The scene is in a town controlled by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, the EZLN.
Nightfall is quick in the mountains of Chiapas. And when it gets dark, it gets very dark. With no electricity the only lights visible are the campfires dotting the town. A woman and man who lived in a small one-room hut next to the place we pitched our tent offered us some firewood, helped us to build a good cooking fire and then lent us their comal to heat up the tortillas that went with our black beans and rice. We fed the fire a little more wood and tried to take the chill off the mountain night. Every now and then a military plane flew over the town and stirred up the local animals. As the night wore on, the few other visible campfires began to die down and a heavy silence fell over the town.
I sat in the ebbing glow of our fire and thought about what I had learned in the town and from the people. As poor as the town was, it was not the poverty and suffering of the people that stood out the most. Instead, it was the way the people living in these conditions rose up and how seriously they were wrestling with all the different ideas of how best to end their suffering and change the society.
In this town the majority of people supported the armed struggle led by the EZLN, although to varying degrees and with different understandings of the strategy and goals. The armed struggle is not viewed as a people's war for seizing overall power but as a way to make the government give in to the demands of the EZLN. The people in the community concretely showed their support in different ways, including through direct participation in the military and through logistical and supply line support for the EZLN bases and troops.
As one Zapatista soldier explained to us, most of the community was organized and campesinos participated in the struggle in a number of ways. Some, like him, were full-time military members while others were in the community militias and reserves. The people in the militias and reserves lived in the communities and, among other duties and responsibilities, were charged with growing and harvesting the food that would keep the troops alive and gathering up all of the other supplies the army needs to carry out its tasks.
Ricardo, a long-time soldier in the EZLN and a participant in the taking of Ocosingo during the January uprising, explained that in the early days of organizing in the countryside the EZLN often sought people out one by one by talking with them in the course of working the fields or in some other community event. Ricardo told us that Zapatistas often belonged to other peasant and community organizations and attended the meetings to find people who they thought were good candidates for the EZLN. According to Ricardo, these people were struggled with in secret, recruited, trained and assigned to either military tasks or community work.
There are many indigenous organizations and peasant organizations operating in Zapatista territory and the surrounding area. With the uprising, some armed peasant groups melted into the EZLN while others continue to function--sometimes in unity with the EZLN and sometimes as separate organizations. And the Zapatistas continue to work within these organizations --in open and clandestine ways--to recruit, to win over the people to their views, and to keep an eye on what they are doing.
Ricardo discussed the training the Zapatista soldiers received. He told of sharpshooters trained in the forests to hit tiny targets from very long distances while using very rudimentary guns. He spoke of training in modern weapons of war as well as in the traditional indigenous hunting weapons. And he told of the troops being trained in jungle warfare as well as urban warfare--learning how to take the war on to the enemy's turf as well as how to survive and fight in the home territory.
"I have been in the struggle for eight years. I was in the struggle from the beginning because of the necessities of life. We were prepared for war. It's not like they say in the press that the Zapatistas just came along and found us in the streets, that they just found us in the road and told us to be the army. We are a young army, many of us are 18 to 28 years old, but we are trained. It is true that when we went out in the first of the year, some of us didn't have arms. Some of us only had sticks, wooden sticks. But when we came back we had AR15s, AK47s and other modern weapons. When we came back we had good weapons. We took them from the Public Security forces, from the police and from the army.
"We are a well-disciplined army with a well-disciplined command. The commanders of our army never eat better than the soldiers. If there is bread to eat then everyone must get the equal piece. We are very different from the Mexican government. We have an army and it is an army. We have some people who are dedicated to the army and others who do work to help maintain the army. They work in the fields or whatever. But our army is very different from the Mexican army. When we are in battle with the Mexican army we treat our enemies very different. If we come across some government soldiers who have been wounded in the battle then we take them in and take care of them. But the Mexican army, if they come on our soldiers wounded from the battle, then they just kill them. We are an army of the poor campesinos. Everyone here is Zapatista.
"In some places there are families with one son in the Mexican army and one son who is with us. And they are fighting. Who is in the Mexican army? The rich and their children are not in the Mexican army. They are the poor people just like us. But they are in the Mexican army. They are wrong. There have been many desertions from the Mexican army. When we attacked Rancho Nuevo [the largest military outpost in Southern Mexico] many of their troops laid down their arms and surrendered to us.
"They say we have not fought a war yet. We only fought a battle. The war is still to come. The war will come and no one knows how it will turn out. But the war is coming." Ricardo believed the Zapatista army would stand up strong against the Mexican army whenever and wherever the war broke out.
Ricardo's discussion of the EZLN military training reminded me of a story I had heard again and again in San Cristóbal. This story, which was later verified in a number of interviews by the EZLN's public spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, details how the Mexican army stumbled on a major Zapatista training base in May of 1993--more than six months before the January uprising. According to Marcos, the area was a Zapatista headquarters where the EZLN had built up a replica of the municipal centers found in Ocosingo and the other towns seized on New Year's Eve. The Mexican army claimed to have found propaganda and leftover ammunition inside the base. The Zapatistas were clearly preparing for their January offensive.
According to the Zapatistas, when the army stumbled onto the base the Zapatistas retreated from the mountainous area immediately. The Mexican army then flooded the area with soldiers and ordered them to scour the area for guerrilla forces. Marcos claims that army troops eventually ended up shooting at each other, killing 12 of their own troops and wounding another six with all of the mortar fire they let loose. The army then went on to claim that the dead were guerrillas and they poured even more troops into the area in an effort to encircle and eliminate the rebel forces.
The Zapatistas were tensely waiting to see what would happen and the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee (CCRI) had issued the order that if the army attacked any of the towns in the area then the armed struggle was to be launched immediately.
Instead, the Mexican government ordered the army to pull back and then seriously downplayed the discovery of the base and the issue of guerrilla forces in Chiapas. This pullback by the government has been the grist of much debate, but many people believe that the order forcing the army to pull back was a desperate attempt by the Salinas government in Mexico to avoid a major crisis during the period leading into the final adoption of the NAFTA Treaty with the U.S.
If this analysis is true, it is ironic that the NAFTA agreement--which in many ways brought the armed struggle to a head--may also have caused the government to stay the army's hand. And it is illustrative of the problems faced by the Mexican government and the U.S. in carrying forward their plans to more fully exploit the Mexican countryside.
Most of the people in the town were Zapatista supporters and they supported the particular demands of the EZLN. The ten points that make up the Zapatista program include demands for land, work, housing, nutrition, health, education, liberty, independence, democracy, justice and peace.
But many people were also looking beyond the immediate demands and program. People wanted to know how to get out from under their suffering once and for all. Ricardo, the EZLN military man, was one of these people. While he was a real mixing bowl of viewpoints on the struggle, he was also hungry for real, thoroughgoing revolutionary change, and often found himself impatient with ideas of peace and dialogue with the government. He had no respect for the authorities and very little expectation of coming to some sort of agreement with them. "Finca owners buy land and they buy governments. In our struggle we are taking what is ours because god made the land for everybody. God helps us because we are fighting. The finca owners bought the land but they didn't buy it from the guy who made it.
"The government doesn't respect us and they don't respect the cease-fire. They come to bomb us. There is no respect so we called off the consultations. There is no dialogue in this situation. We already laid out what we wanted. The government knows that, and if they are going to do it then why don't they just do it."
Ricardo was also especially angry about the visit of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú from Guatemala and her attempts to dull the fighting edge in Zapatista territory with blanket calls for peace. "I don't really know how long this will last. We want peace. But what good is peace without justice? If people want peace then let the government fulfill our demands. If somebody says peace and justice, then good. If someone comes and just says we want peace so stop the war--then they are wrong."
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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