Come to Chiapas

Part 3 - Some secret history

by Al Giordano

This is not my first time in Chiapas. I was here in December 1987 and in January and February of '88. It's a special place for me, the land where I decided -- or, rather, heard a kind of calling -- to become more of a man of letters, a writer. Maybe I was too anti-intellectual in the '80s, before my gringo heart turned Chiapaneco?

I was here, then, as a guest of the late great naturalist and photographer Gertrude Duby Blom. She influenced me deeply. Trudi, as the natives called her, had come to Mexico in the 1940s, an escapee from a Nazi death camp. A photographer of Swiss descent, she was one of the first white women in the jungle. She snapped a picture of the first tractor in the Selva Lacandóna -- the Lacandón jungle -- clear-cutting trees for hardwoods. For almost 50 years, Trudi watched the invasion: first, the loggers; then the cattle ranchers, burning hillsides to make pastures; then the oil men -- yes, they found petroleum here, and they molested the earth to drill it.

Trudi watched them burn the jungle back to a quarter of its previous size. She was, by the time I encountered her, just sick over it, embittered, but fighting with her every breath to preserve what remained. With her husband, archaeologist Franz Blom (who died in 1963), she discovered some of this land's most famous Mayan ruins. In '51, they took over an abandoned seminary in San Cristóbal and established a museum, library, and cultural center devoted to preserving a culture that was almost lost (that may yet be lost) -- that of the 400 surviving Lacandón Indians, the last living full-blooded descendants of the great Mayan civilization. (There are many other Maya tribes here -- all united in revolt -- but the Lacandónes, until this century, had remained the least colonized, inside the deepest reaches of the jungle.)

She became great friends with Chan K'in Viejo, the last Lacandón elder, and opened her home to all the Lacandónes when they traveled to the city of San Cristóbal for health care or to sell crafts. She fought not only the loggers, ranchers, and oil men but also the Mormon missionaries, who had colonized the minds and spirits of another village of Lacandónes until they began abandoning their own ways for the world of pesos and Coca-Cola. As she aged, she became a legend. Her crowning accomplishment was to get the Mexican government, in the '80s, to set aside part of this jungle as a nature preserve, thus stopping a huge project planned to dam the Usamacinta River for hydroelectric power.

Her cultural center, Na Bolom ("House of the Jaguar"), remains today in San Cristóbal. But Trudi died on December 23, 1993, at age 92. I wrote her obituary for the Phoenix.

In mid-July, I journeyed into San Cristóbal to have dinner at Trudi's old table. There I met a 19-year-old Lacandón man. His name: Chan K'in -- after his uncle, the Viejo, the Elder. Young Chan K'in filled in the blanks for me.

Trudi's funeral was held in a hurry. Chan K'in Viejo spoke. Then came New Year's Eve, wild parties, drunken policemen. As the authorities slept off the party, the Zapatistas decloaked, taking San Cristóbal and five other cities and announcing that the mountains were now tierra libre -- free land, indigenous land, reborn after 500 years of conquest. The Zapatistas were quite the sensation, with their black ski masks, kerchiefs, and small arms, some with toy guns carved from soap and burnt with matchsticks to make them black.

From out of this rebellion there came a writer's voice, that of the man known only as Subcomandante Marcos. "This is not a revolution of guns," wrote Marcos, "but a revolution of words. Our guns are just a way of saying, `Hello! We are here!' "

Indeed, in three and a half years of hostilities, there have been fewer than 700 gun casualties, although many indigens -- children, babies -- have died from parasites, malnutrition, and the denial of medicine while entire villages were chased into the hills by the Mexican army.

For a while, in 1994, '95, and early '96, many foreigners and journalists came down here, as did thousands of Mexicans from other states -- human-rights workers, "doctors without borders," and others. Indeed, about a year ago the Boston Globe published a rather snooty and crass story (the last page-one story that I recall about the conflict here) calling the phenomenon "Zapa-turismo." That story fostered an impression that these hills were merely a kind of vacationland for the left.

As to why career journalists so frequently try to defame and discredit change agents who do not work for money, I will let their mealy mouths be judged by history. But it was my experience after 10 years in that sordid profession that most journalists cannot understand anyone who is not mercenary, who is not career-obsessed. Journalists have made their compromises, and they feel viscerally threatened by those who have not so compromised themselves, deformed themselves around capital and its media machines. I've read and seen a thousand puff-pieces about social-service bureaucrats with offices and salaries. But let someone stand for something -- almost anything -- without compensation, and the gotcha game begins, with pens, video cameras, and computers wielded like knives. It's a sick profession. That's a large part of why I defected from it.

And yet, here I am, rendering unto media again, so desperate to reach you and others that I make this compromise after a year of refusal. I have asked the Phoenix to print this tract unabridged, with minimal editing. If you read it in these pages, please understand, its faults are my own; I don't get to blame them on editors.

Anyway, one more note on Chan K'in Viejo, the Lacandón elder. He died, at age 105, on December 23, 1996, three years to the day after the passing of Trudi Blom. As Marcos likes to say, "Things of this land."

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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).