Clash Raises Fears of New Unrest in Mexico’s South : Chiapas: Opposition group says it will try to seize more town halls. Government accuses it of fomenting violence.

MEXICO CITY — As police and protesters prepared to bury their dead Wednesday after an attempt by peasants to seize a town hall in Chiapas left six dead, government and opposition groups angrily accused each other of escalating a conflict now poised to ignite unrest throughout that southernmost state and in neighboring Tabasco.

Declaring Chiapas ungovernable in the aftermath of the brutal clash in remote Chicomuselo early Tuesday, the state’s self-proclaimed “government in rebellion” indicated that it intends to repeat the attempted seizure in dozens of towns throughout the troubled state. And it warned of heavily armed paramilitary groups, backed by ruling-party politicians, who plan to block the takeovers, which it said will expand the violence and chaos.

The state’s embattled elected government countered by accusing the opposition of staging a violent provocation that could snowball.

Gov. Eduardo Robledo Rincon’s ruling-party government blamed opposition leader Amado Avendano, who created the rebel government after losing to Robledo in elections last August, for instigating the armed clash. And Robledo’s government warned that Tuesday’s confrontation was part of a plan to destabilize the state.

Protesters have set up human barricades in oil-rich Tabasco that are paralyzing the state’s oil industry and blocking a new state government from taking office. Government sources in Mexico City expressed concern that Tuesday’s bloodshed appeared to be part of a strategy to compound the nation’s economic and political crises.

As Mexico’s economic markets plummeted for the third straight day before calming somewhat Wednesday, officials stressed that it was a peaceful insurrection by the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas on Dec. 19 that detonated the country’s economic crisis.

Since then there has been massive capital flight and a significant devaluation of the nation’s currency.

Just weeks into his six-year term, President Ernesto Zedillo temporarily defused the Chiapas conflict, using military might and political concessions to bring the Zapatistas to the negotiating table just before the first anniversary of their New Year’s Day uprising, which left at least 145 people dead.

But senior government officials said Wednesday that the bloodshed in Chicomuselo was a chilling indicator that the Zapatistas have found allies in Avendano and his supporters, who they fear will continue to attack government targets while the Zapatista leadership publicly talks peace.

Official and opposition versions of the latest flash point in Mexico’s extreme south varied sharply. But by all accounts, it was brutal.

In a written statement released Wednesday, Robledo’s state attorney general, Jorge Enrique Hernandez Aguilar, asserted that the peasants, many clad in ski masks that are a Zapatista trademark, attacked the Chicomuselo town hall in force just after 2 a.m., using women and children as shields.

The prosecutor conceded that police opened fire, killing at least two peasants and two other men he described only as “citizens.” But he asserted that the peasants had set upon the police with machetes, “savagely and primitively” torturing and killing the commander and his deputy.

“The state attorney general openly condemns and categorically accuses Amado Avendano as the one responsible for these events,” he declared. “We know that what is happening in Chiapas corresponds to a plan that they intend to repeat in other towns.

Avendano’s rebel “government” had a vastly different version. The peasants, it asserted, were engaged in “a peaceful activity of taking over the town hall” when they were savagely gunned down by the police.

The order to open fire on the peasants, the rebels said, came directly from Gov. Robledo. They said the ensuing bloodshed “proved the incapacity of the usurper to establish any semblance of government in the state.”

A lawyer, newspaper publisher and longtime crusader for peasant and indigenous Mexican rights, Avendano contends that Robledo won the election through traditional ruling-party fraud.

Senior government officials conceded that they are deeply concerned about the possibility of escalating populist violence even if the Zapatista National Liberation Army decide to extend a unilateral cease-fire scheduled to end today.