From the mountains of the Mexican southeast

After returning to San Cristóbal from the jungle in time to see Vicki before she returned to the U.S., I spent a few days in and around town helping with a Witness for Peace delegation. They were a group of six students from an alternative college in North Carolina called Warren Wilson and their professor Andy, whom I knew from back when we were both on the Witness for Peace board. It was nice to see Andy and be with a bunch of students again, and it was an excuse to do things I generally don't make time for unless there are visitors--like going to the Mayan ruins at Toniná, about two and a half hours away.

I had been given the names of a couple of Zapatista tour guides at the ruins at Toniná, so that made the tour more interesting as we got commentary comparing the hierarchical structures of ancient Mayan and contemporary Mexican government. Our guide, whom I'll call Melvin, also worked as an apprentice to the head archeologist and was avidly learning everything he could, and he proudly showed us places where he had done the reconstruction himself. At one point we asked if a piece of structure was original, and Melvin replied with a smile, "That's from the Tzeltal era"--meaning his own ethnic group, who are descendants of the ancient Maya. It was a good reminder that history is continuous and "authentic" representation of a culture is an elusive construct.

On Tuesday we went up to Oventic, the closest Zapatista Caracol in the highlands less than an hour from San Cristóbal.
The students got the broad overview from the Junta and the Information Commission, then had a chance to talk with a young woman education promoter and a young man who worked as health coordinator in the regional Zapatista clinic. The 19-year-old education promoter talked about the sacrifice involved in leaving her home community and living at her workplace, and the health coordinator had some interesting reflections about the cultural and educational aspects of preventive/primary health care. I think talking to those young volunteers and seeing their quiet dedication made more of an impact than all the analytical talks the delegation had with think tanks and NGOs in San Cristóbal.

On Tuesday and Wednesday nights there were panels in town featuring the two past bishops of Chiapas, Samuel Ruiz and Raúl Vera.
Don Samuel, like the famous Archbishop Romero of El Salvador, began his tenure as a very traditional bishop and ended as a committed Liberation Theology practitioner and champion of the poor and marginalized. Dubbed the "red bishop" by his detractors from the San Cristóbal elite, he learned indigenous languages and traveled the back roads and was affectionately known as "Tatik," our father, in indigenous communities. Many of the catechists trained by his diocese would become radicalized and join the Zapatista movement (not exactly what the bishop had in mind, but the gods work in mysterious ways), and Don Samuel was tapped as mediator between the government and rebels after the 1994 uprising. The Vatican continually tried to undercut him, first appointing the seemingly mainstream Raúl Vera as co-bishop. But to the Vatican's chagrin, Don Raúl too was converted by the reality he experienced in Chiapas. Don Samuel survived assassination attempts (hence his accompaniment by bodyguards on this occasion who followed him even to the bathroom). Finally the Vatican was able to invoke its retirement rules to force Don Samuel to step aside at age 75, and he moved to Querétaro north of Mexico City. Don Raul was then banished to the desert, transferred to serve as bishop in the northern state of Coahuila, and the colorless/conservative Bishop Felipe Arizmendi was wheeled in.

Don Raúl gave a press conference Tuesday night to discuss the scandal of a deadly mining accident in his new state. It was the first time I had heard him speak, and now I could imagine how his conversion must have occurred in Chiapas. He is detail-oriented and relentless in getting to the bottom of things, but also passionate in exposing what he considers to be wrong. He systematically laid bare all the malfeasance of mining company and government officials, documented their cover-ups, and presented results of his meticulous investigation into the powerful interlocking economic and political interests at work (including mining executive ties to Vamos México, the shady "philanthropic" foundation of First Lady Martha Sahagún (who has been compared to Evita Perón). He left no stone unturned, and by the end of the evening he was positively on fire as he denounced the callousness toward human life exhibited by the powerful. Commenting on the bishop's detailed knowledge of arcane topics such as coal mine degasification, one of the panelists noted with a chuckle that the government probably didn't realize that Don Raúl's first degree was in chemical engineering. And they thought they could keep him quiet by sending him to the desert!

The presentation the following night was a panel introducing the 2005 annual report of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas human rights center (FrayBa), of which Samuel Ruiz was founder and remains the honorary president. The report reflects the careful work of the center, documenting violations but also analyzing the changing strategies of repression. One commentator noted that the government now uses not only paramilitaries but also "para-police," a term she used to describe the rural indigenous organization OPDDIC. Don Samuel highlighted the report's focus on the government's skillful manipulation of the judicial system to allow "legal legitimation of human rights violations"; noting that adherence to the law is not the same as adherence to justice. There was also mention of the continued heavy military occupation of the conflict zones, partly hidden now as the troops are kept mostly in their barracks or spirited away on unknown missions, and the significant escalation of attacks on human rights defenders and journalists. Tellingly, the center has stopped including a section on "Recommendations" in their reports, noting that it's pointless since the government totally ignores independent human rights organizations.

Wednesday night the delegation left on the overnight bus to Oaxaca, and Thursday I ran around town taking care of odds and ends before leaving early Friday morning for the jungle. I'm up at 6:30 a.m. to get to Macondo at 8:30, just in time to catch a truck heading for the third of the four municipalities I'm working in. There were two other foreigners on the truck, but only when we all got off at the seat of the Zapatista autonomous municipality three hours later did we realize we had the same destination. They turned out to be Germans from Giessen, coming here as human rights observers through the FrayBa. The councilmembers here attend Friday afternoons and Saturdays, in addition to serving a 10-day stint on the regional Junta every two months during a three-year term. In between time, they scramble to attend their cornfields and family obligations.

The council receives me in the evening, and they remember me from previous visits. There is a brief moment of uncertainty when they ask if I had stopped at the Junta for a new letter of authorization, but I show them the old letter and explain that it was for multiple visits to communities in the municipality, and they're O.K. with that. We discuss which communities I might visit on this trip, and they tell me they think it is better if I don't travel to divided ejidos right now because there have been a lot of provocations by the paramilitary group OPDDIC, and the council feels responsible for the security of their visitors. This fit with other information I had heard that OPDDIC leader Pedro Chulín had recently lost his bid to be candidate for Congress, and some of his supporters were spoiling for a fight. The council tells me I can leave with them on Saturday afternoon when some of them would be headed down the nearby canyon where I'll be visiting four communities.

Saturday afternoon around 3:00 I'm waiting for word from the council when I see some of them gathering their backpacks and heading for a truck. Sure enough, they're headed out, so I barely have time to say goodbye to the Germans and fetch my damp clothes off the barbed wire and grab my backpack and hop on. The truck stops about ten minutes out of the village so the councilmembers can take a quick dip in the river and retrieve handfulls of fish from the mesh nets they had set the day before, a little protein to bring home. About a half hour down the road I'm dropped off at a a junction with two other compas heading down the same canyon. After a two hour hike at a rapid clip, mostly uphill with packs (me huffing and puffing and my companions floating effortlessly, of course), we arrive at a settlement I'll call San José del Arroyo. It's a beautiful spot nestled between two ranges of green hills, on land recovered from a rich rancher. Just 15 families live here, with plenty of land now for each of them plus collective lands that they work together to generate revenues for community projects.

The folks in San José greet me warmly, offer me something to eat, ask about the differences between life here and in the U.S., and put me up in the radio shack where I drift off to sleep to the sounds of the crackling CB radio. It rains softly overnight, which pleases everyone here because they're waiting for a few decent rains signaling the start of the rainy season so they can start planting their cornfields. All over the region a haze of smoke hangs in the hills as campesinos are burning brush, clearing patches of land as part of their slash-and-burn agricultural cycle.

Sunday morning the responsable of the community, a young man I'll call Pancho, brings me to his house where his wife offers me beans and tortillas and coffee. Pancho is an enthusiastic Zapatista who grew up in the movement, participating in land takeovers that were violently dislodged by the ranchers in the '80s (in which he saw several of his comrades killed), then fought in Ocosingo in '94 and participated in this land recovery in '97. He recounts how they found an arms cache buried on the landowner's property, with high-powered rifles and bombs "that were meant for us." He is also a catechist and enthusiastically shares his views on how the Zapatista movement is biblically based. He recounts the story of Exodus and compares it to their own struggle for liberation. Then he explains that the participation of women as Zapatista insurgents is consistent with the biblical story of Judith, who led her people in heroic resistance against a powerful army.

Sunday church service starts at 8:30 and people file into the small wooden building, including campesinos from surrounding ranchitos who are not Zapatistas, but come here for services. As Pancho explains, "We talk about the Organization in church too, maybe they'll wake up." Men sit on benches on one side, women on the other. After a few Our Fathers and Hail Marys, there is a reading of a Bible passage, about the wealthy landowner who is told that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven. Then they break up into separate groups of men and women to discuss the meaning of the passage and its relevance for their lives, with a list of questions to spark discussion. After about 45 minutes they reunite back in church for further discussion together and clarification from Pancho, the catechist.

Then the service morphs into a community meeting. Marco, a quiet man who joined the Organization only seven months before (leaving his tiny ranchito to join the group here on recovered land), stands up to report shyly on a recent meeting to resolve a church/community problem. It seems the catequists of the region, who belong to non-Zapatista organizations, started hassling the Zapatistas and telling them the land recovered by Zapatistas should be divided among all the campesino organizations. Eventually the Zapatistas got fed up and left the group, holding their own separate meetings of catequists. Then the deacons stopped administering sacraments to the Zapatista communities, using the pretext that they had withdrawn from their region. Several years had gone by and there was a backlog of pending church weddings and baptisms, so they went to talk to a group of missionary women and ask them to intercede with the bishop. The plan now was to meet with deacons in another region, and if they also refused, then the bishop had apparently told the missionaries that he would have a priest come out from the parish in Ocosingo to perform the rites. As Pancho told me later, the problems had originated when conservative Bishop Arizmendi came in, but I guess he didn't want to be on record as denying services of a priest to communities in need.

The next item on the agenda was planning for the celebration of May 3, marking the start of the planting season, a day celebrated in these indigenous territories by going into the mountains to the water source where the elders pray for good rains. The Catholic Church, coopting the indigenous traditions it couldn't undo, has superimposed the holiday of the Holy Cross on that day, which is now typically celebrated with a blend of community picnic in the hills with prayers and with drum and flute music. Women take the lead in the discussion of how many tortillas and how much atole (sweetened rice water) each family should contribute for the community meal.

Afterwards the women retire and the men gather in front of the church to answer my questions. "The landowner was a real bastard," they tell me, who owned all the land in the entire canyon and worked the peasants long hours for $1.50 a day. He "loaned" them small patches of the worst land where they were allowed to plant some corn to feed themselves, but charged them in the form of labor, planting and fencing his cattle pastures. They were not allowed to take so much as an orange from the land. The 15 families here had come from the local area, recovering this land after the Zapatista uprising and attracting new members of the Organization to join them. Now they spoke proudly of planting their own land, enough to feed themselves without working for anyone else, as well as a collective patch that generated corn and income to feed their own community education and health promoters and take care of other collective needs. The women had also started a pig-raising collective, starting by pooling resources to buy and raise one pig, which they sold to buy two piglets to fatten, then sold those to buy three. As they explain, "Collective labor has great significance, it means we have unity, we all work together, we go drink pozol [corn gruel] in the fields together, we share what the land gives us." They tell me some OPDDIC members had tried to occupy their lands but they rallied a larege group of Zapatistas to start planting and refused to fall for the OPDDIC efforts to provoke violent confrontation.

My host Pancho brings me home for another meal, then we go to the river to bathe with his gaggle of kids. There's a fire-red sunset over the hills.
In the evening I hang out chatting with the night shift of radio operators, then all the men come over to watch old Mexican charro (cowboy) movies on a tiny black-and-white TV hooked up to a car battery, on a weak signal from a station in the neighboring state of Tabasco. Afterwards I fall asleep to the sounds of the whistling cicadas, the occasional whinnying of a horse, and the rumbling of the CB radio.

On Monday morning, Pancho fetches me at 6:00 for coffee, then he saddles up two horses for us to ride to the next community I'm scheduled to visit, which I'll call Pedregal. He has to make some purchases there at the bodega de abarrotes (general supply store/warehouse), which is a new project of the autonomous municipality. He insists on escorting me to avoid problems with other organizations like the paramilitary group OPDDIC. It's a beautiful ride through the valley, and we arrive in about an hour and a half. Most of the group in Pedregal are already in the fields, clearing or burning brush in preparation for planting. Those who are hanging around greet me like one of the family and put me up in an upstairs cement room in the crumbling remains of what was once the hacienda house. The large room in the downstairs attachment to the house has been outfitted with a new zinc roof (since what must have been the original wooden beams and red tile had crumbled away), painted, and now houses the new bodega. Electricity came to this community around six months ago when the Junta authorized an unofficial connection to the Federal power lines, and the solidarity group that supported the project donated a refrigerator and a computer.

The compa from the nearby village I'll call Nuevo Amanecer who is responsible for running the bodega comes over to ask if I know about computers, since he has a problem with the printer. I go help with the printer glitch and learn that the solidarity group that donated the computer gave him a crash course in accounting, but didn't get around to teaching him Excel so he could keep the books with a spreadsheet, so the computer was only being used to watch DVDs (Rambo and Schwartzenegger and Kung Fu movies). A typical shortcoming of "development aid." He asked if I could teach him, so I ended up spending the day giving Excel lessons, interrupted periodically whenever someone rode up on horseback to make a purchase through the window, or came around the front to load their purchases, heaving 30-kilo sacks of sugar and other supplies onto their backs, secured with a mecapal (rope sling) around their head for the long walk to their home village.

The bodega generates revenue for the autonomous municipality, and customers include non-Zapatistas as well as Zapatistas, all glad to save the time and expense of travel several hours to the nearest town. The warehouseman is a 30-year-old guy who didn't finish grade school and reads slowly, but he is a quick study and is delighted to learn to use a spreadsheet to ease his bookkeeping headaches. They are still novices at the business, and he tells me the merchants in town refuse to give them a wholesale discount, so they are trying to figure out if it might be worth an occasional run to the state capital--but that's about as far from the village as anyone has ever traveled, and they're not sure how to go about locating suppliers there.

A young man I'll call Joel brings me back to his house for a meal of eggs with chile, beans and tortillas, as chickens and dogs scramble around the dirt floor and smoke from the cooking fire fills a corner of the small wooden house, and grandma swings the youngest of his five kids in a tiny hammock rigged from a burlap sack and pieces of rope. Joel came here from a distant jungle region near Palenque and his wife is Ch'ol, so in addition to his native Tzeltal he speaks Ch'ol and decent Spanish and also some Tzotzil, since 10 of the 14 families here came from the faraway highlands, escaping both landlessness and paramilitary repression in the period after the Acteal massacre.

In the afternoon I meet with the community leaders. Their story is similar to the previous community, also on land recovered from the lord of the valley. But here the first group of land recoverers after '94 fell into problems fueled by alcohol, so the settlement had dissolved, and the Zapatistas brought in new groups of landless peasants from far-flung regions. Now they seemed to be a very close-knit community, with two young education promoters for the 33 kids and a collective cornfield, pasture and chile patch. Like the community of San José del Arroyo, they rent out pasture land for grazing of cattle owned by non-Zapatistas in the surrounding area. I suspect the practice of rental doesn't quite conform to Zapatista agrarian law, but perhaps it is overlooked since it generates income for struggling communities in resistance, helps stake claims to the land, and helps stabilize relations with non-Zapatista neighbors.

In the evening the bodega closes and computer lesson ends, and some of the guys gather outside the remains of the hacienda house/bodega with two guitars and a bass to sing ballads of the Zapatista rebellion and church songs in Tzeltal. Communities with electricity definitely stay up later than those without, and also attract a wild variety of large flying insects dive-bombing the light bulbs. I wonder what the former landowner would think if he could see this scene: his former peons relaxing and laughing on the veranda at night, his parlor converted into a communally-run peasant store, his pastures now dotted with healthy cornfields on the good flat patches of land where his valuable animals used to graze, and an autonomous schoolhouse with Zapata's image painted on the front--the old world turned upside down.

On Tuesday morning two young guys from the community loan me a horse and insist on escorting me to the next community which is only 45 minutes away, again to avoid potential problems with OPDDIC, which has several members in a village along the way. We arrive in the slightly larger community I'll call Venecia, and an older fellow I'll call Lorenzo lets me into the chapel so I'll have a shady spot to rest. After a couple of hours another middle-aged man I'll call Donaldo stops by to see where I'm coming from, exclaiming "That's great that you've come to visit!" Visitors seem to be a rare treat in this remote region, and the hospitality is a bit embarrassing. Donaldo brings me over to the one-room schoolhouse and tells me to wait while he finds something for me to eat.

I hang out all day in the schoolhouse waiting for everyone to come back from the fields for a meeting, and getting eaten alive by biting ants in the meantime. School is not in session today, and not much is happening in the village. People stop by from time to time and stare at the strange apparition of a visitor. Only a few speak some Spanish, and they explain in Tzeltal to their curious neighbors: He's from the United States! It's five hours away by airplane! He says they don't eat tortillas there, they eat bread!! And they grow wheat because it's cold country! The thought of life without tortillas seems to evoke a mixture of disbelief and pity, and everyone who hears it has to repeat it to be sure they heard right.

In the late afternoon when everyone is back from the fields, Lorenzo comes over and blows a few blasts on a cow's horn to summon all the men for an assembly outside the schoolhouse. Manuel, the one guy in the community who speaks pretty good Spanish, translates for me. Each question seems to generate about ten minutes of animated discussion in Tzeltal among the villagers before someone gives a summarized response that is translated into "castilla," the language of the foreigner-Castilians. I'm sure I'm missing a lot of the subtlety of the discussion, but they all seem to be thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to get together and kibbitz.

On Wednesday morning, Manuel comes by at 6:00 a.m. to escort me to the next community. It's about an hour and a half hike through back trails to the place I'll call Laguna Toronja. The folks in Venecia had radioed ahead the night before to say I'd be coming, so community members had delayed their departure for the fields and were waiting when I got there. A few more blasts on a cow's horn and soon the whole community of about 40 adults and some of the kids assembled under a thatched roof. This time the women are included, the first time in the four community visits of this trip. It's a good thing Manuel has come along, since nobody seems to speak any Spanish here and he patiently interprets. I decide to go out on a limb, taking the opportunity to ask the women about their participation in decision-making. When the question is translated, the women giggle and cover their mouths and avert their gaze, and the men start to answer for them. I repeat the question, saying I'd really like to hear what the women have to say. It's sort of walking a fine line, since it's not the place of a visitor passing through to try to change the dynamics and traditions of a community, but they had after all included the women in this meeting.

After a bit more embarrassed giggling, a middle-aged woman stands up and begins to talk. She launches into a long monologue which the interpreter has to interrupt from time to time so I can keep up. It wasn't exactly what I had in mind with the question, but it is a fascinating outpouring of her life story. She recalls how when she was small, her father who worked for the rich finquero tried to gain a little freedom by building a little thatch house at the edge of the forest outside the finca, and the enraged finquero had him beaten up and burned down his house. They fled to a remote corner of the jungle in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, where the public security forces later invaded and drove them out again. After drifting around and working on borrowed land, they took the opportunity after the rebellion to settle here on recovered land in 2003. "It's not the same anymore as when the rich people used to tell us what we had to do," she says with pride, "Now we have land, now we eat in peace, you can do what you want. It's not like what I went through before."

At the end of the assembly, the women bring generous portions of beans and scrambled eggs for me and Manuel, then two boys are assigned to escort me down to the road about 45 minutes away to wait for a truck back to town. They don't speak a word of Spanish, and in any case they are focused on trying to nab a squirrel with their slingshots on the way to bring back some dinner. After a couple of hours at the roadside a truck comes by, and by evening I'm back in San Cristóbal.

Time in town is always a scramble to finish up urban tasks before heading out again. Bernard, the French sociology doctoral student who studies autonomous education in the jungle, is in town, so we hang out and catch up. Also some of the members of the Mexico City collective of teacher trainers, who are now focusing on their fair trade coffee and agroecology training projects, have sent one of their collaborators whom I'll call Valeria to crash at my house. She was just out in El Conejo for some meetings with the autonomous municipal council about the agroecology project they're just starting, and she stopped in San Cristóbal for an admissions interview at the anthropology institute CIESAS where she's applying to the Master's program. She wants to do a Master's thesis comparing indigenous autonomy in a Zapatista community in the northern zone of Chiapas with another indigenous community, perhaps in Oaxaca.

Valeria's project sounds great and the interview apparently went well, and Bernard and I were happy to be able to give some encouragement to a progressive young academic who wants to do research in Zapatista communities. There's only a small group of such people, and in fact Bernard and Mariana and I have started pulling the group together to see if we can produce an edited volume that would give a picture of life in the autonomous communities. The people we've contacted so far have responded enthusiastically, and we're trying to move quickly to get some of this material into circulation; in part as a counterpoint to the armchair academics in Mexico City who are writing about Chiapas with a jaded if not hostile outlook on zapatismo. In a recent newspaper article Marcos expressed frustration with academics who claim not to take a political stand, and a group of pro-Zapatista academics organized a panel at the University of Guadalajara (coinciding with the Other Campaign's stop there) to try to create some momentum for politically committed scholarship.

While Valeria was in town we also took a quick trip up to the highlands Caracol of Oventic, to see if we could meet with representatives of a fair trade coffee collective there to learn some tips of the business that might be applied to the project that the teacher trainers are trying to get off the ground in the jungle region. Unfortunately the leaders of the coffee coop were not there, but we did get a lead on how we might track some of them down in San Cristóbal.

Bruno invited me to join him for an interview he has scheduled at 7:00 a.m. Wednesday in Ocosingo with Pedro Chulín, the swaggering leader of OPDDIC (the new rural indigenous organization that most consider to be a paramilitary group, but that its leaders insist is just a sort of social action committee). It promises to be an interesting conversation.