SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico, June 21 (Reuters) – Mexico’s Zapatista rebel group is ready to take “a new step in the struggle” and consult with members on the future of its 11-year fight for Indian rights, leader Subcomandante Marcos said on Tuesday.

Marcos did not say what the rebels’ new direction might be, only that members would be free to decide whether to follow the path chosen by the majority.

The group “is proposing to its sympathizers, who make up the supreme command of our movement, a new step in the struggle,” Marcos said in a statement.

Last weekend, he criticized the leftist front-runner for next year’s presidential election, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, for betraying the left, in a possible sign the Zapatistas might aspire to mainstream politics.

But rights workers close to the Zapatistas, also known by their Spanish-language acronym EZLN, said the rebels would not try to form a political party or give up arms.

The EZLN announced on Monday it was grouping fighters in bases, suspending their radio station and pulling political officers out of villages in the southern state of Chiapas.

Marcos, who became an anti-globalization icon in the mid-1990s hidden behind a ski mask, said the alert was a defensive move to protect the group from the military while it held internal consultations.

“All Zapatistas are now morally free to follow or not the EZLN in the next stage being considered, if it is approved by the majority,” he said.

Government spokesman Ruben Aguilar said on Tuesday that Chiapas was calm despite the rebels’ alert.

The then-unknown Zapatistas shocked Mexico and the world when they emerged shooting from the jungle on New Year’s Day 1994 to fight for Indian rights.

There have been no clashes for years and the pipe- smoking Marcos has even begun a new part-time career as a crime author, co-writing the novel “Uncomfortable Deaths.”

Another statement from the Zapatista leadership on Tuesday signaled a pessimistic tone.

It said the rebel command was “in conditions to continue directing the Zapatista struggle even if it lost part or all of its known leadership through imprisonment, death or forced disappearance.”

ELECTIONS

Rights activists in Chiapas said the rebels were preparing strategy before the presidential election in July 2006.

“What they are going to define is the way of guaranteeing the continuity of their project in the face of a different scenario with a new government,”
said Michael Chamberlin of the Fray Bartolome de las Casas rights group.

He said the Zapatistas would not disarm.

President Vicente Fox vowed during campaigning for the 2000 election to negotiate an end to the Zapatista conflict “in 15 minutes” but the issue fell off the radar screen.

The rebels suffered a serious setback in 2001 when Congress watered down an Indian-rights law the Zapatista leadership had set as a condition for returning to peace talks.

On Monday, Marcos said political officers who worked in Zapatista-run local administrations, known as “good- government councils,” were going into hiding.

Local officials in San Cristobal de las Casas said the Zapatista stronghold village of Oventic 25 miles (40
km) away was almost abandoned.

They showed a video of the village deserted on Monday night after the alert.

“Closed Due To Red Alert” read a sign above a rebel headquarters there. Only a handful of the village’s several hundred people remained. (Additional reporting by Lorraine Orlandi)

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