Mexico's government estimates the country's newest guerrilla insurgency numbers fewer than 200 fighters, yet it has launched a massive low-intensity war to track them down. The campaign enhances the already growing role of Mexico's military from the countryside to the streets of the capital. PNS correspondent Joel Simon's book on the Mexican environmental crisis, Endangered Mexico, will be published by Sierra Club Books next spring. (Second of three parts on the militarization of Mexico).

MEXICO CITY -- In a move to rout out Mexico's newest leftist guerrillas, the Mexican army has launched a low-intensity counterinsurgency war that promises to bring a prolonged and bloody conflict to the Mexican countryside.

The target of the war is the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR), the country's second guerrilla insurgency which surfaced last June. Pledging to use the full force of the state to track the insurgents down, President Ernesto Zedillo vowed in his Sept. 1 State of the Union address never to negotiate -- a radical departure from the government's approach to Mexico's more moderate insurgents, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas.

Even before the EPR's latest spate of violent attacks on police and military outposts, the Mexican army had deployed throughout a wide area of central and southern Mexico where the rebels were thought to be active. Today, a large portion of Mexico's 150,000 person armed forces are involved in counterinsurgency operations in Oaxaca, Guerrero, Tabasco, and even on the streets of Mexico City.

Even without the counter-insurgency campaign, the army's role has been expanding under Zedillo. Consider the following:

*While there has been almost no recent fighting in Chiapas, tens of thousands of troops are deployed throughout the state, home base of the Zapatista movement. Soldiers permanently control the Lacandon jungle region, the Zapatista stronghold.

*The military has been taking a greater and greater role in anti-drug operations particularly since Mexico's attorney general, Antonio Gozano Garcia, began purging corrupt officers from the federal police force. In August 737 allegedly corrupt judicial police officers were fired, and military checkpoints have been set up across the northern states of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas.

*Even the Mexico City police force has been militarized. In June Zedillo appointed General Enrique Salgado to run the city's notoriously corrupt police force. Salgado promptly fired all police commanders and replaced them with fellow military officers.

This growing role makes many in Mexico uncomfortable. Members of opposition parties have complained that the military presence will intimidate potential voters in upcoming state elections. And as in any country undergoing instability, there are also periodic coup rumors.

But while the Mexican army has been involved in its share of well documented human rights violations -- notably the massacre of student protesters in Mexico City in 1968 and the murder of suspected Zapatista rebels in 1994 -- the military has maintained the respect of large numbers of the population. Mexico's army was born in the aftermath of the 1910 Revolution and the country's most popular president, Lazaro Cardenas, was also a general.

Even as other armies in Latin America launched coups and fought dirty wars against guerrillas in the 1970s and '80s, Mexico's military stayed out of politics and kept its hands relatively clean.

At least one military officer deployed in a counterinsurgency operation in the state of Hidalgo took exception to the use of the term "militarization."

"Militarization is what happened in Chile under Pinochet," said the officer. "The Mexican army is loyal to the president and we're not interfering in civilian matters."