Fences and Windows (22 page)

Next thing I knew, I was on the phone talking to airlines, cancelling engagements, making crazy excuses, mumbling about Zapatistas and Martin Luther King Jr. Who cares that it didn’t make sense? All I knew was that I had to be in Mexico City on March 11, the day Marcos and the Zapatistas where scheduled to make their grand entrance.

Now would be a good time to admit that I’ve never been to Chiapas. I’ve never made the pilgrimage to the Lacandon
jungle. I’ve never sat in the mud and the mist in La Realidad. I’ve never begged, pleaded or posed to get an audience with Subcomandante Marcos, the masked man, the faceless face of Mexico’s Zapatista National Liberation Army. I know people who had. Lots of them. In 1994, the summer after the Zapatista rebellion, caravans to Chiapas were all the rage in North American activist circles: friends got together and raised money for second-hand vans, filled them with supplies, then drove south to San Cristobal de las Casas and left the vans behind. I didn’t pay much attention at the time. Back then, Zapatista mania looked suspiciously like just another cause for guilty lefties with a Latin American fetish: another Marxist rebel army, another macho leader, another chance to go south and buy colourful textiles. Hadn’t we heard this story before? Hadn’t it ended badly?

But there is something different about this Zapatista caravan. First, it doesn’t end in San Cristobal de las Casas; it starts there, criss-crossing the Mexican countryside before finally arriving in downtown Mexico City. The caravan, nicknamed the “Zapatour” by the Mexican press, is led by the council of twenty-four Zapatista commanders, in full uniform and masks (though no weapons), including Subcomandante Marcos himself. Because it is unheard of for the Zapatista command to travel outside Chiapas (and there are vigilantes threatening deadly duels with Marcos all along the way), the Zapatour needs tight security. The Red Cross turned down the job, so protection is being provided by several hundred activists from Italy who call themselves ¡Ya Basta! (meaning “Enough is enough!”), after
the defiant phrase used in the Zapatistas’ declaration of war. (In the end security was provided by local groups.) Hundreds of students, small farmers and activists have joined the road show, and thousands are greeting them along the way. Unlike those early visitors to Chiapas, these travellers say they are there not because they are “in solidarity” with the Zapatistas but because they
are
Zapatistas. Some even claim to be Subcomandante Marcos himself— they say, much to the confusion of inquiring journalists, “We are all Marcos.”

Perhaps only a man who never takes off his mask, who hides his real name, could lead this caravan of renegades, rebels, loners and anarchists on this two-week trek. These are people who have learned to steer clear of charismatic leaders with one-size-fits-all ideologies. These aren’t party loyalists; these are members of groups that pride themselves on their autonomy and lack of hierarchy. And Marcos—with his black wool mask, intense eyes and a pipe—seems to be an anti-leader tailor-made for this suspicious, critical lot. Not only does he refuse to show his face, undercutting (and simultaneously augmenting) his own celebrity, but Marcos’s story is of a man who came to his leadership not through swaggering certainty but by confronting political uncertainty, by learning to follow.

Though there is little confirmation of Marcos’s real identity, the most repeated legend that surrounds him goes like this: an urban Marxist intellectual and activist, Marcos was wanted by the state and was no longer safe in the cities. He fled to the mountains of Chiapas in southeast Mexico, filled
with revolutionary rhetoric and certainty, there to convert the poor indigenous masses to the cause of armed proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie. He said the workers of the world must unite, and the Mayans just stared at him. They said they weren’t workers, and besides, land wasn’t property but the heart of their community. Having failed as a Marxist missionary, Marcos immersed himself in Mayan culture. The more he learned, the less he knew. Out of this process, a new kind of army emerged, the EZLN, the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which was not controlled by an elite of guerrilla commanders but by the communities themselves, through clandestine councils and open assemblies. “Our army,” says Marcos, “became scandalously Indian.” That meant that he wasn’t a commander barking orders, but a subcomandante, a conduit for the will of the councils. His first words, in his new persona, were “Through me speaks the will of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.” Further subjugating himself, Marcos says to those who seek him out that he is not a leader, but that his black mask is a mirror, reflecting each of their own struggles; that a Zapatista is anyone anywhere fighting injustice, that “We are you.” Most famously, he once told a reporter that “Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 P.M., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy
student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.”

“This non-self,” writes Juana Ponce de Leon who has edited Marcos’s writings, “makes it possible for Marcos to become the spokesperson for indigenous communities. He is transparent, and he is iconographic.” Yet the paradox of Marcos and the Zapatistas is that despite the masks, the non-selves, the mystery, their struggle is about the opposite of anonymity—it is about the right to be seen. When the Zapatistas took up arms and said
“¡Ya bastaf!
in 1994, it was a revolt against their invisibility. Like so many others left behind by globalization, the Mayans of Chiapas had fallen off the economic map: “Below in the cities,” the EZLN command stated, “we did not exist. Our lives were worth less than those of machines or animals. We were like stones, like weeds in the road. We were silenced. We were faceless.” By arming and masking themselves, the Zapatistas explain, they weren’t joining some
Star Trek-like
Borg universe of people without identities fighting in common cause, they were forcing the world to stop ignoring their plight, to see their long-neglected faces. The Zapatistas are “the voice that arms itself to be heard. The face that hides itself to be seen.”

Meanwhile, Marcos himself—the supposed non-self, the conduit, the mirror—writes in a tone so personal and poetic, so completely and unmistakably his own, that he is constantly undercutting and subverting the anonymity that comes from his mask and pseudonym. It is often said that the Zapatistas’ best weapon was the Internet, but their true secret weapon was their language. In
Our Word Is Our Weapon
, we read manifestos and war cries that are also
poems, legends and riffs. A character emerges behind the mask, a personality. Marcos is a revolutionary who writes long meditative letters to Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano about the meaning of silence; who describes colonialism as a series of “bad jokes badly told;” who quotes Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and Borges. Who writes that resistance takes place “anytime any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes resignation has woven for them and cynicism has dyed grey.” And who then sends whimsical mock telegrams to all of “civil society” : “THE GREYS HOPE TO WIN STOP RAINBOW NEEDED URGENTLY.”

Marcos seems keenly aware of himself as an irresistible romantic hero. He’s an Isabel Allende character in reverse— not the poor peasant who becomes a Marxist rebel but a Marxist intellectual who becomes a poor peasant. He plays with this character, flirts with it, saying that he can’t reveal his real identity for fear of disappointing his female fans. Perhaps wary that this game was getting a little out of hand, Marcos chose the eve of Valentine’s Day this year to break the bad news: he is married and deeply in love, and her name is La Mar (“the Sea” —what else would it be?)

This is a movement keenly aware of the power of words and symbols. The twenty-four-strong Zapatista command had originally planned to make their grand entrance to Mexico City riding in on horseback, like indigenous conquistadors (they ended up settling on a flatbed truck filled with hay). But the caravan is more than symbolic. The goal is to address the Mexican Congress and demand that legislators pass an Indigenous Bill of Rights, a law that came out of the
Zapatistas’ failed peace negotiations with former president Ernesto Zedillo. Vicente Fox, his newly elected successor who famously bragged during the campaign that he could solve the Zapatista problem “in fifteen minutes,” has asked for a meeting with Marcos but has so far been refused. Not until the bill is passed, says Marcos, not until more army troops are withdrawn from Zapatista territory, not until all Zapatista political prisoners are freed. Marcos has been betrayed before and accuses Fox of staging a “simulation of peace” before the peace negotiations have even restarted.

What is clear in all this jostling for position is that something radical has changed in the balance of power in Mexico. The Zapatistas are calling the shots—which is significant, because they have lost the habit of firing shots. What started as a small, armed insurrection has in the past seven years turned into what now looks more like a peaceful mass movement. It has helped topple the corrupt seventy-one-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and has placed indigenous rights at the centre of the Mexican political agenda.

Which is why Marcos gets angry when he is looked on as just another guy with a gun: “What other guerrilla force has convened a national democratic movement, civic and peaceful, so that armed struggle becomes useless?” he asks. “What other guerrilla force asks its bases of support about what it should do before doing it? What other guerrilla force has struggled to achieve a democratic space and not taken power? What other guerrilla force has relied more on words than on bullets?”

The Zapatistas chose January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force, to “declare war” on the Mexican army, launching an insurrection and briefly taking control of the city of San Cristobal de las Casas and five Chiapas towns. They sent out a communiqué explaining that NAFTA, which banned subsidies to indigenous farm co-operatives, would be a “summary execution” for four million indigenous Mexicans in Chiapas, the country’s poorest province.

Nearly a hundred years had passed since the Mexican revolution promised to return indigenous land through agrarian reform; after all these broken promises, NAFTA was simply the last straw. “We are the product of five hundred years of struggle & but today we say
“¡Ya basta!”
Enough is enough.” The rebels called themselves Zapatistas, taking their name from Emiliano Zapata, the slain hero of the 1910 revolution who, along with a ragtag peasant army, fought for lands held by large landowners to be returned to indigenous and peasant farmers.

In the seven years since they stormed onto the scene, the Zapatistas have come to represent two forces at once: first, rebels struggling against grinding poverty and humiliation in the mountains of Chiapas and, on top of this, theorists of a new movement, another way to think about power, resistance and globalization. This theory—Zapatismo—not only turns classic guerrilla tactics inside out but much of left-wing politics on its head.

For years I have watched the Zapatistas’ ideas spread through activist circles, passed along second- and third-hand:
a phrase, a way to run a meeting, a metaphor that twists your brain around. Unlike classic revolutionaries who preach through bullhorns and from pulpits, Marcos has spread the Zapatista word through riddles and long, pregnant silences. Revolutionaries who don’t want power. People who must hide their faces to be seen. A world with many worlds in it.

A movement of one no and many yesses.

These phrases seem simple at first, but don’t be fooled. They have a way of burrowing into the consciousness, cropping up in strange places, being repeated until they take on this quality of truth—but not absolute truth: a truth, as the Zapatistas might say, with many truths in it. In Canada, indigenous uprising is always symbolized by a blockade: a physical barrier to stop the golf course from infringing on a native burial site, to block the construction of a hydroelectric dam or to keep an old-growth forest from being logged. The Zapatista uprising was a new way to protect land and culture: rather than locking out the world, the Zapatistas flung open the doors and invited the world inside. Chiapas was transformed, despite its poverty, despite being under constant military siege, into a global gathering place for activists, intellectuals and indigenous groups.

From the first communiqué, the Zapatistas invited the international community “to watch over and regulate our battles.” The summer after the uprising, they hosted a National Democratic Convention in the jungle; six thousand people attended, most from Mexico. In 1996, they hosted the first
Encuentro
for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism.
Some three thousand activists travelled to Chiapas to meet with others from around the world.

Marcos himself is a one-man web: he is a compulsive communicator, constantly reaching out, drawing connections between different issues and struggles. His communiqués are filled with lists of groups that he imagines are Zapatista allies: small shopkeepers, retired people and the disabled, as well as workers and campesinos. He writes to political prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier. He is pen pals with some of Latin America’s best-known novelists. He writes letters addressed “to the people of the world.”

When the uprising began, the government attempted to play down the incident as a “local” problem, an ethnic dispute easily contained. The strategic victory of the Zapatistas was to change the terms: to insist that what was going on in Chiapas could not be written off as a narrow “ethnic” struggle, that it was both specific and universal. They did this by clearly naming their enemy not only as the Mexican state but as the set of economic policies known as neo-liberalism. Marcos insisted that the poverty and desperation in Chiapas was simply a more advanced version of something happening all around the world. He pointed to the huge numbers of people who were being left behind by prosperity, whose land and work made that prosperity possible. “The new distribution of the world excludes ‘minorities,’” Marcos has said. “The indigenous, youth, women, homosexuals, lesbians, people of colour, immigrants, workers, peasants; the majority who make up the world basements are presented, for power, as disposable. The
distribution of the world excludes the majorities.”