One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  Every political movement needs its icon and Marcos, whether he likes it or not, has become one – not simply for the Zapatistas of Chiapas, but also for the growing global movement they helped to spawn. Interestingly though, he is not, even to his most fervent worshippers, ‘followed’, because he refuses to be anyone’s leader.

  Partly this is a reflection of reality. In the official scheme of things, Marcos is not the leader of the Zapatistas because the Zapatistas have no leader. The Zapatista army is run by twenty-three comandantes who make up the ‘Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee’. All of them are Indians and they are elected by, and take their orders from, the autonomous communities they come from. The decision to go to war in 1994, for example, was not made by the comandantes – they do not have the authority to make such significant decisions without the go-ahead from the Zapatistas in every autonomous village. Only after an exhaustive, months-long process of consultation and voting across Chiapas did the EZLN get the go-ahead for war; and only then did they act.

  Marcos, meanwhile, is simply a subcomandante. In theory, this makes him a deputy, instructed by the comandantes to train and command the Zapatista troops. In reality, though he is not the leader of the Zapatistas, he is their voice, both in Mexico and internationally. He provides a vital bridge between the world of the Indians and the modern world. But he refuses to lead, to be followed, or to write anyone a manifesto, political or otherwise. Because to do so would be to make a nonsense of everything that Zapatismo stands for – local democracy, political and economic control at community level, and a very different way of looking at power.

  Marcos is always writing, though. He can’t seem to stop himself. ‘Communiqués’ have stuttered forth from his jungle redoubt ever since 1994, and are instantly recognisable both from their unique style and from their sign-off, which never varies – ‘From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos’. All self-respecting guerrillas, of course, have to write acres of revolutionary cant about the evils of capitalism. It’s in their job description. Marcos, while not immune to this tendency, is decidedly more poetic, and more unpredictable, in his approach. He writes elegant denunciations of political opponents: ‘Health to you,’ he closes one communiqué to former president Zedillo, ‘and a parachute for the cliff which comes with your tomorrow.’ He writes ‘telegrams’ to ‘international civil society’: ‘THE GREYS HOPE TO WIN STOP RAINBOW NEEDED URGENTLY STOP’. He writes absurdist morality tales: ‘The tale of the lime with an identity crisis’; ‘The tale of the nonconformist little toad’. And he is surely the only guerrilla in history whose pet beetle, ‘Don Durito of the Lacandon’, writes his own stories, essays and economic critiques.

  ‘This making of a new world,’ says Marcos, by way of explanation, ‘is a serious business. If we can’t laugh, the world we make will be square, and we won’t be able to turn it.’13 One thing seems clear: this is no ordinary Latin American guerrillero. Che Guevara may have had the student beard and the martyr’s death, but he never had Marcos’s sense of the absurd. This is revolution with a twinkle in its eye, and you don’t get much more post-modern than that.

  Who Marcos really is remains a mystery. President Ernesto Zedillo, Fox’s PRI predecessor, ‘unmasked’ him as an ex-philosophy professor from Mexico City. Marcos naturally denied it. What does seem clear is that the young Marcos, whoever he was, started his journey in Chiapas as a revolutionary steeped in the hard-left dogma of the twentieth century, and ended it as something very different. His journey from where he was then to where he is now has become one of the central legends of Zapatismo, and it makes a telling point about a growing political movement that rejects the rigid ideological certainties of both left and right.

  The story goes that Marcos arrived in Chiapas in the early 1980s, with a now defunct bunch of Maoists from Mexico City. They wanted a revolution. Revolutions happened when the oppressed workers rose up against the capitalist classes, seizing the means of production for The People, and strangling the last Starbucks executive with the innards of the last World Bank consultant. The indigenous people of Chiapas, if they were anything, were certainly oppressed. They looked like fertile ground. All they needed was a proper education in the realities of their class position, and hey presto: a vanguard in the making.

  Only it didn’t work out like that. ‘Rise up!’ Marcos told them. ‘Go away,’ they said. ‘We’re not a proletariat, our land is not your means of production and we don’t want to work in a tractor factory. All we want is to be listened to, and for you big-city smart-arses to stop telling us how to live. As for your dialectic – you can keep it. You never know when it might come in handy.’

  For Marcos, Chiapas was a revelation. ‘We thought we were the light of the world,’ he once told a Mexican journalist, ‘sent here to organise the Indians. Then we began to speak with the communities, and they had a very important lesson for us.’14 The young revolutionary learned more than he taught – learned about grass-roots democracy, about tradition, about working the land and closeness to nature, and about an entirely different, ancient, indigenous worldview, that could not be classified by any of the political rigidities of the modern world. He began to question his ideological certainties, and learned, through over a decade in mountain caves and forest redoubts, in villages and valleys and farms, that what los indios wanted, after 500 years with the white man’s boot on their collective neck, was the freedom and power to live and grow their own way, untramelled by the ideals of those who would ‘develop’ them, from right or left or centre, and all for their own good.

  Was this revolutionary? Was it conservative? Did it matter? Marcos didn’t seem to think so, and has since taken to revelling in his and Zapatismo’s quixotic position as a new, old, radical, traditional, local, global, romantic and practical political phenomenon, which no one has managed to cram into any existing ideological boxes. ‘The communists accuse him of being anarchist,’ he writes, autobiographically. ‘Guilty. The anarchists accuse him of being orthodox. Guilty . . . The reformists accuse him of being an extremist, a radical. Guilty. The radicals accuse him of being reformist. Guilty. The “historical vanguard” accuse him of appealing to the civic society and not to the proletariat. Guilty. The civic society accuses him of disturbing their tranquillity. Guilty. The Stock Exchange accuses him of ruining their breakfast . . .’15

  Marcos likes to insist that the answers the Zapatistas have found apply only to them. He will not tell anyone, anywhere, what they should do; only that, when they find their own answers, appropriate to their own situation, they should put them into practice. Out of the first post-modern revolution comes the first post-modern guerrilla: one who offers more questions than answers, to whom ideology is fluid, to whom power is to be redefined not seized, to whom mocking is more effective than preaching, to whom ‘our word is our weapon’. Marcos’s political identity crisis turned him into something new and unique: a kind of dissenting, faceless Everyman. And in him, more than any other one person, the thinking, and the workings, of a new, rising international movement are reflected.

  Who is Marcos? He has answered that question himself. ‘Marcos,’ he wrote in 1994, ‘is gay in San Francisco, a black person in South Africa, Asian in Europe . . . a Palestinian in Israel, a Jew in Germany . . . an artist without a gallery or a portfolio . . . a sexist in the feminist movement, a woman alone in a Metro station at 10 P.M. . . . a writer without books or readers, and a Zapatista in the Mexican Southeast . . . He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak, their way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable – this is Marcos.’16

  In other words, if Subcomandante Marcos did not exist, the international movement that is coalescing in opposition to ‘globalisation’ would have to invent him. Todos Somos Marcos reads a slogan chanted by crowds and printed on T-shirts from Mexico City
to Seattle to Genoa: We are all Marcos. Who is Marcos? Who isn’t?

  I’ve been in San Cristobal almost a fortnight, interviewing people, trailing the Global Exchange crowd on a few other visits, organising interviews, being a tourist and trying to work out what I think about what I’ve seen so far. I was never sure exactly what to expect in Chiapas, but I am realising the complexity of the situation. The poetic guerrilla rebels that are sometimes romanticised by activists in the West are, in reality, determined peasant farmers, indigenous people fighting for their own lives and traditions. Nevertheless, I think I am beginning to grasp some, at least, of the essence of Zapatismo.

  Autonomy is clearly a key part of it. Every Zapatista you talk to will tell you that autonomy – real, local control of their community, economically and politically – is a hard-fought-for principle, rather than an expedient political move. They will tell you, too, that autonomy for them doesn’t mean independence, dropping out, isolation – it means control of their own destinies. Linked with that is the commitment to community democracy – real control, by all, at community level, however difficult it may be to implement.

  Taken together, these seem to be at least the beginnings of a practical realisation of all Marcos’s words about re-thinking what power is and how it should be used. In a world of centralised power blocs, ‘the ones without voices’ will always be trampled on. Challenge that by devolving as much power as possible down to ground level, and ensuring that the people really get their hands on it, and you have already begun a revolution in the way the world works – though it may not be one that any traditional revolutionary would recognise.

  I was told I would find something in Chiapas which would inspire me. And this is inspiring, for it seems to me that, despite the hardship and the struggle these people are going through, they have hit on something which has, in principle at least, global potential. Something that is spreading. Later, on my travels, I will understand just how far.

  But I need to see more – need to see where the Zapatistas are really coming from, literally and otherwise. So Lucy and I have arranged to spend some time living in one of the five Zapatista ‘capitals’ – all known as Aguascalientes. Oventic was one, but this one – La Garrucha – is much more remote. We will be there as peace observers. The Zapatistas, who are still harassed and occasionally attacked by the army and paramilitary gangs, are keen to have groups of ‘internationals’ living in their most vulnerable villages; a tradition that began in 1995, when the government’s military assault against ordinary Zapatista villagers was at its height. The internationals both gather information on military comings and goings, and, theoretically, act as some sort of deterrent – a clear signal to the Mexican government that the world is still watching Chiapas. For the next ten days, this will be our job – in return, we get to live and work in the birthplace of Zapatismo.

  Before I leave, I write a letter to Marcos and the General Command and deliver it, as instructed, to a contact somewhere in San Cristobal who has promised to get it to whatever lonely outpost the guerrillas are currently camped in.

  ‘We will send it,’ she promises me, ‘but I don’t think you will be lucky.’ She’s probably right. Since the success of the Zapatour and the consequent failure of Congress to honour the San Andres Accords, the EZLN General Command have been incommunicado, and the usually garrulous Marcos has been refusing all interviews. Still, it has to be worth a try.

  Ocosingo is a frontier town. It has a lot of potholes, fume-spewing trucks, flyblown bars, a fair few drunks, no tourists and absolutely no Internet cafés. Two hours and a world away from San Cristobal, it guards the entrance to the Cañadas – canyons – great green valleys which run through the Lacandon rainforest down to the border with Guatemala, some seventy miles away. The Cañadas are the wild, forested, rebellious heart of Chiapas where the Zapatista rebellion was fomented, and where Marcos and his guerrilla band lived for years in caves and forest camps, and probably still do. In 1994, Ocosingo was one of the seven towns the Zapatistas invaded, and the scene of the worst disaster of the uprising, when the EZLN were ambushed and gunned down by the army and the air force, some shot in the back of the head after surrendering. Around 150 people – Zapatistas, soldiers and civilians – died in the bloodbath that was Ocosingo.

  We’re only here to get transport out again, and soon we find ourselves packed on to the back of a truck which staggers out of town and on to a road hardly worthy of the name. There are no buses east of Ocosingo – buses can’t cope with the roads, so truck travel is the only way into the heart of Zapatista country. Lucy and I are shoehorned between piles of old tyres, boxes of beer, bags of corn and about ten other people. There are skinny old men hauling great sacks of maize; women on the way back to their villages from market; children hanging on to their skirts; a gang of grinning, shoeless wide boys perched on the roof and a couple of shaven-headed, slab-chested soldiers on leave from the military bases that squat near the Zapatista villages.

  The journey to La Garrucha takes four hours, and we alternate between teetering on the end of wooden benches that are jolted up into the air by every rut, and standing on the wooden slats that make up the side of the truck. A ratty brown dog, lying under one of the benches, quietly and persistently ejects the contents of its stomach, which flows gently up and down the floor with the movement of the vehicle. The road is scatter-bombed with potholes the size of large ponds, and we have to get out and push several times.

  But the Cañadas have a powerful beauty. They grow deeper as you drive south, away from the cities, passing small thatched villages, smoke rising through the wooden roofs. Women in traditional dress gaze shyly at you as you pass and children chase the truck for a few yards, yelling in Tzeltal. The branches of overhanging trees are smothered in brilliant red fungi, gentle white blossoms and tree orchids, and all around the green, misty hills close in, cutting you off from any other reality. Vultures collide with air currents overhead, insects whistle and whine and all around you, wherever you look, there are butterflies. Huge iridescent blue ones, with wingspans like palm leaves; tiny tiger-printed ones; white, red, purple, brown and bronze ones, with the fitful sun filtering through their litmus-like wings, circling and seething along the miles of fog-swollen road until it seems that a shimmering cloud of leaf-thin butterflies escorts our truck to the gates of La Garrucha.

  La Garrucha bears little resemblance to Oventic: where that was buzzing with activity, this is almost silent, apart from the ever-present sound of insects. As we jump down from the back of the truck, hauling our rucksacks after us, we are virtually the only people around. We are deep in the Cañadas, and the tight green valley we were in has widened enough for dozens of thatched smallholdings, surrounded by milpas – tiny fields of maize – to dot the grasslands between the forested and still cloud-hung mountains. A man in a sombrero leans against a fence post chewing a blade of grass and a couple of dogs are sniffing about in the ditches at the side of the track. As the truck lumbers off down the valley, a line of pigs – a mother and three offspring – wander into view, trotting neatly down the side of the road in single file, going nowhere in particular.

  The only sign that this is an ‘Aguascalientes’ is a huge mural on the side of a wooden building to the right of the road. We wander round it and tell the grass-chewing man who we are. He waves in the direction of some huts on the other side of a grassy area surrounded by haphazard buildings. There is a stone church on one side – the only building that looks new. Next to it is a crumbling school, painted with a huge mural of the magnificently moustachioed Emiliano Zapata. On another side is a long, slatted wooden building featuring a painted rendition of a famous photograph – lines of unarmed Zapatista women successfully, and peacefully, preventing armed soldiers from storming their village. Resistencia! says the red slogan painted next to it. On another side of the grassland is a long barn with a rusting blue bus sitting next to it, and completing the quadrangle is a small collection of huts. We knock on one of the door
s.

  Inside are four men, sitting in a circle on plastic chairs, chewing grass or smoking. These, it turns out, are the community leaders. One of them plonks himself behind an old desk which sits at an awkward angle on the dirt floor, and asks for our passports and letters of introduction. We hand them over. They are perused, then handed back to us.

  ‘Welcome to La Garrucha,’ says the man. ‘We will show you where to sleep.’

  The barn, it turns out, is our sleeping quarters. Its beams are strung with the mosquito nets and hammocks of the other peace observers who are already here. We dump our kit in a corner and go to find them. The sound of voices and the smell of smoke wafting from a small, mural-scrawled hut next to the barn identifies their likely hiding place. A grey, saddled horse is tethered next to the door. We push it open and go in.

  ‘Hi,’ we say, our eyes adjusting to the dimness. The hut is evidently a kitchen – it is hung with battered and blackened old pots, and on its wonky shelves are bags of beans, piles of tortillas and the odd vegetable. Six people are sitting around a shaky table, chatting. They look up.

  ‘Hi,’ they chorus.

  We sit down and I hand out a chocolate bar I wisely brought with me.

  ‘Chocolate!’ says one girl, wide-eyed. ‘Oh God, chocolate! It’s been a week since I saw chocolate!’ Instantly popular, Lucy and I are handed scratched plastic mugs full of coffee boiled mercilessly on the open fire in the corner.