Politics and religion form murderous blend in troubled state of Chiapas

The simple, unorthodox beauty of worship in a special colonial church in the highlands of Mayan Chiapas belies the murderous …

The simple, unorthodox beauty of worship in a special colonial church in the highlands of Mayan Chiapas belies the murderous political and religious landscape in a state seething with land disputes.

There is little doubt that for most Mexicans, religion takes precedence over politics. But the nasty mixture of the two in San Juan Chamula reflects Mexico's co-existing worlds of the modern and the antique. Its church has no pews - only a carpet of sweetsmelling ocote pine needles to kneel on - and no altar. It has not had a priest for nearly 30 years.

The belief system is a mixture of Catholicism and the ancient Mayan belief in Cuauc, the lord of water, rain and fertility (who appears as a conquistador), and his pre-Columban companion, Xib-alba, the earth monster who is lord of death and disease. The Chamulans, few of whom are literate, don't like being told by the bishop in nearby San Cristobal De Las Casas that what they do is not really Catholic. Mgr Samuel Ruiz Garcia says it's Catholic, but not Roman. The Chamulans say they are "traditionalists" and that the Maya had an idea of one supreme god even before 16th-century Spanish missionaries remade Chamula in their own image. Walter "Chip" Maurice, an expert on Mayan culture, says this view has much to commend it.

Nor do the Chamulans like the growth in their midst of Protestant evangelism. Since the early 1970s an estimated 10,000 evangelistas have been violently run out of the community. Chamulans opposed to Mexico's long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), whose patronage ensures its local control, became evangelists partly as a way of avoiding church obligations to buy only from PRI shopkeepers. The evangelists drifted towards the opposition left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in the hope of breaking the PRI's local hold on power. The PRD has a chance of taking the Mexican presidency in 2000. This would end almost a century of PRI hegemony. But in Chamula we are centuries away from Mexico City power politics. Jesus "of Esquipulas", a Mayan town in neighbouring Guatemala where I'd seen similar religious observances, is one of the more important of the plaster saints in real robes. The saints look down from their glass cases on a sea of serried candles devout Indians have melted to the floor. Beside them are placed offerings - sold only in PRI shops - of hens' eggs, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, mirrors and "posh". This local liquor, stronger than tequila, worshippers end up offering to themselves.

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There is a saint for everything. But San Nicholas protects chickens, which chamanes (medicine men) put to a special use.

A person presenting with "spiritual sickness" is rubbed over with a clucking chicken into which his evil spirits migrate. The chamane then wrings the neck of the chicken in front of the congregation.

Sergio Castro runs a museum of living Mayan cultures in San Cristobal. The Maya have about 20 languages and Chamula's is the somewhat guttural Tzotzil. He says much of Chamulan belief is related to witchcraft. Photographs in church are forbidden by the village's "police", locals in white belted ponchos, for fear cameras steal souls.

This authoritarian municipality has a chief, his government and assembly chosen by a rotation system, and 10,000 inhabitants. Another 70,000 live in the surrounding hills. The local government of caciques (strongmen), runs the church or "ceremonial centre".

As an uneasy peace persists in this increasingly militarised state, Bishop Ruiz tries vainly to restart negotiations broken off in August, 1996. Meanwhile, says Mr Maurice, about 1.5 million of the state's 3.3 million population have got themselves a gun.

Chamula, a PRI pet, has autonomy - something Zapatista communities want. But Zapatistas want an autonomy as of right with the local democracy that already exists in Zapatista areas where land has been seized by communities. The conflict is reflected in constant violent incidents.

Only last week a party of two bishops, Mgr Raul Vera Lopez, of the state's political capital, Tuxla Gutierrez, and Bishop Ruiz, of the spiritual capital, San Cristobal, was attacked by gunfire in the badlands of north Chiapas.

Guardias blancos have been blamed. These are thugs believed to be from a big ranchers' group called "Peace and Justice". Its leader is a PRI deputy. Five Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, joined international condemnations. Bishop Ruiz has, during his 34 years in eastern Chiapas, been a champion of the marginalised in this still semi-feudal state - and even friend to Chamula's expelled evangelistas, according to Onesimo Hidalgo, of the National Mediation Commission, the official body for the Zapatista problem under Bishop Ruiz's chairmanship.

Mr Hidalgo says Chiapas is "a colony" run for big landowners by the PRI. They are the inheritors of Mexico's convulsive 1910-1917 Revolution - whose finest achievement was radical redistribution of land. But in Chiapas the counter-revolutionaries won.