Zapatista Code Red
by Naomi Klein


[from The Nation, January 7, 2008 issue]
San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas

Nativity scenes are plentiful in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a colonial city in
the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. But the one that greets visitors at the
entrance to the TierrAdentro cultural center has a local twist: figurines on
donkeys wear miniature ski masks and carry wooden guns.

It is high season for "Zapatourism," the industry of international travelers
that has sprung up around the indigenous uprising here, and TierrAdentro is
ground zero. Zapatista-made weavings, posters and jewelry are selling briskly.
In the courtyard restaurant, where the mood at 10 pm is festive verging on
fuzzy, college students drink Sol beer. A young man holds up a photograph of
Subcomandante Marcos, as always in mask with pipe, and kisses it. His friends
snap yet another picture of this most documented of movements.

I am taken through the revelers to a room in the back of the center, closed to
the public. The somber mood here seems a world away. Ernesto Ledesma Arronte, a
40-year-old ponytailed researcher, is hunched over military maps and human
rights incident reports. "Did you understand what Marcos said?" he asks me. "It
was very strong. He hasn't said anything like that in many years."

Arronte is referring to a speech Marcos made the night before at a conference
outside San Cristóbal. The speech was titled "Feeling Red: The Calendar and
the Geography of War." Because it was Marcos, it was poetic and slightly
elliptical. But to Arronte's ears, it was a code-red alert. "Those of us who
have made war know how to recognize the paths by which it is prepared and
brought near," Marcos said. "The signs of war on the horizon are clear. War,
like fear, also has a smell. And now we are starting to breathe its fetid odor
in our lands."

Marcos's assessment supports what Arronte and his fellow researchers at the
Center of Political Analysis and Social and Economic Investigations have been
tracking with their maps and charts. On the fifty-six permanent military bases
that the Mexican state runs on indigenous land in Chiapas, there has been a
marked increase in activity. Weapons and equipment are being dramatically
upgraded, new battalions are moving in, including special forces--all signs of
escalation.

As the Zapatistas became a global symbol for a new model of resistance, it was
possible to forget that the war in Chiapas never actually ended. For his part,
Marcos--despite his clandestine identity--has been playing a defiantly open
role in Mexican politics, most notably during the fiercely contested 2006
presidential elections. Rather than endorsing the center-left candidate,
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he spearheaded a parallel "Other Campaign,"
holding rallies that called attention to issues ignored by the major
candidates.

In this period, Marcos's role as military leader of the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN) seemed to fade into the background. He was Delegate
Zero--the anti-candidate. Last night, Marcos had announced that the conference
would be his last such appearance for some time. "Look, the EZLN is an army,"
he reminded his audience, and he is its "military chief."

That army faces a grave new threat--one that cuts to the heart of the
Zapatistas' struggle. During the 1994 uprising, the EZLN claimed large
stretches of land and collectivized them, its most tangible victory. In the San
Andrés Accords, the right to territory was recognized, but the Mexican
government has refused to fully ratify the accords. After failing to enshrine
these rights, the Zapatistas decided to turn them into facts on the ground.
They formed their own government structures--called good-government
councils--and stepped up the building of autonomous schools and clinics. As the
Zapatistas expand their role as the de facto government in large areas of
Chiapas, the federal and state governments' determination to undermine them is
intensifying.

"Now," says Arronte, "they have their method." The method is to use the deep
desire for land among all peasants in Chiapas against the Zapatistas. Arronte's
organization has documented that, in just one region, the government has spent
approximately $16 million expropriating land and giving it to many families
linked to the notoriously corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party. Often, the
land is already occupied by Zapatista families. Most ominously, many of the new
"owners" are linked to thuggish paramilitary groups, which are trying to force
the Zapatistas from the newly titled land. Since September there has been a
marked escalation of violence: shots fired into the air, brutal beatings,
Zapatista families reporting being threatened with death, rape and
dismemberment. Soon the soldiers in their barracks may well have the excuse
they need to descend: restoring "peace" among feuding indigenous groups. For
months the Zapatistas have been resisting violence and trying to expose these
provocations. But by choosing not to line up behind Obrador in the 2006
election, the movement made powerful enemies. And now, says Marcos, their calls
for help are being met with a deafening silence.

Exactly ten years ago, on December 22, 1997, the Acteal massacre took place. As
part of the anti-Zapatista campaign, a paramilitary gang opened fire in a small
church in the village of Acteal, killing forty-five indigenous people, sixteen
of them children and adolescents. Some bodies were hacked with machetes. The
state police heard the gunfire and did nothing. For weeks now, Mexico's
newspapers have been filled with articles marking the tragic ten-year
anniversary of the massacre.

In Chiapas, however, many people point out that conditions today feel eerily
familiar: the paramilitaries, the rising tensions, the mysterious activities of
the soldiers, the renewed isolation from the rest of the country. And they have
a plea to those who supported them in the past: don't just look back. Look
forward, and prevent another Acteal massacre before it happens.