The women of Chiapas.

Barefoot, with a baby in a sling on her back, Calendaria Morales Perez runs up a dusty road and brandishes a stick. Her orange skirt flounces around her knees,, and her collar flaps in the wind. "Murderers, assassins, sons of the devil," she cries in Spanish as she runs. "Out of our village!" Next to Morales Perez, an old woman, her aunt Aydelina Morales Guillen, lopes ahead on bent legs, echoing the cry, "Out, devils!"

Nine trucks, carrying close to 200 armed Mexican federal soldiers, prepare to leave Morelia, a small community in Chiapas, Mexico. Fifty women and children wave sticks and throw rocks at them.

Sixteen-year-old Clotilde Gomez Morales throws a rock that glances off the helmet of one of the soldiers in the last truck. He aims his rifle at her. Gomez Morales pushes forward. "Kill me then, if that's what you came for," she cries. "We don't want you here." The soldier lowers the rifle and looks away.

This is the second time in a week soldiers have tried to enter Morelia, and the second time in a week the women have turned them back.

It's early January, and the soldiers are acting on orders from Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo to "reestablish law and order" in the region after the massacre that took place in Acteal, Chiapas, on December 22. That day, a paramilitary group killed forty-five people, including four pregnant women and eighteen children. The Mexican government has arrested several police officers in connection with the massacre.

Citing the national Firearms and Explosives law, Zedillo has sent troops into several villages known to be supportive of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), a guerrilla movement defending the rights of indigenous people in Chiapas.

"The Mexican government has an obligation to put an end to this fratricidal war," stated newly appointed Minister of the Interior Francisco Labastida Ochoa. "No one has the moral authority to ask that justice and the law apply only to others. Therefore, the disarming of those who are using weapons illegally will continue."

But for many in Chiapas, the presence of federal troops means more conflict, not less.

In 1996, two years after the Zapatistas staged an armed uprising that drew international attention to the region, the Mexican government and the EZLN signed partial peace agreements--referred to as the San Andres Accords. The accords guaranteed the Zapatistas the right to free passage during negotiations and promised that the government would cease all attempts to pursue or prosecute members. It also prohibited the military from interfering with the civilian population. This agreement holds unless either party definitively terminates the ongoing peace talks. Neither has done so, but the talks have reached a standstill while Labastida calls for the rebel leader known as Subcommander Marcos to return to the negotiating table. Marcos refuses to talk until the government complies with the accords by pulling out of the indigenous communities, including the refugee camps around Acteal.

Zedillo maintains that the presence of federal troops is necessary, though his reasons vary. He has declared the need to disarm the civilians, to disarm the Zapatistas, and to bring humanitarian aid to the communities affected by the violence.

The commanding officer of the troops in the convoy attempting to enter Morelia on January 8 claims that the soldiers came on a human-rights mission. "We're here to see that everyone is all right, and to determine if the people need any aid," he says. He will not give his name.

"They say they come to take care of us. But we're not pets they need to take care of," says Morales Guillen. "We're not animals they have to control with weapons. Why do they bring their guns? They say they bring aid, but all they bring are their guns."

The population of Morelia is largely supportive of the EZLN, and the women suspect the government of attempting to provoke a confrontation with the insurgents by attacking the Zapatista civilian communities. As in most other parts of the region, there are divisions among the inhabitants of Morelia. Morales Perez says two of her uncles are soldiers in the federal military and two of her brothers are insurgents in the EZLN.

"We don't want a war. If it comes, we're ready, but that's not what we want," Morales Perez says. "We want to be left alone. We're here taking care of ourselves, doing our work. But the women here are organizing to defend our community, and we are not afraid."

So determined are the women to guard their community, they have sent the men away.

"We're tired of running away from the soldiers," Irma Morales Perez says. "When they came in 1995, we abandoned the community and hid in the mountains for a month. We were cold and hungry--we had no food and no way to get food. We spent two years trying to recover from the crops we lost then. We don't want that again, so we organized and decided to push the soldiers out and stay here with our work."

The women charge that on January 7, 1994, the federal military kidnapped three Morelia men who were later tortured and assassinated. Investigations performed under the auspices of the Frei Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, confirmed these claims. But the government has never publicly accepted responsibility for the deaths.

The community was not willing to endure that violence again, so the governing committee of Morelia decided to send the main targets--the males--into hiding in the nearby mountains. The decision was not a mandate of the EZLN, the women say. Rather, the communities asked the EZLN to support their actions.

Frei Bartolome estimates that there are 6,000 internal refugees in Chiapas now. A disproportionately large number of them are women and children. "The men can run," says Blanca Flor, part of Kinal Antzetik (Women's Territory), a group working with indigenous women in the conflict zone. "But the women with their children can't run so fast, so they stay and wait for what comes. Even after all that's happened, there is so much courage. Every day the women get madder. And the madder they get, the stronger they get."

Since early January, Morales Perez and her sister Irma, along with most of the other women in Morelia, have been taking turns keeping watch at the entrance to their community. It they haven't seen soldiers for a while, the women go home. Because the men are gone, the fields lay idle and beans and corn are scarce. The women are behind on the coffee harvest, and there is no money to buy what they cannot grow.

Women in many rural communities in Chiapas have begun to stand up to the military. Diez de Mayo is a small community set far back from the road. It is surrounded by villages where anti-Zapatista government supporters live, though the population of the village itself largely supports the EZLN. Until recently, many of the women of Diez de Mayo had never even seen a federal soldier. When a lookout alerted the community that soldiers were approaching, thirty women, with their babies and young children, went up to the road to meet them.

"We asked them nicely to turn away," says thirty-five-year-old Evelina Aguilera Sanchez. "I told them my children were afraid and I didn't want them to come in. The soldier said it was a federal road and said, 'Stand aside, filthy Indian whore.' 'No, I told him, I won't let you into my house to scare my children."' She says one soldier hit her baby with a stick.

Aguilera Sanchez pulls the baby forward and opens up the shawl, showing a purple bruise on the child's lower back. "I said he was a filthy government whore and I picked up a stick and defended myself. My friend Juana, they hit her so hard on the head that blood came out and she fell on her baby. But what can you do? Here we are."

By late January, reports of troop movement in the conflict zone continue, but the attempted incursions are less and less frequent. The women are trying to catch up on their work, and in many communities the men have returned from the mountains.

The Zapatistas say they want the Mexican government to provide the indigenous people of Chiapas autonomy and the right to work their land. But it's not clear what the government wants. Labastida says that he, too, wants peace in Chiapas, but he says all players in the game must abide by the same rules. That means no more special dispensation for the guerrilla army.

"The government wants to destroy us," says Morales Guillen. She says the large number of civilian supporters of the EZLN is an embarrassment to the government, and that Zedillo is attempting to defeat the guerrilla army by weakening its base of support. "Who knows what they will do? But we're still living, trying to work, to eat, to learn," she says. "Even the old women have their part-organizing to live a little better, maybe suffer a little less."

Robin Flinchum is a freelance journalist and a women's health educator living in San Cristobal.