MEXICO: Mexico's Zapatista rebel group is ready to take "a new step in the struggle" as it consults members on the future of its 11-year fight for Indian rights, its leader Subcomandante Marcos said yesterday.
Marcos did not say however what the rebels' new direction might be, only that members would be free to decide whether or not to follow the path chosen by the majority.
The group "is proposing to its sympathisers, who make up the supreme command of our movement, a new step in the struggle", Marcos said in a statement.
Last weekend he criticised the leftist frontrunner for Mexico's presidential elections next year, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, for betraying the left, in a possible sign the Zapatistas might aspire to mainstream politics. They announced on Monday they were grouping fighters in bases, suspending their radio station and pulling political officers out of villages in the state of Chiapas.
Marcos, who became an anti- globalisation icon in the mid- 1990s hidden behind a ski mask, said the alert was a defensive move to protect the group from the military while it held internal consultations.
At the time unknown, the Zapatistas shocked Mexico when they emerged shooting from the jungle on New Year's Day 1994 to fight for Indian rights.
There have been no clashes for years and the pipe-smoking Marcos has even begun a new part-time career as a crime author, co-writing the novel Uncomfortable Deaths. He said the guerrillas' new strategy move would be "a step that implies, among other things, risking the loss of the lot or the little that has been gained".
President Vicente Fox vowed during campaigning for elections in 2000 to negotiate an end the Zapatista conflict "in 15 minutes", but the issue fell off the radar screen.- (Reuters)