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Zapatistas In Mexico City

Fulfilling a vow in their declaration of war seven years ago, Mexico's masked Zapatista rebels led a march into the heart of Mexico City on Sunday to press their demands for Indian rights.

Winding up a two-week tour of southern Mexico, the Zapatista leaders became the first rebel group to ride openly into the city since revolutionary leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata - the rebels' namesake - did it in 1914.

The 23 masked rebel commanders and their leader, Subcomandante Marcos, rode a flatbed truck and waved to onlookers on Mexico City boulevards as supporters marched and rode behind.

Both new President Vicente Fox and the Zapatista National Liberation Army hope to benefit from the event. The rebels want to win support as a political force. Fox hopes it will help him achieve what two previous presidents failed to do: persuade the rebels to abandon their guns.

CBS News Correspondent Bill Whitaker reports Marcos' path to Mexico City has been long and bloody. Seven years ago, he led an uprising of Indians in the southern state of Chiapas. His troops were defeated, but since that time, his popular movement has held the government in a political standoff.

The arrival of Marcos and the Zapatistas was not quite as the rebels envisioned it when they shocked the world by emerging from obscurity to seize several cities in the southern state of Chiapas on Jan. 1, 1994, the very day Mexican officials were celebrating enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Instead of "conquering the Mexican federal army," the goal they set in their declaration of war, the 24 Zapatista leaders have found themselves touring the country in a bus caravan protected by federal police.

Instead of "liberated" Mexican civilians, they find themselves accompanied by hundreds of foreign supporters who see the Zapatistas as exemplars of the struggle against the global financial system.

The "evil government" against which they rebelled was toppled last year: not by armed leftist insurgents but peacefully, at the polls, by Fox, a former Coca Cola executive whose pro-market leanings the leftist rebels deeply distrust.

Fox's welcome of the Zapatista march has been so effusive that Marcos has accused him of trying to turn it into a Fox march.

"Welcome Subcomandante Marcos, welcome to the Zapatistas, welcome to the political arena, the arena of discussion of ideas," Fox said in a radio address on Saturday. Fox said the rebel tour was proof of the new democracy ushered in when he broke the former ruling party's 71-year grip on the presidency.

The Zapatistas used their bus caravan from the Chiapas jungle village of La Realidad to barnstorm for sweeping constitutional reforms that would grant Mexico's roughly 10 million Indians more local autonomy and guarantee them schools and radio stations in their own languages.

They have also repeately expressed wariness of Fox. In an interview published Sunday with the magazine Proceso, Marcos said he and Fox were "diametrically opposed."

"We are part of the world moving toward recognizing differences, and he is working toward hegemony and homogenizing, not just the country, but the world," Marcos said.

But the differences may be negotiable. Speaking of himself, Marcos conceded he was "more of a rebel seeking social change" than a revolutionary.

Fox's first act in office was to send the Indian rights bill to Congress, and has freed scores of Zapatista prisoners and closed several army bases. But the rebels insist others be freed and more bases near their strongholds be closed before peace talks can start.

The Zapatistas have roots in Indian peasant organizations, church activists, and a Leninist guerrilla group from northern Mexico.

Their only significant military success was the seizure of the Chiapas towns. Fighting with the government lasted only 12 days before a cease-fire took hold.

Peace talks with the government started in February, but have been stalled since 1996 in a dispute over how to guarantee Indian rights - the first of six subjects to be discussed with the government en route to a peace agreement.

© MMI Viacom Internet Services Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report

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