The scene is in a town controlled by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, the EZLN.
It rained sometime around dawn, and at 7 a.m. a gray mist still hung over the mountains that lined the horizon. Early morning was the busiest time down at the market in Ocosingo. Mounds of fruits and vegetables of every type and color imaginable filled the concrete vendor stalls. Indigenous peasants jammed the aisles of the market, buying and selling supplies and goods. One old woman from an outlying village arrived at the market with a few live turkeys hung upside down and slung over her shoulder. A small trickle of blood ran down her shin from the turkeys constantly pecking at her leg as she walked.
It was just before the Easter holidays so the market was especially busy. Hundreds of bullet holes scarred the walls, the vendor stalls, the tin roof and the steel support beams of the market--the only sign of the massacre of indigenous peasant rebels by the Mexican army during the January uprising led by the EZLN, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. Across the street from the market, Mexican army troops leaned against the sandbag walls of one of their rooftop machine gun nests and tensely watched the crowds in the market and the surrounding streets.
Empty cargo and livestock trucks with large metal skeleton frames on the back--like the monkey bars in urban playgrounds--were parked up and down the streets bordering the market. The drivers were eating, talking with their friends, or trying to catch some sleep before making the long trip home. The trucks from some of the more remote villages had already travelled five to eight hours and were scheduled to do a return trip later in the afternoon. These trucks were the main form of transportation for the indigenous campesinos going back and forth from the countryside.
We were headed out to a town in the territory controlled by the EZLN--known as the Zapatistas. We found a truck headed in our direction and climbed up on the back. It was loaded down with food and other supplies and about twenty indigenous campesinos and campesinas all headed deep into the hills and forests beyond Ocosingo.
At the edge of the city the Mexican army stopped our truck at a roadblock. The roadblock was only a small part of a huge army encampment. Heavily armed soldiers--dug in deep on both sides of the road--kept their guns ready for anything. Tanks and artillery sat out in the middle of a field, only partially hidden by camouflage netting. The soldiers ordered all of us off of the truck. And while one group of soldiers checked everyone's papers, another searched the truck and the supplies for gasoline or other items that local peasants might be smuggling out to the Zapatistas.
Federal Judicial police sat on a hillside watching the roadblock, and the sound of gunfire from an army practice range just over the hill cracked the intense silence at the roadblock.
A couple of kilometers past the roadblock our truck turned off the paved highway and onto the narrow and rutted dirt road that ran out to EZLN territory. There was nothing but pasture and woods lining the road for miles. Huge parcels of land were marked as government or army territory while other huge pastures were marked off as the property of a rancher or finca owner. Handpainted signs along the road pointed out the location of local water wells. Small clusters of mud huts sprang up unexpectedly and every now and then the truck stopped to let off or pick up passengers.
As the truck geared down to a slower crawl and pulled over to park, a column of men suddenly came down out of the woods and began unloading boxes of food--cooking oil, boxes and boxes of Ramen instant noodles and other supplies. They were from an ejido located miles back in the forest and this was one of their regular supply deliveries.
While the campesinos unloaded the truck and loaded up huge bundles to hang from the straps around their foreheads, my thoughts raced back to what had happened out here during the New Year's Rebellion and the days that followed. The EZLN organized and led thousands of indigenous peasants from the villages and ejidos out here and in other parts of the highlands in an armed uprising that stunned Mexico and focused all eyes on the campesinos and the issue of armed revolution. The peasant rebels slipped through the night and, armed with old and small weapons--including knives, sticks and traditional weapons--took over four county seats in the Chiapas highlands. The Zapatistas also sharply contested with the Mexican government troops for control of three other smaller towns. They attacked government buildings and destroyed financial and criminal records--temporarily removing a major source of suffering for the indigenous campesinos. They sacked government offices and state-run stores, turning supplies and equipment over to the people in the towns. They attacked prisons--totally destroying the local jail in San Cristóbal--and freed the prisoners. They fought the army in Ocosingo and at Rancho Nuevo--the largest military outpost in southern Mexico.
All throughout the highlands, big landowners and arrogant cacique political bosses fled in terror as campesinos inspired by the uprising seized land and fought back against their oppression. On the eve of the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)--which would bring new levels of exploitation to the Mexican countryside--the indigenous peasants of Chiapas issued a hard slap in the face to both the Mexican rulers and the U.S. imperialists.
The uprising was brief. The rebels were on the offensive for only a few days. The Mexican government hit back hard. Over a hundred people were killed, with some estimating the casualties at over 400 dead. Hundreds were arrested throughout the highlands and many were tortured. The Mexican army rampaged through indigenous villages and towns. U.S.-supplied helicopters and Swiss airplanes were used to strafe and bomb the indigenous peasant communities.
By January 7 all of the cities captured by the Zapatistas were back in the hands of the government. By the middle of January a cease-fire was called and a short while later the EZLN and the Mexican government began a dialogue about the demands raised by the EZLN as part of a peace process. In some areas of the Chiapas Altos white flags flew on top of houses, supposedly to show support for the peace talks. These flags were not all that common in the poorer peasant communities, and in other areas people often flew them in hopes that it would keep the army away from their homes.
Shortly after the first stage of the dialogue process ended, the Mexican ruling party's presidential candidate was assassinated. The government immediately and dramatically increased the military presence in the highlands of Chiapas and especially in the areas close to the EZLN bases. There were reports of government troop movements in the areas around Ocosingo and Las Margaritas, and the Zapatistas reported that the government was setting up and getting ready to close a pincer around the EZLN territory. Military planes made constant flyovers of the territory behind the Zapatista lines, and one area near the town of Altamirano reported that a military plane had dropped a bomb on an ejido sympathetic to the EZLN. The "peace process" was temporarily suspended. The EZLN put all of its troops and territory on red alert, and the situation was still very tense as we made our way into Zapatista territory.
It was blistering hot as we paused on a rock where a small dirt road broke off from the main dirt road and headed up a hill toward one of the EZLN roadblocks guarding the entry points into their territory.
A few baby pigs thrashed about in the underbrush. Two riderless horses galloped up a hill towards a town controlled by the Zapatistas. A local youth was waiting for a cargo truck headed back into Ocosingo. As he talked to us about the January rebellion, the young campesino scanned the horizon--hoping that one last truck would come so he could see his girlfriend.
He reached down in the dirt and picked up an empty bullet casing. He tossed it over to me and explained that it was from a major battle between the Mexican army and the EZLN right at that spot in the road.
"At first we were all scared here. I mean, they were not letting anybody in or out during those times. We didn't know what was going on. There was a 40-minute fight right here in January. They shot at each other a lot--the Mexican army and the Zapatistas. The Mexican army came up here and the Zapatistas attacked them and forced them back.
"We were scared. But up there, everybody supported the Zapatistas. And when they published their demands, when they said what their demands were, then we weren't afraid of them. Their demands were the demands of the peasants. They listed the needs of the peasants.
"They always say on television and the radio that Chiapas is the poorest place in the country. They say Chiapas has been abandoned.
"The government gives us no help. They always come around and promise everything--especially in election years....But still we have nothing and some are very rich and have lots of land. That's why the struggle happened.
"The Zapatistas began a struggle. It is a process, the struggle is a process and it is good that it happened. But it is not over yet and nobody knows how it will end."
Jaime swept his arm out towards the hills way over on the other side of the dirt road. "For a long time really, people have been very badly treated. So, from the time of the 1910 Revolution, people came here and then, what happened? What happened is that they settled on the hills. They only gave us the land that is here on the hills. What can you grow on a hillside? Nothing. Things don't grow."
Jaime was a civilian representative of the Zapatistas and he was giving us an overall orientation on the situation in his town and among the people. Though I knew that there were many differences between the Zapatista strategy and the Maoist path of New Democratic Revolution and protracted People's War, I was anxious to learn more about the organization and practice of the EZLN in the areas they controlled and their relationship with the peasants.
Jaime explained that the EZLN was composed of some members who were mainly military soldiers and others who mainly did political and civilian work in the communities. The Zapatistas responsible for civilian work carried out political organizing and education among the people and helped administer the various areas under the control of the EZLN.
The tiny town was one of the poorest I had seen in Chiapas. It was almost entirely mud and stick huts--no electricity and hardly any water. There was one faucet for the entire town but it only dripped water, and a bucket was hung over the faucet to catch each drop. We were told that it often took more than a day for the bucket to fill.
All the way out to the town we saw long concrete poles laying alongside the dirt road. Jaime told us that they were supposed to be electric poles for the eventual electrification of the countryside. He said the poles suddenly began appearing on the rural dirt roads shortly after the January uprising. People in the area joked about what it would take to actually get the poles erected and some wires strung out between them. So far the only sign of the government-sponsored project was the name "Solidarity" (the main government poverty program) painted on the backboards of the town basketball court.
"Before, when they began to build the highway between San Cristóbal and Comitán, people here were paying highway taxes for that, for light, all of that," Jaime said, with a disgusted gesture. "And we still don't have those things here. We've been paying for these things, and we don't have them. It's a form of really repressing the people. That's why people get mad. The last `centavo' you have, it goes to taxes. And not just that. There's the increase in the prices of merchandise. And what you produce, you get paid real cheap. So they're totally wiping us out. There's nothing left."
Jaime leaned against an old truck parked in a clearing in the middle of the town. The truck had the name of another campesino organization painted on its side, but this organization advocated working with the government to resolve the suffering in the countryside and really had not functioned in this town for a while. Many of the former members of this organization were now supporters and members of the EZLN.
"It's not that people don't work the land," Jaime explained. "You can work the land, but it just doesn't produce. The plowing is done seasonally. The hills are rocky and people dangle on the slopes. So there's not enough for people to consume. It is not good land. It is all poor people who live and farm in the hills. There are no rich people on the hills. The rich people live in the flat lands and near the rivers. They can grow food and live good there. Here we don't even have water. Most of the time we have to go to the river. It's 4 km from here. There was a small stream closer but it is dried up now.
"So people have been here a long time. Since the time of our ancestors, many people have died suffering. It's not a good life for the poor. They don't have enough to eat, they don't have what they need to benefit the family, there's not enough.
"Our children get no education here. The teachers that were here before have not come back since January. There have never been any doctors here. When people get sick we have to take them to the hospital in the city. But it is very hard to get sick people to any hospital. You've seen how the road is--full of holes and when it rains it is even worse. Before the road was here we had to carry our sick people to the hospitals in the city."
It was a story we had heard over and over in our conversations with the peasants in our travels in Chiapas.
I asked Jaime about the fincas and big landowners in the area. He pointed to a barbed wire fence back towards one end of the town. He said that there were many large landholders in the area, including the one who owned the land behind the barbed wire fence--a finca of more than 4000 hectares.
Jaime told us that the town was founded by their relatives who left the finca to establish an ejido in the days after the Mexican Revolution.
"Our ancestors, our grandfathers, died on these fincas. Everyone here used to be a peon. When our people left the finca to first settle these lands the ranchers sent people to attack them. They sent people to bring us back to work the finca or to kill us. Before, in the time of our ancestors, people made 5 cents, 25 cents. Now it's just 5 to 7 pesos, working from dawn to dusk. So people feel that.
"The work is very difficult. In the city, people don't really know what it's like. Working the fields is very hard work. You work the cornfields, and when you don't have work, people go out to sell their labor. But there you get paid after a period of two or three months. Even though you need things right away, they don't pay you. You feel bad about it, but for a long time it's been like that. And not just here. All over Chiapas it's like that. So people feel that. They feel really scorned.
"Many people go to the city to look for work, but in these jobs they give you twice the work. You have to work extra hours and it's hard work. Many people here in this area can't speak Spanish. So many of us can't even go to the cities because we can't read so we can't even know where to ask for food. There's so many things. People couldn't take it anymore and had to organize."
Jaime explained that most of the big landlords fled into the city when the peasants rebelled in January.
The EZLN was born in the remote indigenous villages of the Lacandón Forest--the Selva--and the southeastern mountains. In addition to the long-time indigenous residents, the Zapatistas also gathered a lot of support from among indigenous settlers who arrived in the Selva 30 or 40 years ago--people driven out of other parts of Chiapas by repression or land starvation. In interviews published in Tiempo, the main newspaper in San Cristóbal, and La Jornada, a nationwide leftist newspaper, Sub-comandante Marcos, the EZLN spokesperson and the leader of the military operations of the Zapatistas, talked about the origins of the EZLN.
According to Marcos, the EZLN began with a small group of urban and educated young radicals moving out to the rural mountain areas to live among and organize the indigenous people ten years earlier. Marcos said that these early radicals were influenced by and learned from the heroes of the Mexican Revolution--like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa--as well as all of the other radical and guerrilla movements that had gone before them. They also studied movements around the world, especially those in Central America and read from authors as diverse as Mao to military manuals put out by the U.S. Pentagon.
The early Zapatista core spent a long time preparing for the day they could launch their uprising. According to Marcos, along with military preparations and training there was much emphasis by the young radical group to join with the local indigenous people in their struggle for reforms. The young radicals joined with the peasants to fight for land and other basic needs in legal protests to petition the government.
In the beginning the Zapatistas also worked in the community to take up things like medical care, education and other needs of the people. Not only was life in the mountains and jungles completely new to them, but most of the indigenous people they set out to organize spoke little or no Spanish.
Marcos and other people speaking for the Zapatistas described the beginnings of the EZLN, the army, as being rooted in self- defense measures taken up against attacks from the guardias blancas, the armed goons organized by the big landowners and ranchers and known as the white guards. According to Marcos it was this process of living and struggling together with and learning from one another that provided the support base, membership and influence the Zapatistas have today.
Over the last ten years or so the Zapatistas have built up an organization with its strongest base among the Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolobal and Chol indigenous communities. And, while the EZLN still credits all of the various influences that shaped it in the past, it has evolved into an organization that tries to merge together indigenous traditional organization and leftish grassroots democracy. Marcos has vehemently denied that the EZLN is a vanguard leadership of the revolutionary struggle in Mexico. Instead, he has spoken about the Zapatistas being a facilitator for the birth of a new society based on participatory democracy.
This emphasis on criticizing political vanguards echoes the political philosophy of Che Guevara, and it has won the EZLN much sympathy among the middle classes of Mexico--who take some comfort in the fact that EZLN does not claim to be a proletarian vanguard. Within the ranks of the EZLN, and more broadly among their supporters, there is a wide array of views on all of the key questions of the day.
Raul, another civilian representative of the Zapatistas, jumped into the discussion. Raul had a lot of experience with the repression brought down on the indigenous people by the Mexican government and he counted this as high among the conditions leading up to the rebellion and the widespread support for the uprising throughout the area.
Raul told us that the Mexican army was especially brutal in this area in the days after the uprising. Repeated bombing and strafing of the village and milpas was aimed at driving the Zapatistas and their supporters out of the area. And the army had actually marched within a few kilometers of the village where the local residents stood them off in a long and intense gun battle.
"There's a lot of repression from the government. If you ask for land, they don't resolve it. There are requests for land that have gone on for 30 or 40 years without a solution. If a request for land is authorized, then the owner of the finca or the landowner send people to evict you. Even though it's been authorized and people are already there, they come take it back anyway. Many people many times have suffered that. Not just once. All over Chiapas, people have suffered that kind of situation, that kind of abuse. Why so much repression? We have to defend our rights too. That's why people put themselves on a struggle footing.
"If the government sees somebody that has a little bit of awareness and supports the cause, then they either have them killed or kidnapped or they send them to jail. So many times that's happened. Indigenous people fill the jails. The people that the authorities go after are mainly the people that always participate in the activist communities. That's exactly who they look for and that's who they've thrown in jail."
Raul, who described himself as a long-time member of the Zapatistas, talked some about how the campesinos suffered in the past and how things have changed. He made a point of emphasizing that he thought one big change was that people today were not going to bear their oppression in silence. "It's changed from how it used to be. They've changed how to exploit people. Before on the fincas there were stone corrals that poor people made by themselves. People carried these huge stones on their backs. They endured it. But now people are beginning to open their eyes. We're living in misery and exploitation, and that's not good. Well, with so much misery, what are we going to do? We have to just throw ourselves into the struggle and see how it goes, either we win or we lose."
Raul, like most of the people we spoke with in this area, hated the Mexican government and especially what he and other Zapatistas saw as the one-party dictatorship of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has run the government for more than 65 years. While there was overwhelming support for the January uprising and the armed struggle in general, there was a lot of informal debate in the ranks of the EZLN and among their supporters over how exactly this dictatorship can be changed. Most of the people we spoke with saw the need for waging an armed struggle, but this wasn't the same as seeing the need for a protracted People's War and a New Democratic Revolution.
Although Raul enthusiastically upheld the peasant rebellion, he did not see the armed struggle as part of a struggle for nationwide power. He viewed the armed struggle as both a last resort and a hammer to hold over the head of the regime in order to force it to listen to and respond to the needs of the people. And even if the armed struggle didn't bring about a total change, Raul thought that it might at least bring about a situation where the peasants could get some partial benefits. We spoke for a while about how he saw ending the oppression of the people.
"I think that for a long time we've been talking with the government, with commissions, acting authorities, and we've never gotten attention. That's why now we as peasants think that we need to struggle. With the legal road, they didn't pay any attention to us...and now? If we don't fight in this way, the government is going to finish us off. That's why we began this struggle."
"We did it through their legal road. We didn't start off with weapons. We went through the legal road first. Twenty years, right here. Struggling and struggling and struggling, and they told us, `Yes...such-and-such day, such-and-such month,' and nothing ever happened. You can see it right here in this community. What is there? There's nothing here from the government. No schools, no electricity. The school that's here, people put up themselves with their own money from the ejido. What do you see? There's nothing here.
"There's no other way, only taking up weapons. Many peasants would rather die in war than in misery. Die fighting. We know that we're going to die in the end. That's how it is, everybody is going to die one day anyway. So we can't just stay with our own thoughts.
"There was a dialogue with the government. But it's just promises. We'll have to see if they fulfill them. Before the dialogue happened, people thought that they would fight and fight their whole life. We'll have to see if they give everything that they promised. Things haven't really changed. Some proposals have been made. But in terms of change, not yet. It hasn't been confirmed yet. The government, the Commissioner, promised that these things could be done, but who knows? If it's true, then things can begin to change, but if they don't, well then."
As our discussion with the first few Zapatista representatives began to break up, a small crowd gathered around us. Some were just there to check out the visitors. Others had taken a deep interest in our discussion and were eager to talk. Most of the campesinos that talked with us that day knew about the NAFTA treaty from the education of the Zapatistas, but they knew very little about the life of the people in the U.S. In many ways, the NAFTA treaty--combined with changes in the Mexican constitution that threatened to dispossess the peasants of their land--had brought things to a head and triggered the January uprising.
The campesinos saw the U.S. as a very wealthy country where everyone is rich, and they were shocked and outraged to discover that there were actually poor people inside the borders of the U.S. They peppered us with questions as we told them about the Los Angeles rebellion, the condition of the people, including the situation of immigrants in the U.S. Broad smiles greeted the news that many people in the U.S. supported the Chiapas rebellion. The Zapatista members and supporters quickly drew the links between their situation and that facing the proletarians and oppressed people in the U.S. And many of the campesinos were very happy to hear that there is a growing revolutionary movement inside the beast of the north.
José, a young man who had joined the EZLN as a full-time military cadre five years earlier, spoke for many in the crowd. "The U.S. has the same politics as the government there in DF (Mexico City). The U.S. is the same. The U.S. is here controlling Salinas in Mexico. That's why the U.S. come down here to Mexico. And the U.S., they don't really look at Salinas like he's the President, they see him more as their `manager.' Salinas is manipulated by the President of the U.S. That's how we see it.
"It's the same. The same capitals that they have here, their people are `capitalenas.' That's who most supports them. What's happening is that the U.S. wants to run the world, be the owner of the world, that's why they're doing what they're doing. It's not just Mexico, there's other countries that they also control. The United States is always intervening, controlling every nation. That's what the U.S. wants to do, be the owner of the world. That's what we think. For a long time we've thought that.
"What's needed is to gather the masses, the nations, together so that they see this. They have to get through to the U.S. Sooner or later it has to come to the United States. That's it, there's no other way."
"Tell our brothers in the U.S. and other countries how we live. Tell them that here in southern Mexico there are people just like them, that there are people who are poor like them, who can't read like them. Tell them that we are suffering just like them."
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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