two towns rather than in the vast green hills above excites suspicions – at least those of a veteran reporter who covered the northern California drug wars of the seventies. Not a few Zapatista supporters suggest the dope was sown there as a pretext for military incursion.

In response to accusations of complicity with the narco trade, the Zapatistas of Aldama respond that, though they are vehemently opposed to the cultivation of marijuana, they did not chop down the stalks because they were afraid of retaliation from the PRI paramilitaries. Down the valley in Cotzilman, one Zapatista sympathizer, who destroyed several stray mota bushes he says were grown by local PRIistas, had fifty of his tomato plants chopped down in revenge.

The cultivation of marijuana in the conflict zone hasReportedly, marijuana is plentiful inside Cerro Hueco.

Drugs have always been a sub-text to the conflict in Chiapas. Cocaine from Central America crosses into this southernmost border state at the boomtown of Tapachula on the Pacific coast; and deep in the eastern jungle, where small planes are said to bombard outlying villages with sacks of the powdery drug. It is then smuggled, along with precious hardwoods, through the Tabasco cities of Palenque and Villahermosa, and north to the U.S.

And while native drug crops (marijuana and opium poppy) are grown in the extreme west of the state in the Chimilapas and in the central valleys, drug cropping here in the highlands and the jungle is a recent phenomenon. According to anthropologist Andres Aubry, plantation-size drug cropping was an open secret