On the Road with the Zapatistas
BENJAMIN, MEDEA
On the Road with the Zapatistas BY MEDEA BENJAMIN It was about 10 p.m. on February 9 when a representative from the human-rights group CONPAZ called our hotel. Breathless, he informed us that...
...One young woman appeared...
...The previous round of talks between the government and the rebels broke down in March 1994...
...We don't need or want their protection...
...Yet another claimed the soldiers beat him in the testicles and stomach...
...Paradoxically, the Mexican government is in a weaker bargaining position as well...
...On February 15, police raided the church in Ocosingo, supposedly looking for weapons...
...We found signs of a hurried exit—tortillas still soft and pots of food still warm, clothes left drying on the line, animals roaming around the shacks...
...In the town of Patihuitz, we met with a group of about 100 men who told us that the military had detained and interrogated them, demanding to know who the Zapatista supporters were...
...They didn't find us because God is grand...
...The central squares of Mexico City and other urban centers were jammed with protesters...
...At first she seemed alarmed by this strange group of foreigners, but she took a deep breath and out came a torrential discourse in Tzeltal...
...This was the very day that Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo abandoned peace talks with the Zapatista rebels and ordered the police and the army to arrest suspected Zapatista leaders...
...We want them to leave...
...The two sides, while still worlds apart, are closer than they've been in the past...
...We were left even more dehydrated, lying on the ground like dunces, stinking of urine...
...They even stop us on the way to our fields to inspect our food and count the tortillas we're carrying...
...Also hiding in the jungle were the Zap* Soldiers are constantly interrogating us,' a frightened elderly man told me...
...The mild-mannered director of the Economic and Social Development Organization for Indigenous Mexicans was charged with terrorism, mutiny, and sedition...
...We took the CONPAZ folks back to our hotel where they would be safe for the night...
...When the military roadblocks were finally lifted, our delegation was among the first allowed in...
...The military offensive was certainly a blow for the rebels, but not the final battle, says John Ross, author of Rebellion at the Roots...
...Other communities were so afraid of the military that they fled when they heard the soldiers were coming...
...Embassies were taken over or boycotted in the United States, Spain, France, Germany, and elsewhere...
...They could not forget what had happened on January 7, 1994, when the army troops came into their village and tortured the men in the town chapel...
...Eduardo Robledo, the controversial governor of Chiapas whose dismissal the Zapatistas demanded, has since stepped down...
...Dozens of hamlets were completely abandoned...
...Today, the Zapatistas are in a weaker bargaining position...
...The diarrhea was memorable," Marcos recalls...
...The government had offered to address the rebels' material demands for schools, hospitals, and roads, but refused to consider the Zapatistas' nationwide demands for fundamental changes that would separate the government from the ruling PRI and make the country more democratic...
...I shuddered to think that Mexico might succumb to the same fate, watching its most committed community activists whisked away in the middle of the night...
...This outcry forced the government to change its tune...
...Our men can't go out to tend the fields for fear of leaving the women and children alone, so we will have no food...
...The only reason no direct combat was taking place was that every time the army arrived, the rebels retreated...
...Most Mexicans are furious with the government's botching of the economy and with the universally unpopular austerity measures imposed to prevent further hemorrhaging...
...With little food and no shelter from the bitter cold nights, the children and elderly began getting sick—with fevers, vomiting, and diarrhea causing fears of a cholera epidemic...
...While soldiers were turning peasant hamlets into armed camps, the national and international outcry against President Zedillo's unleashing of the army was growing...
...They may be drinking their own piss," he says, "but they're still pissing defiant...
...I don't know who began the concert, but almost immediately all of us began vomiting...
...It is hard to see how much farther the rebels can be pushed without calling it defeat, she writes...
...Our children are shut in the tiny shacks all day, because we are too afraid to send them to school...
...Breathless, he informed us that his office was under siege...
...The soldiers are constantly interrogating us," a frightened elderly man told me...
...The following day, one of the development community's most respected leaders, Jorge Santiago Santiago, was arrested at his home in Teopisca...
...The witch hunt had begun...
...Frequent abuses take place at military roadblocks...
...And of course they still have the mythical Subcommander Marcos, who always seems to have another card up his sleeve...
...Here, army tanks, humvees, and troop carriers rumbled into jungle areas previously under Zapatista control, while helicopters circled overhead...
...The military says it is here to protect us, but that is not true...
...By mid-February, some 10,000 indigenous people had taken to the jungle to escape the Mexican army...
...In the days and weeks that followed, attacks on the church, and the bishop in particular, escalated...
...This is not the same as the Zapatista demand that the army retreat to its pre-February 9 positions...
...We found villagers terrified by the soldiers and their war machines...
...And look what they gave us—guns and soldiers...
...Global Exchange organizes week-long educational/human rights delegations to Chiapas...
...The raid was a sober warning that from now on it was not just Zapatistas who were under attack...
...Just then a patrol of federal troops passed close by...
...In a few minutes the cramps began...
...Today, the Zapatistas are in a weaker bargaining position...
...We found the CONPAZ office surrounded at every corner by police with automatic weapons...
...They even stop us on the way to our fields to count the tortillas we're carrying.' ausia soimcis uicmscivcs, wnusc piccaii-ous condition rivaled that of their civilian supporters...
...We decided to take a sip, all at the same time, to see what would happen," Marcos relates...
...For more information call 1-800-497-1994...
...And a steady stream of observer delegations from around the world relayed the abuses committed by the army to all corners of the globe...
...Then I remembered—they were the police...
...The entire village of Morelia, a community of some 600 people, fled when the news came that the military was advancing...
...An eerie silence hung in the air...
...The rebels rejected the deal...
...The real horror, however, was taking place in the remote depths of the Lacandon forest...
...They were ail-too reminiscent of the 1980s death squads in Central America...
...But despite divine intervention, the Mexican military had the Zapatistas totally cornered...
...More ominous, however, were the hulking, plainclothes thugs in white pick-up trucks with tinted windows and no license plates...
...The Zapatista forces were dispersed, uncoordinated, and without provisions...
...Subcommander Marcos gave a tragi-comic depiction of their wretched state...
...Human-rights activists, development workers, and church officials with a history of social activism were also fair game...
...The rebels still have enormous popular support from the local indigenous community, as well as from the Mexican and international left...
...After knocking over files and rummaging through desks and closets, they left empty-handed...
...We asked our government for schools and medicine and roads and more democracy...
...They ask us where the Zapatistas are, who their supporters are, if they're armed...
...The government also announced that the army would withdraw from villages within the territory formerly controlled by the Zapatistas...
...For five days, the Mexican military kept human-rights advocates, health workers, international observers, and the press out of the territory they had invaded...
...I tried to speak to the plainclothes officers, but they refused to reveal who they were, why they were there, or why their cars had no license plates...
...The smell of shit and urine could be smelled kilometers away...
...Dehydrated, they had decided to try to drink their own urine, after a discussion about whether they should drink it fresh before the odor got stronger or cool in their canteens so it would taste more like soda...
...That evening, ravenous, they ate some meat that had gone bad...
...Their civilian sympathizers, hungry and sick, had begun to trickle back to their villages only to find them occupied or destroyed by the military...
...My first gringa reaction was to call the police...
...The demonstrations in front of the cathedral by the opponents of Bishop Ruiz became a weekly show...
...The ruling PRI is also debilitated by the depth of corruption emerging from the astonishing investigations into the murders of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, PRI general secretary Jos6 Francisco Ruiz Massieu, and Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas...
...Moreover, given the army's recent track record of noncompliance with government orders to withdraw, there is good reason for skepticism about the military's intentions...
...Letters of protest were published daily in La Jornada newspaper from Nobel Prize laureates, Italian artists, Australian parliamentarians, U.S...
...I disagree...
...Some analysts, like The New Yorker's Alma Guillermoprieto, feel the Zapatistas are in such a weak position that they are likely to sign a surrender treaty disguised as a dialogue offer...
...It became clear that the army's war was against not the Zapatista soldiers but their indigenous supporters...
...I think that our image was hardly soldier-like...
...filmmakers—you name it...
...On March 13, the Law for Dialogue, Reconciliation, and a Dignified Peace, approved by the President and the Mexican Congress, formally suspended the arrest warrants and called for new talks within thirty days...
...But it is a positive sign that the government felt compelled to make concessions, and it has once again brought Chiapas back from the precipice of war...
...Another man had a rope tied around his neck in a simulated hanging...
...We asked to speak to some of the women...
...And the central Zapatista demand that there be a separation between the party and the government is a transformation that President Zedillo himself is calling for—at least rhetorically...
...One campesino was stripped and sent home naked...
...Three of the village elders were disappeared, their bones later found scattered along the side of the road...
...Please come over right away," he urged our group of international visitors...
...Also, with the country's shattered economy, there is less money available to address the rebels' material demands...
...Medea Benjamin is the Co-Director of Global Exchange in San Francisco...
...The army has invaded their strongholds, destroying much of their material base of support and terrifying their civilian backers...
...Their issues—the dearth of health care and schools, the maldistribution of land, the need for greater democracy and less corruption—will not go away...
...Later that evening, without a search warrant, the police raided the CONPAZ office looking for evidence that would link the human-rights workers to the Zapatistas...
...The Zapatistas also risk losing popular support throughout Mexico if the government can successfully portray them as exacerbating the nation's financial woes...
...We women are too scared to leave our homes to collect firewood, so we have no fuel for cooking," she told us...
...Carlos Salinas, one of the Zapatistas' principal nemeses, is in exile and his brother Raul is in the clink...
...It was the day all hell broke loose in Chiapas...
...Still, they have enormous popular support, their issues will not go away, and Subcommander Marcos may yet have a card up his sleeve...
...His supporters speculated that Santiago was targeted by the government because he was a personal friend of the controversial Bishop Samuel Ruiz (see sidebar, page 30...
Vol. 59 • May 1995 • No. 5
