The Uncomfortable Dead

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  GGM: What are you reading at the moment?

  SM: Don Quixote is always at my side, and as a rule I carry García Lorca’s Romancero Gitano with me. Don Quixote is the best book of political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the Mexican political system, in its tragic and comic aspects: Hamlet, Macbeth, and Don Quixote. Better than any political columnist.

  GGM: Do you write by hand or on a computer?

  SM: On a computer. Except on this march, when I had to write a lot by hand because there was no time to work. I write a rough draft, and then another and another and another. It sounds silly, but by the time I finish I’m at about the seventh version.

  GGM: What book are you writing?

  SM: I was trying to produce a folly, which was to try to explain ourselves to ourselves from the standpoint of ourselves—which is virtually impossible. What we have to relate is the paradox that we are. Why a revolutionary army is not aiming to seize power, why an army doesn’t fight, if that’s its job. All the paradoxes we faced: the way we grew and became strong in a community so far removed from the established culture.

  GGM: If everyone knows who you are, why the mask?

  SM: A touch of coquetry. They don’t know who I am, but it doesn’t matter to them anyway. At stake is what Subcomandante Marcos is, not who he was.

  ¡ZAPATISTA! THE PHOENIX RISES

  by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  This essay originally appeared in The Nation magazine, March 28, 1994.

  I

  They’ve come out of nowhere. From its perennially censorious perspective, the television repeatedly displays without understanding the faces of the Zapatista rebels, hooded by ski masks or covered with quintessentially Mexican paliacates (the red, yellow, and black bandannas worn by Mexican campesinos).

  What the hell is this? Paloma wakes me up in midmorning and puts me in front of the TV. The Zapatista guerrilla army has taken half a dozen cities in Chiapas, including the state’s traditional capital, San Cristóbal de las Casas.

  The first words delivered by the rebels to the TV cameras are enunciated in shaky Spanish with a peculiar syntax: Vinimo de aquí porque no aguantumos, ¿ve?, el ejército que persigue a nosotros. Vinimo a la guerra. “We came here because we couldn’t take it, see?, the army persecuting us. We came to the war.”

  Among the guerrillas are some officers, very few, whose speech gives away their urban origins; they could be members of a far left group, students who fled chronic unemployment to burrow into the jungle in what the language of the left called trabajo de topo, mole’s work (teaching literacy classes, barefoot doctoring, organizing cooperatives), or schoolteachers who went through twenty years of ceaseless struggle in order to win the right to earn $200 a month and, in a handful of regions, to elect union representatives. But the vast majority are indigenous. Tzeltales, Choles, Mijes, Tojolabales. From the tribal babel of Chiapas, where the lingua franca of almost 60 percent of the population is not Spanish but one of the indigenous dialects.

  Their weapons are indigenous, too. The images show an AK-47 here and there, an assault rifle stolen from the Mexican Army, but the majority are carrying shotguns and .22-caliber hunting rifles, even machetes and stakes, or wooden guns with a nail in the tip of the barrel. A lot of them are women and children. They’re uniformed: green baseball caps, green pants, homemade black vests, paliacates around their necks or covering their faces.

  The country enters the year 1994 with an insurrection and no one except the rebels understands anything.

  II

  They call themselves Zapatistas.

  History repeats itself. In Mexico it always repeats itself. Neanderthal Marxists never get tired of reiterating that it repeats itself as farce, but that has nothing to do with it. It repeats itself as vengeance. In Mexico, the past voyages, rides, walks among us. Zapata is the key image: stubbornness, the dream cut short but not sold out.

  III

  In the first confrontation, twenty-four policemen died. In the fight for control of the town halls, the insurgents clashed with the state police, known as judiciales, and with the municipal police forces. The nation sees images of their dead bodies lying in the plazas. A lot of hate is stored up there. The judiciales are traditionally the landowners’ white guards; they go into communities and ransack, make arrests, torture. Overheard on the second day of January in the Mexico City metro: Los judiciales no son gente; no son personas. “The judiciales aren’t decent people; they aren’t people.”

  IV

  Are they crazy? How many of them are there? Where did the Zapatista army come from? Do they really think they can face in open combat a modern army that has air power, helicopters, heavy weapons, artillery?

  In the first wave of attacks they’ve taken control of the entrances to the Lacandón jungle, the road from Chiapas to Guatemala and the second largest city in the state. The following day, they keep their promise and attack the military zone where the 31st Army Division is headquartered. Then they disappear, falling back into the shadows. A reserve force of Zapatistas remains in Altamirano, Las Margaritas, and Ocosingo, the towns that serve as gateways to the jungle.

  They have announced that they took up arms against a government founded on an electoral fraud, that they have decreed a new agrarian reform, that they will no longer endure any abuses by the police, the army, and the latifundios’ caciques, that the North American Free Trade Agreement is the final kick in the stomach to the indigenous communities.

  V

  A couple days later, the coordinator of the coffee cooperatives of Chiapas will tell me that this rebellion was announced in advance. The air was full of forewarnings that the government didn’t want to hear. No one would admit to being in the know.

  An anthropologist friend who knows the region tells me that at the end of last summer the communities voted not to sow their crops. This, for groups that live from the precarious economy of corn, is death. There’s no going back. He tells me that the rebel organization’s work began ten years ago. Looking back over the newspapers from the past few months I find bits of news here and there of clashes between the army, the police, and the indigenous communities.

  At the end of March last year, the judiciales, in pursuit of an armed group that had killed two soldiers in an ambush, entered San Isidro Ocotal: indigenous men—old men and one minor—were arrested. Some were tortured. In May, the same story. There were rumors of a guerrilla force. Everyone denied them. Soon afterward, the judiciales entered Patate Viejo, firing their guns. They assembled the residents of the small community in the basketball court, picked out eight at random, arrested them, and took them to the penitentiary in Cerro Hueco.

  Mexico’s Secretary of Gobernación (who is in charge of internal political affairs and police) acknowledged a few days after the fighting broke out that he knew of the existence of fifteen guerrilla training centers.

  VI

  I haven’t left the house in three days except to buy the newspaper. I talk on the phone, listen to the radio, watch the television with the fascination of a blind man seeing an image for the first time.

  An agrarianist friend explains to me that 15,000 indigenous people have died of hunger and easily curable diseases in Chiapas in the past few years. Without crop rotation, the fields are not very productive. The price of coffee has dropped, so the landowners have seized more land for cattle; they create conflicts between the communities and assassinate community leaders. Although the land cannot feed any more people, the population has been growing by 6 percent annually with the arrival of indigenous refugees from Guatemala and the internal migration of Indians whose land has been taken by the owners of the large haciendas. All this in a region where there is no electricity, 70 percent of the population is illiterate, most houses have no sewage systems or hookups for potable water, and the average monthly income of a family is less than $130.

  VII

  In La Jornada, I read a fascinating story. The night they took San C
ristóbal, the Zapatistas burned the municipal archives, the financial records, the land titles. The director of the historical archive negotiated with them: “You aren’t going to burn the historical archive. The papers there tell the history of the origin of this city. The history of the seventeenth-century campesino rebellions and the Tzeltal uprising are there.” The Zapatista committee met. Not only did they not burn it, they posted someone to guard it.

  VIII

  In an amazing burst of lucidity, Toño García de León, one of our best anthropologists, foretold what was going to happen in a book published nine years ago, Resistencia y Utopia.García says, “The elements of the past are still here, as alive as phantoms and wandering souls…. The subsoil of Chiapas is full of murdered Indians, petrified forests, abandoned cities, and oceans of petroleum.”

  Chiapas lies at the asshole of the world, where Jesus Christ lost his serape and John Wayne lost his horse. After the nineteenth-century uprisings had ended, the governors had their pictures taken standing next to defeated midgets. The Mexican Revolution got here twenty years late, at a fraction of its original strength, leaving the large haciendas intact. The Lacandóns, a nearly extinct Indian tribe, buy electric lamps to put in rooms without electricity, towns without electricity, whole regions without electricity—in a state that has the country’s largest hydroelectric dams. San Cristóbal, a gathering place for hippie tourists, has three Zen centers and hundreds of satellite dishes, and barefoot Indians walk through its streets unable to find work as bricklayers.

  IX

  A popular Mexican bandit of the 1920s, el Tigre de Santa Julia, died in a rather unseemly manner, trapped and pumped full of lead by the police while he was sitting on the toilet. When you’re caught off guard, people say, “They got you like el Tigre de Santa Julia.”

  The Mexican state has been taken by surprise, like el Tigre de Santa Julia. Did they believe their own lies? Here are the results of the last few elections in Chiapas: according to official figures, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) won in 1976 with 97.7 percent of the vote, in 1982 with 90.2 percent. Were they so stupid that they believed the official figures? They must have been the only ones.

  People say Salinas had information on what was being planned and preferred to ignore it so as not to cast a shadow over the celebration of the implementation of NAFTA.

  But elections are coming up. The chief opposition again is the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. To confront it with a new electoral fraud while a civil war is brewing would throw gasoline on the flames.

  X

  In post-1968 Mexico, the forces of the new left opted to work for social organization among the masses. Thousands of students were mobilized by the union movement, the struggle in the slums, the slow work of assistance to campesino insurgent movements. A minority took up arms. There was never much sympathy between the two groups, who accused each other of being “ultras” and “reformists.” The guerrillas, caught up in a crazed spiral of minor confrontations that led to new clashes until their final annihilation by the police, never took any interest in working with the people. They heated things up, and years of union or campesino work were often endangered by their sectarian adventures. In short, the majority of the left was never attracted to the idea of armed struggle. But the Zapatista uprising generates a wave of sympathy.

  “How could I not like them? Ernesto, a university union organizer, tells me, “since I agree with their program for a new democracy, and since they’re not some tiny group, they don’t want to be anybody’s vanguard, they don’t impose their path, they’re indigenous, they’re an uprising of the masses, and on top of that they’ve been screwed over even worse than I have.”

  XI

  The army deployed 10,000 soldiers in the first days of the conflict, and the figure slowly rose to 17,000, one-third of the Mexican Army. Jeeps with machine guns, tanks, helicopters, German G-3 rifles, Saber planes.

  XII

  The dead will always be dead. The horror draws nearer. In the face of horror, political explanations are not moving. Reasons are harsh in wartime. I’m disturbed by the repeated sight of the bodies of campesinos, riddled with bullets, lying in ditches along the road. I see terrible images of a baby girl killed by a grenade fragment, her body lying in a cardboard box.

  XIII

  An enormous demonstration is held in Mexico City against the government’s policy in Chiapas and for peace, with close to 150,000 attending. One of the chants: “First World, ha ha ha.” Again we see the faces of the old and new left, but also of thousands of students joining the movement for the first time. The Zapatistas are not alone. Their program and the faces and motives of the indigenous rebels are greeted with a massive outpouring of sympathy that is reflected in the press. Something new, something different, is happening.

  XIV

  The Department of Gobernación has decided to invent an enemy phantom. The real phantoms, the Chiapan rebels, aren’t of much use in the great propaganda war that is being launched—they’re too likable. One of the ski-masked comandantes, the one who led the occupation of San Cristóbal de las Casas and who said his name was Marcos, is chosen. He is useful because he appears to be from the city; he isn’t indigenous and might even be foreign. A verbal portrait is disseminated across the country. His vital statistics: six feet tall, blond hair, green eyes, speaks three languages (where the hell did they come up with that one? and why not four languages, or five?). The newspaper-reading sector of the country laughs at the absurdity. People call you on the phone to tell you that Marcos is their cousin, that he’s the milkman. The phantom is welcomed in a wave of affection. The news magazine Proceso has just sanctified him by putting a close-up of him on the cover of its first issue on Chiapas. A Venezuelan biologist doing research on the endangered jaguars of the Lacandón jungle—and whose closest contact with a jaguar to date was the sight of some excrement—is arrested and beaten. The judiciales want him to confess to being the guerrilla commander in chief. Marcos himself laughs at his popularity in a joking letter to the media.

  But does Commander Marcos really exist? Interviewed in the municipal palace of San Cristóbal at dawn on the first day of January, after the Zapatistas had made a clean sweep of the judiciales, the phantasmagoric Marcos avows that he is there to carry out the policies of a committee of indigenous campesinos; he is only a subcomandante, and he warns that the name “Marcos” is interchangeable—anyone can put on a ski mask and say, “I am Marcos.” He invites people to do so.

  XV

  “It’s like Vietnam,” says a soldier talking on the phone, overheard by an alert La Jornada reporter standing in line behind him. “They come out of the mist.” The jungle air is full of messages. At night, 150 short-wave radio stations saturate the ether over the ravines and footpaths with cryptic messages: “Six for Uruguay, do you copy?” “Truckloads of green cement passed in Paris.” Zapatista bases identifying themselves as Two, Zero, and Thunder are the most important. The helicopters try to avoid the antennas that rise through the trees.

  XVII

  Bombs in the Distrito Federal of the capital. The war comes nearer to the monster city. The “bombers” aren’t Zapatistas. A mini-sect of the extreme left, said to be fully infiltrated by the Department of Gobernación, is responsible. Even so, the feeling that the war is getting closer and could burst out of the TV screen and explode on the corner of your street sweeps the city for a week.

  XVIII

  The government tightens its grip. A general mobilization of the army has been ordered. Then, the armed resistance of the Zapatistas and the almost unanimous response of the intellectual community (with the lamentable exception of Octavio Paz, who weeps for a lost “modernity”), along with the demonstration in Mexico City, force the government to draw back. It changes its line, changes its personnel, dismisses the Secretary of Gobernación, the Attorney General, the governor of Chiapas. The soft line takes over. Manuel Camacho Solís, whom Salinas recently
rejected as the PRI candidate for the presidency, is now Salinas’s man once more and becomes a negotiator. An amnesty is proclaimed.

  In a desperate quest to end the conflict, economic support plans rapidly succeed one another, institutions are created to protect the indigenous people (from whom? from themselves?), and the official discourse adopts the critiques of the left and incorporates them, chameleonlike. The jaguar is a Mexican species. The Venezuelan biologist should have known that.

  A cease-fire is declared—a tense cease-fire.

  XIX

  On TV there are images of soldiers vaccinating children and distributing food. The women standing in line for food in Ocosingo’s plaza don’t get any the second day if they don’t bring their husbands. The soldiers distributing food are there to identify Zapatistas.

  XX

  Rumors again. Phone calls from journalist friends, low-voiced conversations during a Cárdenas rally on the esplanade of the Insurgentes metro station. Provocations are expected. There will be armed clashes. Does the army want to avenge the affront? The country grows uneasy once more. In Quintana Roo, only four kilometers from the Disneyland with real sharks known as Cancún, the judiciales arrest campesino leaders supposedly because they were armed. A secretary photographs a judiciale taking AK-47 bullets out of his sock and putting them inside a roll of toilet paper in the offices of the campesino union: this will be the proof. The judiciales unleash an enormous operation in the state of Guerrero. During the meeting of a powerful organization of agrarian unions on the Isthmus of Tehauntepec in the state of Oaxaca, many voices are heard protesting against the pacifism of the leaders: “If we’d rebelled, people wouldn’t have died from the epidemic, there would be a hospital by now, and the fraud would have fallen flat on its ass.” The states of Tabasco and Michoacán are worried. The Cárdenas-led opposition won the elections there and a spectacular fraud was carried out. During the past two years, campesino community leaders who were members of the PRD have been assassinated.