trocities by the army. In late February and early March, a government team headed by a former Mexico City mayor met with rebel leaders. Samuel Ruiz, who has been the Catholic bishop of Chiapas for the past 30 years and whose "Liberation Theology" was clearly sympathetic to the rebel goals, served as a mediator. (He also persistently criticized the government's approach to negotiations.) The government made a major concession by allowing the rebels to keep their arms until the August elections, agreed to step up aid and promised to consider various EZLN demands. The government refused, however, to negotiate with EZLN national electoral reforms. Salinas insisted that the revolt was an isolated "local problem which occurred in a region of profound poverty."4 In early June, EZLN rejected the government's proposals but said they would honor the cease fire until after the elections.5
Chiapas was both an unlikely and a likely trouble spot. It had once been a major center, "the Athens of the Mayan world,"6 of then most advanced civilization in pre-Hispanic Mexico, which declined by 900 A.D. The Mayans revolted against mestizo rule in 1712 and 1842-1850. However, Chiapas had not been significantly involved in the revolution of 1910 nor had large-scale peasant revolts occurred there such as had taken place in the western state of Guerrero in the 1980s. Trouble was, however, brewing in Chiapas in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Chiapas is the poorest Mexican state. It is populated largely by peasants with little or no land, 59 percent of whom earn less than $300 a month. The illiteracy rate is over 30 percent. Less than 20 percent of the homes have running water and a third electricity.7 The economy of Chiapas is based on large coffee plantations and cattle ranches. Land reform has made little progress. Large reserves of petroleum had been discovered in the post-war period in Chiapas and adjacent areas but had been largely u...