Rape in Mexico: an American is the latest victim of the repression.

On a placid October afternoon.. Cecilia Rodriguez--a Texas-born human-rights activist, mother of three teenagers, and the Zapatistas' U.S. representative--took a break from her work in southern Mexico's war zone to go walking at the Montebello Lakes, a tourist spot in a still-tranquil pocket of the state of Chiapas. Instead of a respite, however, it turned out to be another day of war. Four ski-masked men abducted Rodriguez along with her American male companion, separated them, and raped and sodomized Rodriguez. She remembers one of the men saying, "You already know how things are in Chiapas. Now shut up. Shut up! "

It was the latest act in the low-intensity war going on in Mexico. As Indian peasants lead a struggle for democratic change against a corrupt regime, women have become a favored target of official violence. The only difference this time was that the target was a U.S. citizen.

Who abducted and raped Cecilia Rodriguez? The attack "was clearly a political retaliation and a warning to others who speak for peace and human rights in Mexico," Rodriguez says. Although her attackers were not uniformed soldiers, she believes they were acting as agents of systematic repression in Chiapas. "They looked like local thugs. I think they may have some association with the local landowners," she says.

Peace activists in the area suspect the attackers work for Chiapan ranchers, who run virtual fiefdoms under the generous patronage of the Mexican government. Outraged at the indigenous Mexicans actively challenging the status quo, many have paramilitary "white guards" who carry out massacres and abuses against peasant organizers.

Rodriguez's colleagues believe that her high-profile work on behalf of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) did not escape the attention of Chiapas's most powerful. In Washington a month earlier, she had announced the opening of a Chiapas office where international supporters will work together with Zapatista peasant communities. Her visit to Chiapas in October coincided with, another round of peace talks between the Mexican government and the EZLN. It also happened to be the same period when alleged Zapatista member Fernando Yanez Munoz was illegally arrested by government agents, in violation of the peace agreements, and on charges many considered absurd: he "was supposedly carrying around an AK-47 right between his legs in broad daylight in the middle of Mexico City traffic," says Rodriguez. In an open statement to American citizens and a letter to President Clinton, Rodriguez condemned the arrest and the government's breaching of the peace accords. This protest was her last act as U.S. representative of the EZLN before her abduction.

Since the attack, activists in the United States and Mexico have rallied around Rodriguez, and she has received many letters of support. "The warm wishes counteract the cold wind blowing through my middle right now," she says.

Cecilia Rodriguez grew up in segregated El Paso, Texas, in the 1950s and sixties, the oldest of six children. Her mother was a librarian and her father--a U.S. citizen illegally deported to Mexico as a youth--worked in a shoe store and as a warehouseman. In 1969, the Rodriguez family moved to a new neighborhood, and Cecilia found herself among the Chicanos and Mexicans entering the all-white high school for the first time. "There were attacks on the Mexicanos by the football players. So I wrote an editorial when I was sixteen, and it got censored. The article led to protests and I fell into organizing from there.... I don't think I ever stopped." Awarded the Ruben Salazar Scholarship for Journalism, she attended the University of Texas in El Paso.

In the 1970s, community organizing in Texas, Chihuahua, and Mexico City was a path that led her further south. Rodriguez ended up in rural Chiapas in the early 1980s, working in public-health education on sanitation, water treatment, and other issues basic to women and children.

When she returned to the United States, Rodriguez headed Mujer Obrera in El Paso, a community working-women's organization. There, she instigated an eight-day hunger strike that spurred a Department of Labor investigation of the border garment industry, revealing that the garment companies owed $85,000 to hundreds of El Paso workers.

After ten years of border organizing, Rodriguez moved east. By 1991 she was administering $5.5 million as the first Latina to head the Funding Exchange, a national social-justice foundation based in New York City.

Two years ago, Rodriguez sat fixed to the television, gripped by the reports on New Year's Day about the Zapatista uprising that rocked Mexico. The grave faces staring out from front pages of newspapers around the world made clear the identity of the combatants: they were Indians, and a startling number of them were women. Two days into the uprising, with government troops on the rampage and bombs dropping, peacemaking Bishop Samuel Ruiz of Chiapas summoned an emergency human-rights delegation to the colonial capital, San Cristobal de las Casas.

Cecilia Rodriguez, well known and respected from her days of organizing Mexican immigrant communities on the border, was among the delegates. She met with the rebels, government officials, and church representatives, to help negotiate an end to the bombing. In July, five months after a cease-fire between the government and the Zapatistas, Rodriguez was invited to become the rebels' key U.S. representative.

Rodriguez crisscrossed the United States, speaking on behalf of the EZLN Her message was simple: the Mexican government is at war with its own people, as it has been since 1968, when hundreds of protesting students were massacred by army troops just miles from the Olympic games in Mexico City. And because the United States supports the Mexican regime and fortifies its military arsenal, the United States is also at war with the Mexican people. Indeed, during the last six years, under cover of the so-called war on drugs, the United States has passed more than $214 million in military hardware and assistance to the Mexican army. A sophisticated satellite apparatus developed by U.S. scientists is tracking some of the country's last landed indigenous people, while American-made helicopters allow Mexico's federal army to hunt them down.

Although the Mexican government and the Zapatistas negotiated a cease-fire, it was broken by President Zedillo's ferocious crackdown last February. The army continues to occupy the Chiapan countryside, intimidating indigenous villagers and making it difficult for them to travel any distance.

After the assault on Rodriguez, the government's propaganda machine, headed by the notoriously untrustworthy official television station, Televisa, immediately blamed the Zapatistas. It reported that the rebels had raped a tourist--a notion Rodriguez could hardly bring herself to comment upon.

For those under the impression that Zapatistas are an isolated guerrilla movement assembled shortly before January 1994, the link between the ruling party's low-intensity war and the rape of Cecilia Rodriguez may seem tenuous. But for Rodriguez and Mexicans involved in the country's vast networks of democratic groups--from electoral monitors, to urban-slum associations, to land-reform movements--it's all part of the same picture.

"The character of this low-intensity war in Chiapas has been brought to light by my rape," Rodriguez says. "Yet women in the region have been suffering since the army arrived."

In army-occupied Chiapas, shopping for basic necessities--cooking oil, a plastic bucket, yam, shears--has been left to village women, who must cross the precarious military roadblocks that separate the zone of conflict from the world outside. Though women may be more physically vulnerable, peasant families know that male relatives who even approach a checkpoint without identification may well be accused of being guerrillas and arrested. Most men no longer dare.

It was under such circumstances that on June 4, 1994, three Tzeltal teenage girls and their mother approached an Altamirano roadblock, carrying several baskets of produce, and headed toward the market in San Cristobal de las Casas. According to Amnesty International, the girls were separated from their mother, and locked in a room where they were beaten and raped by approximately ten of the thirty soldiers assigned to the post. The soldiers accused them of being Zapatistas.

Amnesty International denounced the rapes and the government's failure to prosecute. Amnesty reported that the case had been transferred to military jurisdiction--in other words, that the army would judge its own--and that there was "little likelihood that a fair and impartial hearing will take place." Adds Cosette Thompson, Amnesty International's western regional director: "The local human-rights monitors who filed their complaints received death threats, and the Mexican army has continued to deny the accusations of torture and rape. To this day, no one has been brought to justice, nor have the victims received any compensation. The impunity prevailing in Chiapas for perpetrators of sexual crimes against women needs to be denounced publicly and forcefully."

In October of this year, three local nurses belonging to the Health and Public Assistance Secretariat returned from a vaccination campaign in one of Chiapas's most destitute districts. Since the uprising, health workers ministering to the poor have been the victims of threats and attacks by rightwing demonstrators. None was more vicious than the attack on the nurses, who were raped and nearly murdered by a group of twenty-five masked and heavily armed men near San Andres Larrianzar, headquarters of the peace talks between the government and the EZLN. Though the attack was reported to the state officials, there has been no progress in the investigation.

Unlike the mass rapes of female civilians by soldiers in the Yugoslav conflict, these cases have not made it to the front pages of the international press. Nor have the other fifty rapes of Chiapan women--mostly indigenous--during the last eighteen months, reported by the Chiapan human-rights consortium, CONPAZ. According to its representative, Miguel de los Santos, "The rapes of the women, and the circumstances in which they were committed, place them within a strategy of low-intensity war."

"Women's groups in Chiapas believe that these assaults are a clear message to women, since enemies of the Zapatista movement realize that families form the main part of the organization's base," Mujeres de Mexico, a national women's rights organization, announced in a November 6 statement.

"Nowadays it's really tough. We can't leave our homes anymore to obtain money or food ... the soldiers are patrolling the communities," Mayan villager Sebastiana Martinez Enriquez told a member of the Chiapan State Women's Convention. According to Mujeres de Mexico, women in the occupied territory say they find themselves in a state of total defenselessness, and charge that more and more young people are being forced into prostitution by federal army soldiers.

To call attention to the crisis, a diverse group of women's organizations--ranging from teachers to housewives to indigenous women--initiated a campaign called "Let's Stop Violence Against Women," which concluded November 25.

An Amnesty International commission, after studying Mexico's human-rights record this November, found that although the government's own National Human Rights Commission revealed evidence of official responsibility for the recent, well-documented massacre of seventeen peasants in Guerrero state, a significant number of those implicated in the crime had still not been brought to justice. The Amnesty report concluded that only a firm political decision by the Mexican Government to eliminate impunity will make it possible to eradicate the practice of torture and other human-rights violations."

The term "impunity" is taking on a personal meaning these days for Cecilia Rodriguez. "The crime of rape is not one that is handled well, even in the United States," says Rodriguez. "In Mexico, you must first file a report, then you have an exam performed by a government doctor. The way it works is that even if you report the rape two years after, you still have to have that medical exam. And the government's medical examiner can say, `This woman has not been raped.'"

On the advice of human-rights workers, Rodriguez left Chiapas the day after her assault, and on October 31 filed a complaint with the American Embassy in Mexico City. Vice-consul Nicholas Manring, who Rodriguez felt was genuinely shocked at the brutality of the crime, advised her to file a police report in the district where the crime had occurred. He would not, he added, recommend that she return to Chiapas at all. Assuring Rodriguez he would forward the report to the appropriate police authorities, he cautioned, "They never prosecute here in Mexico."

According to a report in the Mexican daily La Jornada, U.S. embassy officials reported the crime to Mexican officials, then "notified the Secretary of Tourism regarding the case of Rodriguez . . . in order to avoid giving the attack a political treatment."

The Zapatistas, meanwhile, have announced their intention to pursue those guilty of assaulting Rodriguez and other women in Chiapas, making clear their skepticism about the government's handling of such cases. "Though they have tens of thousands of soldiers here, they are dedicated only to ensuring the impunity of the powerful," the Zapatistas wrote in a November communique discussing military corruption. Therefore, "the EZLN has begun the task of finding and taking prisoner those responsible.... to judge them according to Zapatista Law."

The Zapatistas' "Laws of Women," ratified in 1993 after a poll of women in regional village assemblies, made rape and spousal abuse criminal offenses.

In the early days of the 1994 rebellion, the Zapatista combatants carried out their own form of justice on the infamous ex-governor of Chiapas, Absalon Castellanos, kidnapping him from his ranch outside Las Margaritas, and putting him on trial for torturing and massacring peasants in the area. His punishment: the former governor was sentenced to live in a remote village in the highlands, to work the land for a living, and to dwell among those whom he had brutalized.

As for more conventional means of justice, Rodriguez's US. attorney advised her that while there are some international human-rights bodies that would take up the case, they all would require that local legal channels be exhausted. Rodriguez's office in El Paso has demanded that an investigation be carried out jointly by the official Mexican National Commission for Human Rights in Mexico, and Bishop Ruiz's independent human-rights team. U.S. Attorney Gillian Black, who visited the prisoners accused of being Zapatistas at Cerro Hueco Prison on a human-rights fact-finding delegation to Chiapas last spring, worries that slow moving may jeopardize Rodriguez's case: "Every day that it is delayed, evidence is lost and a quality investigation becomes impossible."

"The United States likes to say it is defender of democracy and justice," Rodriguez said in a statement to the press shortly after her assault. "I am an American citizen, and I will watch closely to see whether any U.S. authority will see fit to investigate this crime and challenge the apparent impunity of the armed men who committed this crime. The only thing the U.S. government seems to care about is a `stable' environment to protect big investors."

Ostensibly, the United States is not supporting a war in Mexico, because none exists. Yet from 1988 to 1992, the U.S. government exported more than $214 million in arms to the Mexican regime. The United States supplied the Mexican military with sixteen times as much hardware as France, Mexico's next biggest supplier.

In 1994, months after the Zapatista uprising and shortly before the besmirched national elections, Clinton approved an arms package for Mexico that included $64 million in sophisticated equipment and satellite-guided UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters. If the Pentagon package now under discussion materializes, the Mexican army fleet may nearly double to almost 200. From 1984 to 1993, more than 700 Mexican military officers were also trained by Pentagon experts in the United States-150 of those at Georgia's notorious School of the Americas.

"All this to support a political system that is so shaky, the only way to prop it up is by force," says Rodriguez.

When the Zapatistas staged their uprising in January 1994, the Mexican army instantly dispatched its U.s.-supplied Huey and Bell 212 helicopters along with C-130 Hercules troop transport planes. These army helicopters, though officially restricted for use in the "drug war," played a key role in the starkly unequal conflict. According to a human-rights report by Bishop Ruiz, government forces killed more than 400 Mayan peasants in less than two weeks.

There are other ominous signs that the United States is increasingly involved in Mexico's "quiet war." Fourteen months after the uprising, American intelligence services actively assisted in an attempt to determine the identity of the Zapatistas' Subcomandante Marcos, and in preparing the federal army for its invasion of Chiapas. In October, Mexico received a visit from U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry. Perry announced that Mexico and the United States have "embarked on a new era of cooperation in their economic, political, and security relations."

"If one of our nations sneezes," Perry explained, "it gives the other a cold."

In Chiapas in the 1990s, in what some call the most important civil-rights movement in the Americas, the disinherited decided to be heard. To the government and the local landed aristocracy, brute force has been the way to control it.

"There is a real fear that any other success that the Zapatistas might have can set a precedent for other areas of Mexico," Rodriguez says. "You have indigenous people all over the country, and there are very similar problems. Mexico is faced with 15 million of its people about to rebel, in addition to the other 30 or 45 million that live in such dire poverty that they also have a reason to rebel. When you have a situation like that, the only way you can control it is by armed force, because your methods of social control are gone."

But she also stresses that the Zapatistas are directing their efforts toward a nonviolent struggle for democracy, and are depending heavily on the civilian, democratic movement to carry it out.

Rodriguez refuses to be intimidated. "I will not `shut up.' I will follow the example of thousands of Mexicans who continue to work for a true democracy in Mexico in spite of the danger to themselves and their loved ones, who tell the truth in spite of physical and mental suffering," she says.

In Chiapas, from the conquest until the present day, sexual violence has been a traditional weapon against Indian women. Rodriguez recalls indigenous women who have told her of being virtually "enslaved in the houses of wealthy employers, and of having to perform sexual favors as part of their enslavement. Some of those women are Zapatistas now." These days, says Rodriguez, she draws her strength from remembering those women, and how determined they were to change their place in Chiapan society, so that their daughters would not have to face the same brutality and demeaning life.

Rodriguez recently received a letter from Subcomandante Marcos, in which he wrote that those who have power and exercise it with brute force must use psychological terror to destroy their opponents' mental health, so they can no longer function. Although going public about her assault has been painful and humiliating for Rodriguez and her family, she has concluded that coming forward was ultimately the healthiest choice she could have made, both in terms of exposing human-rights abuses in Mexico, and in terms of her own survival.

"Rape is a crime that is intended to destroy your spirit," she says. "It's about humiliation, it's about power, it's about intimidation. Understanding that, and acknowledging that it's a wound like other wounds and I'm going to have to struggle with it, and I'm going to have to take care of it, has helped me to do the things I need to do.

"Mexico is a place for investment," she adds, with a trace of irony. "It is not a place our country wants to break out into open conflict--a war that is open and clear. It's easy to conduct a war that's silent." She wonders how long Americans will remain complicit.

Diana Banjac is the pen name of a writer in Oakland, California.