From the mountains of the Mexican southeast

It's been an interesting few days. Since returning from my last trip to the countryside, my Argentine friend P. arrived from Mexico City for his first visit to Chiapas. He's the one who has been diligently working in the office of the Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past (FEMOSPP), investigating the "dirty war" conducted by the Mexican security forces against the left since the late '60s. When the Fox administration got ready to declare the investigation over, issue a whitewashed report and close the office, P. and a group of fellow researchers leaked the damning inside version of the report, which was posted on the National Security Archive website and reported in the New York Times. In the ongoing fallout, P. lost his job, so now he has been doing freelance reporting to try to get out of debt, hence his assignment to write about Chiapas...for the Mexican edition of Playboy! (No, it’s not “Chicks of Chiapas,” it’s actually a serious article.) Anyway, P. quickly got tired of the line he was being fed by the Secretariat of Tourism in Chiapas and wanted to do a little digging, so I put him in touch with some of the local NGO and activist folks and loaded him up with reading. Now he and his cameraman D. are off to Tapachula on the Guatemalan border to document the plight of the stream of Central American migrants, often victimized on their way north by everyone from the migrant smugglers to criminal gangs to the Mexican army (three categories that are sometimes fused into one).

On Wednesday I set off for Ocosingo with Bernard, hoping to interview paramilitary leader Pedro Chulín, and P. who planned to go on to the Caracol to interview the Junta. Chulín had given us a 7:00 a.m. appointment, but when we got to his house his wife told us that he had gone back to the ranch to check on his cattle (about five hours away, and no way to contact him to find out when he planned to return). Chulín is an indigenous cacique (boss) who has built something of a following and a fortune as a powerbroker. His house is huge and tasteless, decorated with enormous cement swans on the outside and painted in garish colors, like the houses of organized crime chieftains and other nouveau riche.
The photo gallery in his living room included one of Chulín with his arm around Roberto Madrazo, the presidential candidate from the hardline "dinosaur" wing of the PRI. Bernard and I went off to do other interviews and came back in a couple of hours, but still no sign of the Man. So we took a truck a couple of hours down the road and hiked another half hour or so to a tiny community where we had been given an open invitation by one of the Junta members to go visit him anytime. When we got there, it turned out he was back on duty at the Caracol and wasn’t home, but his sons welcomed us like family.

The community was a ranchería, basically consisting of the Junta member whom I’ll call Felipe and his four sons and their families. It was May 3, the day of celebration of the sources of water at the start of the planting season (or Day of the Holy Cross). When we arrived we were greeted by one of the sons whom I’ll call Francisco, who apologized for being covered with soot because in the middle of their Holy Cross celebration, someone noticed that the fire from one of the fields that was being burned in preparation for planting had caught the neighboring woods and was getting out of control. So the family had just spent the last couple of hours putting out the fire. Now they were back, and everyone knelt down in the dirt for prayers. Then they invited us inside for leftovers from the feast, a delicious chicken broth with chayote (green cactus-like vegetable), and home-made soft white cheese from their small dairy operation of ten cows. Francisco turned out to be quite a talker, so he told us the whole family history in great detail. His father, the patriarch of the little community, had been orphaned young and had to fend for himself as a merchant. The family joined the Organization, and paramilitaries killed two of Francisco’s brothers. They wanted to stay and fight, but they were relocated to recovered land near the Caracol, where they worked in collective for a few years. They carefully saved their resources, investing in a few cattle when some Zapatistas were selling them cheap because they feared that the ranchers and military would launch a new offensive and take or kill all their animals. But the family believed that the movement had a future, and their investment allowed them to build up a small herd, which they then sold to buy this plot of 48 hectares (from a non-Zapatista small farmer who was happy to sell a little of his land at a low price to a Zapatista family as a kind buffer between his land and a larger Zapatista settlement with which he had had conflicts). Through hard work and imagination, they parlayed that into a small corn and cattle farm, going without new clothes or toys for the kids in order to buy a little machine for chopping up hay to fatten the cattle; then slowly developing a profitable cheese business. It was an interesting example of a different breed of Zapatistas, small farmers who were entrepreneurial yet had a passionate commitment to social justice and the Organization.

In the evening I played chess with the kids until it was too hard to see the pieces in the candlelight, then Bernard and I strung our hammocks in the one-room schoolhouse and crashed. In the morning we kept the kids company while they milked the cows, then said goodbye to Francisco who headed out to his fields. His wife insisted on giving us care packages of cheese, and we said our farewells to the families and headed back. Fortunately a truck came by almost as soon as we got to the road, but halfway to town the truck in front of us carrying two cows tipped and went into the ditch, so there was a delay while everyone pitched in to pull it out.

We got back to Ocosingo and checked back with the paramilitary leader, who still hadn’t returned. As we stood in the marketplace preparing to go our separate ways, we saw one of the Zapatista education promoters I’ll call Roberto, whom we both knew from one of the remote communities. We stopped to greet him and he asked where we were off to. I said I was on my way to the Caracol, and he looked surprised and said there’s nobody there! What do you mean?, I asked, confused. There’s a red alert since the Atenco massacre, the Caracoles are closed, he said. Roberto quickly filled us in on the news we had missed while we were out in the community: There had been a protest in the vicinity of San Salvador Atenco in central Mexico not far from the capital, site of a radical peasant organization called the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (People’s Front in Defense of the Land), which in 2002 successfully blocked an airport project that would have displaced peasants from their lands. Anyway, it seems the FPDT were supporting a group of flower vendors who were being driven out of their spot in the market by the authorities. The feds descended in riot gear and all hell broke loose, and in the end two of the protesters (including one child) were killed. More federal forces were called in and started doing a house-to-house sweep, and at last count 275 people had been detained, wounded or disappeared.

So Bernard and I stopped at an internet cafe to get caught up on the news, then I returned to San Cristóbal since the Zapatista territories were now closed for the alert. Back in town I ran into P., who had returned to the house because he was unable to get to the Caracol for the same reason. Reflecting ruefully on his recent experiences in trying to get the Mexican state to face up to its defects of an unaccountable military and lack of an independent judiciary, and now seeing the gap between official and actual Chiapas, P.’s parting words before he left for the border-town underworld of Tapachula were: "When you start to scratch the surface in Mexico, you realize things are even worse than you thought. It’s painful."

Being grounded in San Cristóbal during a Zapatista red alert seems like deja vu, as this was exactly the situation when I arrived here in June of 2005, when the Zapatistas were preparing to issue the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle and launch the Other Campaign. That time it lasted a couple of weeks, and all the NGO/activist folks who normally worked in communities were starting to go a little stir crazy in town, getting tired of waiting and speculating. People eventually started using the time to catch up on city chores, get together with folks who are usually not all in town at the same time, and throw lots of parties. My guess is that this time the alert will be shorter, but nobody is in much of a party mood in the wake of Atenco.

The repression at Atenco seems in part an indirect attack on the Zapatistas. The FPDT were subscribers to the Zapatista Sixth Declaration, Marcos and company had just passed through Atenco, and members of the peasant group were in fact serving as a security detail for the Zapatista leaders on the Other Campaign swing through Mexico City. Maybe the government figured the moment wasn’t (yet) politically favorable for a direct blow against the Zapatista leadership, but perhaps they calculated that this would have a chilling effect on the Other Campaign, or maybe it was intended as a trial balloon to see if they could get away with a direct move against the Zapatistas. In any event, the new alliance strategy of the Zapatistas since the Sixth Declaration meant that the Zapatistas had a political commitment to help galvanize a response to this repression against an allied group. One of the chilling aspects of this attack has been the reporting in the mainstream Mexican media, with TV Azteca in particular using highly inflammatory language to vilify the peasant group as violent extremists. Once again, this is an indication that the Other Campaign, with its invitation to broaden the national debate to more fundamental issues than electioneering, is touching some raw nerves.