The Uncomfortable Dead (24 page)

GGM:
Could it not be the other way around—that a command of words was what made possible a new phase of struggle?

SM:
It’s as if it all goes through a blender. You don’t know what you tossed in first, and what you end up with is a
cocktail.

GGM:
Can we ask about your family?

SM:
It was middle class. My father, the head of the family, taught in a rural school in the time of Cárdenas when, as he used to say, teachers had their ears cut off for being Communists. My mother also taught in a school in the countryside, then moved and entered the middle class: it was a family without financial difficulties. All of this was in the provinces, where the society pages of the local newspaper are the cultural horizon. The outside world was Mexico City and its bookshops—the great attraction of coming here. Occasionally there would be provincial book fairs, where we could get ahold of something interesting. My parents introduced us to García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Monsiváis, Vargas Llosa (regardless of his ideas), to mention only a few. They set us to reading them. A
Hundred Years of Solitude
to explain what the provinces were like at the time. The
Death of Artemio Cruz
to show what had happened to the Mexican Revolution.
Días de guardar
to describe what was happening in the middle classes. As for
La ciudad y los perros,
it was in a way a portrait of us, but in the nude. All these things were there. We went out into the world in the same way that we went out into literature. I think this marked us. We didn’t look out at the world through a news-wire but through a novel, an essay, or a poem. That made us very different. That was the prism through which my parents wanted me to view the world, as others might choose the prism of the media, or a dark prism to stop you seeing what’s happening.

GGM:
Where does Don
Quixote
come in all that reading?

SM:
I was given a book when I turned twelve, a beautiful cloth edition. It was Don
Quixote.
I had read it before, but in those children’s editions. It was an expensive book, a special present which must still be out there somewhere. Next came Shakespeare. But the Latin American boom came first, then Cervantes, then García Lorca, and then came a phase of poetry. So in a way you [looking at GGM] are an accessory to all this.

GGM:
Did the existentialists and Sartre come into this?

SM:
No. We arrived late at all that. Strictly speaking we were already, as the orthodox would say, very corrupted by the time we got to existential literature and, before that, to revolutionary literature. So that when we got into Marx and Engels we were thoroughly spoiled by literature; its irony and humor.

GGM:
Didn’t you read any political theory?

SM:
Not to begin with. We went straight from the alphabet to literature, and from there to theoretical and political texts, until we got to high school.

GGM:
Did your classmates believe that you were or might be a Communist?

SM:
No, I don’t think so. Perhaps the most they called me was a little radish: red outside and white inside.

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

T
hey’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 Cristóbal, 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.