The state prosecutor is to review 80 more cases and suspend the sentences of detainees charged with political crimes since the conflict started in 1994. But when Mr Fox announced that some regiments would stay in the area to curb trade in narcotics and illegal immigrants, the ELZN high command started grumbling.The publication last week of a secret army memorandum which implies that the conservative President Fox is using an outdated army plan as a blueprint for his Chiapas peace strategy did not help matters.Subcomandante Marcos once said a Zapatista was anyone who fought for communal space against market forces, and he sneers at neo-liberalism. Entrepreneurial solutions, such as the foreign-owned assembly plants advocated by Mr Fox, might bring jobs to the region, but Mr Marcos is not expected to support them.Gonzalo Ituarte, a senior Roman Catholic official and former peace mediator in Chiapas, says the state needs programmes that could restore dignity to Indians in its remote rural regions. “This is a phenomenon in an Indian world, which is in a different historic era than other parts of Mexico,” he said. “Mr Fox cannot think that solutions which may work in the centre of the republic will be successful here.”Chiapas is primarily rural, unlike the rest of Mexico, and almost a third of its inhabitants are Maya; more than 80 per cent of the people have some Indian blood.

Most of the indigenous population work as farmers or peasant labourers. Few speak Spanish fluently, but education has not been available in Maya languages, which contributes to the cycle of illiteracy and poverty.Violence flares sporadically between Maya Indians, who espouse the Zapatistas’ left-wing ideals yet do not support armed uprising, and local paramilitary units armed by landowners. At least 30,000 villagers have been driven to refugee camps from their homes in the highlands and jungles by massacres or brutal intimidation. The dispute also pits Roman Catholics against evangelical Christians.Because of Mr Salazar’s evangelical faith, the sectarian roots of the hostilities will not be overlooked. He hailed the Zapatista guerrillas as “freedom fighters” in a fiery inaugural speech that also dismissed his predecessors from the Institutional Revolutionary Party as “tyrants”.But in Cerro Hueco, paramilitary prisoners cry foul. From his cell, the leader of a rightwing paramilitary group, Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice), demands that a new government truth commission should investigate human rights abuses on all sides.

Samuel Sanchez does not seem resentful about political change, but belligerent.”I can summon 300 people with one phone call,” he boasted to the Independent on Sunday. “They will come where they’re needed with machetes and farm implements. There’s no real need for guns.” Some had predicted that paramilitary violence would start to ease now that government funds will no longer be providing weapons and impunity. But nobody believes that the rifts will be healed, as Mr Fox once claimed, “in about 15 minutes”.. General Augusto Pinochet today plans to defy a court order to undergo a two-day mental fitness examination and interrogation in Santiago. Judge Juan Guzman, whom the ex-dictator’s defence team failed to remove from a multiple murder trial based on the notorious “Caravan of Death”, ordered that the tests begin today and hinted that he would reissue the general’s arrest warrant if he resisted.