The hundreds of tourists in San Cristobal got more than they bargained when the guerrillas of the Zapatist Army (EZLN) hit the streets. Only the shop selling film and camcorder cassettes stayed open, doing a roaring trade.
Incredibly the peasant army had been training for 10 years without the Mexican government knowing.
As the government of Carlos Salinas moved to crush the insurgency with tanks and planes, explanations concentrated on the endemic poverty of the region, and the ruthless exploitation of the peasants by local landlord bosses.
Landless
Poverty and crude exploitation certainly is endemic in Chiapas. Landless peasants are forced to work for a pittance for long hours, and then compelled to spend a large part of their earnings of the landlords' But the timing of the revolt is connected to the imposition of the North American Free Trade Alliance (NAFTA). The deal is catastrophic for Mexico's peasants.
Free trade means free movement of goods and capital. But the US has the biggest agri-business in the world and will flood Mexico with cheap maize, threatening the livelihoods of 1.6 million people.
But more than that, the basic need of all peasant producers -access to the land - is being threatened.
New law Salinas' government has enacted a new law ending state ownership of land enacted under the Cardenas presidency during the 1930s. The land will be 'given to the peasants' - an apparently generous move.
But the small plots owned by peasants will not be able to survive economically. Eventually the peasants will be forced to agri-business. That's what the free market and free trade are all Social ownership of the land is the basis of the numerous peasant co-operatives. The cooperatives will die. Agri-business will move in with hi-tech farming. And landless peasants will move to the city slums for a marginal existence as peddlers or rubbish-dump dwellers.
The revolt of the peasants is overlaid with the oppression of the indigenous Indian populations in Central America; many of the Chiapas peasants are of Indian origin.
In taking up arms the people of Chiapas have imitated the Indian-based revolutionary guerIlla movement in Guatemala, just a few miles away over the border. And of course they have been inspired by the guerrilla movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
The government in Mexico is that of the PRI - the Institutional Revolutionary Party. It was the party of the 1910-1920 Mexican First time around: Zapata with soldiers peasant revolution, of which Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa were key leaders.
But the revolutionary wing of the government was defeated, leaving behind a bourgeois nationalist government.
The Cardenas PRI government in the 1930s was a radical form of nationalism which nationalised key industries, including oil, and nationalised the land.
Debased But the present government is a degenerate and debased WORLD NEWS form of this nationalism. By a system of patronage and gangsterism, topped off with a considerable amount of electoral fraud, they have stayed in power uninterruptedly, dominating even the labour unions.
The EZLN uprising had no chance of success and its crushing has been brutal. In next year's election the main challenge to the PRI incumbents will be the radical populists of the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) led by Cardenas, son of the 1930s president. The whole of the Mexican left will back his campaign.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 55, January 15 1994, Page 12