The refugees also presented the Mexican government with one of its most serious diplomatic challenges of the late twentieth century. The governments of Romeo Lucas García and later Efraín Ríos Montt and Oscar Mejía Víctores claimed that guerrillas used the refugee camps and settlements to channel weapons, food, and medicine to their compatriots-inarms. The Guatemalan government demanded that Mexico repatriate the refugees, or at the very least relocate them further away from the border zone. When the Mexican government failed to act decisively either way, the Guatemalan army expanded its counterinsurgency campaign into Mexico. From 1982 to 1984, the counterinsurgency units, known as the kaibiles, crossed the border to kidnap, interrogate, and murder alleged guerrillas and their supporters, and Guatemalan planes and helicopters strafed or bombed refugee camps and settlements to intimidate the population.35 From May 1980 to May 1983, the Guatemalan army conducted sixty-eight incursions into Mexican territory: nine Guatemalan refugees and seven Mexican farm workers were killed; twenty Guatemalans kidnapped; and seven detained, beaten, and/or tortured.36 However, the casualties were underreported, the Diocese of San Cristóbal claimed, because of the isolation of the refugee settlements and the Mexican government's militarization of Chiapas, which restricted access to the camps and to information. The raids occurred regularly along the border and sometimes several miles into Mexican territory, terrorizing the refugees and the local population, and forcing thousands to flee into the jungles or further inward.37
The Guatemalan army was assisted in its actions by Mexican allies, some of them on the government payroll. In 1982, for example, in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, Chiapas, the local director of Servicios Migratorios, César Morales, unilaterally decided to continue deporting Guatemalans en masse, whether or not they had protected status. Gobernación eventually transferred Morales out of the area but only after COMAR officials threatened to withdraw.38 Refugees were often detained and starved and tortured while interrogated.39 Soldiers, lawyers and prosecutors, and local police and security guards were implicated in these actions.40 Local caciques (power brokers), many of them wealthy ranchers and growers, also conducted their own immigration policy. Fearing the impact leftist guerrillas might have on Chiapas's politics and economy, they funded their own paramilitary groups, popularly referred to as the Guardias Blancas (White Guards), to safeguard their interests. The Guardias kidnapped and murdered refugees, clergy, and aid workers suspected of guerrilla sympathies.41 In March 1982, for example, the Reverend Hipólito Cervantes Arceo, the parish priest of Mapastepec, was found murdered, both thumbs tied behind his back and his head beaten in with a church statue.42 Local government officials claimed that he had been a victim of robbery, but residents and church officials blamed the paramilitaries as well as the government that gave them carte blanche to operate. Over the next few years, dozens of clergy, nuns, and aid workers were threatened, kidnapped, and assaulted. In June 1984, for example, Mexican police kidnapped three aid workers from the Puerto Rico camp, a doctor and two nuns, and transported them to secret locations, where they were bound, blindfolded, and interrogated at length on their—and the church's—suspected ties to guerrillas.43
The Mexican government clearly feared the role the refugees might play in destabilizing the state of Chiapas, which in spite of its poverty was of strategic importance to Mexico's long-term development programs. Chiapas was the agricultural heartland of southern Mexico, producing coffee, corn, cacao, tobacco, sugar, fruit, vegetables, and honey for export. It was also a key state for the nation's petrochemical and hydroelectric industries. By 1990, 82 percent of PEMEX's petrochemical plants were located in southeastern Mexico; and 21 percent of Mexico's oil and 47 percent of its natural gas were extracted in the Chiapas-Tabasco region.44 Fifty-five percent of the nation's hydroelectric energy and 20 percent of its electricity were produced in Chiapas. Corporations made enormous profits from the land and the labor, but contrary to the federal government's assurances, the wealth did not “trickle down” to the municipalities. In 1990, two-thirds of Chiapas's 3.5 million residents did not have sewage service, and half did not have potable water. Despite its energy production, only a third of the homes in the state had electricity. More than half of the schools in the state offered only a third-grade education, and seventy-two out of every hundred children dropped out of school by the first grade. There were more hotel rooms for tourists than hospital beds for the local population (seven hotel 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