While the media-savvy Zapatistas in the Mexican state of Chiapas continue to hold foreigners spellbound, southern Mexico is confronting a far larger challenge: how to overcome the generalized lawlessness that has spread through the dirt-poor region in the past year. The resignation of Guerrero governor Ruben Figueroa amidst a mounting scandal over last year's massacre by state police of 17 peasants is a small sign of hope that grassroots leadership might turn the lawlessness around. PNS reporter Kent Paterson spent four weeks researching this story which he wrote with PNS associate editor Andrew Reding, who directs the North America Project of the World Policy Institute.

Last week's forced resignation of Ruben Figueroa, governor of the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, is the first sign of hope in southern Mexico's otherwise grim political landscape increasingly marked by electoral fraud, assassination and generalized lawlessness.

Last June, in a conversation with the mayor of a small town north of Acapulco, Governor Figueroa warned he would have to take action against a group of peasant activists known as the Campesino Organization of the Southern Sierra (OCSS). The following day, state police lying in ambush at the crossroads of Aguas Blancas opened fire on a truck bringing peasants down from the mountains to the market town of Coyuca de Benitez. They killed seventeen of them, and, according to eyewitnesses, executed the wounded while a state helicopter flew overhead.

Governor Figueroa denied any involvement, despite the statement he had made a day earlier to Maria de la Luz Nunez, municipal president of the neighboring town of Atoyac de Alvarez. To substantiate his innocence, the governor released a videotape of the incident, which he claimed showed the police had responded in self-defense, after peasants had threatened them with machetes.

The case was referred to the National Human Rights Commission, which uncovered two damning facts. First, the Commission had previously recommended the removal of Gov. Figueroa's state police chief, for excessive use of force on other occasions. Yet Figueroa stood by his deputy even after the Aguas Blancas massacre. Furthermore, experts easily determined that the videotape had been edited before being made available to the press. There was, moreover, strong circumstantial evidence implicating the governor. His father, who had been kidnapped by guerrillas while governor of the state in the 1970s, had later responded by massacring villagers. It was no secret that the younger Figueroa feared a zapatista-inspired uprising in Guerrero, and wanted to lay down the law, Guerrero-style.

Mexico's major opposition parties called for impeachment. But President Zedillo, who is godfather to the governor's children, steadfastly refused to intervene, insisting he must respect states' rights. While such legal niceties might make sense in a country accustomed to the rule of law, in Mexico they are interpreted to mean what they have always meant: that the president is standing by an influential member of his party, and citing the law only because it is convenient.

Whenever the law is seen as nothing more than a tool for the preservation of the interests of an unaccountable few, it loses its authority. Within weeks of the Aguas Blancas massacre, armed peasants ambushed a state police convoy, slaughtering five policemen. Unable to trust the police and the law, civizens turned to vigilantism. The police responded in kind. In the months since the massacre, at least seven members of the OCSS have been murdered. So have activists of the state's major opposition party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Last October, Marta Morales, a prominent physician and PRD leader, was gunned down in Tecpan de Galeana. On New Year's Day, PRD activist Gildardo Morantes was shot to death.

With the killings undermining Zedillo's pledge that no one will remain above the law, the president responded by appointing a special prosecutor. But in a country that has been ruled by a single party for two-thirds of a century, and in which no prosecutor has ever dared offend his boss, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Last week, the special prosecutor exonerated Governor Figueroa.

Two days before the verdict, however, someone anonymously slipped a copy of the unedited Aguas Blancas videotape to a Mexico City television station. The tape, which was telecast nationwide, demonstrated that the police had murdered unarmed peasants without provocation, evidently as a political message from the governor. Though the tape did not sway the special prosecutor, it swayed the nation.

President Zedillo had no choice but to ask the Supreme Court to review the case. When a still unrepentent Figueroa responded by busing supporters into city squares to demonstrate against the president's decision, he threatened to undermine Zedillo's already shaky authority. Zedillo asked for his resignation.

Though no testament to President Zedillo's commitment to political reform, the resignation of Governor Figueroa is a tribute to the development of civil society in Mexico. That same development is evident in municipal efforts to make police forces more accountable. In Atoyac, the mayor who first disclosed the governor's intentions has documented at least 21 cases of murder, kidnapping and arbitrary detention alleged to involve the State Judicial Police and the Motorized Police between 1993 and 1995. In a campaign that is gathering support from municipalities throughout the state, Mayor Nunez is proposing that only well-respected localr esidents with clean records be allowed to police communities. Only by restoring a sense of confidence in the rule of law, Nunez insists, will peace and economic development return to Guerrero and the other troubled states of southern Mexico.