[J. Ross] Chiapas blackout, May 3 (fwd)

[Chris <red@xxxxxxx>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 4 May 1997 10:21:50 -0500 (CDT)
From: Tamara Ford <tamara@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: zapatismo <zapatismo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 4 May 1997 10:10:39 -0500 (CDT)
From: Chiapas95 <owner-chiapas95@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: chiapas95@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 3 May 1997 13:30:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mauricio Banda <mbanda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Multiple Recipients of List Mexico2000 <mexico2000@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [J.Ross] Chiapas blackout

San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 9, 1997

 WORLD VIEW
 Chiapas blackout
   By John Ross

   TUXTLA GUTIERREZ, CHIAPAS, MEXICO -- From coast to coast and border to
   border, a low-intensity war is spreading across Mexico. Although it's
   not the sort detailed in Pentagon handbooks and practiced by CIA
   spooks, there are some similarities.

   This low-intensity war is about power -- electric power. Mexican
   ratepayers here are battling recent Federal Electricity Commission
   (CFE) rate hikes by withholding their payments in a massive strike. In
   Chiapas the CFE has responded by cutting off power to a quarter of the
   state's population. The people are not taking it lightly.

   CFE offices have been burned down and CFE officials taken hostage in
   Pijijapan, on the blazing Chiapas coast, where air conditioning units
   boost the monthly wattage and drive electric bills sky high. When CFE
   employees show up to disconnect lines, they are sometimes stoned or
   shot; one technician was killed in Pueblo Nuevo Soistahuacan last
   November. Workers who climb light poles to pull down lines of
   nonpaying customers risk having the poles set on fire under them.

   Chiapas CFE superintendent Rey David Jimenez calculates that 131,000
   households, or 750,000 citizens, are now without lights. The rate
   strike -- activists are demanding a preferential rate -- has thus far
   cost the CFE about $1 million, estimates Jimenez, who warns that the
   state's electricity system is imperiled by the "no-pay culture."

   Since late 1996 hundreds of thousands of Mexicans have refused to pay
   what they consider to be exorbitant charges, which have tripled since
   the elimination of special government subsidies last year. In
   retaliation, CFE has cut off juice to entire municipalities, leaving
   substantial swaths of the nation in the dark.

    The IMF crackdown

   As with other recent rebellions in Mexico, the ratepayer insurrection
   first broke out in Chiapas, the country's southernmost state, and has
   since marched northward.

   Chiapas produces 45 percent of the nation's hydroelectric energy.
   Despite an infrastructure that has Chiapas-generated power being sold
   in northern Guatemala, two-thirds of indigenous households in the
   state remain unlit.

   Ever since the January 1994 rebellion of the Zapatista Army of
   National Liberation (EZLN), the Mexican government has been attempting
   to get electricity to the backwater villages of Chiapas. But once
   these communities are plugged in, families are finding it impossible
   to keep up with payments that have skyrocketed to as high as 300 pesos
   ($40) every two months to keep one bulb lit.

   One reason for the rate hikes: International Monetary Fund-ordered
   policies have ended decades of subsidies to underclass Mexicans.

   Last February interim governor Julio Ruiz Ferro inaugurated 200
   kilometers of line that would illuminate hamlets in the Lacandon
   jungle canyons -- Zapatista territory. Meanwhile, CFE workers were
   busily cutting the current to thousands of homes in the same region
   for failing to keep up with payments.

   "We are asking a flat rate of 5 or 10 pesos a month," Gustavo Zarate,
   director of the Chiapas State Democratic Peoples' Assembly, said.
   "This would eliminate meters and meter readers and save the CFE an
   enormous amount that would easily offset any losses in revenue."

   The demand for a preferential rate was first made in 1994. Since then,
   the Chiapas ratepayer strikers have been organizing municipality by
   municipality; at least 38 of the state's 112 such jurisdictions are
   now participating, according to Zarate. In Ocosingo, which encompasses
   the Lacandon jungle, 1,500 representatives from the region's outlying
   communities met last October to set their own rates: 5 pesos a month
   for farming households, where electrical usage is often reduced to a
   single bulb, 10 pesos for urban dwellers, and 30 pesos for small
   businesses.

   Payments are actually being held in escrow, pending resolution of the
   dispute with the CFE. Following the Ocosingo assembly, representatives
   took over a local radio station to broadcast their decision to
   far-flung hamlets in the jungle.

   Now CFE workers are being dispatched to recalcitrant communities to
   start cutting off power. The suspension of electricity has had a
   painful effect on municipal life in towns like Jiquipilas, where water
   pumps have ceased to function and tortilla factories have been forced
   to shut down.

   "Without electricity, Jiquipilas is dead," town secretary Arturo Sosa
   said. The municipal market has also suffered, and fiestas have had to
   be canceled.

    Power to the people

   State police squads assigned to protect CFE workers have clashed with
   angry villagers. To avoid such ugly and often fatal scenes, the CFE
   has begun effecting massive cutoffs from regional power stations
   rather than venturing into the communities.

   The conflict continues to escalate: consumers have grown outraged over
   massive blackouts; almost daily, roads are blocked around the state;
   and security forces are using tear gas and gunshots to repel
   demonstrators. In February farmers from 28 ejidos (rural communal
   production units) blocked the highway between San Cristobal de las
   Casas and the ancient Mayan ruins near Palenque, Chiapas's premier
   tourist corridor, called "the route of the Maya." Subsequent clashes
   with police led to the arrests of 61 Mayas, who were jailed at the
   state's infamous Cerro Hueco prison.

   As tempers short-circuit, there is evidence of sometimes violent
   retaliation by strikers. According to newspaper reports, in early
   March 100 armed men chopped down 14 light poles in the Chiapas
   highlands.

   The CFE's testy response to the ratepayer strike has generated a unity
   among Chiapanecos from all walks of life -- something the Zapatistas
   themselves have yet to accomplish. The region's four major Mayan
   subgroups -- Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Chol, and Tojolabal -- have found
   common ground in opposing the cutoffs.

   Indigenous organizations that have been feuding for years, such as the
   Palenque-based Xi'Nich campesino group and the government-oriented
   Socama group, have staged joint road blockades. Workers from the big
   cities have joined forces with farmers from the remotest jungle
   villages; recently the Mexico City-based Electrical Workers Union
   (SME) sent members to the Zapatista outpost of La Realidad to install
   lines that the CFE had stopped working on.

   The CFE blackouts have unified different classes and sectors.
   Restaurant owners and undernourished Indians are equally indignant
   about the cutoffs. Fishers, whose catches spoil without refrigeration,
   strategize with campesinos from the jungle. The blacking out of
   schools and clinics, such as the jungle hospital at Benemerito de las
   Americas, which has been unable to function since the first of the
   year, angers every level of Chiapas society.

   In the San Cristobal neighborhood, electric power shuts down at 10
   p.m. each night, prime soap opera time in this nation of soap opera
   addicts. "People lose a few chapters of their favorite telenovela
   (soap opera), and they get rabid," strike leader Amado Avendano said.

   Now the ratepayers' strike is spreading beyond Chiapas's borders. In
   neighboring Oaxaca, Mixe Indians have taken meter readers prisoner to
   publicize their demands for a 10-peso preferential rate, and the
   Pan-American highway has been shut down by protesters on the
   Tehuantepec isthmus.

   Last October merchants in five southeastern states (Chiapas, Tabasco,
   Campeche, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo) imposed a blackout on themselves
   to dramatize their demands for a 30 percent discount. On the northern
   border of the nation, for the past nine months 7,000 ratepayers in the
   Mexicali Valley have refused to accept a rate hike.

   Resistance is spreading to other utilities too. Natural gas prices in
   Mexico's northernmost states have risen 104 percent in the past 74
   days, and in some cases are now higher than prices across the border.
   In response to the skyrocketing costs, ratepayers, taking a cue from
   the anti-CFE strikers, have started refusing to pay.

   John Ross is a San Francisco- and Mexico City-based freelance writer.



     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---