Mexican Shootout Leaves Bullet Holes and Bitterness

          By JULIA PRESTON

               EL CHARCO, Mexico -- The stucco walls of the two-room
               schoolhouse are gouged with hundreds of bullet holes and stained with
               patterns of dried blood: a handprint that slides downward, a broad
          wash that spills into a thick puddle on the floor.

          These are what remains of a three-hour shootout on Sunday morning at the
          hilltop school between army troops and armed fighters whom the authorities
          have identified as members of a clandestine rebel group, the Popular
          Revolutionary Army. At least 11 civilians were killed, five were wounded
          and 27 people, who were inside the school but survived the army barrage,
          were detained. The army reported no casualties.

          Local officials and Mixtec Indian inhabitants of this drought-scorched
          hamlet have accused the army of using excessive force to subdue about a
          dozen guerrillas who holed up in the schoolhouse along with dozens of
          farming families from the area they had invited to a daylong meeting to
          discuss local problems.

          The incident has reawakened the bitterness that still lingers in the state of
          Guerrero, on Mexico's southern Pacific coast, over the killings of 17 peasant
          farmers by state police on a rural road in 1995.

          But this was a different type of violence. It revealed that the insurgency of
          the Popular Revolutionary Army, known by its initials in Spanish as the
          EPR, has continued to percolate in the mountains of Guerrero even though
          the group has refrained from conspicuous attacks and faded from
          newspaper headlines.

          The group made its first spectacular military appearance on Aug. 28, 1996,
          when it mounted small-scale but coordinated attacks in at least six Mexican
          states. But since then it has engaged only in minor skirmishes with police
          and army troops in isolated rural areas.

          Unlike the Zapatista Indian rebels in the southern state of Chiapas, the EPR,
          which is descended from some of the most radical leftist groups of the
          1980s, has never had support from mainstream Mexicans.

          But in Guerrero, whose rugged mountains have been home to generations of
          rural guerrillas, it has continued to operate. The guerrillas have often been
          welcomed in hamlets like El Charco, where the Indians live on the low end
          of subsistence and expect that the government will treat them at best with
          neglect and at worst with racist violence.

          On Wednesday, four days after the combat in El Charco, open fighting also
          broke out, for the first time in more than three years, between army and
          police troops and Zapatista guerrillas in Chiapas. The long fire fight in the
          Indian community of Chavajeval began after the government forces moved
          in to break up an alternative village government set up by the Zapatistas.

          According to accounts from villagers and the testimony of several prisoners
          to the federal police, the people here did not think it unusual when about a
          dozen masked and armed rebels marched through the hamlet on Saturday
          morning and convened an all-day meeting in the school, attended mainly by
          Indians from other outlying hamlets.

          "The EPR comes here a lot," said a 28-year-old Mixtec woman whose
          adobe hut stands just above the schoolyard. Still frightened by the bloodshed,
          she did not wish to be identified.

          "They always treat us very well, and they teach the young men how to fight
          in case there is a war," she said.

          But the guerrillas committed a surprising error for a group known for its
          attention to security. Apparently overconfident of their safety in a valley
          they had visited many times, they let the farmers who attended the daytime
          meeting spend the night on the cement floor of the main schoolrooms while
          they slept in an annex behind. They did not set up a security perimeter.

          Whether the army troops were on a routine anti-drug patrol, as generals
          have asserted, or received a tip from a pro-government villager, as some
          other residents believe, by the early hours of Sunday hundreds of them had
          surrounded the school. The troops caught the guerrillas while most of them
          were asleep.

          Defense Ministry officials said the troops had repeatedly called on the
          armed fighters to surrender. But the Mixtec woman said she had heard the
          troops shouting, "We're going to kill you all!" Officials of the surrounding
          county said other villagers had told them that the civilians inside called out
          that they were "peaceful people" and had no weapons.

          It remains unclear how the shooting began, but it was thick and dragged on
          until after sunrise. Federal investigators who questioned the prisoners said
          on Wednesday that one of them, a woman who admitted to being an EPR
          military commander, testified under oath that other guerrillas had tried to
          "break the military circle" by charging the army troops.

          The army fed suspicion by closing the hamlet to journalists and human rights
          observers for 24 hours. The federal civilian police said they had found 14
          AK-47 combat rifles in the schoolhouse.

          Guerrilla fighters responded by painting walls and hold fleeting
          demonstrations in at least eight Guerrero towns over the last two days.