Tuesday, April 11, 2006
tierra y libertad
I had to get back to town for an interview that Mariana and I planned to do with the number two at the agrarian attorney general's office. The position of Delegate had just been vacated in a reshuffling of posts, so the Sub-Delegate for Juridical Affairs had agreed to do the interview. After a couple of postponements the office finally calls to confirm, just in time for us to grab a cab for the two-hour ride to Tuxtla. He gives us the official line and trips himself up a few times, not nearly as clever as the Special Representative of the Secretariat of Agrarian Reform whom we had previously interviewed--who, we learned, had just resigned to run for a secure Senate seat, a plum prize for her hard work of agrarian counterreform and counterinsurgency. It seems all the top bureaucrats are repositioning themselves in anticipation of a PAN defeat in the July election.
The official finally admits that Chiapas is in last place for percent of ejidos entering into PROCEDE, the program for individual titling of collective land; and that less than 1% of ejidos here enter the final stage of the process to convert their plots to individual private property. Since the data are presented on the web site in a manner that obscures this fact, we ask for the statistical breakdown which he promises to send later; we'll see if it comes. He does some verbal gymnastics to claim that individual titling actually gives campesinos more security to land and is simply a continuation of what Zapata would have wanted (which probably made the agrarian hero of the Mexican Revolution roll over in his grave). We both kept a straight face when he claimed that most of the peasant organizations supported PROCEDE, though he must realize the absurdity of this assertion because he later made reference to the meeting I had attended in Petalcingo, where representatives of 35 organizations and 6 individual ejidos denounced the program and promised to begin direct actions to stop it.
Saturday morning I leave at 6:00 to head for the Caracol for the April 10 festivities. Fiestas are a major event in the life of communities here, which is my excuse for going. I get to Macondo too early because I had forgotten that people out here refuse to implement daylight savings time, preferring "God's time" to "government time." On the bus from Macondo to the Caracol, it soon becomes clear that most of the passengers are Zapatistas heading in from the communities for the fiesta, and soon they are joking and addressing each other openly as "compa," which they usually refrain from doing on a public bus.
As I'm coming out of the Junta building where I got permission to stay for the festivities, I run into the Catalans and Germans I had met on my last stay here. We spend the next few days hanging out talking, hauling firewood and water, cooking and sharing sleeping quarters in the camp. Saturday night the music starts, two bands blaring the same limited selection of popular songs. Parties here are more like county fairs, lasting several days, with stands selling food and people camped out everywhere under sheets of plastic.
Sunday there is a church service which spills out onto the basketball court because the crowd doesn't fit. I'm interested to see that there is a woman deacon giving communion to the women on one side of the court opposite the line of men on the other side. The Pope might not approve, but it's just one more adaptation of tradition to fit local needs. After the service, there is a solemn ceremony to bless the region's two new ambulances. Well, actually they're white pickup trucks being used as ambulances, festooned with balloons for the occasion. And actually they're not brand new, but I hear they're finally paid for, hence the ceremony. There are two health promoters riding in each vehicle, presumably representing the four municipalities they will serve, wearing white shirts with a red cross marked "EZLN." The trucks are driven onto the basketball court, trailed by a procession headed by standard bearers with the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's indigenous miracle. The health promoters get out and line up in front of the vehicles and the t'unel (deacon) dips flowers in holy water. Someone opens all the truck doors and pops the hood so holy water can be sprinkled on the engine and seats as well as on the outside and on the health promoters, accompanied by drum and flutes, as a few hundred onlookers observe.
After the ceremony, the main event of the three-day marathon party begins: The basketball tournament between teams from all the communities. We foreigners form impromptu teams, Chojetik (meaning tigers in Tzeltal) for the men's league and Las Pingüinas (female penguins) for the women's. The guys are eliminated in the first round with a respectable 34-27 defeat. In the evening the bands strike up again, then they pause at midnight for singing of the Zapatista hymn and raising of the Mexican national flag and Zapatista flag (the latter at half staff to commemorate the assassination of Zapata on April 10, 1919). Then the party resumes--minus alcohol of course, as Zapatista territory is dry; a violator is caught and hauled off to jail for 24 hours.)
Monday is the main day of the party, with the men's basketball finals and the women's games (Las Rebeldes defeat Las Pingüinas). At lunch time a compa I'll call Felipe drops by our kitchen to chat, and I recognize him from one of the municipal councils and from his stint on the Junta. The Germans are going to visit his small village of six families to test a sample of the stream water for their water purification project. They ask if there's electricity and he says no, we have a little dispute with the Federal Electricity Commission. It seems the Commission ran electric lines through the Zapatista territory (without a connection for the Zapatistas of course), and there was a short circuit that caused a fire in his community. He says now they're trying to get the feds to either pay for the damage, or compensate them with a transformer so they can connect to the power lines.
I ask Felipe if that's the burned patch I've seen by the roadside a half hour from here. No, he says, that's another story. That was a patch of land recovered by some non-Zapatistas after 1994, who took government aid as part of a cattle project. But everytime they were given cows, they secretly sold them and told the government the Zapatistas had stolen them. After a few rounds of this trick, the Zapatistas investigated and found out what was going on. Fed up with being falsely accused, the Junta authorized a group of landless Zapatistas to move in and occupy the land themselves. The non-Zapatistas burned the place down in retaliation.
The two stories illustrate the complexities of relations with the government and with non-Zapatistas. During these few days of chatting with a cross-section of the region's Zapatistas gathered in a relaxed mode at the Caracol, I've also gotten a sense that the organization continues to grow by offering space on recovered land to landless supporters, including some from faraway regions, and is also steadily growing in the nearby city. As one Macondo resident who works on recovered land a half hour from the city said with some amazement, "there are all kinds of people who are joining in the city now since the Sixth Declaration, even licenciados [college graduates] and architects!" There's also a new secondary school project in the works in one of the municipalities, and new autonomous schools being built all the time as more education promoters are trained. Felipe told us his little village of six families still didn't have a promoter, but he had just persuaded one of his grandkids to enroll in training.
In the evening the music stops briefly and a group of Zapatistas with paliacates (kerchiefs) over their faces and one in a pasamontañas (ski mask) take the stage. The young man in the ski mask reads a proclamation in Spanish noting the continuation of Zapata's struggle in today's movement. I realize that I know him, he's a guy I'll call Horacio, I visited his remote community. This is the second time now I've recognized the ski-masked main speaker at an event in the Caracol, and I realize another layer of irony of the symbolic masks: Lots of people in this crowd must recognize their homeboys when they get up there on stage with masks. As the Zapatistas like to point out, they wear masks to unmask the government; and they put on their masks when they want to be public, and take them off when they want to be faceless invisible indigenous people to everyone else.
After the official speech, there's a short fireworks display, then Horacio makes a few remarks in Tzeltal, followed by announcement of the lineup for the cultural program of the evening. First the Zapatista anthem is sung. Then there's a short theater piece about Zapata performed by schoolkids.
The Smaliyel collective performs a folkloric dance number. A soloist sings some Latin American protest songs with keyboard accompaniment. A group of brigadistas who have come to do construction work present a modern dance feminist piece. A group of Native Americans from the U.S. perform Aztec dances,
and the leader makes a short but heartfelt speech in Spanish expressing solidarity of indigenous peoples in the north with the Zapatista struggle. One of the German campamentistas does a juggling act with fire, followed by brief remarks thanking the Zapatistas for their example of autonomy which inspires other progressive movements.
Finally, the performances end and the music and dancing continue into the wee hours of the morning.
During a break in the music I catch Andrea, one of the teacher trainers from Mexico City who has just come from meetings in El Conejo to plan the next phase of their project, more specialized classes in agroecology. She fills me in on her
collective's other new project, trying to market fair trade coffee to raise funds to support autonomous education in the municipality. The effort has been something of a comedy of errors, as the group has no experience in coffee marketing and is learning along the way at the school of hard knocks. In our last exciting episode, the group had made a trial purchase of a half
ton, then realized they had failed to specify important details such as the stage of processing in which the coffee would be delivered, humidity level, etc. So they wound up having to do the final processing at a high price in Mexico City before transporting it north to U.S. fair trade markets (to be distributed by Danza Mexica in Minnesota, the same Native American
group that performed the Aztec dance at the fiesta).
This time they arranged a purchase of five tons depulped and dry, but then after the purchase was arranged, when they scouted around for a place in Chiapas to do the next step of processing (removing the thin inner skin) they learned that the very few processors in the state are very jealous of their turf and protective of their existing clientele and reluctant to even give out information. So the collective finally negotiated with the Junta to use the processing equipment that they normally use for another collective’s fair trade coffee project, but it involved delicate reassurances that they wouldn’t be competing with that group’s market segment. Also the Junta didn’t have much business experience either and wouldn’t tell them the price for using the equipment, saying don’t worry, we’ll work out a fair price later. (Fortunately it turned out to be less than the commercial rate.) That’s when they learned that there’s an additional step, hand-sorting the beans to remove the ones that got burned or not properly skinned by the equipment. After a quick scrambling of volunteers, that little problem was taken care of.
So then Elena came down from Mexico City to Chiapas to arrange the transport of the coffee which had now been delivered to the state capital in Tuxtla. That’s when they learned that in order to transport coffee on federal highways they were supposed to have a government certificate verifying the coffee’s provenance and certifying that it was free of plant disease. The problem of course was that the coffee came from Zapatista autonomous territory, where official government authorities don’t operate. The truck driver was nervous about the whole idea and to Elena’s dismay, stopped the truck at an office of the Federal Preventive Police to ask, What should I do, I’ve got this load of coffee from some group called the Zapatistas who say they don’t recognize the authority and laws of the federal government?! Amazingly, the officer explained to the agitated truck driver, Oh, the Zapatistas have their own autonomous authorities in their territories, don’t worry about it! (Apparently the feds have bigger problems on their hands than a truckload of coffee on the road.) Elena quickly reassured the driver that she would personally guarantee that the Zapatista Junta would provide a letter verifying that the coffee was disease-free and not stolen, so finally they were on the road to Mexico City.
Then there was the problem of the sacks. To save money, they had bought a bunch of Guatemalan burlap coffee sacks for a cheap price. When they were stopped at a federal highway inspection station, Elena suddenly realized in a panic that the inspectors were going to open the truck and see a bunch of sacks that said “Product of Guatemala,” and of course they didn’t have an import license or proof that it was actually Mexican coffee. Fortunately, the inspector was a portly fellow who couldn’t haul himself up into the truck for a close look, so he peered in from the road and said they could go on their way. Finally they arrived in Mexico City where another progressive group had agreed to loan them some space to store the coffee, and they realized that nobody could lift the enormous Guatemalan sacks, so the five tons of coffee had to be transferred to more manageable sized bags. Now the group is pondering various ways to deal with the paperwork problem to get the coffee from autonomous regions across the Mexico-U.S. border: Buy some artful documents on the black market, find someone in the office of the Secretary of Agriculture who might issue the certificate, take a chance and drive the truck across at a point where there’s a lot of day traffic and hope for the best, split up the shipment and mobilize a lot of people to run it back and forth in the trunks of private cars like a drug deal, or find another organization that has the proper documentation and might list the shipment as one of theirs. Then they have to guess at a price that will recoup costs, remunerate the producers fairly, and generate some excess to support autonomous education in the region, which was the original point of the exercise. The trials and tribulations of solidarity.
The official finally admits that Chiapas is in last place for percent of ejidos entering into PROCEDE, the program for individual titling of collective land; and that less than 1% of ejidos here enter the final stage of the process to convert their plots to individual private property. Since the data are presented on the web site in a manner that obscures this fact, we ask for the statistical breakdown which he promises to send later; we'll see if it comes. He does some verbal gymnastics to claim that individual titling actually gives campesinos more security to land and is simply a continuation of what Zapata would have wanted (which probably made the agrarian hero of the Mexican Revolution roll over in his grave). We both kept a straight face when he claimed that most of the peasant organizations supported PROCEDE, though he must realize the absurdity of this assertion because he later made reference to the meeting I had attended in Petalcingo, where representatives of 35 organizations and 6 individual ejidos denounced the program and promised to begin direct actions to stop it.
Saturday morning I leave at 6:00 to head for the Caracol for the April 10 festivities. Fiestas are a major event in the life of communities here, which is my excuse for going. I get to Macondo too early because I had forgotten that people out here refuse to implement daylight savings time, preferring "God's time" to "government time." On the bus from Macondo to the Caracol, it soon becomes clear that most of the passengers are Zapatistas heading in from the communities for the fiesta, and soon they are joking and addressing each other openly as "compa," which they usually refrain from doing on a public bus.
As I'm coming out of the Junta building where I got permission to stay for the festivities, I run into the Catalans and Germans I had met on my last stay here. We spend the next few days hanging out talking, hauling firewood and water, cooking and sharing sleeping quarters in the camp. Saturday night the music starts, two bands blaring the same limited selection of popular songs. Parties here are more like county fairs, lasting several days, with stands selling food and people camped out everywhere under sheets of plastic.
Sunday there is a church service which spills out onto the basketball court because the crowd doesn't fit. I'm interested to see that there is a woman deacon giving communion to the women on one side of the court opposite the line of men on the other side. The Pope might not approve, but it's just one more adaptation of tradition to fit local needs. After the service, there is a solemn ceremony to bless the region's two new ambulances. Well, actually they're white pickup trucks being used as ambulances, festooned with balloons for the occasion. And actually they're not brand new, but I hear they're finally paid for, hence the ceremony. There are two health promoters riding in each vehicle, presumably representing the four municipalities they will serve, wearing white shirts with a red cross marked "EZLN." The trucks are driven onto the basketball court, trailed by a procession headed by standard bearers with the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's indigenous miracle. The health promoters get out and line up in front of the vehicles and the t'unel (deacon) dips flowers in holy water. Someone opens all the truck doors and pops the hood so holy water can be sprinkled on the engine and seats as well as on the outside and on the health promoters, accompanied by drum and flutes, as a few hundred onlookers observe.
After the ceremony, the main event of the three-day marathon party begins: The basketball tournament between teams from all the communities. We foreigners form impromptu teams, Chojetik (meaning tigers in Tzeltal) for the men's league and Las Pingüinas (female penguins) for the women's. The guys are eliminated in the first round with a respectable 34-27 defeat. In the evening the bands strike up again, then they pause at midnight for singing of the Zapatista hymn and raising of the Mexican national flag and Zapatista flag (the latter at half staff to commemorate the assassination of Zapata on April 10, 1919). Then the party resumes--minus alcohol of course, as Zapatista territory is dry; a violator is caught and hauled off to jail for 24 hours.)
Monday is the main day of the party, with the men's basketball finals and the women's games (Las Rebeldes defeat Las Pingüinas). At lunch time a compa I'll call Felipe drops by our kitchen to chat, and I recognize him from one of the municipal councils and from his stint on the Junta. The Germans are going to visit his small village of six families to test a sample of the stream water for their water purification project. They ask if there's electricity and he says no, we have a little dispute with the Federal Electricity Commission. It seems the Commission ran electric lines through the Zapatista territory (without a connection for the Zapatistas of course), and there was a short circuit that caused a fire in his community. He says now they're trying to get the feds to either pay for the damage, or compensate them with a transformer so they can connect to the power lines.
I ask Felipe if that's the burned patch I've seen by the roadside a half hour from here. No, he says, that's another story. That was a patch of land recovered by some non-Zapatistas after 1994, who took government aid as part of a cattle project. But everytime they were given cows, they secretly sold them and told the government the Zapatistas had stolen them. After a few rounds of this trick, the Zapatistas investigated and found out what was going on. Fed up with being falsely accused, the Junta authorized a group of landless Zapatistas to move in and occupy the land themselves. The non-Zapatistas burned the place down in retaliation.
The two stories illustrate the complexities of relations with the government and with non-Zapatistas. During these few days of chatting with a cross-section of the region's Zapatistas gathered in a relaxed mode at the Caracol, I've also gotten a sense that the organization continues to grow by offering space on recovered land to landless supporters, including some from faraway regions, and is also steadily growing in the nearby city. As one Macondo resident who works on recovered land a half hour from the city said with some amazement, "there are all kinds of people who are joining in the city now since the Sixth Declaration, even licenciados [college graduates] and architects!" There's also a new secondary school project in the works in one of the municipalities, and new autonomous schools being built all the time as more education promoters are trained. Felipe told us his little village of six families still didn't have a promoter, but he had just persuaded one of his grandkids to enroll in training.
In the evening the music stops briefly and a group of Zapatistas with paliacates (kerchiefs) over their faces and one in a pasamontañas (ski mask) take the stage. The young man in the ski mask reads a proclamation in Spanish noting the continuation of Zapata's struggle in today's movement. I realize that I know him, he's a guy I'll call Horacio, I visited his remote community. This is the second time now I've recognized the ski-masked main speaker at an event in the Caracol, and I realize another layer of irony of the symbolic masks: Lots of people in this crowd must recognize their homeboys when they get up there on stage with masks. As the Zapatistas like to point out, they wear masks to unmask the government; and they put on their masks when they want to be public, and take them off when they want to be faceless invisible indigenous people to everyone else.
After the official speech, there's a short fireworks display, then Horacio makes a few remarks in Tzeltal, followed by announcement of the lineup for the cultural program of the evening. First the Zapatista anthem is sung. Then there's a short theater piece about Zapata performed by schoolkids.
The Smaliyel collective performs a folkloric dance number. A soloist sings some Latin American protest songs with keyboard accompaniment. A group of brigadistas who have come to do construction work present a modern dance feminist piece. A group of Native Americans from the U.S. perform Aztec dances,
and the leader makes a short but heartfelt speech in Spanish expressing solidarity of indigenous peoples in the north with the Zapatista struggle. One of the German campamentistas does a juggling act with fire, followed by brief remarks thanking the Zapatistas for their example of autonomy which inspires other progressive movements.
Finally, the performances end and the music and dancing continue into the wee hours of the morning.
During a break in the music I catch Andrea, one of the teacher trainers from Mexico City who has just come from meetings in El Conejo to plan the next phase of their project, more specialized classes in agroecology. She fills me in on her
collective's other new project, trying to market fair trade coffee to raise funds to support autonomous education in the municipality. The effort has been something of a comedy of errors, as the group has no experience in coffee marketing and is learning along the way at the school of hard knocks. In our last exciting episode, the group had made a trial purchase of a half
ton, then realized they had failed to specify important details such as the stage of processing in which the coffee would be delivered, humidity level, etc. So they wound up having to do the final processing at a high price in Mexico City before transporting it north to U.S. fair trade markets (to be distributed by Danza Mexica in Minnesota, the same Native American
group that performed the Aztec dance at the fiesta).
This time they arranged a purchase of five tons depulped and dry, but then after the purchase was arranged, when they scouted around for a place in Chiapas to do the next step of processing (removing the thin inner skin) they learned that the very few processors in the state are very jealous of their turf and protective of their existing clientele and reluctant to even give out information. So the collective finally negotiated with the Junta to use the processing equipment that they normally use for another collective’s fair trade coffee project, but it involved delicate reassurances that they wouldn’t be competing with that group’s market segment. Also the Junta didn’t have much business experience either and wouldn’t tell them the price for using the equipment, saying don’t worry, we’ll work out a fair price later. (Fortunately it turned out to be less than the commercial rate.) That’s when they learned that there’s an additional step, hand-sorting the beans to remove the ones that got burned or not properly skinned by the equipment. After a quick scrambling of volunteers, that little problem was taken care of.
So then Elena came down from Mexico City to Chiapas to arrange the transport of the coffee which had now been delivered to the state capital in Tuxtla. That’s when they learned that in order to transport coffee on federal highways they were supposed to have a government certificate verifying the coffee’s provenance and certifying that it was free of plant disease. The problem of course was that the coffee came from Zapatista autonomous territory, where official government authorities don’t operate. The truck driver was nervous about the whole idea and to Elena’s dismay, stopped the truck at an office of the Federal Preventive Police to ask, What should I do, I’ve got this load of coffee from some group called the Zapatistas who say they don’t recognize the authority and laws of the federal government?! Amazingly, the officer explained to the agitated truck driver, Oh, the Zapatistas have their own autonomous authorities in their territories, don’t worry about it! (Apparently the feds have bigger problems on their hands than a truckload of coffee on the road.) Elena quickly reassured the driver that she would personally guarantee that the Zapatista Junta would provide a letter verifying that the coffee was disease-free and not stolen, so finally they were on the road to Mexico City.
Then there was the problem of the sacks. To save money, they had bought a bunch of Guatemalan burlap coffee sacks for a cheap price. When they were stopped at a federal highway inspection station, Elena suddenly realized in a panic that the inspectors were going to open the truck and see a bunch of sacks that said “Product of Guatemala,” and of course they didn’t have an import license or proof that it was actually Mexican coffee. Fortunately, the inspector was a portly fellow who couldn’t haul himself up into the truck for a close look, so he peered in from the road and said they could go on their way. Finally they arrived in Mexico City where another progressive group had agreed to loan them some space to store the coffee, and they realized that nobody could lift the enormous Guatemalan sacks, so the five tons of coffee had to be transferred to more manageable sized bags. Now the group is pondering various ways to deal with the paperwork problem to get the coffee from autonomous regions across the Mexico-U.S. border: Buy some artful documents on the black market, find someone in the office of the Secretary of Agriculture who might issue the certificate, take a chance and drive the truck across at a point where there’s a lot of day traffic and hope for the best, split up the shipment and mobilize a lot of people to run it back and forth in the trunks of private cars like a drug deal, or find another organization that has the proper documentation and might list the shipment as one of theirs. Then they have to guess at a price that will recoup costs, remunerate the producers fairly, and generate some excess to support autonomous education in the region, which was the original point of the exercise. The trials and tribulations of solidarity.
# posted by Richard Stahler-Sholk @ 5:28 PM 
