Mexico said on Sunday the door had reopened for peace talks with Zapatistas after the rebels pledged to withdraw troops from roadblocks and to stop charging travelers to pass through their territories.
Interior Minister Santiago Creel said the promise made late on Saturday by rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos at an Indian gathering in the highland village of Oventic in Chiapas state was an olive branch for a stalled peace dialogue to restart.
"Let's make this event an opportunity to relaunch new initiatives with an open mind, with new ways to bring us together and to talk," Creel told local radio.
But no timetable was set for talks between the government and the Zapatista rebels, who rose up in arms 10 years ago seeking greater autonomy and indigenous rights.
Rebels and entire families of Tzotzil Indians converged on Oventic for a three-day Indian jamboree at which they launched self-proclaimed Good-Government Committees empowered to raise "brotherly taxes" -- 10 percent of aid grants given to villages from nongovernmental organizations.
Interior Minister Creel said he had no problem with the indigenous committees, which some observers complained were formed outside the constitution.
"We are going to respect these forms [of government] and moreover we think that they can have a good, compatible stance in the framework of the constitution and [international] treaties which Mexico has signed," Creel said.
The Zapatista National Liberation Army, or EZLN from its initials in Spanish, burst onto the scene in January 1994, taking over towns in Chiapas in clashes that killed around 150 people. They have rarely used violence since.
The Zapatistas, who take their name from early 20th century Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, control dozens of impoverished Indian villages in the jungles and mountains of southern Mexico near the Guatemalan border.
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