CHIAPAS REVOLT MADE MEXICO NOTICE MAYAS.

Byline: Anthony DePalma The New York Times

When skies clear after a storm, Indian women still gather on the edge of the highway here to wash clothes in the rainwater in culverts that they have blocked with stones and mud.

Indian men in black wool tunics still hoe steep slopes by hand. Barefoot children with soles like stone still lug loads of wood bigger than they are.

Life along the highway to this dusty town seems to have changed little in the two years since Mayas began an armed insurrection in the southernmost Mexican state, Chiapas, where 196 people were killed in 12 days.

But what has changed for the Mayas - and for other Indians - is that injustices in the lives of those who have called themselves "Mexico's most forgotten people" are no longer forgotten.

"The underlying message from the government seems to be that we, too, will have to rise up in arms one dark morning to get them to pay attention to us," said Marcelino Diaz de Jesus, a Nahua Indian from the state of Guerrero, where poverty and isolation have only deepened in the last two years.

"We Indians respect the flag of Mexico. We feel like Mexicans. But we don't feel we are represented in the Constitution or the laws."

Although a cease-fire that took effect Jan. 12, 1994, has held, the Chiapas rebels have not yet put down their arms or put away their anger. They have continued to demand change not just in Chiapas but throughout the country.

Peace talks have been going on for nine months, and they are expected to continue for another year. But only when they resumed last week did they get down to the thorny heart of the issue: Indian rights.

This time government negotiators came prepared to deal. The uprising led by the Zapatista National Liberation Army and its masked leader, who calls himself Subcommander Marcos and is not an Indian, shamed the government into acknowledging that its Indian citizens - nearly 10 million, one in every 10 Mexicans - had been nearly abandoned.

More than 80 percent of Mexico's Indian communities suffer high levels of poverty. Nearly half of all Indians in Mexico are illiterate, and only 14 percent complete even the sixth grade. Some scholars think there are as many Indians in Mexico today as when Hernando Cortes and the conquistadors arrived in 1519, but they hold no major government office, and they hold just a handful of the more than 600 federal congressional seats.

"We know the whites don't like us because when we can't return home in time and have to ask them for shelter in their communities, they give us day-old tortillas," said an elder of the Tarahumara people in the northern part of the state. The implied insult is unmistakable. After just a few minutes, tortillas, the staple of most Mexican diets, turn stale.

Relations with the huge Indian population have been full of conflict and contradiction for much of Mexico's history. Images of Indian leaders from the ancient past are on Mexican money, but exclusive restaurants in Mexico City will not serve Indians.

Even government officials agree that had it not been for the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico would not have been forced to re-evaluate its treatment of the Indians.

At a meeting in the Indian town of Tepexi de Rodriguez in the central state of Puebla last week, President Ernesto Zedillo pledged change.

"With your help, we can achieve important reforms in our laws, in our institutions, in our constitution, so that you can construct your own future," he told thousands of Mixteca Indians.

What the government is offering at the peace talks in Chiapas is substantial change not only recognizing that all of the country's Indians are full citizens of Mexico, but also acknowledging that they have special rights based on their ages-old cultures.

If approved - and they would have to be submitted to Congress - the constitutional amendments would produce changes like requiring that a legal notice be printed not only in Spanish but also in whichever of the 56 Indian languages is most appropriate in a region.

The proposed amendments would recognize the Indian way of justice - meaning, for example, that someone who steals a chicken would not go to jail but would have to produce another chicken, one just as fat. And the amendments would recognize that Indian democracy depends on an open discussion of a candidate's values and a public show of hands, not on secret ballots and computer counts.

But those and other changes may not be enough. Indian leaders have made it clear that their most prized goal is self-rule. Their proposals range from autonomy in some regions to quotas setting aside seats for Indians in the national Congress. Indian leaders also want to roll back recent changes in property rights that they believe are destroying their communities by encouraging the sale of land.

Marco Antonio Bernal, head of the government's negotiating team, has said he would not be willing to reopen the debate on property rights. And he said that demands for large regions under Indian rule and for Indian control of natural resources, like oil, are unacceptable, although the government is willing to authorize more independence for small Indian villages.

"There is not going to be any abdication of national sovereignty," he told reporters at San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas.

Despite such differences, the latest round of talks opened Wednesday with great optimism after dramatic announcements within the Zapatista movement.

On Jan. 1, the second anniversary of the start of the uprising, movement leader Marcos declared that the time had come for the Zapatista Army to become the Zapatista Front for National Liberation. He said the organization, known for its ski masks and beat-up rifles, would convert itself into a publicly recognized special-interest group to seek reform in government without seeking power itself.

The government welcomed the change, but the announcement did not go over well with much of Mexico's left, shaken badly by recent election losses. The headline on the cover of the left-leaning news weekly Proceso this week is "The Sunset of Marcos."

Heberto Castillo, a leftist leader, said he fears that unarmed Zapatistas could become "a bunch of respectable, well-meaning people but without any popular resonance with the masses."

In a forum on Indian rights sponsored by the Zapatistas just before the talks began, Marcos appeared without weapons for the first time in two years - a symbol, he said, of the group's intent to become a political front. At the close of the forum he warned that if the Zapatista front fails, "the process of peace will fail."

Indians in many parts of Mexico have long practiced their own form of democracy, and as long as it does not conflict with constitutional law it is tolerated. In November, in the neighboring state of Oaxaca, a new state law officially recognized the elections by traditional methods in 400 municipalities.

Carlos Tello Macias, director general of the National Indigenous Institute, said the government's proposal at the peace talks would amend the Constitution to allow elections according to "uses and customs," throughout Mexico's Indian regions.

Such a change would go far beyond a 1992 constitutional amendment that recognized the diverse nature of Mexican society but had little practical effect on Indian lives.

"The 1992 reform was not satisfactory to people in the Indian communities," Tello Macias said, "and as a result of the Chiapas uprising this dissatisfaction came very much out in the open."

Based on the tussle for power in San Andres, Perez Diaz doubts the government's sincerity about really wanting to change now.

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