My visit with the Bishop of Chiapas.

In January of this year, Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia of Chiapas resigned as the main negotiator between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government. He cited the government's "constant and growing aggression." The resignation of Ruiz, a 1998 Nobel Prize nominee, has upended a peace process that had already been faltering.

In July, I went to Chiapas to meet up with my sister, who was volunteering there on a project that gives cameras to indigenous people to document their lives. I also wanted to speak to Bishop Ruiz. As it happens, I had met Ruiz in my hometown of New Glarus, Wisconsin, in 1993, a few months before the Zapatistas rose up in arms. He was visiting the Reverend Tom Nielsen of the United Church of Christ. Nielsen had worked closely with the Catholic Diocese in San Cristobal to provide humanitarian aid to thousands of Guatemalans in refugee camps in Chiapas. Ruiz gave only hints of the conflict brewing in his native country.

Trying to look like a tourist, I fly into Cancun and take a twenty-hour bus trip to San Cristobal. The road, dotted with poor villages, army camps, and swatches of burned forest, twists and turns into the mountains surrounding San Cristobal. Many passengers become ill with motion sickness. Action movies such as Ninja Warrior dubbed into Spanish play repeatedly on small overhead TV sets. We pass a town where a group of villagers, all dressed in pink embroidered garments, gathers around a priest who holds a microphone.

On the brick streets of San Cristobal are markets crowded with Indian people wearing vibrant colors. Women from the surrounding villages--many with babies slung on their backs--gather in the market near the San Cristobal cathedral to ply their crafts to tourists. These include elaborate embroidery, weavings, and pottery--each village has its own patterns and colors. Other nearby markets feature mangoes, bananas, radishes, pork, chicken, beef, spices, peppers, roasted bugs, and beans. I find my sister, and we go to a cafe where two young girls climb into our laps. They kiss and hug us, hold our hands, introduce themselves. They point to the bakery goods lined up at the counter, priced for tourists. "Please," they say in English. After they eat the scones we buy for them, we have to ask them please to let us go.

Soldiers stand sentry outside banks, and military trucks roll through the streets.

Two young boys approach us for a shoeshine as we're walking down the street. When we refuse, they spit on us, and one of them scratches my arm.

We take a horseback ride to Chmula, a village just outside of San Cristobal. My sister warns me to eat beforehand because it's too heartbreaking to eat in front of so many hungry people. Young children cling to us as we arrive in the plaza. Some try to put bracelets on us, hoping that we will make a purchase. Others hold out their hands asking for pesos. Old people, wrapped in rags, and suffering from diseases that are peeling their skin, huddle against the shelter of the municipal building, their hands outstretched.

In the countryside, army posts line the roads.

Bishop Ruiz keeps an erratic schedule. I visited the Catholic Diocese office in San Cristobal several times in an attempt to arrange a meeting with him. Finally, I found the best way to track him down was to attend mass in the cathedral near the zocalo, or main square, of San Cristobal.

After the evening mass one Sunday, Don Samuel--as the locals call him--exits to the rear of the cathedral. In a tiny room behind the altar, people crowd around him. Cameras flash, and several reporters hold up tape recorders. Ruiz seems oblivious to everyone but the woman standing in front of him. She is indigenous, dressed in traditional clothing. They are speaking about her marriage.

Eventually, Rosie, a family friend who works for the diocese, helps me get the bishop's attention. He says he would be pleased to meet me the following day.

Bishop Ruiz is loved and reviled in Mexico. His detractors call him "the red bishop." Many indigenous people call him "Tatic," a Mayan word that means "dear father." He embraces liberation theology, which encourages priests to advocate for the poor.

The son of a migrant farmworker and a maid, Bishop Ruiz was a conservative when he arrived in San Cristobal in 1960. His first pastoral letter railed against "atheistic communism." But Ruiz also made it his mission to travel--mainly by mule--to each village and hamlet in his diocese. Little had changed since colonial times. Indigenous people weren't allowed to walk on footpaths. The word "indio" was used to mean both indigenous and lazy or stupid. Despite abundant natural resources, much of the population lived in dire poverty--and still does.

By speaking to people in these remote and impoverished Indian communities, the bishop began a transformation. He now speaks several indigenous languages. Under his tutelage, the diocese includes 7,000 lay preachers--or catechists--stationed throughout the jungle and mountain regions of Chiapas. They translate the Bible into indigenous languages and encourage church members to protest injustice.

Long before the Zapatista uprising in 1994, the bishop had endeared himself to the region's poor and infuriated the local and national elite. In 1974, he convened an Indigenous Congress in an attempt to improve conditions for Mexico's Indians. In 1989, he founded the Bartolome Fray Human Rights Center, which investigates human-rights cases and conflicts over land and religion. He upset the military when he linked it to human-rights abuses in Chiapas. He accused the government of drug dealing and election rigging. He gave a letter to the Pope in 1993 that criticized the proposed NAFTA agreement. In his August 1993 pastoral letter, Ruiz wrote, "Difficulties have forced native people to mobilize against hunger, exploitation, and repression."

Mexico's more conservative bishops and Pope John Paul II responded to Ruiz's activism by asking him to resign. In 1993, the Pope's ambassador to Mexico, Girolamo Prigione, said Ruiz had committed "grave pastoral and doctrinal errors." Bishop Ruiz did not step down, and 20,000 indigenous supporters came to San Cristobal to show their support for him.

Since then, Ruiz has been publicly accused of being a Zapatista commander. "His sermons have always been subversive," says former Chiapas governor Gustavo Armen-Dariz.

Last November, gunmen attacked a convoy that included Ruiz, his assistant, Bishop Raul Vera Lopez, and several Bible teachers. In a separate incident, Ruiz's sister, who works with the diocese, was shot and wounded.

Ruiz now wears a helmet to protect himself when he visits troubled areas.

The mist lifts from the rounded mountains that circle the city as my sister and I set off to meet Don Samuel. Four Indian children approach us with bracelets and tiny dolls that depict Zapatistas carrying sticks and wearing ski masks. The children explain that each represents a commandante, identifiable by his or her clothing. The two oldest ones remember when the Zapatistas occupied the municipal building in 1994, and they know the leaders by name.

"They came here," they explain in Spanish. "Marcos was wearing a colorful tie. Trini was older. She had long hair streaked with gray. Ramona had a red scarf."

We ask the children about their lives. Only one has been to school, and only for a few months. They work all day selling the trinkets their mother makes.

Across from the yellow and orange cathedral, the Zapatistas have set up a booth with a banner that reads, !Justicia! Fuera el ejercito de Chiapas: Cumplimento a los acuerdos de San Andres ("Justice! Remove the army from Chiapas: Comply with the San Andres Accords"). In February 1996, the government's advisers signed the Agreements of San Andres. The accords guaranteed the indigenous people of Chiapas the right to autonomous rule.

I knock on the cathedral door. To my surprise, Don Samuel opens it himself. The bishop is stout and balding, with big glasses and prodigious eyebrows. He wears a large, amber cross. He ushers us into a simple, yellow room lined with portraits of the popes.

I test the microphone by asking him what a bishop eats for breakfast. Ruiz laughs. "Well, I don't know. It's no different from all other mortals. He doesn't eat angel chicken breast. He eats oatmeal, a piece of bread, and ham and eggs."

His demeanor changes when I ask why he resigned as the chief mediator between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government. Ruiz chaired the National Mediation Commission (CONAI), a group that brokered agreements between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government.

"I need to clarify," he says, leaning forward. "I did not resign. Rather, the mediation commission ended. If a bus usually goes down a road, but the bus is no longer going through because the road is blocked, the passengers would be stupid to keep waiting for it. We cannot wait." His hand hits the table. "Therefore, I did not resign from the CONAI. The CONAI ended because it did not have a reason to be."

The government has reneged on the San Andres accords, Ruiz says. "When the government said that it was complying with the San Andres accords, we could not continue saying that what was false was true, or be silent. We had to say, `This is not true.' And all this meant R.I.P.--rest in peace."

Ruiz also condemns the Mexican government for attacking--or sanctioning paramilitary attacks on--communities that set up local governments, known as autonomous municipalities.

"There were many deaths in different places," he says. "A wave of violence advanced, generating paramilitary movements and making a great conflict out of small problems."

The army has assaulted the church, says Ruiz. "The hierarchy is being directly attacked by the authorities. We have twenty-seven closed churches, two occupied by the army, seven priests expelled from Chiapas and the country. Ail the priests and nuns who are foreigners have generally not been given their documents to remain in the country. They have a sword hanging over their heads."

For Ruiz and many others, the Acteal massacre in December 1997 was the clearest sign that the government did not want peace in Chiapas. Masked gunmen belonging to a paramilitary group murdered forty-five unarmed Tzotzil Indians who were living in a makeshift refugee camp on the road to the village of Acteal, some twenty miles north of San Cristobal. The victims belonged to the Sociedad Civil Las Abejas (the Civil Society of the Bees), a nonviolent cooperative that sells honey and coffee and has ties to the Diocese of San Cristobal.

"This cooperative was engaged in a peaceful movement," says Ruiz. "It didn't have a violent posture, and it wasn't organized as a political group. But local publications constantly talked about them as though they were an armed group. And all the violent things that occurred were attributed to them. It wasn't Las Abejas that was being attacked. It was the diocese. Las Abejas was a movement inspired by the word of God."

Ruiz says many members of Las Abejas sympathized with the Zapatistas. They had been threatened by government forces and were seeking refuge in Acteal. "A few days after they had arrived, they were praying and fasting for peace in the chapel of Acteal when they were massacred--children, women, and old people," he says.

Father Gonzalo Ituarte, another CONAI member, heard reports of the massacre while it was happening. He tried to intervene. But a high government official told him everything was under control. State authorities took the corpses away from the scene of the killing and initially declared the deaths the result of a family feud.

"This is where the intervention of the authorities became clear, so clear that they had to remove the governor of the state and the chief of police," says Ruiz. "It is not a violence that is accidental. It is not a violence where only those actors who appear implicated are involved. It is a violence induced and conducted by the authorities."

Ruiz presided over the funerals at Acteal. "I was in Acteal when the bodies were buried, and I felt great pain," he recalls. "I gave a brief speech, telling those who were there--victims and survivors of the attack--that they should not seek vengeance, but that Christianity offers forgiveness as the path of peace."

Ruiz says he was heartened at the notice the human-rights situation in Mexico received in the United States. "That was really unexpected, because we are serving the United States," he says. "The United States is demanding that we do, as we say in Spanish, el trabajo sucio [the dirty work]. ... We are tackling the people who are coming from Central America trying to get to the States. And we are giving oil to the United States through NAFTA. More than eighty products are now sold that weren't allowed to be sold before the NAFTA agreement. So, we are in good relations with the United States--a relation of submission."

Ruiz says the Zapatistas do not want a drawn-out civil war. "In Guatemala, the war lasted thirty-five years. In El Salvador, it lasted eleven years. With us, it was only eleven days," he says. "The Zapatistas always said, 'For us it was impossible to choose another path. But we know that war is not the path to peace. You must help us, show us how to go ahead in a peaceful movement. Make the war impossible.'"

For now, the Zapatistas are in retreat, focusing their attention on an international solidarity movement and building democratic institutions. The Mexican army occupies Chiapas. Ruiz rattles off a list of duties the army has taken over, from land distribution to jailing cattle thieves. "If the army is going to take on, in peacetime, the role of other civil authorities, it has changed the nature of the state. Then it is a military state, not a civilian state."

Onesimo Hidalgo, another CONAI member, says that four or five of the thirty-eight autonomous municipalities formed by indigenous people have been destroyed in the last six months.

In response to such criticism, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo called CONAI members "apostles of hypocrisy," saying they sided with the Zapatistas. In a January article, the Mexican news-weekly Proceso laid bare Zedillo's covert support for the proliferating paramilitary groups. The article revealed the government's strategy of training "self-defense groups." It also outlined the "secret organization of certain sectors of the population, among which ranchers, small private landowners, and individuals characterized by their high sense of patriotism... will be employed under army orders in support of army operations."

Despite the Acteal massacre and the collapse of the accords, Ruiz hasn't lost faith. "There are many other shadows and rocks on the way. But we are moving more or less ahead," he says. "A peace must be found, and not only in the absence of guns and bullets, but it must be found in justice, the recognition of the dignity of the people. It's another kind of unity. Nobody will be left out. Everybody will be included. We must all be together. Because the problem is not `of Chiapas.' It's in Chiapas, but this is a problem of all our country."

After thirty-eight years as the bishop of the San Cristobal Diocese, Don Samuel is preparing Bishop Raul Vera Lopez to succeed him. Many believed that the church appointed Bishop Vera to temper Ruiz's activism and keep an eye on him. But after a year in Chiapas, Bishop Vera sounds much like Bishop Ruiz. "The system here actively blocks the Indians' social development and the work of the church," he recently told The New York Times.

"I will be seventy-five years old," says Don Samuel. "I will leave the diocese. I will not stay here. I must choose another place. No doubt the future of the diocese will be in good hands. But, meanwhile, we'll both be together this year and next year in order to assure the continuation of the line."

At the end of our time together, several people are lined up outside the room, waiting to speak to the bishop. One of the nuns hands him a cell phone. He speaks for a minute, promising to get back to the caller as soon as he can. He escorts us into the sunny courtyard, where we take photos. Then he sends greetings to his friends in Wisconsin and asks us to visit him again, the next time we're in town.

Catherine Capellaro is Associate Editor of the Progressive Media Project. The interview portion of this profile was translated by David Alvarado. Sabrina Felson provided simultaneous translation during the interview.