Zapatista Protests Spread Mexico Stock Market, Radio Station Targeted

Demonstrators protesting government policy in the southern state of Chiapas blocked the entrance to the Mexican Stock Exchange on Monday, delaying the start of trading.

Meanwhile, 40 supporters of the leftist Zapatista rebel movement in Chiapas staged a three-hour takeover of a Mexico City radio station.

The protesters blame the government for the Dec. 22 massacre of 45 Indian children, women and men by a paramilitary death squad in the Chiapas hamlet of Acteal.

President Ernesto Zedillo’s government has repeatedly denied any responsibility for the killings and has arrested 46 people, suspected members of a paramilitary gang linked to the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party.

The rebels are protesting stepped-up weapons searches and security crackdowns in Chiapas by the military, which they see as a government effort to cover up its role in the massacre.

At the stock exchange, protesters daubed the building with red paint and posted signs reading: “The power of money has been stained by Indian blood from Chiapas.”

The exchange opened after a 45-minute delay.

The rebel sympathizers who seized Radio Imagen abandoned the building after a scuffle with federal police officers.

The protesters were unable to transmit anything and behaved quietly while inside the building, an employee of the station told The Associated Press.

Mexico City police kept a low profile at both events.

Protesters have been camped out at Mexico City’s Independence Monument, a few blocks from the stock exchange headquarters on the capital’s main thoroughfare, since the massacre.