From the mountains of the Mexican southeast

After working off and on for the last couple of weeks to revise my research proposal so it will make sense to local Zapatista authorities (with helpful advice from Melissa and Mariana, two anthropology grad students at UT-Austin who had already been through the process), it's time to make the first trip out to the jungle to present it.

At 5:00 a.m. I go down to the spot where the combis (VW vans) leave for the city at the edge of the jungle, 2 hours east of San Cristóbal. [I'm going to omit a lot of names and places for security reasons.] The combis have no schedule, they leave when they're filled, so the first of many waits begins. Eventually we arrive, and I trek across town and through the marketplace to ask for the bus that heads down the canyon I want, not mentioning my actual destination. I finally find it, a rattletrap old retired yellow schoolbus in a muddy lot behind other parked vehicles, with a shack where a man takes fares and reserves seats (a rarity in these parts). I'm told the bus won't leave for another 3 hours or so. (It's an hour earlier here, since people in the jungle use "God's time"and reject the government's daylight savings time.) This is the only bus on that route; there are occasional trucks, but Melissa has told me that the truck drivers are usually drunk and sometimes careen off the road, so it's worth waiting for the bus. I go for coffee and a sweet roll in the market, wander around the plaza, read a bit (you always have to carry a book for the long waits here). A vendor appears at my side and starts asking too many questions--you have to be security conscious here--so I get up to go claim my seat, which is fortunately an aisle seat since the space is about half the length of my upper legs. A few vendors of sweet and fried things ply the aisles, then we're off. The pavement soon runs out, and most of the 3-hour ride consists of bouncing and lurching and grinding gears along the narrow winding mountain road, plowing through little streams and ponds left by the rainy season downpours.

Finally the sign appears by the roadside: "You are in Zapatista rebel territory. Here the people command and the government obeys." I get off and check in with the vigilance committee, who write down my basic data and pass a note to the Junta of Good Government, part of the regional structure of autonomous government created in August 2003, consisting of five centers called "Caracoles"(meaning snails or conch shells). I wait in a little passageway under a galvanized tin roof that is pounded by an afternoon downpour, producing a deafening roar. Posters outside explain the chronology of the Zapatista movement since the 1994 uprising, with its achievements and challenges. Tzeltal indigenous people take turns filing in and out to conduct their business, and eventually my turn comes. I enter the dark shed and see six men and one woman seated behind rough wooden tables, with several ancient manual typewriters tilted back on end. All are unmasked (unlike another Junta, I've heard, which is closer to town). I briefly explain my proposal, they ask a few clarifying questions, talking among themselves in Tzeltal, then they ask me to leave the written proposal and return in a week for a response. They call someone over to show me to the "camp" where I can rest, and they tell me the next transport back is at 2:00 a.m. God's time, 3:00 Federal time.

The camp is a long shed with wooden planks to sleep on or space to sling hammocks, and there are letrines 100 yards away across a muddy field. My bunkmates are a Greek couple whose solidarity committee helped build and fund a very successful teacher training school in an autonomous community not far from here, and four Catalan women who have come for the first time to try to figure out what projects they might get involved with to try to help the movement. It's interesting that so many more Europeans come to Chiapas than people from the U.S. The Catalans are ordinary middle class women in their 30s without much history of political involvement, who heard about the situation in Chiapas and met in the course of making plans to come here.

We go over to the "cafe,"a modest operation that sells coffee and soda and can occasionally rustle up a plate of beans for visitors, and I am amused to see that they have a computer with a satellite Internet connection, for k'axlanes (foreigners, non-indigenous) who can't wait until they get home to check email.

The Junta and camp and a few surrounding buildings are adorned with brightly painted murals and slogans celebrating the Zapatista struggle in Tzeltal and Spanish, and the community is downhill a bit from these installations of the Caracol (seat of autonomous regional government). Kids, chickens, pigs, and dogs wander around in the mud. The atmosphere is relaxed. Women wear the beribboned traditional Tzeltal dresses, and men usually wear work clothes with rubber boots and cowboy hat or baseball cap, the rural uniform. Clothes are patched, but I don't see any swollen bellies among the kids. I can't help thinking about the first time I was in this same spot in 1995, when the villagers were just returning after fleeing a government military offensive that violated the ceasefire. The army had killed their animals, trashed their homes, cut their water pipes, and the people looked awful then after living in hiding in the hills. It's a pleasure now to see a bustling community.

I meet a 50ish Argentine woman who volunteers as a doctor in the clinic, which is one of the new projects since the 1994 Zapatista rebellion. There are also hand-lettered signs for a women's artisanry co-op and a bicycle repair & rental shop. Construction of some new buildings is underway, presumably to accommodate the representatives of "civil society" who will be gathering to meet with the Zapatistas every weekend in August and into mid-September.

The meetings are part of a new political outreach strategy announced in June in the Zapatistas' "Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle." These open-ended consultations are to be followed by Zapatistas traveling to other parts of Mexico to connect with other activist groups and build coalitions, and perhaps work toward rewriting the Mexican Constitution (which suffered several reactionary "reforms" since the early 1990s as successive Mexican governments bent to the dictates of global capital).

The Sixth Declaration sparked a flurry of punditry. Contrary to the claims of the corporate media and the Coca Cola executive who is Mexico's current President, the Zapatistas made it clear that they were neither laying down arms nor forming a political party. But the text of the declaration provides few details of the new strategy, and adding to the confusion was the Zapatista announcement of a state of "red alert" and closing of access to their communities prior to the Declaration. It remains unclear whether that was a necessary security measure, but it meant that all the San Cristóbal-based NGOs working in Zapatista communities had a kind of unplanned vacation, giving everyone way too much time to speculate on what the Zapatistas were up to.

One of those bull sessions I attended in town was a panel at the trendy Museo Café, and the place was packed with a couple hundred mostly NGO workers and academics, about half foreign. Everyone's political and institutional agenda seemed to be driving the observations they made for public consumption. The Mexican left is just as divided as the U.S. left. There were glowing speeches by uncritical cheerleaders of the Zapatistas; fiery denunciations by "Indianists" claiming the Zapatistas had shown their true colors and reverted to a socialist agenda at the expense of ethnic rights; and lively debates over whether the EZLN should have toned down its attacks on Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the "center-left" (moving more to the center all the time) Mexico City mayor from the PRD party who has been leading in the polls for the July 2006 presidential election. The current PAN government has been so incapable of delivering on its empty promises of "change" since ending the 71-year reign of the PRI in 2000, that the most retrograde wing of the old PRI is making an electoral comeback. The "lesser of evils" argument had a familiar ring, though many of AMLO's closet defenders didn't want to admit their electoral hopes. Some armchair academics weighed in; including one with a long record of historical writing on Chiapas but little recent experience in Zapatista communities, who hypothesized that the Declaration reflected the victory of an orthodox left faction in intra-EZLN divisions, and that the Declaration seemed to have been written by Marcos in a "pseudo-indigenous" voice. Later a friend who has worked for years in Zapatista communities laughingly dismissed both theories.

I keep getting the feeling there is a sharp divide in perceptions between those who work in the communities and those who don't (especially the academics). I hope to trespass across that divide, but already I sense the difficulty, as the two worlds speak very different languages. In my academic readings I am finding I need to read work by local anthropologists and historians to get a perspective that doesn't come from just following and speculating on current events and Zapatista communiqués.