EMILIANO ZAPATA -- The rebels of Chiapas who shocked the Mexican government and much of the world two months ago are out among their people in the rugged hillsides of this impoverished province these days, asking whether they should accept the government deal to end the war.
In exchange for their weapons, the government has promised hospitals, roads, schools, electricity and clean water.
But the people of Chiapas have heard it all before. The Mexican government has broken promises to them for generations.
One promise came from President Carlos Salinas de Gortari five years ago, when he initiated a program called Solidarity. On paper it is an impressive program in which billions of dollars are allocated to improve the appalling living conditions of the poor throughout Mexico.
In Chiapas, the government has spent more than a half-billion dollars, making the state the largest recipient of public funds.
But the view of Solidarity from several villages in Chiapas is much less spectacular. Schools are more often closed than open. Roads remain unpaved and therefore impassable during the long rainy season. Farmers harvest their crops with sticks and machetes. Health clinics operate with insufficient supplies.
People in isolated villages such as Emiliano Zapata said they did not participate in the Zapatista uprising, but most said they shared the rebels' fury and frustration.
"We have heard on the radio that the government has sent more money to Chiapas than any other state, and we laugh," said Francisco Lopez, a frail man with the round facial features of most of the Mayan descendants who live in Chiapas.
"Where is it? If they had sent a lot of money here, there would be roads. We would have electricity and medicine and clean water," he said.
All the men of the village, some 150, squatted on the ground around him. The sun had set, and their faces were only slightly illuminated by thin white candles.
"Look around you," one of them shouted. "We have nothing."
Solidarity funds paid for the construction of a clinic just a short walk from Emiliano Zapata a few years ago. But people have found little help there.
The doctor sent by the government would call the farmers names like "dirty pigs," and would deny them the free medicine.
The doctor would scold that medicine could not help them if they did not bathe regularly, boil water before drinking it, build latrines, and sleep in beds or hammocks instead of on their dirt floors.
"Sometimes we would take fruit to the doctor so that he would help us," said Manuel Lopez, whose round belly and square black-framed glasses distinguish him from his thin neighbors. "He would say that he did not have any medicine, but I could see it on the shelf."
Jose Luis Lopez said his brother nearly died of cholera last year because the doctor refused to give him a serum to rehydrate his organs. Relatives and friends of the ill man put together their pesos to buy the serum for about $10 at a local store.
"The doctor said there was no free help for people like us because we are dirty," he said, watching his wife cut dried corn from the cob in their dirt-floor hut. "But he said the cemetery was free. He told us the government was already spending a lot of money on us."
The government provided teachers for the elementary school in a clearing of the pine trees that shade most of Emiliano Zapata. But little learning occurs there.
Every two weeks the teachers must lock up the four bare classrooms and travel by small airplane to the nearest town to get their pay checks. The government allows three days for the journey; often the teachers take five or six.
"I like school, but the teachers are gone a lot," said a 13-year-old girl, Flor, wading in the Perla River. Asked if she knew how to read, her head dropped and she mumbled, "No, not very well."
The village of dried-mud huts sits at the point where the Perla and Jatate rivers meet. But none of the water is suitable for drinking.
The Jatate River carries sewage from the town of Ocosingo, so residents generally stay away from it. However, they gather at the clear, warm water of the Perla River every afternoon to seek relief from the sun.
"The river is beautiful, but there have been animals that have died from drinking that water," said Antonio Romero Lopez. "And it is the same water we have to drink. There is nothing else."
In the afternoon, women take their children to bathe in the strong current. Men frolic in the river with their horses. Before they leave, everyone scoops up a jug of the water to quench their evening thirst. Even though most people boil the water before drinking it, illnesses persist.
'They let us suffer'
Government officials promised to provide Zapata with a clean water system. Last year, they sent pipes to the village as a sign that the work would soon begin. Now those pipes sit gathering dust in the hamlet's main meeting hall, a tall concrete structure called the Casa Grande -- the "Big House."
Other supplies sit in a warehouse more than a day's journey away by car, but rain has made the dirt road to that warehouse impassable.
"We will build the system if the government sends the materials and a technician to show us how to do it," said one man, sitting outside the Casa Grande. "But we cannot do it alone."
"The government does not give us any help," said Jose Luis Lopez. "If it were a good government, they would at least give us medicine to keep us alive. Instead, they let us suffer. They kill us."
He adds, "If the government is not going to help us, we have to fight to survive."
The rebellion in Chiapas has collapsed Mr. Salinas' most highly publicized social effort. Solidarity had won praise because it appeared to have improved Mexico's infrastructure, met basic needs of many of its people and rebuilt popular support for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
President Salinas basked in that impression. He liked to lace on his hiking boots and travel to remote towns to inaugurate Solidarity projects and tout its successes, accompanied by the press.
There were some successes. But they were limited in this impoverished region, which needed the most help and ultimately spawned the New Year's Day revolt.
Government statistics for Chiapas remain about the same as before. Nearly one third of the state's 3.2 million residents have no access to health care. More than 15,000 people die of curable diseases each year. Close to 70 percent of all households have no electricity, 60 percent have no sewerage and 40 percent have running water.
"Solidarity is a great food program, but it is not a project that has helped get people out of poverty," said Delmar Lopez Morales, administrator of a coffee-processing union in Chiapas.
"It is not a program that has created jobs or helped people produce more on their farms. That is what people need most."
Critics say Solidarity failed because the government initiated many projects, but then left them for poor, unskilled peasants to manage without any technical support. Solidarity funds have not been subject to public accounting, they say, and often the money was misused to keep the rich fat and the poor silent.
Solidarity officials point out that the social crisis in Chiapas is deeply complex because the poverty is not only based on lack of jobs or low wages; it also comes from a rigid system in which the rich descendants of Spanish settlers dominate poor Mayan peasants.
"There are tremendous needs in Chiapas," said one government official who asked not to be identified. "But there has also been extreme injustice."
A once-confidential government document detailing the actions of former Gov. Patrocinio Gonzalez Garrido Blanco, who governed Chiapas from 1989 to 1993, said he was responsible for jailing "entire villages" and leaders of independent indigenous advocacy groups who protested his actions.
"Anyone who planned a peaceful march or demonstration was called a delinquent and harassed or jailed," said another government official, who asked to remain anonymous.
Last year, President Salinas appointed Mr. Gonzalez secretary of the interior, one of the most powerful posts in the Cabinet. Mr. Gonzalez resigned a few weeks after the Zapatista uprising began.
Some tried hard to make the Solidarity program work.
"We cannot think that Solidarity can resolve all the social problems here," said Alejandro Villar Borja, recently named as head of the program in Chiapas. "The program has accomplished much, but not enough to address the magnitude of the problems."
There are examples of extraordinary commitment against enormous odds. One of them is a clinic in the town of Altamirano. Dr. Irma del Valle Morones has worked in the clinic for two years, and although she is a city girl born in the nation's capital, she is committed to the people of the Lacandon jungle.
She says she has walked hours to far-away villages to take food to malnourished children or to visit patients who are too weak to make the journey to her clinic. And she boasts that her counseling has led to dramatic changes in the way her patients )) live. Among the 5,000 people she serves, there have been no cases of cholera, a common killer in the jungle.
"The people are boiling their water before they drink it, and they come here to have their babies instead of having them at home," said Dr. Morones, a petite, plain-spoken woman. "They have begun eating a little meat instead of selling all their animals, because we told them it was important for their diet."
In the best of all worlds, the Solidarity program wants communities to organize and decide what projects are most urgent. Then the government provides the materials and technical support to build schools, hospitals, roads and water systems, and the communities provide the muscle.
"I have always said that the most important thing about Solidarity is not the finished project, but that it organizes people and calls them to participate," said Mr. Villar, the Chiapas Solidarity chief. "Only an organized society can guarantee that the government fulfills its promises."
But what may look practical in a planner's office in Mexico City tends to collapse in the face of the realities of a place such as Emiliano Zapata, and to ultimately generate the sort of frustration that led to the Zapatista rebellion.
'We vote but have nothing'
Emiliano Zapata, the town, is named after the same Mexican revolutionary hero that the rebels named themselves after. Established in 1967, the town has never benefited from organization.
The inhabitants have written dozens of petitions, gathered signatures and traveled hundreds of miles by bus to Mexico City to ask the government for basic services. most of their pleas remain unanswered.
Despite the government's failure to deliver basic services to Emiliano Zapata, the people feel obligated to vote for candidates of the ruling PRI, which has controlled the Mexican government for more than 60 years.
"[The candidates] come and they say, 'Campesino [the farmer] is in my mind and in my heart,' " says Rigoberto Jimenez, squatting in the shade of pine trees in front of his hut. "But when they are in power, they forget that."
His friend, Valentino Lopez Lopez, stands over him and adds, "The candidates say, 'Vote for us. We will give you this and that. If you do not vote for the [PRI], you will not get any support.'
"So we vote for the government, but we still have nothing."
CHIAPAS AT A GLANCE:
State population about 3.2 million people
40.4 percent live in urban areas
59.6 live in rural areas.
There are 16,422 localities of which 16,302 (99 percent) have fewer than 2,500 residents.
Close to 30 percent of the population is indigenous
About 7 percent of the people do not speak Spanish.
In the state, 50 indigenous languages are spoken. The largest dialects are Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Chol and Tojolabal
According to government figures, 30 percent of adults are illiterate;
63 percent have not completed grade school;
60 percent of homes have no plumbing;
70 percent of homes have no electricity
40 percent of homes have no clean water
51 percent of homes have dirt floors
80 percent of the people earn less than $8 per day.