" Therefore, according to this declaration of war, we give our military forces ... the following orders: First: Advance to the capital of the country, overcoming the Mexican Federal Army, protecting in our advance the civilian population and permitting the people in the liberated area the right to freely and democratically elect their own administrative authorities. "

— from the Zapatista Declaration of War

December 31, 1993

Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas, Mexico

IT WAS AN incredible claim for a poorly armed movement of Indian women and men to make seven years ago. But this Sunday, March 11, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish acronym) and millions of supporters will arrive at the gates of the National Palace in Mexico City, without having fired a shot since 1994.

Twenty-four masked Zapatista delegates, including the revolutionary organization’s spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, left the jungle in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas on February 24 and are making their way through 12 Mexican states toward Mexico City. Multitudes of Mexicans, indigenous and non-indigenous, have assembled at every stop along the way, and joined the advance on the capital.

The objective, when the caravan reaches Mexico City, is to force the Mexican government to keep a promise it made in 1996 when it signed the San Andrés Accords for indigenous autonomy.

“We’re going to Mexico City to speak with the congressmen and senators to demand compliance with indigenous rights and culture,” says Comandante Mister, a delegate from an indigenous ethnic group known as the Tojolabal, “so that the San Andrés Accords are complied with.”

If the Zapatistas succeed in steering the Mexican Congress to implement this heretofore ineffectual treaty, it could lead to negotiations between the indigenous army and the new government of Mexican president Vicente Fox to end the seven-year conflict between Zapatista rebels and the government in Chiapas.

But Fox is frustrated. In spite of his calls and invitations to meet with Marcos and the Zapatista command, the rebels are bypassing him and going directly to Congress. History may bypass him too; for Fox, the son of ranch owners, it may come down to a question so basic that most world leaders haven’t ever thought about it: how to tell when the rain wants to fall.

Fox isn’t likely to learn that from Texan political consultant Rob Allyn, who produced the Bush campaign’s anti–John McCain attack ads during last year’s GOP primaries. Fox’s political future — the success or failure of his presidency — would be better served by somebody like Don Andrés Vasquez de Santiago, a man who knows something about rain.

DON ANDRÉS was born in 1910, the year of the Mexican revolution led by General Emiliano Zapata. Four summers ago, when he was 87, he trekked 2400 kilometers from his cornfield in San Bartolome, Guanajuato, to the Chiapas highlands, to be with people who made him young again.

There, above the Zapatista rebels’ base camp of Oventik Sakamch’en de los Pobres, he sat on a hill beside his cane, his sombrero, and a gringo a half-century his junior, who was struggling with spoken Spanish. Don Andrés raised his gnarled wooden cane up at the clear afternoon sky and commented to the foreigner, “Quiere llover” — “It wants to rain.”

“You mean it’s going to rain,” his companion tried to correct.

“Yes, it’s going to rain, because it wants to rain,” insisted the octogenarian.

“But I don’t see any clouds,” the younger man replied, constructing a sentence in rudimentary Castilian that probably came out something like, “But clouds not I see, Don Andrés.”

Don Andrés smiled at the gringo’s garbled syntax, patted him on the knee, and reminded him, as if to excuse his twisted tongue, “It’s my second language too!”

“The rain,” continued Don Andrés, speaking slowly and watching the eyes of his companion to make sure he understood, “always comes from over there.” He pointed to the south. “Can you feel the wind? It comes from over there.” He pointed his dark brown workingman’s finger back at the sky, repeating, “It wants to rain.”

Moments later, the clouds attacked from over the hill and doused the encampment, leaving at least one very wet gringo scratching his head, trying to remember the lesson of how to tell when it “wants to rain.”

FEBRUARY 28, 2001: Don Andrés was still walking with the Zapatistas and with the Indigenous National Congress, of which he is the eldest member. That night, he and his cane were in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, north of Mexico City, to greet 23 indigenous Zapatista comandantes and the rebel army’s Subcomandante Marcos, who on New Year’s morning back in 1994 rose up in arms against the Mexican state, the nation’s neoliberal economic system, and 500 years of conquest.

In this region, known as the Huasteca, February is part of the dry season. The barren hills, more brown than green, wait until May to receive seeds for corn, beans, chilies, peanuts, and other staples. In this state of 230,000 Mexicans, one-fifth of the residents are Indians, many of the same ethnicity as Don Andrés — Otomí-Ñähñu — and most of them, peasant farmers, do not earn even a dollar a day. Those who don’t have access to communal lands must work for the large plantation owners, who treat them and pay them badly. Many of their sons and daughters have already headed north to the United States, in search of work. Without rain, there are no crops. Without crops, there is no money. February is a season of scraping by — a long, hungry anticipation of the water that means life.

This night, 20,000 citizens of this community awaited the Zapatistas’ caravan the way the cracked and baked soil of Ixmiquilpan (an indigenous word that means “barren clouds”) awaited the rain.

A burst of laughter escaped Don Andrés’s parched, dry lips as he watched the crowd arrive to greet the Zapatistas. A younger member of the Indigenous National Congress, Miguel, looked into the old man’s eyes, now with 90 years’ experience of watching the evening skies, as Don Andrés smiled and pointed toward the stars. “Very funny, Don Andrés,” said Miguel, wiping the dust from his face with a red-and-gold kerchief. “I suppose that now you’re going to joke that it wants to rain in the place of the barren clouds.”

Soon after, when the Zapatistas arrived and took the platform to address the assemblage, the skies exploded in thunder, and a torrent came washing down from the dark heavens. Within minutes, everyone was soaked, but the people refused to leave. The farmers were ecstatic.

All night — and probably for years to come — they would repeat: “Marcos brought the rain!”

And there, at the microphone, his black ski mask already soaked, Subcomandante Marcos began to speak, ignoring the torrential downpour.

Marcos criticized the government’s idea of “peace” and repeated what he’d said at every stop during the previous four days and nights through six Mexican states — that the Zapatistas will not be tricked into signing a false peace.

He explained for the umpteenth time the three signals from the government he considers necessary before peace talks can begin. First, the government must comply with the San Andrés Peace Accords, signed in 1996, restoring the rights of indigenous communities to autonomy over their lands and their ways of life. Second, the new government of President Vicente Fox must retire just seven of the 259 military bases that surround the Zapatistas in the jungles and highlands of Chiapas. Thus far, Fox has shut down only four. “Seven,” Marcos insisted, “is a special number for the indigenous. We will not dialogue until all seven are gone.” And third, that the Fox government must release the remaining 53 Zapatista political prisoners. “Then,” said Marcos, “the Zapatistas will negotiate the peace.”

MARCOS AND FOX are the two most commonly spoken names in Mexico today, largely because both men are skilled at using the media to reach the public. But in recent weeks, Marcos and the Zapatistas have begun closing in on Fox. Now they are literally circling Mexico City for a triumphant taking of the giant city square known as the Zócalo on March 11. From there they will launch a citizens’ lobbying campaign at the Congress to implement the San Andrés Accords.

Like Marcos, Fox often uses the word “freedom.” During last year’s Mexican presidential campaign, the conservative National Action Party (PAN) candidate compared himself to Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa, and called for an end to 70 years of one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Fox also boasted that he could end the Chiapas conflict with the Zapatistas “in 15 minutes.”

But 90 days after taking office, President Fox has been unable even to bring the Zapatistas to the negotiating table. He recently visited the editorial board of the left-wing national daily La Jornada, begging the journalists to persuade Marcos to meet with him, but to no avail. And since a February 16 visit by US president George W. Bush, Fox has hardened his public stance toward the Zapatistas — although State Department press secretary Richard Boucher insists that the US does not meddle in Mexican affairs. “Poor Mexico,” as a popular saying goes, “so far from God, so close to the United States.”

Realistically, it’s no secret that the bankers, stockbrokers, agribusiness barons, and, above all, petroleum interests are not thrilled with the concept of local autonomy — “home rule,” as it is called in some regions of the States — in the Mexico that has had them salivating for profits since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994. Autonomy was not part of the business community’s plan to market Mexico’s natural and human resources under free trade.

Although he welcomes this week’s Zapatista march as a gesture toward peace, Fox, himself a former Coca-Cola executive, has increasingly criticized the Zapatistas for placing conditions on the dialogue. The rookie Mexican president still leaves 53 innocent Indians in prison as political hostages, while continuing to talk about “peace” and “freedom.”

AT IXMIQUILPAN, Subcomandante Marcos, standing in the pouring rain that turned the dust below to mud, leaned into the microphone and explained, “There is another difference between their freedom and our freedom. For them, freedom is the freedom to buy or sell. They want us, we who are already screwed, to be able to buy and sell as well. The only things that we can sell are our blood and our hands, and even still we have to sell them very cheaply. This is not the freedom that we want, not the freedom that they tell us means that somebody can put up a little store when he wants. It’s not the freedom to buy what we want. In sum, it’s not neoliberalism that we want.”

“The freedom that we want is our own,” continued the fortysomething Marcos, who entered the Chiapas jungle in 1984 and remained there, clandestinely, for a decade until the 1994 uprising. “It is the freedom to choose and to decide — being well-informed. To be able to choose and to decide who governs us and which plans of the government we accept, and which ones we refuse. It is being able to choose and to decide how they are going to govern us, how they are going to organize us, what kind of work is most important. The power to choose and decide, for example, to listen to what a group of masked outlaws come to say from the Lacandon Jungle.”

On that fifth night of the two-week Chiapas–to–Mexico City caravan — marking Marcos’s first appearance outside Chiapas in seven years; some say his first trip out of the state in 17 years — even his trademark Sherlock Holmesian pipe was soaked. “I’m going to be quiet now because the longer I speak, the more it rains,” he said.

But the mass of supporters would not let Marcos stop. “¡Duro! ¡Duro!” they chanted, as if to say, Be tough, be strong. The subcomandante continued, “There is a difference between their justice and our justice. Their justice is a prostitute, and beyond that, she is very poorly paid. Let’s see: how many bankers are in jail? How many industrialists? How many plantation owners? How many landlords ... ? No, sir, the prisons are filled with poor people — with Indians, with workers, with employees. That’s their justice — justice from above that has a price.... And he who cannot pay it becomes the crime. Our justice is for everyone according to his work. He who works more can receive.... The justice that we, the indigenous, practice is much more advanced than the justice that they offer.”

SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS is many things to many people: outlaw, hero, hated or beloved gunman, writer, sex symbol, feared warrior, a mestizo who learned from the indigenous, a white man who manipulates the indigenous, author of children’s stories, crazy poet, priest figure, a revolutionary in counterrevolutionary times. Sometimes Marcos seems to be all things to all people. A masked face — “a mirror,” Marcos likes to say — in which millions of Mexicans and a good many citizens of the world see reflected their hopes and fears.

Perhaps above all, Marcos is an educator, a student of the indigenous turned teacher to a nation, who has painstakingly — step by step, communiqué by communiqué — created a new vision of Mexico from ancient indigenous code. In the seven years following the Zapatista uprising, Marcos would sometimes be silent for long periods of time. Months would pass without a word. The media would spread rumors that he was dead, or ill, or taken prisoner by his own rebel army. The silences became unbearable even to his adversaries. Then suddenly Marcos would return, crackling like the lightning bolts above him on the rainy night in Ixmiquilpan, to speak and write again. In this over-mediated world, Marcos has developed a way to break through the banal consumer frenzy of the mass media. Through that media, without spending a peso on advertising, he has educated much of a generation in the art of social struggle. Recently, Fox himself cited Marcos as an example of “successful use of the Internet.” Today people in every corner of Mexico, and indeed many parts of the world, share the vision of the Zapatista rebels.

The indigenous of Chiapas, of all of Mexico, have tried to speak for centuries, tried to make themselves heard by the governments and economic forces that exploited them and their lands, that kept them poor and uneducated, without access to basic medicines or sufficient food. Before 1994, the simple act of speaking out, or organizing a union or a farmer’s organization or a student movement, led hundreds each decade to prison cells, torture chambers, disappearance, and assassination.

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation had to take up arms to establish the platform from which they speak today, and, more significantly, from which they are heard. In the pre-dawn of that New Year’s Day, seven winters ago, the Zapatistas took four Chiapas cities and then slipped back into the jungles and highlands, from which they shot ideas, instead of bullets, into the Mexican and international psyches.

Latin America’s most legendary guerrilla fighter, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, once said that the United States should not be afraid of communists in Latin America. “What they should fear,” said Comandante Che, “is a communications expert.”

The long-overdue Mexican national movement for indigenous rights and culture, as Portuguese Nobel Prize–winning author José Saramago recently commented to President Fox, is now “unstoppable.”

Still, every day, the Mexican press spits out the desperate words of bankers, chamber-of-commerce presidents, politicians, columnists, and other men of power trying in vain to discredit the indigenous movement. “Marcos is not for the indigenous,” these educated men who have not spent a night on the mountain claim of the man who has spent 17 years on indigenous lands. “His goal is national.” The indigenous, and much of Mexican civil society, are not bothered by the specter of a national movement. Indeed, they are excited, mobilized. And today they have joined the Zapatista march to the heart of their country.

The 15-day Zapatista caravan to Mexico City finds the indigenous movement at its hour of truth: the conquered on the verge of conquest. It is a defining, transcendent moment in this movement, similar to Gandhi’s Salt March for the independence of India from British rule or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Ten percent of all Mexicans speak an indigenous language. Most Mexicans have some indigenous blood. Over the past seven years, people without any apparent indigenous roots have begun to think more like the indigenous of Chiapas, and less like the TV newsmen.

“Who are the indigenous?” asked Marcos in Tehuacan, Puebla, on February 27. “The indigenous are we who remember.”

OVER THEIR seven years of struggle, the Zapatistas have inspired 50 of the nation’s 56 ethnic groups to unify in the form of the Indigenous National Congress. Their number-one priority: that the government comply with the San Andrés Accords and recognize the indigenous customs and ways of life as rights under the federal constitution. This movement will not allow another treaty with the Indians — this one signed five years ago — to be broken by the government.

On February 24, 20,000 masked Zapatistas flooded the streets of San Cristóbal, Chiapas, to send off the 24 delegates to Mexico City. On February 25, 10,000 citizens in Latin America’s largest indigenous city, Juchitán, Oaxaca, greeted the Zapatistas, chanting, “You are not alone!” On February 26, 30,000 awaited them in the city of Oaxaca, in a city square so loud with screams of joy — “¡Marcos! ¡Marcos! ¡Maaaarcooooos!” — that if you closed your eyes you might have thought this was the arrival of the Beatles on American soil.

The caravan that represents the realization of the Zapatistas’ long-awaited advance on the Mexican capital has been organized and orderly. It moved like a cross-country motorcade — the bus that carried the Zapatista command, escorted by police on motorcycles, leading a convoy of cars and more buses carrying the media, international observers, civilians, and even filmmaker Oliver Stone. At each stop en route, throngs of supporters mobbed the Zapatista bus, anxious just to touch it.

In the daylight of February 27, multitudes greeted the Zapatistas in Orizaba, Veracruz, and Tehuacan, Puebla. At all these stops the indigenous ethnic groups along the way passed the bastón, the cane that signifies political-military command, to the Zapatista comandantes. (In Oaxaca, the cane was specifically passed to the four female Zapatista comandantas, named Susana, Yolanda, Fidelia, and Esther.) On the night of February 28, the seven indigenous ethnic groups, comprising one million of the state of Puebla’s five million residents, were met by tens of thousands of young people — 50,000 poblanos in all — filling the city square, singing the Zapatista anthem, “Vamos, vamos, vamos, adelante” — “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go forward ... ”

“The San Andrés Accords will be ratified,” Marcos told the mainly indigenous crowd earlier that day in Tehuacan, “so that Mexico will never be lost again.”

From Hidalgo, in the heart of the Huasteca, where the Zapatistas had brought the refreshing rain of “our freedom” the previous week, the Zapatistas drove toward the state of Querétaro. As the caravan entered that state, a bus carrying observers lost its brakes and hit several vehicles, including the Zapatista bus. A number of civilians were injured and one of the motorcycle escorts was killed. The caravan’s itinerary was suspended for the day, and the Zapatistas issued a statement that they lamented the death of the officer.

The following day, the caravan continued through Fox’s home state of Guanajuato and on to a three-day Indigenous National Congress in Michoacán with 10,000 participants to organize the final advance upon Mexico City and Congress. From there, the caravan planned to move on to the states of Mexico, Guerrero, and Morelos, to follow in the footsteps of Zapata’s own march into the capital, under the watchful growl of El Popo, the volcano.

By the time it gets there, according to the announcements of hundreds of social organizations of farmers, workers, and students, an unprecedented mass of people, including more than 1000 tractors and horsemen, will have joined the caravan. “Advance to Mexico City,” the Zapatista Command ordered its troops when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1993. On March 11, Marcos and the Zapatistas and millions of Mexican supporters will be at the gates of the national palace, an audacious promise kept.

WHETHER THE Mexican government keeps the promise it made when it signed the San Andrés Accords will decide whether the long Chiapaneco drought of war and conflict will be replaced by the rain of a new era of peaceful struggle for democracy, justice, and freedom — an order wherein the indigenous and the non-indigenous can work peacefully “to choose and to decide” what constitutes “our freedom.”

President Vicente Fox, who also embodies the hopes and aspirations of much of Mexico, has three major challenges as he takes the helm of this nation of 96 million people: improving an economy that is chained to the rise and fall of foreign economies, restoring public safety in this era of the US-imposed drug war that fuels the violent narco, and bringing about peace in Chiapas.

The last is the most attainable — perhaps the only attainable — goal among the top three on the national agenda. If Fox can’t steer the San Andrés Accords through a Congress dominated by his party, his long drought will have only just begun. Fox may find himself compared more to Aleksandr Kerensky, the Russian leader who raised the expectations of his nation, failed to meet them, and was swiftly overcome by the communist revolution, than to Nelson Mandela. And the Chiapas conflict could explode nationwide. One need only look at the multitudes who have come to greet Marcos and the Zapatista Command on their journey to the center of the country: the energy of youth, the experience of social fighters, the indigenous heart of Mexico, together as never before, will not allow this mission to fail. If Fox does not match his words of “peace” and “freedom” with concrete acts, his six-year term will soon turn into a nightmare not much different from those of his immediate predecessors Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto Zedillo, both now disgraced and hated by their own nation.

Don Andrés is an elder in an Indigenous National Congress made up of cultures that still respect elders. For almost his entire life, he has been a social fighter. He has watched presidents come and go like dry seasons. Today he walks alongside hundreds of thousands of Mexican youths on the Zapatista Caravan, and alongside 24 masked guerrillas who, more than any politician or political party, made the defeat of the ruling PRI possible after 71 years. Don Andrés, too, is advancing on Mexico City.

Don Andrés, his bastón tapping the earth on this long march for “our freedom,” peers over the mass of young people who now walk with him and with the indigenous movement, and says to the president, “It wants to rain.”

Former Boston Phoenix political reporter Al Giordano publishes the Narco News Bulletin — www.narconews.com — from Latin America. This week, Narco News is publishing daily online coverage of the Zapatista Caravan in Mexico. Al Giordano can be reached by e-mail at narconews@hotmail.com.