CHIAPAS 4: ZAPATISTAS

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¨The elements of the past are still here, as alive as phantoms and wondering souls...the subsoil of Chiapas is full of murdered Indians, petrified forest, abandoned cities, and oceans of petroleum.¨ So said Mexican anthropologist Garcia de Leon back in the 80´s.

Even earlier, author John Stienback had also traveled to Mexico, and predicted, ¨It is more than probable that with more time emiliano Zapata will emerge as the great and pure man of Mexico and will take a parallel position to the Virgin of Guadalupe as the human patron of the freedom of mexico.¨

While Zapata hasn´t yet quite achieved the status Steinbeck predicted, Zapata´s ghost and legacy are quite alive here.

On January 1, 1994 they burst out of their jungle communities and declared to a surprised mexico that there was unfinished business to be taken care of.

Zapata´s slogan during the Revolution was, ¨Tierra y Libertad!¨ Land and Fredom! And this is one of the slogans adopted by the new Zapatistas.

This will be my most political entry about Chiapas. Those who would care to focus on my travel sights and experiences feel free to skip over this one. Those who are interested in this topic or know more than I please comment.

Some of you may know about the Zapatista uprising over the last decade and the iconic personality of the masked and pipe-smoking Subcomandante Marcos through the media or independent research. I had known about them only in the abstract and had seen the images of the ski-masked EZLN members (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), which are found all over here. My first exposure to the Zapatista realities were 2-fold, both en route from Palenque to San Cristobal.

First, as the bus slowed for the numerous curves climbing up Los Altos, the highlands of chiapas out of the lowland rainforests, I saw a sign that said Zapatista Autonomous Zone and a school with a mural with EZLN themes. Further on down the road I had fallen asleep. When I awoke, the bus was stopped at a military checkpoint, and a soldier boarded and walked toward me and me alone. He asked for my credenciales, and I showed him my passport and licence. Apparently satisfied I wasn´t a troublemaker or a zapatista sympathizer, he said nothing and turned around and got off the bus.

I would come to learn that Chiapas is the most militarized of all the states and this solder of the Mexican army was one of 10,000´s in the past decade who would be here to ¨keep the peace¨.

There are mixed messages. There certainly is not universal support here... for example the Mayan-Catholic Chamulans are more aligned with the old PRI than the Zapatistas. Some younger locals, including a nice drunk mexican with a Spongebob Sqaurepants T-shirt (Spongebob is very popular in mexico actually) who gave me a lecture that punk is revolution, have declared their support of Zapatismo in glowing terms. Others don´t have an opinion one way or another. Polls have shown strong support throughout the country. Back in the 90´s, 100,000´s showed up in the zocalo in mexico city to protest the governments military movements in chiapas. They understood instinctively the issues that the Zapatistas were raising and were captivated by Marcos and his image and humor and rhetoric.

Others expressed displeasure including an expat who owns the bookstore who told me about how whe knows some friends who lost there ranches and livelihoods because Zapatistas took them over and ran them out. As Graham Green writes about something very different: ¨It´s typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps--violence in favor of an ideal lost and the violence just going on.¨

To understand the conflict in Chiapas it is necessary to understand some things about both recent history and colonial history. I think there are at least 5 things that are factors that made the uprising inevitable. In chronological order: 1)500 years of conflict and oppresson since conquest, 2)neglect by the federal and state govermnents of indians, 3)the 1988 election, widely believed to be fraud and stolen by the PRI party once again, 4)the revoking of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, which protected communal indian lands (ejidos) from sale and privatization, and 5)the effects of US neoliberal economic policy, and its proposed NAFTA.

Number 4 was part of the provision to the NAFTA treaty and January 1, 1994 was the day it was to go into effect, thus the day Zapatistas arrived with guns and masks in San Cristobal and other Chiapaneco towns and declared, ¨NAFTA is death!¨

A good resource for EZLN viewpoints see the Zapatista Reader. On Marcos view of globalization, see his essay, The Fourth World War Has Begun. A summary of his points: He argues that the logic and force global markets dictated by banks and the world trade organization and trade treaties have undermined local democracies and freedoms. He argues that corporations run the show and politicians have become mere managers for them. Corporations and banks are more powerful than nation-states. He argues that instruments like NAFTA have actually resulted in the net loss of jobs as well as the loss of land for indians and traditional farmers around the world and has driven wages lower for everybody. This is resulted in masses of humanities roving the globe as refugees and immigrants in search of a better life. He argues that local communities can´t protect their own environment or labor laws because the so-called investor´s rights are violated under these treaties. He argues that resources owned by the community as a whole like forests and water are being stolen and polluted.

So what do they want? They don´t want to overthrow the government and take power. Marcos says they want to make their guns useless. Locally they want schools and teachers, they want roads and infrastructure, nationally they want democracy and an end to fraud. In the past 10 years the government has delivered roads. There is a new highway that encircles the Lacondon jungle from here to palenque to the border of GUatemala and back. The cynics say this is less about investing socially and economically than about allowing easier access to extract resources from the forest and for the military to be able to encircle the area and establish checkpoints and keep vigilance. You decide. One effect of these roads has been more trade and more tourists. The tourists both mexican and foreign have brought dollars here but also all that entails.

I saw a film on zapatistas at a local cafe. I was moved by the nonviolent resistance of the women who formed a chain to push the soldiers back. They told them they don´t want or need the military there and asked them why they are persecuting their own citizens. they shouted ¨el pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido!¨over and over again. The people, united, will never be defeated. I heard the same chant in DF during the protests supporting Lopez Obrador .

Some commentators raised the issue of US involvement. The USA was there in the guise of Huey helicopters and 100´s of mexican army officers trained at Ft. Bragg and the School of the Americas. For its part, the business community could only hope for a brutal suppression of such rabble rousers who were crying foul at the world they were attempting to impose upon the colored peoples of the south. For example, Chase Manhattan bank declared in a memo not meant to be public, ¨The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of national territory and of security policy.¨

Straight from the mouth of Mr. CEO, symbolizing what really matters for the global finance masters of the world. And in my view, that pretty much captures in a nutshell USA involvment via the tools of our army, navy, cia, and soa, in every latin american country in the past century or so. It explains how we can ally ourselves with murderous regimes and dictators. Again the past is present...of course we are more subtle, with the WTO and worldbank, and the drug war, but it marches on. There are countless examples in central america, but recently only take for example the venezuela coup of Chavez or Monsanto´s profit in Columbia and elsewhere. (With our taxes too!)

Meanwhile, mexico pretended there was no problem. And while they mobilized troops, there was what some people called admirable retraint in that the army, (armies throughout latin america are notorious for not showing retraint) because the government had to pay attention to both strong domestic witness and international witness. The Zapatistas had invited international human rights observers to the area and even invoked the geneva conventions as well. Some human rights groups documented the politically disappeared and other abuses.

But I suppose what restraint looks like is different whether you are holding the stick or being beat by the stick.

For example: the massacre in the village of Acteal in 1997. The army didn´t do anything...directly. Paramilitaries had been armed (favorite strategy of choice by the pentagon too) and had some good old fun shooting up the place while the army did nothing. The problem was these weren´t armed zapatista rebels, but unarmed praying citizens. Out of the 45 killed, 20 were women, 4 of them pregnant, and 18 were children. They were shot from behind.

You see images of dead, mangled, babies and you are somehow changed.

It was a modern day Wounded knee, 1890 all over again. And the graves to prove it. In fact, the Lakota Sioux in south dakota and other conducted protests and vigils in support of the Acteal victims. They knew about this type of thing all too well.

So the conflict wore on and off during the 90´s and in the past few years. Most has been non-violent actions on the part of the Zapatistas, occasionally heading to Mexico City, drawing a multitude of supporters. Currently it is unclear to me what is going on. The San Andreas accords signed by both parties guaranteed peace and provisions such as recognition of indian language and rights, but the accords had been watered down by legislators and there is brekdown in communication. Marcos has been in the news for calling the election a fraud like Obrador´s camp, even though the two groups haven´t really united.

I have been reflecting on the differences between the USA and Mexico´s relation to the Indian. Take these for what they are worth. While in both countries the Indigenous populations suffered immensely and lost their lives and much of their culture, the arrangement was very different historically and presently.

In the US, native were always a problem to be solved or obstacle to overcome. From the first landing of Puritans, their simply was no place for the natives in their world. With independence from Britain, america still conceived of the indian as Other, and the goddess of manifest destiny rolled right over them. There were basically three strategies: 1)convert them and assimilate them, often forcibly, 2)move them, forcibly, 3)annhilate them.

And we all know the consequences of those options.

Now all those options were also exercised in New Spain, but things worked out differently. As Octavio Paz points out, Spanish Catholicism was syncretistic and able to absorb the other. Anglo-Saxon reformers were exclusivist, contagion was dangerious. In New Spain, the Indians were always considered (and still are) 2nd-class inferiors, but at least they were part of the social and religious order of things (perhaps with the help of Dominicans like Bartolome´de las Casas who argued that they were humans who had souls and therefore deserved the mercy and treatment that christ called for). Their cities and culture was destroyed, but they were given an alternative. Even if you are at the bottom of the caste system, you have and know your place. The catholic church baptized indios into the faith and the Virgen of Guadalupe came and gave her blessing. Nothing on that scale happened in the US.

As a result, when the seeds of independence began to sprout in 19th century Mexico, there were mestizos of indian-spanish blood who were active in organizing against the crown and its representatives. So the indigenous was there at the beginning of the formation of the Mexican identity.

In the US, nothing could be further from the truth. It is only recently that our cultural and political leaders have relucantly looked back over our history and paid tribute and sometimes with a tear, like correcting our textbooks and creating museums in our capitals. But indians have always been Other for Americans, sometimes even to Indians themselves as the result of forced assimilation. That being said, Mexicans also have an ambiguous relationship to their indian identity. Mexican indians have been neglected politically and economically. There has been much historic prejudice. But nonetheless, Mexicans invoke their native blood, they are proud of it, their flag has pre-hispanic symbols of the eagle and snake, their money presents indian heroes, and they put a statue of the last aztec leader Cuatemoc on the main road through mexico city, the Paseo de la reforma...but also Cristopher Columbus.

Is Manifest Destiny is a relic of the 19th century? Too bad for those indians of Jackson´s persidency, we say. But the neoliberal globalization is marching on. Usually the racism so blatant the 19th century is either hidden or not a prime motivator, but there are manifestations of it. I was talking with a Dutch girl the other day about her trip to brazil while listening to a Reggae band. We discussed the Indian population there and some of the problems with clearing of the rainforest. She told me her british friend told her that all of latin america should get rid of all the indians if they REALLY want progress.

Progress, what a seductive goddess you are! Bow down and take the whipping, poor savages!

So far, I have yet to see a masked Zapatista guerilla, but their images are all over the place, from t-shirts to dolls to to button to writings on the wall. Of course, you would probably never see an actual zapatista wear a zapatista t-shirt. These are for intellectuals, artists, middle class students, and tourists. I went to a t-shirt store and asked the girl at the counter about the images on the shirts, even though I knew about them. She was clueless. I asked what the zapatistas wanted.

She didn´t know.

She only knew that--like Che Guevara t-shirts--the images were marketable.

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Photos

Zapatista Autonomous Zone
One of dozens of zapatista communities, with their own schools and facilities. Most are deeper into the Lacondon Jungle or the edges of the Azul Reserve

Masked Zapatista Woman
One Tzotzil mayan woman named Ramona is famous for advocating women´s rights. She died this year of cancer.

City Building
The EZLN soldiers took this over and burned the land title records in January 1994.

Comments

[Alfonso]

Truly insightful!
The most moving and eye opening of all the travel blogs I've read. Bottom line, Mexico needs another uprising like the one at the beginning of the 20th century. Like Marcos, Mexico needs more Zapatas, Carranzas, and Villas. It certainly needs a more equitable distribution of wealth. Mexico can do without having the 3rd Richest man in the world (Carlos Slim Helu), with a net worth of 30 Billion Dollars, while the majority of the people are in poverty. Although I was born and raised in the United States, I've seen enough inequities around the world in my 50 plus years to realize that change is necessary. Thanks again Vagabondvan!!