Abstract

The Killers and the Killing

The onslaught on the Zapatistas by the Mexican Army was announced by Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon on February 9, less than a month after the Chase Bank, which has billions at stake in Mexico, issued a peremptory call for the extinction of Subcomandante Marcos and his comrades. The eagerness of the Mexican elites and military high command to end the Zapatista insurgency goes without saying, but the pressure on Zedillo from the big U.S. investors was probably decisive. The memorandum, which was circulated by the bank's Emerging Markets Group to major investors, said it is in the best interests of Mexico's ruling party, to fix crucial state elections over the next few months. The collapse of the Mexican peso and subsequent events offers a record, as detailed as tremors on a seismograph, of the stress points in U.S. relations with boom economies in the Third World and the fantastic plunder such relations involve.