Tracy Barnett

"We are not here to conquer the world, but to make it anew."

--Subcommandante Marcos

Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)

EL PRADO PACAYAL, CHIAPAS

The road to the Subcommandante's former hideout is long, narrow and gouged with landslide-like washouts. It takes an hour to travel the 12 mile stretch from the nearest settlement, Patehuitz. But that's only if you're lucky enough to hop a ride on the back of a cattle truck, the preferred mode of mass transit in these parts. Besides the military jeeps, it's about the only vehicle that can navigate these rugged mountain corridors.

It costs 30 pesos--more than two days' wages for those who can actually find employment--to hop one of the cattle trucks and head out to the closest actual town, Ocosingo, to buy food and supplies. For some families, Ocosingo might as well be Omaha; there are people who spend their entire lives without even visiting a full-fledged Mexican town. At sunset, the roads are lined with weary campesinos--men with bowed shoulders, women with babies on their hips--making their way back home.

It is near dusk in the village, and clouds are rolling in. But it's not too late to see the breathtaking 50-story white cliffs in the background--the same ones these people fled to when the Mexican military launched its offensive here in January 1995. The army was trying to contain the elusive Zapatistas, who had slipped through a military cordon around the region in their second strike against the government, taking over several towns.

The government's response was swift and lethal; dozens of villages were bombed and then occupied, resisters were detained and tortured, and an unknown number were killed. Beset with death threats and a government warrant for his arrest, Marcos had gone into deep hiding at the time of an international aid caravan's visit in early autumn. But his legacy remained.

There was the young man who was Marcos' "tocayo," the Spanish word that conveys a special relationship between two people who share the same name. Young Marcos could not leave his village without intense questioning and harassment by the military. Nevertheless, his pride in the name would not allow him to use another.

There was the village leader who called himself simply Daniel del Prado in the way the people of these parts have of identifying with their communities. Daniel met a group of international volunteers recently with talk of justice for his people. But his first concern was for a new church, this despite the fact that the moss-encrusted structure in the heart of the village is the only community building with four walls and a roof. He asked the villagers to carry his wish to Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the Church's untiring advocate for Chiapas' indigenous people.

Then there was Gloria Torres, who, like Marcos, had left an urban, modern Mexico to cast her lot with a people who, as she sees it, "put on the pants for all of Mexico." Torres, 31, is a strikingly beautiful artist from Puebla who has become teacher, protector and spokesperson for the community. Shortly after the military occupation she dropped everything to respond to the villagers' call for help. Gloria is the sole inhabitant of this village's civilian encampment. The peace encampments, most of them structures as rough as those the campesinos inhabit, or more so--have been set up to bear witness--and, ultimately, deter--aggression from the Mexican military against the beleaguered people of these villages.

Gloria sits on the church steps surrounded by the adoring children who follow her everywhere and tells a grim story of this village's trials over the past year. It's a story that echoes through the mountaintops from one isolated village to the next. Food shortages, rampant disease with inadequate medication, scarcity of even primitive agricultural tools, meager crops wrested from a depleted soil that bears less each year. Children who beg for notebooks and pencils, even though there's no one to teach them what they most need to learn. Mothers with 13 children, who look like old women at the age of 40--if they live that long. Fathers who walk two hours each morning to their pitiful milpas, the nearly vertical plots from which the farmers try to eke out enough corn and beans to feed their families.

The poverty is always as ubiquitous as the mud that clings to walls and clothes and feet. This year was worse, however.

Villagers here will never forget the widespread massacres of the past two decades just across the border in Guatemala, where 100,000 mostly indigenous campesinos were killed or disappeared in a bloody war. Fearing for their lives, some 10,000 indigenas from El Prado, Altamirano, Patehuitz, La Realidad, Guadalupe Tepeyac and scores of other villages--elders, children and pregnant mothers included--fled to the jungles in the surrounding mountains. Gloria received the call from CONPAZ, a human rights group in the capital which was looking for volunteers to establish a presence in the villages so the campesinos could return without fear of massacre. She was among the five women who traveled to the abandoned village, which was inhabited only by the dogs and the chickens that roamed the quiet paths that connect one home to another and to the dirt road that passes on to La Sultana.

Perhaps it was because of its role in harboring Marcos that this town was particularly hard hit. In the weeks they had occupied the village, soldiers entered the poor stick-and-mud structures and destroyed the few belongings that the villagers had managed to accumulate. Carefully embroidered indigenous clothing was shredded; cookware smashed; seed corn scattered over the ground and doused with oil. The primitive planting tools and machetes that the farmers use were stolen or broken. Even the children's toys were smashed; dolls had their heads and limbs torn off. A documentarian who came in and interviewed villagers in the days after they returned home told the story of a young boy who was an extraordinary artist. His family was so proud of his sketches they papered the walls of the rough cabin with his work. The soldiers had ripped them off the walls and used them as toilet paper.

"We were aghast at the intensity of anger that the soldiers must have felt, to do such things," Gloria says. Most of the El Prado residents were persuaded to return to their homes within about a month, and the painful process of reconstructing lives and homes began.

Gloria recalled one day when a panicked young mother came knocking at the door of the encampment shelter where she stayed. Someone had dug a hole in her kitchen, and she was afraid it might contain explosives of some kind. Gloria went to investigate. She began pulling out strips of cloth torn from the family's clothing until she hit metal. The clatter of tin and glass filled the room. The soldiers had apparently rigged up a series of fake landmines, and the one in the young woman's kitchen was the first they found.

The hardest consequence of the occupation was that in the six weeks the villagers spent in hiding, planting time came and went. The men came from the mountains and planted their maize with what tools they could find or construct and the little seed corn they could glean from the fields. But the delay took a severe toll on the crop, which is bearing a pathetic return this year, spelling disaster in the upcoming dry season if there is not more international or national aid.

While the villagers were in hiding, two women gave birth and the babies died, apparently from exposure. Following the traumatic incident, the single girls of the village made a pact with each other.

"See those young women?" asked Gloria, pointing to a cluster of colorfully dressed, silky-haired beauties who were eyeing us from across the street and smiling shyly. "They've all made a vow not to marry, because they are afraid. They don't want to have babies because they don't want to see their children cry. This is the consequence of the stupidity of our president."

Today El Prado sits tranquilly in the shadow of the towering white cliffs. It's Saturday, and the women have gone to the river to wash their families' clothing. Hair carefully combed and pulled back with beaded barrettes, they still appear to be wearing their Sunday best: colorfully beribboned dresses, painstakingly hand-sewn and scrubbed on the rocks at the edge of the clear stream. As clean as the water appears, they must spend hours each day carrying it back to their homes and boiling it to protect their families from the diseases it carries: blindness, death and untold suffering has resulted from failure to do so.

Unlike the neighboring village of Patehuitz, there are no fluttering white flags posted over homes and shelters, which to some signify PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has ruled Mexico in a caricature of democracy for the past 60 years) and to others merely PAZ. El Prado has refused the meager aid delivered in these parts by soldiers.

"The army never dreamed these people wouldn't be overjoyed to receive the food they brought," said Gloria. "They couldn't have imagined that the people would say, 'No, thank you.' But it's not assistance they want as much as change."

Gloria starts her lessons at 7 each morning at the insistence of her eager students. The sun rose on Saturday to the knocks and shouts of the youngsters outside her encampment door. The children ring the entire structure and rap on the rickety windows, a baby riding in one young girl's gingham pouch wailing persistently.

"Gloria! Es el tiempo para las clases!" (It's time for classes!) cries one particularly vocal boy.

"No hay clases hoy!"(There are no classes today!) she called back sleepily, but the racket didn't stop until she went out and shushed them away.

Later when she rose and stepped outside to fix breakfast, she glanced at the mud-encrusted floor of the school and smiled. One dedicated student had carefully drawn a perfect "9" in the mud.

On the wall of the encampment, Gloria has hung a poster bearing the phrase, attributed to Los Niños de Chiapas: "Merecemos al menos una alegría por día" ("We deserve at least one joy each day"). Her passion for these people is clear as the tears that well in her eyes as she speaks in a torrent of Spanish too rapid and eloquent for this reporter to fully interpret. But one thing is clear: She stands by the villagers for years, if necessary.

"I dedicate myself to these people until they receive true liberty," she said. "Until he can be a doctor if he wants to be," she gestures at a shy boy who watches us from a distance. "Until she can be an engineer," she points to a smiling girl.

"I don't want a war; nobody here wants war. But the people around here can't keep living like this. They are not going to continue this way."

Gloria is alone now among the non-indigenous Mexican nationals that once manned the encampment at El Prado, but her frustration with government policy is clearly shared by thousands. Hundreds of Mexicans and internationals have kept up a constant steady presence in the hardest-hit villages throughout the Chiapas highlands, and some credit that presence with the very survival of the villagers--and the Zapatista movement with them.

"Everything our government does is suspect," said Gustavo Escutia, a 30-year-old student from Mexico City who traveled to Chiapas with Para Todos Todo (All for Everyone), the Mexican human rights group that helped deliver an international shipment of humanitarian aid to the group along with Pastors for Peace, a Minneapolis-based group. "They are not acting in the interest of the people of Mexico, but in the interest of the White House and of the 24 rich people in our country. Their sympathies lie with the investors of other countries."

Escutia, like most other Mexicans, assumed the Zapatista movement would be crushed immediately. But disillusionment with the Mexican government has risen to the point that middle-class and even owning class people are rising up and forming organized resistance movements that have pressured the government to relax its grip on the mountain people. Perhaps the most notable example is El Barzon, the group of middle-class debtors who were lured into buying homes, cars, and daily necessities on credit, only to have the interest rates shoot up to 150 percent. The group launched a debtor's strike in recent months, refusing to pay back the debts on the grounds that they are usurious and unfair, further exacerbating the economic crisis that is now spiraling out of control.

Thus El Barzon and other groups of professional, formerly well-heeled urban Mexicans have formed an unlikely alliance with the penniless, uneducated indigenous people of the mountains in an unprecedented and extremely powerful movement that perhaps has more potential to create revolutionary social change than any movement in recent history. One indication of the strength of this movement came shortly after the government offensive in January, when angry protesters converged on the Capitol, a million strong. Another occurred on Sept. 4, when some 200 representatives from 18 Mexican states--including high-level politicians, lawyers, doctors, and national celebrities--boarded a caravan of buses and trucks headed for an undisclosed site in the mountains to meet with the Zapatistas.

The destination was kept secret for security reasons, and the mood was festive despite the hundreds of military vehicles that lined the route and the inevitable downpour that turned the road to quicksand. The dignitaries spent the night in vehicles mired in mud, never losing a sense of humor and purpose. Many stayed on for the next day's peace talks in the neighboring town of San Andreas, helping form the Cinturon de Paz--a human "ribbon of peace" surrounding the building where representatives of the EZLN sat down with Mexican government officials to hammer out a peace accord.

The clandestine meeting in the mountains was called to present members of the EZLN with the results of an international referendum the Zapatistas sponsored over the summer. The referendum, or "Consulta," posed six questions, including whether the EZLN should be a player in national political reform. An unprecedented 1.2 million Mexicans--and 80,000 internationals from more than 40 different countries--cast their ballots in the first poll ever conducted by an armed revolutionary group.

The answers overwhelmingly supported the EZLN position on key issues, such as inclusion of the Zapatistas in national policy decisions and the basic right of all Mexicans to education, housing, health care services, food and land. Members of the caravan attributed the movement's success to an intense organizing campaign by volunteers all over the world who, with few resources and little time--less than three months for the entire campaign--more than tripled the response rate the government was able to muster in its last referendum.

"It is transcendental what you have achieved," Chiapas governor-in-transition Amado Avendaño told some 800 mountain people who had gathered to meet the delegation. The governorship of Avendaño, the eloquent Zapatista supporter and journalist who was nearly killed in an accident he attributes to an attempted government-sponsored assassination, is thus far the movement's most tangible victory. The fraudulently elected PRI governor stepped down early last year after Zapatistas demanded his resignation.

"You, the smallest, the most humble of the earth have lit a spark from the Lacandon Jungle that burns around the world," Avendaño told the group. "In Italy, Spain, France, the United States, there are more Zapatistas than there are in Chiapas. They understand the language of misery. It is spoken all over the Earth."

Opponents of U.S. policy in Mexico point to the increasing marginalization of farmers like those in Chiapas, who can no longer sell their corn at a profit. Many are being forced off their land by Mexican privatization policies encouraged by NAFTA. They say it means more poverty, resulting in more immigration and more border conflict in the states. And now that Mexico's economy is inextricably married to our own--by virtue of NAFTA and the Clinton administration's recent $40 billion bailout of the peso--it is no longer possible to view the situation as someone else's problem.

Frank Bardacke of Watsonville, Calif., who has written extensively about global trade issues, says the Zapatistas are striking a significant blow against the inexorable globalization of trade, symbolized recently by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

It was no coincidence that the Zapatistas launched their uprising on Jan. 1, 1994, the day NAFTA took effect. Subcommander Marcos, said the treaty "sounded the death knell" for the indigenous people of Mexico.

"Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, there's been this idea out there that there's no way to fight the domination of American and other kinds of transnational capital in the world," Bardacke said in a recent interview. "As the `Sub' said, 'Even the poorest in the world have the dignity and the self-respect to fight.' That is an example to all of us: That even though you might be small and outnumbered, you can still be a force in your country--and in the world."

GABINO VAZQUEZ

Las Margaritas Township

"We are so poor here, you cannot imagine," says the one they call El Lindo for his pretty face and long sleek hair. El Lindo, 16, sits for hours with his young friend Eberto in front of the tiny store that sells orange Fanta, chile peanuts, sweet bread and the grain alcohol they use to numb the pain. "You can leave this place and get on a plane and go back to America, and do whatever you want to do there. But we have to stay here forever."

Eberto speaks of his dreams for his newborn son, for whom he is seeking a name--a new name, one that has never been used in the state of Chiapas. But his eyes are blurred and his speech slurred, and he soon loses focus altogether.

Sitting quietly on the edge of the porch, listening to the entire exchange, is another young man who I later am told is a friend of the soldiers who pass by every day. Surveillance is omnipresent, and it is not unusual for young men like Eberto and El Lindo to be seized by the government and imprisoned--sometimes never to return.

Down the road from Gabino Vazquez lies the settlement of Guadalupe Tepeyac, where long ago in the hills overlooking this village, as legend has it, a poor Indian named Juan Diego sighted the apocryphal Virgin of Guadalupe.

Since that time, local leaders of the Catholic Church in that region have accepted the indigenous people as subjects. Some have embraced the philosophy of liberation theology, backing and spurring social change movements. Bishop Samuel Ruiz, a nominee for the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize, is credited with giving this generation of indigenas the courage and conviction to launch the current rebellion, and the Vatican has endeavored of late to undermine his presence there.

Today the village of Guadalupe Tepeyac is little more than a ghost town--and a surreal symbol of what is wrong with the PRI's efforts to stabilize the current conflict. In the months after the uprising, the Salinas government constructed a modern hospital in the village, complete with the latest technology and highly trained staff. It was the first hospital the government had placed in the region. Salinas held a press conference in the village to expound on the new social program he had launched to help the impoverished state regain a measure of dignity. The day after the press conference, according to a communique from Subcommandante Marcos, the equipment was quietly removed from the hospital and hauled away in government trucks.

Two recent visits to the town revealed a modern, spacious facility nearly devoid of patients. The hospital is still staffed with a skeleton crew, and has the basic equipment needed to provide good medical care. But the people in these parts are afraid to go there for treatment, saying that they are questioned in detail about their political activities and those of their friends and family members when they go there. Many prefer to take the day's journey to the grass-thatched hospital in Altamirano, where government troops frequently encircle the hospital and threaten the staff, but where the villagers are provided with relatively high-quality care free of political questioning.

As for the town, the streets--if the mud paths could be called that--are nearly vacant. People fear a return to this village because of the constant government and military presence there, and many are still living in the hills. Some say the Virgin has been making appearances of late, giving them hope for impending change.

One Mexico City psychiatrist who traveled with the caravan, Aurora Domenech, expressed her hope and her despair as a reason for supporting the Zapatistas. In her work she sees desperate poverty daily, but feels helpless to effect a change in her clients' lives.

"It feels like putting on a bandage; I feel like a spy, like a hypocrite," she said sadly. "I feel impotent; I can do nothing. You are a witness, but what more can you do?"

LA REALIDAD

Las Margaritas Township, Chiapas

Hundreds of villagers from this Zapatista stronghold and the surrounding villages gathered one day in late August to thank international travelers from the Pastors for Peace and Para Todos Todo caravans. "La Realidad" means "reality," and indeed it was a harsh one that confronted the human rights activists that had traveled through the night in the back of a cattle truck to be there.

The threat of destruction still hangs over La Realidad like the mists of these jungle-clad mountains. Heavy shelling and bombing accompanied a military offensive in January, and as in El Prado and dozens of other villages, the entire community fled to the surrounding rainforest. Three men in their early 20s were seized by authorities, tortured and killed, according to a village elder who calls himself Jacobo.

One who addressed the delegation was an eloquent young woman, a musician from a neighboring village. Her bare feet were covered with the region's omnipresent red mud but she held her head high as she welcomed the strangers to her community, speaking through the red bandanna she wore as a mask.

She identified herself only as Tzotzil, one of the Mayan groups inhabiting the region. She spoke in a slow, careful Spanish--a second language for those villagers who can speak it at all. The Zapatistas have been credited with teaching the language to thousands in an attempt to unite the isolated, multilingual region.

"One would think that with all the millions of pesos the government has spent in these lands, they would have spent some on food for the poor, on something for the children," she said. "But we don't see anything like that--only the soldiers who invade us every day."

"We're very tired of the sickness, the malnutrition, the death all around us," she went on. "We have much land, but it is full of rocks and grows poorer every year. The insects are constantly biting us, but we can't go where we need to. We work through our illness and our pain; how can we continue?

"We are ready to die if we need to. We are thinking of the future of our children, and we are going to continue with this struggle. We hope you will continue with us."

Sociologist Luis Serron of Minneapolis, a member of the caravan, addressed the group in a voice choked with emotion: "I feel so much feeling as I look around me here," he said to the group of colorfully dressed men, women and children surrounding the delegation, many of whom had walked for miles to be there. Many of the small, silent people had covered their faces with red bandannas--even some of the children.

"For the past week I have been seeing the poverty in this region; now I am seeing the beauty--the beauty that cannot be crushed in a people, no matter how poor."

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Updated: 12/9/2000