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Rebel Rainmakers
Pubdate: 08 Mar 2001
Source: Boston Phoenix (MA)
Copyright: 2001 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group.
Contact: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/54
Author: Al Giordano
REBEL RAINMAKERS
After seven years in the Chiapas jungle, the Zapatistas are finally on the
road to Mexico City
" Therefore, according to this declaration of war, we give our military
forces ... the following orders: First: Advance to the capital of the
country, overcoming the Mexican Federal Army, protecting in our advance the
civilian population and permitting the people in the liberated area the
right to freely and democratically elect their own administrative
authorities. "
-- from the Zapatista Declaration of War
December 31, 1993
Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas, Mexico
IT WAS AN incredible claim for a poorly armed movement of Indian women and
men to make seven years ago. But this Sunday, March 11, the Zapatista Army
of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish acronym) and millions of
supporters will arrive at the gates of the National Palace in Mexico City,
without having fired a shot since 1994.
Twenty-four masked Zapatista delegates, including the revolutionary
organization's spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, left the jungle in Mexico's
southernmost state of Chiapas on February 24 and are making their way
through 12 Mexican states toward Mexico City. Multitudes of Mexicans,
indigenous and non-indigenous, have assembled at every stop along the way,
and joined the advance on the capital.
The objective, when the caravan reaches Mexico City, is to force the
Mexican government to keep a promise it made in 1996 when it signed the San
Andres Accords for indigenous autonomy.
"We're going to Mexico City to speak with the congressmen and senators to
demand compliance with indigenous rights and culture," says Comandante
Mister, a delegate from an indigenous ethnic group known as the Tojolabal,
"so that the San Andres Accords are complied with."
If the Zapatistas succeed in steering the Mexican Congress to implement
this heretofore ineffectual treaty, it could lead to negotiations between
the indigenous army and the new government of Mexican president Vicente Fox
to end the seven-year conflict between Zapatista rebels and the government
in Chiapas.
But Fox is frustrated. In spite of his calls and invitations to meet with
Marcos and the Zapatista command, the rebels are bypassing him and going
directly to Congress. History may bypass him too; for Fox, the son of ranch
owners, it may come down to a question so basic that most world leaders
haven't ever thought about it: how to tell when the rain wants to fall.
Fox isn't likely to learn that from Texan political consultant Rob Allyn,
who produced the Bush campaign's anti-John McCain attack ads during last
year's GOP primaries. Fox's political future -- the success or failure of
his presidency -- would be better served by somebody like Don Andres
Vasquez de Santiago, a man who knows something about rain.
DON ANDRES was born in 1910, the year of the Mexican revolution led by
General Emiliano Zapata. Four summers ago, when he was 87, he trekked 2400
kilometers from his cornfield in San Bartolome, Guanajuato, to the Chiapas
highlands, to be with people who made him young again.
There, above the Zapatista rebels' base camp of Oventik Sakamch'en de los
Pobres, he sat on a hill beside his cane, his sombrero, and a gringo a
half-century his junior, who was struggling with spoken Spanish. Don Andres
raised his gnarled wooden cane up at the clear afternoon sky and commented
to the foreigner, "Quiere llover" -- "It wants to rain."
"You mean it's going to rain," his companion tried to correct.
"Yes, it's going to rain, because it wants to rain," insisted the
octogenarian.
"But I don't see any clouds," the younger man replied, constructing a
sentence in rudimentary Castilian that probably came out something like,
"But clouds not I see, Don Andres."
Don Andres smiled at the gringo's garbled syntax, patted him on the knee,
and reminded him, as if to excuse his twisted tongue, "It's my second
language too!"
"The rain," continued Don Andres, speaking slowly and watching the eyes of
his companion to make sure he understood, "always comes from over there."
He pointed to the south. "Can you feel the wind? It comes from over there."
He pointed his dark brown workingman's finger back at the sky, repeating,
"It wants to rain."
Moments later, the clouds attacked from over the hill and doused the
encampment, leaving at least one very wet gringo scratching his head,
trying to remember the lesson of how to tell when it "wants to rain."
FEBRUARY 28, 2001: Don Andres was still walking with the Zapatistas and
with the Indigenous National Congress, of which he is the eldest member.
That night, he and his cane were in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, north of Mexico
City, to greet 23 indigenous Zapatista comandantes and the rebel army's
Subcomandante Marcos, who on New Year's morning back in 1994 rose up in
arms against the Mexican state, the nation's neoliberal economic system,
and 500 years of conquest.
In this region, known as the Huasteca, February is part of the dry season.
The barren hills, more brown than green, wait until May to receive seeds
for corn, beans, chilies, peanuts, and other staples. In this state of
230,000 Mexicans, one-fifth of the residents are Indians, many of the same
ethnicity as Don Andres -- Otomi-Naehnu -- and most of them, peasant
farmers, do not earn even a dollar a day. Those who don't have access to
communal lands must work for the large plantation owners, who treat them
and pay them badly. Many of their sons and daughters have already headed
north to the United States, in search of work. Without rain, there are no
crops. Without crops, there is no money. February is a season of scraping
by -- a long, hungry anticipation of the water that means life.
This night, 20,000 citizens of this community awaited the Zapatistas'
caravan the way the cracked and baked soil of Ixmiquilpan (an indigenous
word that means "barren clouds") awaited the rain.
A burst of laughter escaped Don Andres's parched, dry lips as he watched
the crowd arrive to greet the Zapatistas. A younger member of the
Indigenous National Congress, Miguel, looked into the old man's eyes, now
with 90 years' experience of watching the evening skies, as Don Andres
smiled and pointed toward the stars. "Very funny, Don Andres," said Miguel,
wiping the dust from his face with a red-and-gold kerchief. "I suppose that
now you're going to joke that it wants to rain in the place of the barren
clouds."
Soon after, when the Zapatistas arrived and took the platform to address
the assemblage, the skies exploded in thunder, and a torrent came washing
down from the dark heavens. Within minutes, everyone was soaked, but the
people refused to leave. The farmers were ecstatic.
All night -- and probably for years to come -- they would repeat: "Marcos
brought the rain!"
And there, at the microphone, his black ski mask already soaked,
Subcomandante Marcos began to speak, ignoring the torrential downpour.
Marcos criticized the government's idea of "peace" and repeated what he'd
said at every stop during the previous four days and nights through six
Mexican states -- that the Zapatistas will not be tricked into signing a
false peace.
He explained for the umpteenth time the three signals from the government
he considers necessary before peace talks can begin. First, the government
must comply with the San Andres Peace Accords, signed in 1996, restoring
the rights of indigenous communities to autonomy over their lands and their
ways of life. Second, the new government of President Vicente Fox must
retire just seven of the 259 military bases that surround the Zapatistas in
the jungles and highlands of Chiapas. Thus far, Fox has shut down only
four. "Seven," Marcos insisted, "is a special number for the indigenous. We
will not dialogue until all seven are gone." And third, that the Fox
government must release the remaining 53 Zapatista political prisoners.
"Then," said Marcos, "the Zapatistas will negotiate the peace."
MARCOS AND FOX are the two most commonly spoken names in Mexico today,
largely because both men are skilled at using the media to reach the
public. But in recent weeks, Marcos and the Zapatistas have begun closing
in on Fox. Now they are literally circling Mexico City for a triumphant
taking of the giant city square known as the Zocalo on March 11. From there
they will launch a citizens' lobbying campaign at the Congress to implement
the San Andres Accords.
Like Marcos, Fox often uses the word "freedom." During last year's Mexican
presidential campaign, the conservative National Action Party (PAN)
candidate compared himself to Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa, and called
for an end to 70 years of one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary
Party, or PRI. Fox also boasted that he could end the Chiapas conflict with
the Zapatistas "in 15 minutes."
But 90 days after taking office, President Fox has been unable even to
bring the Zapatistas to the negotiating table. He recently visited the
editorial board of the left-wing national daily La Jornada, begging the
journalists to persuade Marcos to meet with him, but to no avail. And since
a February 16 visit by US president George W. Bush, Fox has hardened his
public stance toward the Zapatistas -- although State Department press
secretary Richard Boucher insists that the US does not meddle in Mexican
affairs. "Poor Mexico," as a popular saying goes, "so far from God, so
close to the United States."
Realistically, it's no secret that the bankers, stockbrokers, agribusiness
barons, and, above all, petroleum interests are not thrilled with the
concept of local autonomy -- "home rule," as it is called in some regions
of the States -- in the Mexico that has had them salivating for profits
since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994.
Autonomy was not part of the business community's plan to market Mexico's
natural and human resources under free trade.
Although he welcomes this week's Zapatista march as a gesture toward peace,
Fox, himself a former Coca-Cola executive, has increasingly criticized the
Zapatistas for placing conditions on the dialogue. The rookie Mexican
president still leaves 53 innocent Indians in prison as political hostages,
while continuing to talk about "peace" and "freedom."
AT IXMIQUILPAN, Subcomandante Marcos, standing in the pouring rain that
turned the dust below to mud, leaned into the microphone and explained,
"There is another difference between their freedom and our freedom. For
them, freedom is the freedom to buy or sell. They want us, we who are
already screwed, to be able to buy and sell as well. The only things that
we can sell are our blood and our hands, and even still we have to sell
them very cheaply. This is not the freedom that we want, not the freedom
that they tell us means that somebody can put up a little store when he
wants. It's not the freedom to buy what we want. In sum, it's not
neoliberalism that we want."
"The freedom that we want is our own," continued the fortysomething Marcos,
who entered the Chiapas jungle in 1984 and remained there, clandestinely,
for a decade until the 1994 uprising. "It is the freedom to choose and to
decide -- being well-informed. To be able to choose and to decide who
governs us and which plans of the government we accept, and which ones we
refuse. It is being able to choose and to decide how they are going to
govern us, how they are going to organize us, what kind of work is most
important. The power to choose and decide, for example, to listen to what a
group of masked outlaws come to say from the Lacandon Jungle."
On that fifth night of the two-week Chiapas-to-Mexico City caravan --
marking Marcos's first appearance outside Chiapas in seven years; some say
his first trip out of the state in 17 years -- even his trademark Sherlock
Holmesian pipe was soaked. "I'm going to be quiet now because the longer I
speak, the more it rains," he said.
But the mass of supporters would not let Marcos stop. " Duro! Duro!" they
chanted, as if to say, Be tough, be strong. The subcomandante continued,
"There is a difference between their justice and our justice. Their justice
is a prostitute, and beyond that, she is very poorly paid. Let's see: how
many bankers are in jail? How many industrialists? How many plantation
owners? How many landlords ... ? No, sir, the prisons are filled with poor
people -- with Indians, with workers, with employees. That's their justice
-- justice from above that has a price.... And he who cannot pay it becomes
the crime. Our justice is for everyone according to his work. He who works
more can receive.... The justice that we, the indigenous, practice is much
more advanced than the justice that they offer."
SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS is many things to many people: outlaw, hero, hated or
beloved gunman, writer, sex symbol, feared warrior, a mestizo who learned
from the indigenous, a white man who manipulates the indigenous, author of
children's stories, crazy poet, priest figure, a revolutionary in
counterrevolutionary times. Sometimes Marcos seems to be all things to all
people. A masked face -- "a mirror," Marcos likes to say -- in which
millions of Mexicans and a good many citizens of the world see reflected
their hopes and fears.
Perhaps above all, Marcos is an educator, a student of the indigenous
turned teacher to a nation, who has painstakingly -- step by step,
communique by communique -- created a new vision of Mexico from ancient
indigenous code. In the seven years following the Zapatista uprising,
Marcos would sometimes be silent for long periods of time. Months would
pass without a word. The media would spread rumors that he was dead, or
ill, or taken prisoner by his own rebel army. The silences became
unbearable even to his adversaries. Then suddenly Marcos would return,
crackling like the lightning bolts above him on the rainy night in
Ixmiquilpan, to speak and write again. In this over-mediated world, Marcos
has developed a way to break through the banal consumer frenzy of the mass
media. Through that media, without spending a peso on advertising, he has
educated much of a generation in the art of social struggle. Recently, Fox
himself cited Marcos as an example of "successful use of the Internet."
Today people in every corner of Mexico, and indeed many parts of the world,
share the vision of the Zapatista rebels.
The indigenous of Chiapas, of all of Mexico, have tried to speak for
centuries, tried to make themselves heard by the governments and economic
forces that exploited them and their lands, that kept them poor and
uneducated, without access to basic medicines or sufficient food. Before
1994, the simple act of speaking out, or organizing a union or a farmer's
organization or a student movement, led hundreds each decade to prison
cells, torture chambers, disappearance, and assassination.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation had to take up arms to establish
the platform from which they speak today, and, more significantly, from
which they are heard. In the pre-dawn of that New Year's Day, seven winters
ago, the Zapatistas took four Chiapas cities and then slipped back into the
jungles and highlands, from which they shot ideas, instead of bullets, into
the Mexican and international psyches.
Latin America's most legendary guerrilla fighter, Ernesto "Che" Guevara,
once said that the United States should not be afraid of communists in
Latin America. "What they should fear," said Comandante Che, "is a
communications expert."
The long-overdue Mexican national movement for indigenous rights and
culture, as Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago recently
commented to President Fox, is now "unstoppable."
Still, every day, the Mexican press spits out the desperate words of
bankers, chamber-of-commerce presidents, politicians, columnists, and other
men of power trying in vain to discredit the indigenous movement. "Marcos
is not for the indigenous," these educated men who have not spent a night
on the mountain claim of the man who has spent 17 years on indigenous
lands. "His goal is national." The indigenous, and much of Mexican civil
society, are not bothered by the specter of a national movement. Indeed,
they are excited, mobilized. And today they have joined the Zapatista march
to the heart of their country.
The 15-day Zapatista caravan to Mexico City finds the indigenous movement
at its hour of truth: the conquered on the verge of conquest. It is a
defining, transcendent moment in this movement, similar to Gandhi's Salt
March for the independence of India from British rule or Martin Luther
King's "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Ten
percent of all Mexicans speak an indigenous language. Most Mexicans have
some indigenous blood. Over the past seven years, people without any
apparent indigenous roots have begun to think more like the indigenous of
Chiapas, and less like the TV newsmen.
"Who are the indigenous?" asked Marcos in Tehuacan, Puebla, on February 27.
"The indigenous are we who remember."
OVER THEIR seven years of struggle, the Zapatistas have inspired 50 of the
nation's 56 ethnic groups to unify in the form of the Indigenous National
Congress. Their number-one priority: that the government comply with the
San Andres Accords and recognize the indigenous customs and ways of life as
rights under the federal constitution. This movement will not allow another
treaty with the Indians -- this one signed five years ago -- to be broken
by the government.
On February 24, 20,000 masked Zapatistas flooded the streets of San
Cristobal, Chiapas, to send off the 24 delegates to Mexico City. On
February 25, 10,000 citizens in Latin America's largest indigenous city,
Juchitan, Oaxaca, greeted the Zapatistas, chanting, "You are not alone!" On
February 26, 30,000 awaited them in the city of Oaxaca, in a city square so
loud with screams of joy -- " Marcos! Marcos! Maaaarcooooos!" -- that if
you closed your eyes you might have thought this was the arrival of the
Beatles on American soil.
The caravan that represents the realization of the Zapatistas' long-awaited
advance on the Mexican capital has been organized and orderly. It moved
like a cross-country motorcade -- the bus that carried the Zapatista
command, escorted by police on motorcycles, leading a convoy of cars and
more buses carrying the media, international observers, civilians, and even
filmmaker Oliver Stone. At each stop en route, throngs of supporters mobbed
the Zapatista bus, anxious just to touch it.
In the daylight of February 27, multitudes greeted the Zapatistas in
Orizaba, Veracruz, and Tehuacan, Puebla. At all these stops the indigenous
ethnic groups along the way passed the baston, the cane that signifies
political-military command, to the Zapatista comandantes. (In Oaxaca, the
cane was specifically passed to the four female Zapatista comandantas,
named Susana, Yolanda, Fidelia, and Esther.) On the night of February 28,
the seven indigenous ethnic groups, comprising one million of the state of
Puebla's five million residents, were met by tens of thousands of young
people -- 50,000 poblanos in all -- filling the city square, singing the
Zapatista anthem, "Vamos, vamos, vamos, adelante" -- "Let's go, let's go,
let's go forward ... "
"The San Andres Accords will be ratified," Marcos told the mainly
indigenous crowd earlier that day in Tehuacan, "so that Mexico will never
be lost again."
From Hidalgo, in the heart of the Huasteca, where the Zapatistas had
brought the refreshing rain of "our freedom" the previous week, the
Zapatistas drove toward the state of Queretaro. As the caravan entered that
state, a bus carrying observers lost its brakes and hit several vehicles,
including the Zapatista bus. A number of civilians were injured and one of
the motorcycle escorts was killed. The caravan's itinerary was suspended
for the day, and the Zapatistas issued a statement that they lamented the
death of the officer.
The following day, the caravan continued through Fox's home state of
Guanajuato and on to a three-day Indigenous National Congress in Michoacan
with 10,000 participants to organize the final advance upon Mexico City and
Congress. From there, the caravan planned to move on to the states of
Mexico, Guerrero, and Morelos, to follow in the footsteps of Zapata's own
march into the capital, under the watchful growl of El Popo, the volcano.
By the time it gets there, according to the announcements of hundreds of
social organizations of farmers, workers, and students, an unprecedented
mass of people, including more than 1000 tractors and horsemen, will have
joined the caravan. "Advance to Mexico City," the Zapatista Command ordered
its troops when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1993. On March
11, Marcos and the Zapatistas and millions of Mexican supporters will be at
the gates of the national palace, an audacious promise kept.
WHETHER THE Mexican government keeps the promise it made when it signed the
San Andres Accords will decide whether the long Chiapaneco drought of war
and conflict will be replaced by the rain of a new era of peaceful struggle
for democracy, justice, and freedom -- an order wherein the indigenous and
the non-indigenous can work peacefully "to choose and to decide" what
constitutes "our freedom."
President Vicente Fox, who also embodies the hopes and aspirations of much
of Mexico, has three major challenges as he takes the helm of this nation
of 96 million people: improving an economy that is chained to the rise and
fall of foreign economies, restoring public safety in this era of the
US-imposed drug war that fuels the violent narco, and bringing about peace
in Chiapas.
The last is the most attainable -- perhaps the only attainable -- goal
among the top three on the national agenda. If Fox can't steer the San
Andres Accords through a Congress dominated by his party, his long drought
will have only just begun. Fox may find himself compared more to Aleksandr
Kerensky, the Russian leader who raised the expectations of his nation,
failed to meet them, and was swiftly overcome by the communist revolution,
than to Nelson Mandela. And the Chiapas conflict could explode nationwide.
One need only look at the multitudes who have come to greet Marcos and the
Zapatista Command on their journey to the center of the country: the energy
of youth, the experience of social fighters, the indigenous heart of
Mexico, together as never before, will not allow this mission to fail. If
Fox does not match his words of "peace" and "freedom" with concrete acts,
his six-year term will soon turn into a nightmare not much different from
those of his immediate predecessors Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto
Zedillo, both now disgraced and hated by their own nation.
Don Andres is an elder in an Indigenous National Congress made up of
cultures that still respect elders. For almost his entire life, he has been
a social fighter. He has watched presidents come and go like dry seasons.
Today he walks alongside hundreds of thousands of Mexican youths on the
Zapatista Caravan, and alongside 24 masked guerrillas who, more than any
politician or political party, made the defeat of the ruling PRI possible
after 71 years. Don Andres, too, is advancing on Mexico City.
Don Andres, his baston tapping the earth on this long march for "our
freedom," peers over the mass of young people who now walk with him and
with the indigenous movement, and says to the president, "It wants to rain."