time. 
 
    One of the reasons why the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) 
insists that religious turbulence is only one part of the conflict in 
Chiapas is that the loyalties of particular denominations vary from region 
to region. 
 
    "In some places," said WOLA's Eric Olson, "Protestants are trying to 
break fee of the oppression of others; in other areas, they represent that 
system." 
 
    The system Olson describes is one where the "old guard ... who've 
always run things" is up against others who are demanding more democracy, 
more respect for indigenous rights and protection of human rights, 
particularly in more isolated areas of Mexico. 
 
    "The violence here is not on a par with Central America in the 1980s," 
said Hodgson. He believes the churches are a credible voice in the midst of 
the larger political debate, even though the different traditions disagree 
on how to approach political reform.  "The more you put people together so 
they can speak to each other, even if the conversations are angry at first, 
the more possibility there is for local dialogue.  This is new in Chiapas, 
this effort for ecumenical dialogue." 
 
    Overcoming polarization is a problem, Tovilla agrees, adding that it 
even permeates international press coverage of Chiapas' conflict, with much 
more attention given to the Zapatistas.  But he insists that ecumenical 
dialogue has helped overcome some of the problems in northern Chiapas. 
 
    "All over the place there is death, orphans and pain," said Tovilla. 
"Both sides want to receive support, but [do not want] the other side to 
have support. But [the Protestant church in Chiapas is] helping orphans on 
all sides." 

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