President Ernesto Zedillo put his shaken authority over Mexico on the line with a dramatic reversal of policy on the Zapatista National Liberation Army rebels of Chiapas state. Instead of continuing fruitless negotiation, he publicly ordered the arrest of six Zapatista leaders known by nom de guerre.
The first reaction was humiliating defeat of his ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate in gubernatorial elections Sunday in the western state of Jalisco, which includes Mexico's second city, Guadalajara. The official result was 54.5 percent of the vote for the candidate of the opposition National Action Party (PAN), and 35.9 percent for the PRI man.
Since the rhetorically leftist PRI has adopted the program of the conservative PAN, the only remaining reason for voting for PAN is that it is not PRI. To Mr. Zedillo's credit, the timely announcement of results show that PRI had heeded one imperative of reform and decided not to try to steal this election.
Failure to capture a celebrated fugitive can be costly, as United States forces learned in Somalia. Now that Mr. Zedillo says he is going to catch "Subcommandante Marcos," he had better do it. So far, he has failed, and the Sunday press was treated to a bantering letter supposedly from the fugitive in the jungle of Chiapas.
The reason given for the crackdown is discovery of small arms caches along with arrests in Mexico City and Vera Cruz, taken as evidence of preparations for a wider campaign of terrorism. More to the point, authority in Chiapas was breaking down. The losing leftist candidate in last August's state election had charged fraud and set up a "parallel government," with Zapatista support. The legitimacy of the official winner, Eduardo Robledo Rincon of PRI, remains in question.
Combine disintegration in Chiapas with the currency crisis that erupted Dec. 20, wiping out many middle class Mexicans and trashing recent foreign investment, and Mr. Zedillo's own credibility is at stake.
Now Mr. Zedillo means to lead the nation. His action eliminates the mediating role of Bishop Samuel Ruiz of San Cristobal, a friend of the Zapatistas. The president repudiated the rebels' fabled identification with the dispossessed Maya Indians, painting them as conventional violent leftists of an earlier generation. Subcommandante Marcos is identified as Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, aged 37, child of bourgeois privilege in Tampico.
Supporting the peso and suppressing the Zapatistas, formerly quite separate issues, are now intertwined. The health of Mexico, our trading partner in NAFTA, depends on Mr. Zedillo handling both matters better than heretofore.