Roberto Albores sits and chats in his governor's office in Tuxla Gutierrez, the capital of Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas, with all the assurance of a man to the politics born. In the streets he still smiles out from election posters which helped him a few months previously win a seat in the federal chamber of deputies in Mexico City.It is only a few days since President Ernesto Zedillo yanked him unceremoniously out of the chamber and into the state governorship. But as a seasoned member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which has been ruling this country without interruption since 1929, Don Roberto has a calming phrase for everything.His dizzy accession to head one of the government's nightmare areas owes all to the sins of his predecessor, Governor Julio Cesar Ruiz Ferro, sacked by Zedillo in early January. Ruiz Ferro, under the most favourable construction of events, sat idly by as PRI death squads, helped by the army, trained to such a pitch of readiness that they were able to massacre 45 unarmed Indian peasants in the hamlet of Acteal, gathered in a chapel three days before Christmas to pray for peace. There is everything to lead one to suppose that Ruiz Ferro colluded with those wanting to rub out the peasants who had, after all, showed partiality to the local insurgents, the Zapatistas.Ruiz Ferro had to go, so great were the international protests over the Acteal massacre. Albores was there to pick up the hot potato and do his first interview with a foreign reporter.The new governor talks reassuringly about the need for dialogue, not force, as the key to the future. He distances himself from the accusation by the local army commander that a local septuagenarian bishop, Samuel Ruiz, was a Commie up to all sorts of tricks to help the Zapatistas.I take a minibus and hare across mountains and through forests to the nearby city of San Cristobal de las Casas, the epicentre of the Zapatista rebellion and of Don Samuel's holy see. As politicians visit the bishop the local and national press throng around the diocesan offices in the hope of some juicy quotation, particularly today when there is a day of protest, countrywide and abroad, against the Acteal massacre.A few hours after his speech to me about the need for dialogue, Governor Albores's state police have opened fire against unarmed, stone-throwing civilian protesters in the nearby town of Ocosingo. The toll: one young Indian woman dead; a baby and a teenage boy seriously injured. That evening's television brings the madness to our screens.One massacre is a crime; two in a month is unforgivable carelessness. But the PRI is getting old. For years it was subject to little international opprobrium. It may have cooked electoral registers, bought votes and falsified results. Its members may have taken to heart the commandment to vote early and often. But despite all the abuses, the PRI did for long enjoy wide legitimacy: corrupt though it was, it did seem committed to the little man. And it kept a wary eye on the Colossus of the North, the government in Washington which had stolen half Mexico's land in the 19th century.Today it is different. Successive presidents, not least Zedillo's predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, now living in Ireland, chose or were forced to accept globalisation and a closer economic and political relationship with the United States. The PRI seemed to revel in a carnival of corruption as the poor went to the wall. It was no accident that the Zapatistas broke into revolt on the very day that the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) came into force, sealing the fate of many Mexican small businesses subject to competition from US corporations.It is surely dying but there is life in the Old Party yet and the opposition is split down the middle between the right-wing National Action Party and the left-wingers of the Party of Democratic Revolution. But from Chiapas in the south to Rio Grande on the border with the US in the north the writing is on the wall for the PRI.