Word: zapatistas
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Right now it would be hard to make a case for consistency. Only five days after sending troops and tanks to occupy 18 villages in Chiapas that had been controlled by Zapatista rebels, Zedillo abruptly called off the offensive. He ordered the soldiers to do nothing that might lead to shooting, suspended efforts to catch rebel leaders for whom he had caused arrest warrants to be issued and offered the Zapatistas amnesty and political negotiations if they would lay down their arms. He even went along with one of the rebels' prime demands: the resignation of Chiapas Governor Eduardo Robledo...
...government claimed that the offensive successfully reasserted its authority throughout the region. Indeed, in Guadalupe Tepeyac, where the Zapatista leader who calls himself Subcomandante Marcos made his headquarters most of last year, a garrison of 20 soldiers did seem to be in command--but in command of a ghost town. Elsewhere too, Zapatistas were neither fighting nor giving up but melting away into the jungle, sometimes with families in tow. As a car carrying two journalists approached the village of Oventik, 20 men who had been hoeing at the ground ran into their huts, grabbed clothes, firewood and babies...
...force of Mexican soldiers, killing two of them. Near the town of Cacalomacan, about 50 miles west of Mexico City, 250 police and soldiers surrounded a group of militants and flushed them out of a farmhouse after a two-hour gun battle. In other strongholds of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, or E.Z.L.N., hundreds of heavily armed soldiers made house-to-house searches for rebels and their leaders...
...government's show of force ended a 12-month cease-fire that began after the Jan. 1, 1994, Zapatista insurrection left 145 dead and shattered Mexico's modernizing image. The crackdown also came as Zedillo's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party faced a difficult Feb. 12 election in the central state of Jalisco. That was a suspicious coincidence to some analysts, but Zedillo said his moves were triggered by fears of expanded Zapatista military action...
Government sources had hinted for weeks that Zedillo would undertake some strong action to try to rebuild credibility after the peso's disastrous devaluation. That the Zapatistas should be the target was logical: their activity inspired the erosion in investor confidence that ultimately led to financial panic. But Zedillo's evidence for a spreading Zapatista insurrection was sketchy. Arms caches that authorities discovered held little more than a handful of firearms and several dozen grenades...