rooms per thousand tourists versus 0.2 hospital beds for every thousand inhabitants). Each year during the 1980s over fourteen thousand people died—most of them from curable diseases such as malaria, dengue, measles, and gastroenteritis—who could have been treated if there had been more doctors, clinics and hospitals, and paved roads to facilitate transportation.45
The indigenous people, numbering over half a million, were overrepresented in the poverty rolls in Chiapas. A 1983 study by National Bank of Mexico warned that the continued exploitation of the indigenous peoples would potentially lead to rebellion. As recent Central American history suggested, the unequal distribution of power and economic resources made Chiapas receptive soil for revolutionary movements—or so the elites feared. Its geographic proximity to the centers of revolution in Central America, and its large and historically exploited population, who saw in the refugees a mirror image of their own experience, contributed to Chiapas's potentially volatile state. (Not surprisingly, when the Zapatista rebellion began in Chiapas on January 1,1994, demanding a variety of legal reforms, local officials initially blamed the insurrection on Central American leftists in the refugee population.)46 Mexican journalists reported on the unequal power relationships as they played out in land and labor struggles involving the actions of big landowners, the corruption of agrarian officials, and the delays in implementing agrarian reform. Often these articles were juxtaposed with reportage on the wars in Central America as if warning the Mexican population of their fate.47
The federal and state governments, corporate interests, and local elites took a keen interest in containing the spread of revolutionary ideas, and in so doing, trumped Mexico's own revolutionary heritage. Indeed, Mexico's 1917 Constitution, regarded as a model in Latin America, enumerated social and economic guarantees and protections that were not extended to the refugee population. The government contained the refugees' influence physically, in state-monitored and geographically isolated refugee camps and settlements, but also symbolically, through intimidation and the threat of violence and deportation. In order to protect its international reputation, the Mexican government discouraged international observers from visiting the camps and settlements.48 Army barricades were a common sight on the major roads and highways in Chiapas, and those few who were allowed entry to the refugee camps faced yet other discouragements, namely, the remoteness and inaccessibility of many of them. The limited information that came out of the region during the 1980s came largely from the Roman Catholic Dioceses of San Cristóbal de las Casas and Tapachula, which publicized the refugees' cause and provided the few journalists with contacts and information.
In 1983, the government assumed a more aggressive immigration policy. Under the direction of Mario Vallejo, who at one point headed both Servicios Migratorios and COMAR, more than a hundred additional immigration agents were sent to Chiapas to assist in the roundup of illegal Central Americans.49 The requirements for tourist visas were also stiffened. As further sign of the government's concerns about Chiapas, the de la Madrid administration announced a new “development” program, Plan Chiapas: to construct new roads, ports, and a major airport and theoretically to increase production and trade, as well as opportunities for wage-earning labor and upward mobility. However, for many campesinos, who had never benefited from such programs in the past, development programs were simply another pretence of redressing exploitation. Not surprisingly, by the time the Zapatistas launched their war against the Mexican government ten years later, Plan Chiapas had failed to significantly change any of the socioeconomic indicators.
The administrations of José López Portillo and Miguel de la Madrid were pressured by a wide range of domestic groups each arguing for a specific policy response. In favor of limiting the number of refugees were the conservative news media (e.g., Televisa, Impacto, El Heraldo, Summa, Ovaciones); the major rival opposition party (Partido de Acción Nacional); and ranchers and growers in Chiapas, who increasingly associated the refugees with the Mexican campesinos' land reclamation efforts and the challenges to their authority. More than a few editorialists explored the destabilizing long-term influence the new immigrants might have on Mexican society. One editorial compared the Guatemalan migration to the colonization efforts of North American immigrants in Texas in the first half of the nineteenth century.50 Also supporting immigration restriction was the Reagan administration, which feared not only the expansion of revolution into Mexico but also the Central American transmigration through Mexico to the United States.
Defending refugee rights, in turn, were the more liberal sectors of the Roman Catholic Church, particularly the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas (the fourth oldest diocese in Mexico) and its bishop, Samuel Ruiz García. “Solidarity committees” such as the Movimiento Mexicano de Solidaridad con el Pueblo de Guatemala and the Comité Mexicano de Solidaridad con el Pueblo Salvadoreño emerged to lobby on behalf of the refugees. Four of Mexico's political parties made pronouncements in defense of refugee rights;51 and the moderate-to-liberal press, especially Mexico City's La Jornada, published sympathetic articles and editorials reminding the government of its international responsibilities.52
Given the Mexican government's critiques of right-wing regimes, many found its reserve toward Guatemala surprising, especially in light of the incursions into Mexican territory and attacks on Mexican citizens. However, policy was tempered by the reality of a six-hundred-mile shared border: any diplomatic or military response would have domestic consequences. A military response would also compromise Mexico's leadership role in the regional peace initiatives. A diplomatic solution was made particularly difficult by Guatemala's long-standing grievances about territorial boundaries, trade, commerce, and labor.53 One editorial in the Mexican press warned:
We need to be courteous and even affectionate with our brothers to the south, but we must also treat them with kid gloves. We must support them in all reasonable causes in the international arena. We must give them preferential treatment so they can sell the few surplus products that we need here. We must facilitate the entrance of their tourists and their students so that they can continue to educate themselves here. But we should not invest in Central America, and above all we should not try to influence their internal affairs. We should follow the precept that we so readily proclaim: nonintervention.54
At first, Mexican officials avoided any public condemnation of Guatemala. When asked to comment on the border raids, for example, Luis Ortiz Monasterio, the director of COMAR (1981-1983), simply noted, “We have established a causal relationship between reports of burnings of and attacks on villages and the arrival of refugees in Mexican territory.”55 Likewise, the government's failure to draft new legislation to offer the Guatemalans refugee status or asylum was an attempt to remain neutral, because such refugee assistance would be interpreted as a condemnation of the Guatemalan state. Protests were largely symbolic. Twice López Portillo canceled goodwill trips to Guatemala (one of the trips after threats of assassination by ultra-right-wing groups in Guatemala), which the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores called “postponements” to allow for the possibility of renewed diplomacy.56 And in 1982, Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda de la Rosa delivered seven official protests to the Guatemalan ambassador in Mexico City. In his fifth “state of the union” address, López Portillo commented on Mexican foreign policy, especially with regard to El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, and a number of other countries, but conspicuously absent from his speech was any reference to the troubles with Guatemala.57
Officials in the Secretarías de Defensa and Gobernación sent equally mixed messages. At the same time that COMAR was establishing dozens of camps and settlements, Servicios Migratorios increased its deportation of undocumented Guatemalans, deporting between 250 to 1,000 each week via Talismán and Ciudad Hidalgo.58 Under pressure from the governor of Chiapas, the Mexican army increased its helicopter surveillance of the region, but this offered the refugees and local population little protection or assurance.59 Indeed, there was growing evidence that the Secretaría de Defensa was assisting the Guatemalan government in its hunt for subversives. In 1982, Guatemala's defense minister, General Oscar Mejía Víctores (who several months later replaced Ríos Montt), was invited to observe the Independence Day military
