UNMASKING MILITARISM
U.S.- Supported Low-Intensity War in Chiapas
The Zapatista hamlet of Amador Hernandez in the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas is as far from global markets, media centers and metropolises as physically possible. Yet the January 1994 Zapatista rebellion, beginning in tiny hamlets such as this, mere dots in a dot.com world, has managed to challenge the faraway power centers of government and finance. The continued survival of Amador Hernandez is a pivotal test of whether the globalization of capital is prompting the globalization of conscience.
Last February, I traveled to Amador Hernandez, a village of five hundred indigenous Mayans, and to three other autonomous highlands villages -- Pohló, X'oyep, and Acteal, where 45 Mayans were executed by paramilitaries in December 1997. I was accompanied by Guillermo Mayer, a Mexican-born consultant on my legislative staff, and several human rights observers.
Like so many North American adventurers before me, I brought the baggage of a personal agenda to Mexico. I am sympathetic towards indigenous people trying to preserve their cultures against conquest by either militarism or modernization. I had been troubled by Mexico's expulsion in January of 43 foreigners, including several Californians, for their humanitarian assistance to villages in the Zapatista zones.
More than anything, I went to Chiapas to explore whether resistance is possible to the New World Order first vocalized by George Bush and implemented by Bill Clinton's multiple trade agreements. One of few centers of resistance to this North American corporate dominance was the 1994 Zapatista uprising with its declaration that "NAFTA is death." Cheap NAFTA corn, for example, would be flooding into regions like Chiapas, displacing subsistence farming, and destroying cultural traditions in which corn has embodied spiritual values. The main Western interest in indigenous culture is in obtaining and patenting seeds that may have commercial value. Now that firms like Monsanto and Novartis have come to Chiapas in order to sell genetically-modified and corporate-controlled seed -- promoted by the Monsanto slogan "Food, Health, Hope" -- it seems inevitable that Mayan campesinos will be forced off their traditional ejidos in jungle canyons to sweatshops in the cement canyons of El Norte.
The Mexican government is sensitive to Yankee interference, so I knew that if I explicitly asked to meet the Zapatistas, I might be turned down. I also knew that Mexican officials routinely denied the existence of the Chiapas conflict, and refused to use the term "war" at all. When I visited the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles, I looked over the glossy brochures depicting Chiapas as a charming place of archeological interest, and mentioned to the consulate officials my longtime desire to visit the temples at Palenque. After assuring me that tourists are safer in Chiapas than any part of Mexico "because of the army presence," the Mexican official indirectly noted that I could visit Palenque by taking roads that happened to pass through Zapatista communities. I was given a "distinguished visitor's visa" which would prove useful at army checkpoints in the jungle.
And now I was staring at Mayan children running barefoot in multicolored dress as our small plane bounced along a grassy strip in the middle of the hamlet of Amador Hernandez. Behind them loomed a mural of Emiliano Zapata, the agrarian reformer and revolutionary ambushed by the victors of the Mexican Revolution -- who then co-opted his image, and whose political heirs, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (the PRI), were now being confronted by his ghost throughout the jungle. Here were men and women wearing the mask of the Zapatista front, an ordinary woolen ski mask of varied colors, which not only symbolizes their modern oblivion but also serves to mask their identity from the state.
We dropped our backpacks in an open-air village center, and minutes later I was sitting on a log interviewing two masked men about their hidden history. Amador Hernandez is one of 33 autonomous "communities in resistance" that rose in arms against the Mexican authorities on January 1, 1994, and which now exist as a liberated (or seditious, depending on viewpoint) zone outside the structure of the Mexican state. The villagers live under siege, in total isolation, and journalists and international observers therefore are a necessary lifeline. The population consists of indigenous Tojolabal-speaking Mayans, who had been driven from nearby lands a generation ago. For survival, they plant subsistence crops. Occasionally government representatives try to "develop" them out of the jungle which is thought to contain vast untapped oil reserves.
"We started organizing resistance to the displacement on our own", one man
recounted to me, "and then one day in 1982 or 83, I can't remember when, about a dozen compañeros came walking through the jungle and started talking with us. They asked us if we were ready to stop drinking and start organizing, because the government was fucking us up with alcohol. We saw how the brothers were fighting in El Salvador and Nicaragua, so we said yes, why not?"
Those 1982 visitors to the jungle clearing were the original Zapatistas -- one of them would later become known as Marcos, the Subcomandante's earliest appearance among the indigenous.
The Zapatistas emerged from disillusionment with a Mexican state in 1968 that permitted the slaughter of student activists in Mexico City and likewise smothered all dissent. They chose to move to the poorest, most forgotten areas of southern Mexico, not unlike those activists I have known who organized in Mississippi in 1960. In those days, any Mayan walking in the towns of Chiapas had to step off the sidewalks to let a white Mexican pass, and the countryside was dominated by armed ranchers and vigilante justice. The Zapatistas learned the native languages, made the Lacandon their home, trained with weapons in invisible caverns, and committed to eventual confrontation with the state, not unlike other guerrillas in Central or South America of the time.
But they were distinguished by their "post-modern" ironic defiance of the corporate technocratic state: they used the Internet to communicate with international supporters, and wryly compared themselves to Speedy Gonzales escaping the Mexican army. They are revolutionaries, but reject all notions of taking power themselves, instead trying to galvanize "civil society" to hold the politicians accountable. They are intent on a re-vindication of the history of the indigenous and their vision has evolved from a traditional class-based Marxism to a deep identification with the Mayan and the indigenous spirit around the world.
The declarations of Marcos and the Zapatistas are translated in several places, including the historical reader Rebellion in Chiapas (1999) by Harvard historian John Womack. One that reflects the Indian tone and worldview is the Fourth Declaration of January 1996, which reads in part:
Our blood and our word lit a small fire in the mountain, and we walked it along the path that goes to the house of might and money (their march to Mexico City). Brothers and sisters of other races and languages, of another color, but of the same heart, protected our light and drank in it their own fires ...
The arrogant want to put out a rebellion that their ignorance locates in the dawn of 1994. But the rebellion that today has a dark face and a true language was not born today. It spoke in other languages and in other lands (The declaration goes on to list 70 indigenous dialects) ...
Many worlds walk in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds make us ... In the world of the mighty one only the great and their servants fit. In the world we want we all fit. The world we want is one where many worlds fit ...
The flower of the word does not die, although our steps walk in silence. In silence the word is sown. So that it may flower shouting, it goes quiet. The word becomes a soldier in order not to die in oblivion. To live the word dies, sown forever in the womb of the world. Only those who surrender their history will return to oblivion."
I was reading about the "word in the womb of the world", a Marcos phrase, perched on my log, when the nearby trail into the jungle suddenly reminded me of Che Guevara. I had seen the path Che followed into the Bolivian jungle in a documentary filmed by the late Robert Kramer. He traveled to Bolivia where he managed to document the evolution of Che's Bolivian diaries from his jungle camp to the place of his capture and assassination. The Guevara film is haunting. The emptiness of the jungle rugged trail, as filmed by hand-held camera, visually suggested the isolation of Che's group from the indigenous peasants and Bolivia's civil society. The same trail into the forest is reproduced in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, at the memorial to Che and his fellow comrades from the Bolivian campaign.
I was thinking about these Zapatistas on the trail of Che when one of my masked guides motioned that it was time to go. We were to follow the trail before me into the jungle and to a military encampment where, every day for the past six months, the people of Amador Hernandez had staged nonviolent demonstrations against the presence of the Mexican army.
The ostensible purpose of the Army base is road building to connect remote jungle communities like Amador Hernandez to the outside world. On one level, the villagers want the road because it takes eight hours to carry someone to the nearest hospital. But it was only after the Zapatista uprising that the Army came to the jungle, and most believe that it was not really for community development. The demonstrators were protesting the project because of what they take to be its real purpose: to allow the Mexican military to encircle Zapatista-controlled territory. The troops could conceivably storm the village of Amador Hernandez whenever they wanted and unmask these peon troublemakers -- an action which might, in the process, also unmask the repressive nature of the state.
We hiked over a streambed and through a series of pacific meadows until we came to a small encampment of perhaps 150 men, women, and children in the bright garb of the Tojolabal people. All but the smallest children were masked. A large U.S.-made military helicopter appeared over the hill behind us, circling around our march and descending into the trees just ahead where, I realized, the Mexican army was waiting for us.
As we marched into the canopied shade of the jungle, I heard the beginning of familiar chants ahead. "El pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido/ The people, united, will never be defeated". The voices were intermingled with strains of familiar music, which I couldn't place at first. Ahead of me there were large rolls of barbed wire along the trail, and camouflaged combat soldiers on the other side. The music was coming from enormous loudspeakers being held aloft by the Mexican soldiers and as I approached I realized that it was La Traviata -- a European opera in the Mayan jungle. A concert behind the concertina wire! Later I was told that the music was meant to drown out the chanting and remind the Mexican soldiers of the civilized (and European) values they were defending against these uncultured rabble. After a few minutes, La Traviata was exchanged for a blaring martial anthem that I couldn't place. The Zapatistas moved a few yards along the concertina wire, forcing the Mexican troops to gather up their m
ical equipment, giving the demonstrators a few minutes to speak to the Mexican soldiers guarding the fence: "We are your brothers and sisters, you don't want to fight us, you don't want to kill our women and children, you must stop fighting for Zedillo, stop destroying our forest."
The Mexican soldiers at the line were few in number, perhaps 20, with as many as 400 in the dimly visible encampment behind us. The most prominent, wearing both civilian and military garb, were videotaping the masked faces of each individual in the crowd.
There is little or no American media in Chiapas, and none can reach the highlands without government approval. But make no mistake -- the United States is there. The military presence represents a new post-Vietnam strategy to keep American antiwar instincts dormant by constructing Chiapas as a complex, distant, age-old conflict among Mexicans. But according to Harvard's John Womack, the U.S. Defense Department has encouraged "'low intensity' warfare in Mexico". (p. 328) Over one hundred Huey helicopters, surveillance planes and electronic night vision systems have been sold or donated by the United States to Mexico (El Financiero, Aug 3-9, 1998) and thousands of Mexican soldiers have been trained at U.S. military bases (Proceso, May 3, 1998). The United States rationalizes this training as part of the global counter-narcotics drive.
The political dimension of low-intensity warfare consists of hushing up the conflict in every way. Even though there are over 40,000 Mexican troops in Chiapas, it is never described as a "war" in officialspeak. Potentially critical U.S. constituencies are lulled to sleep or neutralized. The new Latino politicians, one American group that could conceivably make a major difference, have been relatively quiet. They prefer not to criticize the Mexican government publicly, perhaps fearing that their comments might fuel American xenophobia. Organized labor, which is angered at potential job loss from NAFTA and has turned to organizing Mexican immigrants in the States, so far ignores the connection between repression in Chiapas and the instability that drives thousands of Mexicans north to the border.
That leaves the opposition to U.S.-Mexico policy to circles of conscious intellectuals, clerics, artists and students, who have managed to see through the sophisticated public relations of American-sponsored counter-insurgency. Despite these limits, the Zapatista message has broken through to a conscience constituency around the world largely over the Internet.
The Chiapas Indians and their Zapatista allies have two problems. One is the Mexican army. The other, perhaps more formidable, is the United States' designs to make the indigenous disappear into the cultural oblivion where they have been placed for five centuries. A key campaign consultant to Francisco Labastida, the PRI's presidential candidate in 2000, is James Carville, President Clinton's de facto minister of spin. The PRI's pollster was Stanley Greenberg, also the President's long-time polling confidant. Labastida, as secretary of state, was the architect of the Mexican military strategy in Chiapas. The U.S. backing for the PRI candidate-from military advisors to peso bailouts to political consultants-has been in its own way, as masked as the Zapatistas.
The five-hundred-year-old Cathedral of San Bartolomé de las Casas looms heavily over the charming city of San Cristobal, named after Christopher Columbus. A large, shabby, stone colonial structure with a dark, candle-lit interior, the cathedral still remains open to worshippers. From dawn to dusk come Indian vendors selling their handmade clothing and crafts, including miniature Zapatista dolls, to European and North American tourists. Graffitti on the cathedral walls proclaim support for the armed struggle of the Zapatistas.
Bartolomé, as the locals call him even now, was a Dominican bishop who first sailed to the Americas with Columbus and was sent to Chiapas in the 1540s. At some point he became morally repelled by the torture and exploitation of the indigenous, and recorded it in vivid detail in his diaries. He argued in clerical and legal forums that the indigenous people were human beings with souls (although, for whatever reason, he did not always extend the same recognition to African slaves). For his troubles, Bartolomé faced scorn, harassment, and death threats as the designated "Protector of the Indians" until he died in 1566 at the age of 92.
Five centuries later, the Bishop was invoked in testimony at the 1974 Congreso Indigena de Chiapas, the convention that initiated the most recent cycle of the 500-year Indian revolt. A statement from the minutes of that 1974 meeting tells the story from the native viewpoint:
Columbus came with his compañeros to know the people here and to bother them. With them came Brother Bartolomé de las Casas (who) saw that it was very bad what his other compañeros were doing ... Right here in San Cristobal Brother Bartolomé de las Casas was defending the Indian. I believe we all know the church that's to one side of the Church of Santo Domingo, up from the union hall ... Well, comrades, now Brother Bartolomé de las Casas is no longer alive. It's only in his name that we're holding this congreso. So where is the liberty Brother Bartolomé left? We've been suffering injustice for 500 years, and we're still in the same situation."
Today there is a modern Brother Bartolomé in the person of Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia - known to some as "the Indians' Prophet." Hardly a born revolutionary, Samuel Ruiz received a conventional Catholic education at the College Pio Latinoamerico in Rome before coming to Chiapas in 1960. But travelling by foot or mule through the impoverished Indian highlands changed him, as it would change the Zapatistas a decade later. In 1968 Ruiz participated in the historic conference in Medellín, Colombia, when Latin America bishops embraced liberation theology with its "special preference for the poor." The Medellín manifesto recalled that Jesus was sent to "liberate the poor from slavery, hunger, misery, oppression and ignorance" and mandated development of "grassroots organizations for the redress and consolidation of their rights and the search for true justice."
With that in mind, Ruiz began to inspire, train and empower a mass movement of the indigenous across Chiapas. By the time of the Zapatista uprising, Ruiz had became a principal sponsor and mediator of sporadic peace talks, the only leader the Indians would trust. Like the murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador, Ruiz has been subject to cautionary pressures from the Catholic hierarchy, periodic death threats, and constant scapegoating by conservative landowners who blame him for stirring up their Indian servants and laborers. At the time of our visit, the Bishop, age 75, was entering retirement, much to the relief of those in power. His more sophisticated intellectual opponents, unable to crucify him, instead hint that the Bishop's attitudes indirectly justify violence, claim that he polarizes communities in ways that can lead to tragedies like the Acteal massacre of December 22, 1997, the paramilitary killings of 45 Indians at a highlands village which caused international embarrassment for the Me
can government.
Attempting to undermine a robed Samuel Ruiz is more difficult that raising doubts about a masked Zapatista. The most sophisticated sowing of doubts to date has been a lengthy article in The New York Review of Books (December 16, 1999) by the Mexican intellectual Enrique Krauze. The original piece appeared in the Spanish-language publication Letras Libres, with a cover drawing of a benign and lofty Bishop standing over the bodies of Mayan peasants presumably sacrificed as a result of his liberation theology.
Krauze acknowledges that "Don Samuel" is the "true incarnation of Isaiah or Amos" one whose struggle for justice has been "impressive and moving." But the Bishop's teachings serve, according to Krauze, to "intensify the exclusiveness" of the Indians and "feed the temptation toward martyrdom as a means of triumph over injustice."
Nowhere does Krauze mention that all 45 victims of the Acteal massacre were praying at the time of their deaths. Or that 43 were shot in the back, while two were bludgeoned in the head. Twenty were women -- including four who were pregnant -- and 18 were children. The shootings went on for nine hours, and though Mexican troops were stationed only a few minutes away, they did not enter the site until the bloodletting was finished. The Acteal massacre was carried out through a counter-insurgency technique as old as the Conquest itself -- the arming of paramilitary units composed of Indians willing to kill other Indians for advantage.
I had met Bishop Ruiz in Mexico City before travelling in Chiapas, and he suggested that I visit Acteal and see for myself. So after returning to San Cristobal from the trip to Amador Hernandez in the eastern highlands, I found myself driving north of San Cristobal in the heavy rain through military checkpoints up winding roads until we reached a clearing at the foot of the village. We parked next to a structure like a tree trunk carved from wood, which, I noticed as we peered through the fog, depicted the agonized faces of Acteal's dead.
Accompanied by Ofelia Medina, the famous Mexican actress who supports the Zapatista communities with food and medicine, I climbed down the rain-spilling steps and entered the village. Before me was an empty open community center that was used for religious services. A child stood in a doorway, his nose running, and I remembered someone telling me that newborn babies in Acteal are growing smaller due to the lack of medicine and malnutrition. Everyone was shuttered in their shanties because of the pouring rain. Unlike the more hopeful atmosphere of Amador Hernandez, the village of Acteal was suffused with grief.
We passed a red brick building, the only one of its kind, and entered a one-room structure nearby -- Acteal's "city hall." Inside sat a circle of survivors of the massacre gathered to tell us their story. The room had a dirt floor in which numerous Pepsi bottle caps were pressed. The light came through an open door. I noticed a photograph of Archbishop Romero, a calendar, maps of the mountains, and a large poster of a black and yellow bee pollinating a flower.
The community was known as Acteal of the Bees (Las Abejas) to distinguish it from an adjacent Acteal controlled by the Zapatistas. The difference between the neighboring hamlets is that "Las Abejas," while supporting the goals of the Zapatistas, are a devout religious group that prays constantly and practices strict nonviolence - a fact that couldn't have escaped the paramilitaries responsible for the massacre on December 22, 1997.
Many of the communities near Acteal de Las Abejas - Pohló and Juan Diego de X'oyep were two we visited - are filled with refugees from the time of the massacre, still unable to move back to lands taken by landlords and paramilitaries. Because they are autonomous communities (outside the Mexican state) they receive little if any humanitarian support. At least one refugee dies per week from lack of food.
Amidst all this melancholy and devastation, I asked them about their religious beliefs and, in particular, how they could remain nonviolent. They answered readily, in both Tzotzil and Spanish, looking away from me most of the time they spoke. A dark-skinned man in a blue blanket said "the bees" began organizing seven years ago.
"We knew the government didn't recognize us, and since the authorities won't protect us we put ourselves in the hands of God. We call ourselves 'the bees' because bees are unified, they diversify their labor but they all work together. We knew the government was giving weapons to the paramilitaries. Christmas was near, so many of us were praying all the time, hoping our Lord would help them see the light. For two days we fasted, but we could not finish because they came to kill us. We were completely surprised. Some stayed in prayer, and others tried to run into our canyons. They hunted us all day long while we prayed."
It finally stopped raining, and some of the villagers led us over to the brick building I had noticed before. Inside was a chilly rectangular chamber decorated with some flowers and photographs of Indian faces. Below our feet, I realized, underneath a cement landing, the bodies of the 45 dead had been laid to rest. We knelt in silence for a prayer while Ofelia Medina spread newly-gathered flowers in a ceremonial arrangement on the floor. Not everyone's photo was on the wall, they said, because some of the victims never had a photograph taken in their lives. There was a stoicism about these people, based on centuries of struggle, that would sustain them. But would there be a global conscience large enough to add Acteal to its list of wrongs? And how many previous Acteals were there that we knew nothing about?
An unanswered question is how far up the ladder of power the official complicity in Acteal extended. Human rights observers had documented the links between paramilitaries, the army, and Chiapas landowners and government officials. But what of the U.S. role? Our military advisors, after all, blinked at death squads in El Salvador, our CIA hired thugs in Guatemala. President Clinton had even apologized to the new Guatemalan government for our part in that dirty war. How long would it take to establish the murky truth in Chiapas where the low-intensity conflict is intellectually obscure?
President Clinton wrote me about these concerns on March 25, 1994, just after the Zapatista uprising. The relevant section reads as follows:
I assure you that my Administration is working hard to protect human rights in Mexico and other countries. In meetings with President Salinas and Foreign Minister Camacho, Ambassador Jones stressed the importance of Army restraint and respect for human rights in dealing with the recent skirmishes. As I continue to monitor the situation in Mexico, I will keep your ideas in mind.
Sincerely,
Bill Clinton
But today Chiapas has become more than a "skirmish." Even if the White House counsels restraint, even if a massacre like Acteal was the handiwork of isolated forces, it is clear by now that the U.S. government is implicated in a simmering crisis which could explode into more Acteals at any moment.
While I was in Chiapas, President Zedillo was in Davos, Switzerland, speaking at a WTO conference on the aftermath of Seattle. His speech was a classic example of the new corporate globalizer's vision. The low-wages of workers in developing countries -- and how long developing countries have been developing! -- represent a "step toward better opportunities" as well as an escape from "extreme rural poverty or a marginal occupation." The environmental price is acceptable, he added, since more trade equals more growth, without which the funding to clean the damaged environment will be unavailable. We must diminish the environment, in other words, to generate the capital necessary to restore it.
Zedillo branded all opponents of the WTO as "globalphobics", a dismissive label serving two purposes; first, to brand the critics of globalization as anti-modern and therefore irrelevant, and second, to politically blame North American (white) protectionists and environmentalist zealots for holding back Mexico's development. Subcomandante Marcos jokingly responded to Zedillo's comments over the Internet, noting that the Zapatistas welcomed all "Zedillo-phobics, all global-phobics, even all phobic-phobics" to join the struggle against neo-liberalism.
It is not a question of globalization versus protectionism, it is a question of global corporatism versus global conscience.
Meanwhile, the encircled Subcomandante Marcos remains at large. The Zapatistas hope that world opinion, combined with Mexican students, workers and intellectuals, can build a protective climate of solidarity with their struggle. They resist incorporation into a political party because they fear co-optation into the margins of the Mexican state, the fate of many movements before them. Instead, they seem to insist on the relevance of dreamers, armed dreamers to be sure, against the visionless entertainment of modernity. For precisely this reason, many observers write them off as a romantic fringe. The influential Mexican author, Jorge Castañeda, for example, has dismissed Marcos for failing to enter what he calls the "political game". (Womack, p. 321)
In his respected biography of Che Guevara, Castañeda has made a similar argument that revolutionary leaders can become cultural icons but not political or military winners. (The same destiny, of course, awaited the namesake of the Zapatistas 70 ago.) But even if Castañeda is proven right, would pragmatic social-democratic parties more effectively challenge the WTO-NAFTA complex? Should utopianism be purged as an option from the souls of those who oppose injustice? Or is Marcos right, that dreams are a human need worthy of battle?
The dreamless tides of globalization are giving rise to a new global resistance by people who feel their fundamental identities are at stake. That is the message from Chiapas that the globalizers can neither understand nor suppress. |
Tom Hayden is national co-director of No More Sweatshops!, a coalition of labor, clergy, community and campus advocates of "sweat-free" guidelines on public procurement and enforceable labor standards for corporate behavior.
