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Published: October 30th 2007
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After the twelve hour bus ride from Oaxaca I arrived at San Cristobal de las Casas at around 7:00 AM and could immediately feel the unique ambience that was so characteristic of the city. San Cristobal is at the heart of one of the most deeply rooted indigenous areas in Mexico, surrounded by dozens of villages where old customs coexist with elements of modernity, thus it is also Mexico's poorest state. Also, San Cristobal is one of the four cities that the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) took in its uprising in 1994.
One of the things that really attracted me to the city was the array of social events that took place. One night I attended a documentary/discussion about the situation with the US/Mexican border. The film included the story of a women who somehow survived one month in the deserts of Mexico with a broken leg who basically crawled across the border with very little food and water. The movie basically talked about how Mexicans have no other option in order to feed their children besides risking their lives crossing the border to the US (which many Mexicans view as this great Utopian nation where they will
finally be able to give their families all of the basics to survive- food, shelter, clothes etc) and how the last thing the Mexicans who put themselves at risk want is to be away from their families and the country they are so proud of. The movie also talked about how the US changed its border to make it more difficult for Mexicans crossing the desert terrain but this did little to deter them from crossing due to their desperate situation. As I looked around the room while the movie was playing, many of the audience members were in tears and I'm sure could clearly relate to the stories in the movie. The movie also did a segment about the minutemen and how they fooled the US media into thinking that they were somehow being patriotic when in reality many of their members were already members of hate and white supremacist groups. I was just glad to see that the movie showed other US citizens that supported the Mexican point of view. After the movie there was a discussion and one kid mentioned that next august he was starting a group that helps Mexicans cross the border during the hottest
days of the summer- July and August of 08. He will basically do things like provide food and water to those on the last steps of their trek. The website is supposed to be up soon, however at the time of this writing it was not completed (www.mobilityisahumanright.com).
Overall, the movie was very well received by the audience and made a great case for the Mexican point of view. My view on the situation is that if the US is really concerned about Mexicans crossing the border illegally then they should do something to resolve the root of the problem- 3rd world poverty. No one would risk their lives crossing the border and leaving their families behind if they could make a decent living in their own country. The US should take a leadership role in this fight instead of building walls- who knows one day the US might really need help from our neighbors to the south and I would not be surprised if they were to just let us suffer. As they say, what goes around, comes around. Ok, so thats my two cents on the situation.
I enjoyed this film so much that I decided
to see another movie the following night, a documentary on the Zapatista (EZLN) movement- which really sparked my interest in the group and influenced my decisions to visit a few of their pueblos around Chiapas to learn more. The Zapatistas are a group of poor indigenous people who train at night in the jungles of Chiapas (guerrillas basically) and fight for pueblo rights in Mexico (who are too often forgotten in the political arena- no health clinics as many children die of curable disease, no schools past the first grade and earn less than one third of what the average mexican makes). The Zapatistas went public on January 1, 1994, the day that the NAFTA agreement went into effect. The initial goal of the EZLN was to instigate a revolution in all of Mexico but as this did not happen, they used their uprising as a platform to call the world's attention to their movement to protest the signing of NAFTA, which the EZLN felt would only intensify the gap between the rich and the poor in Chiapas. The film showed some graphic footage of the massacre that took place in Ocosingo's market and showed how the Mexican military killed
off many Zapatistas in only twelve days after their initial infiltration in Chiapas. The film also showed the images of the Mexican army in what it thought were Zapatista zones forcing the indigenous people out of their homes and land- basically trying to intimidate them into keeping quite about their situation.
I had originally intended to cross the border to Guatemala after visiting San Cristobal, however after seeing these powerful movies and after all the fun I had in the city, I was not ready to leave Mexico just yet and decided to do more exploring around Chiapas.
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elias
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pobresito...
Sorry to hear you are falling for leftist propaganda in Mexico. I'm Mexican, and I'm sick of foreigners thinking the rest of Mexico and the U.S. is wrong for the "oppresion" of those damm indians. To hell with them. They choose to live in poverty, screw them!