From the mountains of the Mexican southeast

Back in San Cristóbal, I set about assembling another load of school supplies for the autonomous Zapatista schools, with $1,100 in donations collected between the Interfaith Council for Peace & Justice, Laurie & Jack & Gary's fundraising party in Ann Arbor, and the talk at the Oaxaca Study-Action Group organized by George & Nancy. Once again, the wise and practical Bela was indispensable in helping with the logistics in San Cristóbal, as was Vicki who arrived on Wednesday morning from Oaxaca. We got a lead on a pickup truck going to the jungle early Thursday morning, which meant a bit of a scramble to get everything ready.

Meanwhile, there were more reports of harassment of activists in San Cristóbal, including three "robberies" at the only progressive bookstore in town in a short space of time, the last one in broad daylight with the attacker cutting the sales clerk on the face with a knife. They often try to disguise these campaigns by making them seem like random events or common delinquency, adding to the uncertainty. In my few days in San Cristóbal I saw a cop loitering outside a music spot one night where I noticed several local activists were having a drink. I was with an Argentine doctor who volunteers in health projects in Zapatista communities, and later when I walked her back around midnight to where she was staying (a communal house where people doing solidarity work in communities stay when they're in town), a shady-looking guy approached us as we got to the house and asked for a cigarette, then hung around after we told him we didn't smoke. In the next couple of days two notes were torn off my front door, and once when I left the house for ten minutes and noticed a guy hanging out across the street, I returned to find a ten-minute message on my answering machine consisting entirely of indecipherable voices and music. Mostly minor stuff and some perhaps coincidental, but there's a growing pattern.

Thursday morning our ride appeared at 6:30 a.m. and we headed out--R. from a local human rights center, H. from a peace and conflict-resolution NGO, MA from an ecology and indigenous rights group (along with his 11-year-old daughter), and Vicki and me and the school supplies. Vicki hopes to do some math education workshops for Zapatista education promoters, part of her Math for Peace project of community-oriented "family math" education that she has been implementing with great success in South Africa, Palestine, Guatemala, and East Timor. She has a couple of weeks before the next phase of her project in Ecuador, so if the scheduling all works out she can do some workshops for education promoters in one autonomous municipality in the jungle, and then one for a group of the teacher trainers from various solidarity collectives who will be assembling in Mexico City on the 26th, before she flies on from there to Quito. R., H., and MA are making the rounds of the Zapatista Caracoles to propose a joint project between their organizations, with support from a Swiss religious group, for additional human rights observation in the communities in the context of the anticipated increase in tension in the coming months leading up to the July 2006 Mexican elections. In addition to existing human rights observation, their project would assemple a small group of experienced human rights workers in the region as a kind of mobile team to respond quickly to urgent situations, and who would also give workshops to train community observers and set up a rapid alert system. As for me, I'm continuing my interviews in the second of four municipalities. I'm particularly interested in learning more about a community of urban Zapatistas that the municipal council mentioned on my last visit.

We arrive in the Caracol shortly after noon. After an hour or so of waiting and checking in with the Vigilance Commission, Vicki and I are escorted in to see the Junta. We deliver the donation, for which they are very appreciative, and we ask permission for our respective projects of math education and interviews. They show us where to unload the supplies and say they'll get back to us with a response. We hang out in the camp and the café while waiting, and the rest of our group eventually gets a similar promise of a response later in the day. The long wait offers a nice opportunity to hang out talking with people I never get to spend enough time with in the hustle and bustle of our urban/globalized lives. Vicki works on her workshop materials, and in between time we catch up. R. and H. explain more about their human rights proposal, and R. fills in more details about the recent rash of acts of intimidation against activists in San Cristóbal. I tell her about some of my research findings so far, and she shares some stories brought back by the human rights observers that her office sends out for two-week stints in conflict zones. H. passes the time making bead jewelry, to the fascination of the local children. I talk with MA, whom I had only met briefly before, about his work on environmental and land issues, and he invites me to stop in his office back in town for copies of recent studies they have produced on the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve (a conflict pitting transnational corporations, the government, manipulated groups of "Lacandones," and "conservationist" NGOs against Zapatista and other poor indigenous peasants settling the jungle region); and on PROCEDE (a government program to individually title and privatize the collective ejido lands, part of the agrarian counterreform underway since 1992).

While waiting we also strike up conversation with several non-Zapatistas waiting to see the Junta. One man runs a transportation cooperative, and he says he has respect for the Zapatistas even though he is not part of the movement. I ask him about the construction on the main road through this canyon and he says it was originally scheduled to go all the way to a large town at the end (where a major military base is located, not coincidentally), but the contractors wouldn't agree to a tax the Junta imposed for the next stretch of road, so meanwhile the government reallocated the funds elsewhere and the negotiations would have to resume when there was another government funding allotment. Another elderly man, accompanied by his family, had brought a sheaf of papers about what seemed to be a complicated land dispute that he tried to explain to anyone who would listen.

The Junta, working late into the evening, eventually calls us in. They give me a receipt/letter of thanks for the donated school supplies, and a letter of authorization to the municipal council to work out the details of my community visits with them. Vicki gets a letter of authorization for the other municipality where she has offered to give math workshops. The Junta tells us both that this is just an authorization, that the final decision and details are at the discretion of the municipalities, in keeping with the Zapatista spirit of decentralized and participatory decision-making, or mandar obedeciendo, i.e. leading by obeying their constituents. Similarly, the human rights project is approved in principle, noting that it will be up to each community to decide whether or how many people to spare for training as participants in the network of community observers; with the fallback option that they could choose a more limited participation in the alert system for human rights emergencies.

We all turn in early, tired from the dusty trip and from waiting around in the sun. Vicki gets up at 3 a.m. with the plan of catching the one scheduled bus a day back to town to head out to the municipality in a different canyon, and the others leave at 5 a.m. for the next regional Caracol. I sleep in until 7:00 and am surprised to find Vicki still there, as the bus was full and didn't stop. She asks around and is told that someone with a pick-up truck is heading to town "in awhile," a time frame I have come to know well. I camp out in front of the other municipal office, prepared for a long wait. Happily, I am called in after only an hour or so. The council tells me there is someone here from town who can connect me to the urban Zapatista groups in the town I call "Macondo" at the edge of the jungle region, and he'll come look for me when he's ready to go. I commit a faux pas by asking the man his name, and he looks startled and asks, "You mean my real name?" No, I assure him, any name is fine. It turns out he's in the same truck that Vicki is taking to change to another transport to the other canyon, and we eventually leave around 3 p.m., arriving in town around 6.

A different compa in town escorts me back to his house in a poor barrio, where he lives with his wife and five kids and one granddaughter. His wife kindly brings us scrambled eggs and beans and tortillas, and I chat with the compa whom I'll call Gerardo. He's 57, a deeply religious man who has worked for 40 years as the janitor in the church parish. He is also a campesino who spent his childhood working from sunup to sundown for the wealthy landowner just outside town for the equivalent of fifty cents a day, plus the right to plant corn on a tiny patch of the land for subsistence (in exchange for half the harvest). The landowner used to beat them with sticks when he wasn't happy with their work. Gerardo didn't become aware of the Zapatista movement until the 1994 uprising, then he joined "because of the injustice that we suffered under the landowner and the government." He is in charge of a small urban group of 13 families, who just last year were given land by the Zapatistas who had recovered it from wealthy landowners about 15 kilometers from town. He asks for news of the Other Campaign, and expresses the hope "that God guide them on their path."

Gerardo takes me back to the church where he has to get back to work, and tells me to ask the priest for permission to crash in one of the bunks in the back of the parish house. The padre seems less than enthusiastic but agrees, and I get a good night's rest on a real mattress. Saturday morning we go back to Gerardo's house, where he has sent word to members of his group (except for a few who live too far away) to assemble. The dozen or so are all simple, hard-working older men (I ask about the women and am told with some embarrassment, "They don't like to come to meetings"). They are Tzeltales who speak various degrees of Spanish, and most like Gerardo were once virtual slaves of the patrón, Don Manuel. One elderly man still works for a rancher who cleverly sold off most of his land after the uprising, and the others in the group are trying to convince him to leave the ranch and come join them on recovered land. Another migrated with his family to a different area of the jungle in search of land when he was young, and joined the early Zapatista movement before moving to this area after the uprising. They talk about the difficulties of organizing from the city, where they live dispersed rather than in community, and where they say many people are either asleep or bought off by the government. They give examples of government strategies to divide and weaken grassroots organization, including handouts to loyalists (often explicit exchanges for votes, like one scheme they describe that's going on in town during the current election campaign). "People allow themselves to be used, through their ignorance," one man explains sadly.

Another government-aligned peasant organization, ORCAO, has currently invaded some of this group's recovered land and is violently trying to intimidate them into abandoning the land. They say the ORCAO group already has land and is just put up to doing this to undermine Zapatista organization. The government stirs up the conflict by offering to sell the land (already occupied and farmed by Zapatistas) to the competing organization. The compas, squeezed by the pro-government group onto a sliver of land too small for subsistence, all have to supplement their incomes by doing day labor (chambeando) on surrounding fincas and ranchos for the equivalent of US$2.50 a day, but at least since the 1994 rebellion the workday is only 7 hours instead of 12 or more, "since the ranchers are afraid now."

They observe that one of the other Zapatista groups formed in the city has already been infiltrated and divided by people who are "with the government." They think this occurred because the other group didn't have clear political consciousness but were only motivated by personal gain, to get land for themselves. They contrast their struggle for land, in which comrades have given their lives, with pro-government peasant groups that only showed up when the Zapatista had recovered land to try to take it away even if they didn't need land.

For all their obstacles, this group plans to start building houses on the recovered plots 15 kilometers away, to consolidate their claims to the land. They have traveled to the Caracol to ask the authorities to send a commission to investigate and help resolve the conflict with the ORCAO land occupiers. They are proud of what they have accomplished, citing their freedom from the abusive authority of the landlord and ability to build real houses on their own land, as opposed to straw-and-mud structures on land "loaned" by the landlord. Most of these men never had a chance to go to school, but I talk to one of Gerardo's daughters who graduated from high school and works in an adult education institute in town. They interrupt the meeting to insist that I have breakfast, and I know that this hospitality is an important point of pride for them. They ask me to please write down the name of their group, "Nopal," which they proudly explain refers to the hardy cactus plant that is resistant, survives on little water, and sprouts back up whenever it is cut back.

After the meeting they stop by the house of a leader of another Zapatista group in a different barrio, and ask him to set up a meeting for me with his group. He seems unenthused but eventually says he'll come get me at 4:30, and meanwhile Gerardo takes me back to the parish where I hang out reading and writing. I go for a stroll around the plaza, where I am startled to see a campaign banner for a federal Congress seat for Pedro Chulín,
a local representative reputed to be the leader of a paramilitary group. Back at the parish, Gerardo stops by to chat occasionally on breaks from his work. He tells me the current priests aren't nearly as generous or as sympathetic to the movement as previous ones, but it's a job. He also implies that the next group I'm going to meet with are less than wholehearted in their commitment to zapatismo, but tells me I should see for myself. He then tells me the story of the elderly man back at the Caracol with the complicated land dispute and the stack of documents. It seems the man bought some land in good faith from a swindler who had sold the land several times over. The con artist skipped town and paid off the authorities not to pursue him. In the meantime the elderly fellow had sold some of the land to several other families, who were now occupying the land and demanded that they either be given rightful title or their money back. So now the Junta was being asked to mediate between the two sets of victims, since the government was covering up for the wealthy con artist.

The conversations with Gerardo offered some perspective on the ebbs and flows of the Zapatista movement. He and his band talk about people who have left the organization out of fear or the enticement of government handouts, but on the other hand many of them are new recruits since the 1994 uprising. There seems to be a process of shaking out between those seeking short-term individual gain and those who are clearer about the big picture. There are always waverers and fence-sitters, but Gerardo explains to me that he tries to be clear about the terms up-front when he recruits: 1) No drinking, 2) You have to come to meetings, and 3) The struggle is for the long term, it's not just something you join for a little while. What is it that makes some people more willing than others to accept risks and sacrifices for a better future that might mainly benefit others? Interestingly, this particular group consists of older folks who don't have young kids, so it's not something they are doing specifically for their own children. Rather they seem driven by their own past experiences of oppression and injustice, a moral desire for a better world, and perhaps a sense of camaraderie that comes from being part of a collective struggle for what they see as a just cause.

Around 5 p.m. the man I'll call Arturo from the other urban Zapatista group picks me up at the parish. He turns out to be a taxi driver and takes me in his cab to his house. Along the way he toots his horn and leans out the window greeting neighbors and passersby. He tries unsuccessfully to recruit a couple of people at the last minute to come meet with me at his house. His house has a TV that plays constantly, children's toys scattered about, a string of blinking Christmas lights in the living room (in February), and other consumer trappings that set it apart from my last host's home. The others in attendance from his group are a man in his mid-40s who is a grade school teacher in a rural government school outside town, and a campesino in his late 50s whom I'll call José. The schoolteacher does most of the talking, and he describes the growth of his group in very entrepreneurial language, emphasizing the recruitment of professionals and independent small businesspeople such as drivers of trucks and taxis. As he describes his political work, it sounds rather similar to a local politician anywhere, building clientelistic networks of needy loyalists by offering to serve as an intermediary with those in power who control resources. I ask about the apparent contradiction of a Zapatista teaching in a government school, and he says he leaves his politics at the door when he goes to work--quite a different philosophy from what I have heard from education promoters in autonomous schools, who note the political implications of any system of education. This man is well educated and articulate in Spanish as well as a Tzeltal speaker, and he says many of the children in his school are Tzeltal, but the instruction is all in Spanish as a matter of government policy.

The schoolteacher's view of the Zapatista movement is that it has to grow by reaching out to people like him, building on widespread frustration with ineffective and corrupt government, and competing by doing a better job providing goods and services. He gives an example of how non-Zapatista truck drivers, angry at the monopolistic practices of some of the well-connected transportation companies, took their complaint to the regional Zapatista Junta, where a sensible route-sharing arrangement was worked out. Impressed with the results, the drivers declared their affiliation with this urban Zapatista group. (I wonder about such "battlefield conversions," compared to the long process that built the movement in the decades before it went public in 1994.) The teacher saw all this as consistent with the spirit of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, reaching out to all sectors that considered themselves on the left and at the bottom, and he even went so far as to speculate that eventually the Zapatistas would need to "insert themselves in the national political arena." He said it was natural for the urban movement to grow by a continual process of splintering off from the core, since "people like to be in charge" and each ambitious rising leader could take his local group of followers with him and start a new group, "like cell division in an organism."

It's a reformist vision that seems at odds with the more radically democratic, grassroots/participatory emphasis of zapatismo, as well as the community orientation of rural indigenous Zapatistas. The conversation illustrated the dilemmas of a broad alliance strategy, and it was the first time I had ever heard anyone with this outlook call himself a Zapatista, as opposed to just a sympathizer or member of a support committee. Now I understood the reservations of Gerardo about this group, with its much more heterogeneous class and ideological makeup.

José, the campesino member of the group, told a story of his brush with the law that had cemented his loyalties to the group. It seems his no-good brother-in-law had run off and abandoned his sister with a gaggle of kids. The house abandoned by the nogoodnik remained empty for a long time while José's sister was experiencing hardship, so he helped her break the lock and install herself and the kids, reasoning that she had as much right to the house as he did and certainly more need. The brother-in-law, who never liked José anyway, went to the authorities and accused him not only of trespassing but of robbing the contents of the house--which José insists was empty--and he paid off witnesses as well as the police and judge to have José arrested. To make a long story short, José, who had previously belonged to one of the pro-government peasant organizations, turned to the local urban Zapatistas for help. Even though he was still not completely cleared of the charges, he was grateful to this group for their support and infuriated that "the law only works on the basis of money." That seems to be a universal refrain here, and the Zapatista efforts to roll up their sleeves and impart more balanced justice have earned them a lot of legitimacy. As José said, evidently impressed, "You don't have to pay them anything, you just have to come up with the fare for transportation to the Caracol!"

The meeting ended about 8 p.m., and there was some awkwardness about what they were supposed to do with me next. The standard procedure with these visits is that each Zapatista community will contact the next one and arrange the handoff, as Gerardo had done. I have to say, in my eight months of traveling in Zapatista communities, this was the first time I was not offered food or lodging. Not that I necessarily expected or needed it, but it was interesting that the one better-off group I encountered were noticeably less generous than the much poorer Zapatistas I had met, who would invariably give a guest their last tortilla. In the end, although it was well after dark, the schoolteacher took me in his truck to a Zapatista community a few kilometers out of town, where they had not consulted first about my arrival. It turned out that the community belonged to a different regional Caracol, suggesting how poorly informed and connected this urban group was. Embarrassed, he then drove me to a different community which I'll call Belén. By then it was past 9 p.m., well after bedtime in peasant villages without electricity, and the schoolteacher half-heartedly said I could stay at his house if the compas here couldn't put me up for the night. Fortunately the folks here welcomed me graciously in more Zapatista community fashion, putting me up in the school (a one-room wooden building with dirt floor) and bringing me a candle, asking me about my purpose and agreeing to set up a meeting the next morning at 9.

Sunday morning one of the education promoters, a 30-year-old man I'll call Isaác, comes by to invite me to breakfast--scrambled eggs, beans, tortillas and sweet coffee. I learn that he is Tzotzil, originally from Huixtán near San Cristóbal, and migrated to the jungle at a young age because there wasn't enough land in his home village. He joined the EZLN in 1988 and participated in the 1994 rebellion, serving a couple of years in the Zapatista militia before relocating to recovered land here. Now he speaks good Tzeltal as well as Spanish, serves as an education promoter and is fully integrated into the community. He explained that Belén used to belong to a different Caracol, but it was shifted to this one for administrative reasons a year and a half ago. He made it clear that the old Caracol was much more organized and disciplined and politically together than this one, which I had heard from other sources as well. He told me that the government schoolteacher from the urban Zapatista group who had dropped me off was "not 100% Zapatista, he wears a double shirt," since he taught in the official school system and draws a government salary rather than living by working the land. Isaác clarified, "We call him compa, but he's not part of the support base communities, he's more like civil society. He doesn't have cargos (assigned responsibilities) in the Organization, so he's like a volunteer. We invited him to our assemblies but he said he didn't have time. That's fine, we don't force anyone."

The meeting was with 9 men who were community responsables or had cargos such as health or education promoter. They had a regularly scheduled assembly of the entire community that afternoon and had considered having me do a collective interview there, but decided we'd be there all week if everyone started telling their individual tales. This was a determined group of people who had recovered land from the rancher because they needed it for survival, and they were clear about wanting to make a better life for themselves with limited resources. They were a stone's throw from a major military base, and in fact the rancher whose land they took over had been a high-ranking military officer (whom they nicknamed "Little Dog"), but they were not about to be intimidated. They ran the army out when they tried to set up a target practice range on the edge of the community, and on another occasion they arrested a soldier who had wandered into the village under the influence of drugs and tried to enter a house. The community was too poor to provide corn to their education promoters, but instead of giving up, they sent more young community members to be trained as promoters, so they could rotate between teaching the 110 kids and tending their own crops. An impressive, resourceful lot.

After the meeting I took a walk around the community, bathed, had lunch with Isaác, watched the afternoon soccer game (Belén vs. Macondo, a tied match), then attended the community assembly (consisting of just the men; I was told women attend the political sessions but not the business meetings). The first point on the agenda was a collection to buy supplies and an agreed date to go into the hills and haul boards for construction of a new school building. These assemblies look chaotic to the non-Tzeltal-speaking observer like myself, with clusters of people talking among themselves and occasionally a voice rising above the others to address the whole body, then after sufficient murmuring and responses someone eventually tests for consensus, and the process is repeated until agreement is reached. The next main item was an appeal by the catechist for participants and a collection of funds for a pilgrimage to San Cristóbal to protest government harassment of the diocese's "Indian theology" project, which seeks to rescue indigenous cultural traditions in the context of religious activities. The current bishop, Felipe Arizmendi, is a pale shadow of the much-loved Samuel Ruiz, a follower of Liberation Theology who served as mediator for the first Zapatista/government talks in 1994 and was forced into retirement by the conservatives in charge of the Vatican. But apparently the government finds even Don Felipe and the upholding of indigenous culture to be threatening. At the end of the meeting the community authorities introduced me and asked me to say a few words about what I was doing there. You have to be prepared to make impromptu speeches in this line of work. People seemed genuinely appreciative of the visit, and afterwards several approached to ask me about the U.S. and about my observations in the communities.

The authorities suggest that I stay another night and leave early in the morning for a settlement I'll call Los Jaguares, an hour or so away in the mountains. They radio ahead to say I'm coming, and two young men show up at 7:30 the next morning to guide me there. As usual, they're hopping nimbly up and down the mountain trails as I huff and puff. It turns out to be a small community of 13 families perched precariously on bad hilly land recovered from a rancher. They assemble a meeting in the church, men and women, and tell the story of their struggle for land and survival. They have a health promoter but no medicine, and there is no education promoter because nobody has a sufficient level of literacy, since they had all previously been ranch hands working from dawn to dusk for the landowner.

They insist on feeding me, then they suggest I visit a small community I'll call El Guajolote a half hour's hike further into the mountains. There's no time to announce my arrival, but they round up 5 guys out of the 11 Zapatista families there for a chat in someone's front yard. This group is even poorer than the last, and their land is even more limited because of a competing land recovery by members of the non-Zapatista peasant organization ARIC. The pro-government ARIC members reached an agreement with a nearby rancher to get access to water from his stream in exchange for doing odd jobs for him, leaving the proudly independent Zapatistas without a steady water supply. They'd like to have a community vegetable plot, but can't keep it watered during the current dry season. They don't quite have enough land for subsistence, forcing them all to work as day laborers periodically for better-off neighbors for about $4 a day. They're considering asking the Junta for permission to "recover" land on one of two nearby plots that they covet, one owned by an absentee medium landlord/rancher, and the other claimed by an ARIC group that recovered more patches of land than they need and aren't actually living on this one.

It seems doubtful that the Junta will sanction another land invasion at the moment though, especially on lands claimed by the rival peasant organization ARIC. The Zapatista authorities in this region seem more in a conflict-resolution mode, earning legitimacy from their perceived fairness, and the counter claims of competing peasant organization could lead to a never-ending cycle of mutual land invasions and conflict if a truce isn't called. Even the idea of moving in on the absentee landlord seems dubious, since the main wave of land recoveries occurred in the years right after 1994 when the really large owners quickly realized they'd be better off abandoning the land with minimum fuss (taking their valuable cattle with them) and accepting government compensation for their loss, but that moment of opportunity had passed. The other idea this group had tried for getting a slightly firmer grip on subsistence was piping in water from a mountain stream for their vegetable patch, but the pump had broken and they lacked money to replace it. Despite the continued precariousness of their existence, they expressed satisfaction that they were out from under the thumb of the landlord and the government, working only for themselves and enjoying the fruits of their own labor.

I head back to San Cristóbal on Monday afternoon. Vicki is back in town and takes off Tuesday morning to do math workshops in the communities. She'll stop back in town in a few days, before going up to Mexico City to do more workshops for the collective of teacher trainers there. Meanwhile members of one of the other education collectives will be stopping here on their way out to El Conejo next week, and I may join them on that trip to see how the next phase of their project is going. They've also expanded their efforts to help connect Zapatista coffee growers in the jungle to fair trade coffee networks, so they've asked me to help investigate coffee processing and transportation options in San Cristóbal for a five-ton shipment they're hoping to send north for distribution.