Come to Chiapas

Part 2 - Why you must come

by Al Giordano

John Kerry, it ought to be obvious why I extend this invitation to you before the other members of the House and Senate whose acquaintances I made in my three years -- '93 through '96 -- as the Boston Phoenix's political reporter, and through my other adventures in journalism.

John, you are a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. You have jurisdiction to investigate, to take testimony. Furthermore, neither you nor Teresa Heinz is a stranger to the life I describe here: John, with your experiences in the jungles of Vietnam; Teresa, with your childhood on an African savanna. Neither one of you is likely to be spooked by this terrain.

Furthermore, Senator, for better and for worse, you have an abiding interest in US foreign policy as it applies to drug control. I certainly don't agree with all your views, but I don't disagree with every single one of them, either. I ask you, as a vocal drug-warrior, to stand up and take responsibility for how US "antidrug" equipment -- helicopters, guns, surveillance devices -- is being used here, not in serious drug-control efforts, but in a civil war waged by the Mexican army against its own indigenous people.

You might even learn a thing or two -- some better, more effective means of preventing substance abuse in the United States, whose demand for drugs, combined with unenforceable legal prohibitions, has destabilized most of Latin America.

You can hardly find a lush, green terrain in this hemisphere where illegal drugs are not farmed and manufactured. But I make a seemingly incredible claim, which you must investigate with your eyes and ears: this Zapatista territory is the most drug-free tropical rain-forest region on earth. It wasn't like that before the rebellion began, in 1994. It is now.

Incredible but true: these highlands are also alcohol-free. Early in the rebellion, the women of Chiapas, through the democratic indigenous decision-making processes of this land, put their feet down: no more drunken men on Saturday nights, on any night. No more domestic battery with booze on the attacker's breath. These are "dry" towns now. The only ones who complain are us visitors, who from time to time descend from the mountains to the cities for beer or tequila.

Each and every time we reenter this village, we consent to having our bags searched and our bodies frisked -- for alcohol, for grass and other drugs. And the thought may occur to you, knowing of certain pleasures about which I am quite "out of the closet" in our own land, how am I doing without the fine pharmacopoeia available in each of these United States? Very well, thank you very much. Perhaps revolution is the only fix on earth that can supplant the pleasures I once knew.

How is it, Senator, that the people who live here can get me to do what all the laws and persecutions of the States could not? Come to Chiapas, learn for yourself. The ways of this land might even have some application here in our own, where the "problem" really lies. For this is not a prohibition imposed from above, but rather a consensus reached democratically from below. The war has created a situation where prime value is placed on alertness.

Nonetheless, the Mexican government and its army have used the drug war as an excuse to put whole communities under siege -- with helicopters and more supplied by "Tío Sam," the US government.

A little more than a year ago, the community I write from -- Oventic Sakamchen de los Pobres, an hour from the city of San Cristóbal -- was molested for three months as the Mexican army stormed through, day after day, claiming to be searching for fields of marijuana. Now, they knew in advance that they would find nothing, and nada -- not a plant, not a seed -- is what they found. But finding drugs wasn't their purpose. The real reasons the army came here were to conjure fear -- to terrify families and children -- and, I will submit, to gain a better sense of this terrain, these mountains and valleys, where the Indians simply have better maps, based on actually living here, and have thus been able to outfox the army time and time again.

In sum, US "antidrug" dollars and equipment were used to persecute the most drug-free people in Mexico.

Will you account for this? Will you correct it and use the power of your office to assure that this persecution ceases? And if not, why not?

Come and visit, yes, but leave the champagne at home!

Back to part 1

On to part 3

Al Giordano, former political reporter for the Boston Phoenix, is author of The Medium Is the Middleman: For a Revolution Against Media (1997, an Immedia Project pamphlet).