Come to Chiapas

Part 4 - The boot comes down

by Al Giordano

As to the phenomenon of foreign visitors, I wasn't here when they were. Most of them disappeared in 1996, when the Mexican government and army advanced on Zapatista strongholds -- destroying the EZLN base in Aguas Calientes in July, sending thousands of families into the jungle without potable water, pillaging, conducting the phony "drug raids" that found no drugs, and searching in vain for Marcos and the indigenous Zapatista comandantes. It was the government, not the EZLN, that violated the peace accords of San Andres that were meant to curtail the violence between Zapatista and government forces.

John, I know you will be naturally cynical toward the Zapatistas. We've known each other a long time, ever since I worked on your campaign staffs in 1982 and 1984, as a lad in my early 20s.

You need to understand some essential differences between the Zapatistas of Chiapas and those Central American "revolutionary" movements that came before them.

First, as Marcos and others have repeatedly stated, they are not trying to seize power or take over the Mexican government. This divides them from the Cold War-era Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and from the FMLN (the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) in El Salvador. Instead, they fight to open a national dialogue, a real democracy, so that Mexican "civil society" can step forward and people may govern themselves.

Second, they are the first post-Cold War revolutionary movement -- they have no alliance with Cuba, and certainly none with the fallen Soviets. They have more in common, frankly, with the anarchist critics of Soviet Communism: the Makhnovishnas of the Ukraine, the Situationists of the '50s and '60s, the Italian Autonomia movement of the '70s. Theirs is a revolution of locality, of everyday life -- nondogmatic, pluralist, democratic. A social revolution, yes, but also a revolution of the individual. In the highlands, in mountain towns such as Oventic, they enjoy supermajority support. Indeed, the only indigenous village that doesn't support this cause is the ruling-party stronghold of San Juan Chamula, near San Cristóbal, where alcohol conquered what the evangelical missionaries could not. (Still, I have met valiant Zapatista soldiers from Chamula, and if there is hope for that village, with all its problems and poverty, there is hope for Boston or New York.)

Third, the main ideas behind this revolution are not socialist, but indigenous. Marcos answers to and obeys his Indian comandantes -- he is subcomandante and, by his own admission, expendable. Should his commanders ever grow unhappy with his leadership-by-words, a new "Marcos" will replace him.

These are people of the land, of nature. They have, through 500 years of conquest, maintained and refined their own "shadow governance" of these hills. The army comes and goes, but in every place where the soldiers are not directly present, the native ways reestablish themselves instantly. I find these people to be unconquerable.

Indeed, that's why I'm here. To figure out how I can remain uncolonized in my mind, body, and heart in an epoch of imposed sameness, of a monoculture that poses as multicultural. We have a lot to learn from our indigenous neighbors to the south, who have established terrain and lives outside of economy's dictatorship, outside of the media's consumerist brainwash, outside of the screen and its techno-trance.

John, another thing I know about you is that you prefer to research, to study, to investigate a matter thoroughly before you go off half-cocked. I'm certain the State Department has all kinds of evasions and half-truths to give you. I recommend you pick up a copy of Zapatistas: Documents of the New Mexican Revolution (updated edition 1995, Autonomedia Press). It's the best, most accurate translation of Marcos's communiqués and other EZLN statements.

A word about the July 6 elections in Mexico. The spin is that they were the freest ever -- but that's not saying much, given the history of one-party rule here. I was on the Zocalo, the city square, in Mexico City that night as 100,000 supporters of Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas and the left-wing PRD (Revolutionary Democratic Party) won the region's vote. The Zocalo was a sea of yellow-and-black Aztec-sun banners -- it was something to behold. I had to climb a traffic light just to get a full view.

The extent to which these elections were more free (in Mexican states other than Chiapas) is effect, not cause. According to Padre Filiberto Gonzales of Tepotzlan, an hour outside of Mexico City, who has helped lead a two-year revolt against a golf-club development there, the Zapatista strategy was primarily responsible for the election reforms. The stress on "opening a dialogue," rather than "seizing power," is working. Even Cárdenas will give credit where it is due: to the Indians who must wear the black masks.

But in Chiapas, free elections were impossible with 40,000 army troops (according to the government and press) still terrorizing the populace here.

Tell me, please, how free elections can be possible when 85 of 110 municipalities in Chiapas are occupied by unwanted army troops, hostile to the public, and specifically to the indigenous people? How is democracy possible while thousands of families remain displaced from their homes? When uttering an opinion or sporting a bumper sticker has gotten civilians killed, kidnapped, and raped by government soldiers and Guardias Blancas, the vicious "White Guard" vigilantes who do the government's dirty work of violence with its tacit permission? (Those atrocities have been documented by the Catholic diocese and nongovernmental human-rights organizations.)

Early on Election Day morning in Chiapas, the EZLN destroyed 40 polling stations, burning ballot boxes to protest of the farce of "free elections" in an occupied zone. This was not an antidemocratic action but a prodemocracy one, an effort to prevent the simulation of elections and insist on actual ones. Indeed, in every polling place, the protest was carried out without violence to persons -- an indication that the poll workers were, in fact, in agreement with the action.

Certainly, another spin could be put on the destruction of spurious ballot boxes. But I ask you to use your intelligence to discern the truth. What else could they have done?

Back to part 3

On to part 5

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).