Laws of the Jungle

By TIM PADGETT/MEXICO CITY

The poverty-plagued southern state of Chiapas is Mexico's perennial reality check. Every time the country takes a step forward, something awful seems to happen there to remind Mexicans of their nagging social troubles. Just before Christmas, it was the massacre of 45 men, women and children who are said to have been sympathizers of the state's Zapatista guerrillas. The perpetrators: gunmen allegedly loyal to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.). Last week groups of Tzotzil Maya Indians dressed in colorful garb and carrying religious images were nervously returning to the village of Acteal, where the slaughter took place. "We came back because this is where we're from," said survivor Diego Perez, 32, blinking back tears as he recalled how his father, brother and aunt were killed in cold blood in front of him that day. "But it's hard to feel safe here." In fact, even as government soldiers blanketed the region near Acteal, some 5,000 frightened peasants clogged the Chiapas roads seeking refuge in larger towns.

It's hard to feel safe in a lot of places in Mexico, despite the best efforts of President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon. The Acteal bloodbath is just the latest instance of what sometimes appears to be the virtual collapse of public security in the country. From the slums of Tijuana to the hilltop mansions of Mexico City, a rising wave of violent crime, kidnappings and human- rights atrocities has gripped the nation. Many refer to it as the "Colombianization" of the country, a reference to the even scarier levels of violence inspired by drug mafias and paramilitary gangs in that South American nation. "We're approaching a state of jungle law," says Guillermo Fernandez, 23, a Mexico City marketing executive who says he was recently mugged--with a uniformed cop assisting the assailants. Even President Zedillo concedes, "The public has a right to feel outraged and insecure."

The most outrageous part is the role the police and military thugs are believed to play in the crime wave. Last week the Zedillo government had more than 40 people, including Acteal's mayor, Jacinto Arias Cruz, behind bars for their involvement in the massacre. Some of the accused killers reportedly have ties to local and state police. Much of the Mexican public was calling for the resignation of Chiapas Governor Julio Cesar Ruiz Ferro, who showed no signs of complying. By Saturday, though, the crisis had claimed interior minister Emilio Chuayffet, who resigned amid charges that he had ignored the death squads. He was replaced by agricultural minister Francisco Labastida.

Chiapas' campesinos are painfully accustomed to the iron fist of feudal P.R.I. chieftains, known as caciques, who make them survive on small hardscrabble plots. Land disputes in the state are frequent and usually settled with guns. But as democracy finally takes hold in Mexico--last year opposition parties won control of the lower houses of the federal as well as Chiapas state congresses--the caciques are panicking, and the killing has become more brazen. Opposition leaders blame police and the army for arming the sort of groups that hit Acteal.

The Chiapas lawlessness, however, is simply a part of Mexico's wider emergency. Much of the violence stems from uncontrolled drug trafficking and the economic crisis of 1994, from which the country is recovering, but not fast enough. The erosion of the 70-year P.R.I. stranglehold on power is another big factor, similar to the crime wave that blossomed in Russia after the collapse of communism. Until Mexico's new democracy builds effective judicial institutions--and that may take a generation or more--thugs can run amuck. "Criminals were practically licensed under the P.R.I.," says Roy Godson, a national-security expert at Georgetown University. "The old rules have broken down."

Nowhere worse than in Mexico City. Crime in the capital has risen a staggering 30% or more for each of the past three years. Just one small district, Iztapalapa, saw 154 murders in 1997. Worse, a study has found that 90% of the city's crimes go unpunished, probably because police are committing so many of them. Just days after he took office last month promising to clean up the constabulary, Mexico City's first-ever elected mayor, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano of the left-center Democratic Revolution Party, had to dump his newly appointed investigative police chief because of his alleged ties to drug trafficking and torture. Police are suspected of heading a kidnapping boom that has grown into a billion-dollar ransom industry. Americans are by no means exempt. On Dec. 15, Peter John Zarate, 40, a real estate executive and father of four living in Mexico City, was shot and killed by taxi pirates in the posh Polanco neighborhood. Just days before, another U.S. businessman was savagely beaten after stepping into a taxi outside the Sheraton Hotel, next door to the U.S. embassy. A week earlier the U.S. manager of an Acapulco hotel was kidnapped by men wearing police uniforms.

Groping for solutions, Zedillo has put the military in charge of police agencies. The results so far have been disastrous. Last February the President had to order the arrest of his new antidrug czar for being in the pay of a major drug lord.

What can be done about it? Mexico finally has an organized-crime law on the books, allowing wiretapping and seizure of criminal property. And last month Zedillo proposed stringent new anticrime measures that make it easier to fire bad cops. But in an interview last week with TIME, Attorney General Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, a former human-rights ombudsman with little prosecutorial experience, conceded that "Mexico needs a new culture of legality." He plans to announce sweeping new provisions for international participation in the recruiting and training of all Mexican federal police, not just elite antidrug cops. But Madrazo's immediate concern is showing the terrified peasants of Chiapas that their attackers will go to prison for their alleged atrocities. If so, it will be something of a first.

--With reporting by Brendan M. Case/Acteal

With reporting by Brendan M. Case/Acteal