A four-week-long oil well occupation in Tabasco spotlights Mexico's moribund political system which can no longer address simmering social or political grievances. As much as Mexico needs economic change, it needs political change as well. PNS associate editor Sam Quinones, a Mexico City based freelance writer, reports from Tabasco.

On-going oil well occupations in this gulf state are once again challenging the legitimacy of Mexico's government. Like Chiapas' peasant uprising last year, the protests spotlight not only deep social inequities but a moribund political system incapable of resolving them.

Since late January, Chontal Indians and members of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (RPD) have blocked the entrances to 60 oil wells belonging to Pemex, the government's oil company. The occupiers are protesting Pemex's plan to dig more wells and demanding that it compensate farmers for the environmental damage oil exploitation has caused.

The government has taken a hard line, calling in the military to force unarmed protesters away from the wells. Over 100 protesters are now in jail. A truce was declared in mid-February and the PRD is now negotiating with officials in Mexico City. But as talks drag on, no one expects the conflict to end soon.

One thing Tabasco makes clear is that discovering oil on one's property in Mexico is only the beginning of a nightmare. Since oil is state-owned, the property of "all Mexicans," Pemex is free to move in. Landowners, often poor farmers, get nothing. In Tabasco, Pemex doesn't even pay property tax, one of the few taxes municipalities can charge. Some 58 years after oil was nationalized here, the government still hasn't found the money to pave the roads in towns and villages in Tabasco's oil fields (although money was found to pave the streets of far-off Villahermosa, the state capitol where Pemex bureaucrats live).

What farmers do receive is gas explosions, acid rain, and great glops of oil and other contaminants that seep into their farms as well as air and water. For years farmers here have sought compensation but until now they have never managed to get the government's attention.

The grievances in Tabasco go way beyond oil. The state has been a roiling vat of political passions since its gubernatorial elections in November 1994 which the current governor Roberto Madrazo won the traditional way -- by theft. President Zedillo tried but failed to get Madrazo to step down and the two men have since made their public peace. But the runner-up, PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and thousands of Tabasquenos have been unwilling to let the matter slide.

Last spring, Lopez Obrador gave the federal Attorney General's office several boxes of leaked documents that he said showed Madrazo had spent close to $74 million on the campaign -- 50 times what's permitted by election law and well above what Bill Clinton spent on his 1992 American presidential campaign.

In August, Madrazo filed suit in the Supreme Court, alleging that the Attorney General's office had no jurisdiction to investigate the campaign-spending charges. The court is expected to rule soon on the suit. The oil well occupiers clearly hope their actions will influence the court's decision.

They have already badly weakened Madrazo's position. As long as he is governor, Tabasco will be synonymous with political crisis. Reports are that he remains in seclusion in his governor's mansion, depending on the state-financed media to electro-shock his image back to life.

Meanwhile the PRD is looking good again. Once the country's major opposition party, the seven-year-old PRD was badly weakened by internal divisions. Last year it even lost the gubernatorial elections in Michoacan, its bastion of strength. But the oil well occupations are reunifying it and giving prominence to a new charismatic leader, Lopez Obrador, who could well win the PRD presidency this summer.

On the other hand, Zedillo's image as a new kind of Mexican president, willing to offer the negotiator's handshake instead of the authoritarian's iron fist, has been badly tarnished. Inexplicably, he also allowed the Attorney General's office to seek an arrest warrant for Lopez Obrador who was already bloodied in a confrontation with soldiers. A jailed Lopez Obrador is the last thing the government wants or needs.

The message of Tabasco's turbulence is the same as Chiapas' peasant rebellion or, for that matter, city hall takeovers in other states: as urgently as Mexico needs economic change, it needs political change as well.