The Demands of the Dead (10 page)

I walked over to look at the chess game, which was being played in silent intensity. The players and most of the spectators I already knew, from the photos that Chief Saltillo had shown me. Black was an old white Mexican with a full white beard and long straight gray hair, who I didn't recognize. White was a young mestizo guy with short hair, who kept fiddling with his glasses, probably because he was losing: Luis Muros, sociology student, suspected Zapatista supporter, also from Mexico City. There were spectators on either side of the table. Behind the older man stood two men in their thirties – neither of whom I could place - and a much younger woman in an apron, Susana Mendez, sociology student, Zapatista supporter, girlfriend to Luis, and apparently, a waitress here. Behind the younger guy, oblivious to the board, slouched a blonde American woman, with her hand on his shoulder. Her battered jeans, plain white blouse, and ponytail hid her shape and beauty – just not completely.

I knew her face from the photograph with Walter, and she was looking right at me.

I would have been hard pressed to avoid looking at her under any circumstances, but the fact that she knew my dead friend meant I couldn't trust myself, at least not right away. I ignored her as pointedly as I could, settled in and watched the game. It was a total rout, a rapid and thorough checkmate – the old man obviously knew the game, and Luis was equally obviously a novice who didn't develop his pieces and didn't even try to

attack.

As the players set up another game, I looked at my watch. It was time for me to go. The chess observer who had noticed me kissed the loser goodbye, platonically, and left when I did, so that we were walking on the same street in the same direction.

And ended up going to the same place. We looked at each other. She broke the silence in American-accented Spanish.

‘You’re here for the
platica
?’

That was what they called the briefing the organizations gave before they sent human rights observers into the rebel communities.

I nodded.

We buzzed.

The metal gate swung open. I stepped over the frame into a courtyard, green, yellow and red with small trees and spring flowers, onto which the rooms of the house opened. I felt the same hard cobblestone of the street underfoot, but the walls of the building inside were painted bright pink. Old, lightly colored wood picnic tables waited in the corner of the courtyard for the meeting to begin.

I looked around at the milling internationals and listened to their accents – Spanish, Americans, Italians, Argentinians, all speaking in Spanish or sitting quietly on their packs.

“I’m Evelyn,” Walter's friend said.

“Mark.” We shook hands. She was strong.

Hoffman had told me to look for a lawyer named Jorge. Reception told me he would be giving the chat.

I was looking forward to meeting him. I imagined a young activist lawyer like Shawn had been, with the free legal clinics on weekends, accompanying his clients through the process, filing the police brutality cases
pro bono
, accompanying them to court, doing it again and again. I knew a lot about his work, respected it more than I could say. We never named names in our conversations, but I wasn't in any of the units that were doing stop-and-frisk, I always thought it was a stupid policy, and in my combat classes I taught them to use the minimum amount of force. No guys I trained went on to commit brutality.

Sometimes, like lawyers do, Shawn would ask me hypotheticals. “If you knew a witness to a serious crime, or had an informant, the criminals are still at large and very dangerous, how do you avoid exposing them to danger?”

“You never reveal an informant, unless you're already at trial and you're sure you'll get a conviction. And even then you have to be careful.”

“So, you would have to build a case, even if it took years, and have overwhelming evidence before you did anything.”

“I'd say so, yes. Is this organized crime though? Do you need my help? What makes these criminals so dangerous?”

That day he was being deliberately nonchalant. “Maybe they're cops.”

At 12:30, the man appeared. Distracted by his lean, athletic, clean-cut appearance, it took me a moment before I realized he was dressed in a black short-sleeved shirt and black pants – the clothes of a priest – and that I had seen him before in a picture. This was no lawyer named Jorge.

“Jorge could not be here today,” the priest said. “My name is Raul, and I will be giving the charla today.” His eyes scanned the group, paused an extra beat on me, and he started.

Evelyn sat at my side, taking notes. She whispered:

“Do you plan to go any place in particular?”

“Hatuey.”

“I wanted to go there too. They prefer to send pairs,” she whispered. “Do you want me to go with you?”

I allowed myself to look at her freely for the first time, the woman I saw as my best lead to Walter. But it seemed she had uses for me in mind.
Did they see me coming?
Now am I being worked?
The rebels would need their own intelligence. Perhaps Evelyn – and Walter – were part of it.

“It sounds fine,” I said with finality. Y
ou can take me to Walter, and maybe I'll go with you to Hatuey.

Raul ran us through the numbers again. 70 000 (army), 3 000 (rebels). He added some new figures. 21 000 (refugees) and 45 (massacred in a church in Acteal in 1997). The map showed a peppering of refugee camps throughout the rural south of Chiapas, and Raul narrated a recurring pattern of events.

It started with some people farming on some land. These were usually but not necessarily Zapatista supporters. Maybe they colonized the land from the jungle, or maybe they took it over from some landlord after the landlords fled after the rebellion, or they might have been on it for generations.

Paramilitaries would show up and announce that they had a day to clear out. They would threaten to kill everyone if they didn’t clear out. To make sure that threat was credible, they occasionally did kill everyone, like in December 1997 at a village called Acteal. Then they’d loot and burn the village to the ground. The villagers would end up higher up the mountain, in a refugee camp without water or firewood, farming even more marginal lands. The paramilitaries were men with links to the army and the police, including Public Security. They were also affiliated with the landlords who had lost lands in the rebellion.

Raul warned us that we might not recognize when these fellows were coming around and making threats, since they might not dress in combat fatigues all the time. He said the links were so close that paramilitaries had sometimes made attacks in Public Security uniforms. And that some paramilitaries were just police who took off their insignia.

That was interesting to me.

“What’s in it for them? For the paras?” I asked.

“They’re soldiers who are following orders. This is a war. It’s a low-intensity war. Their strategy is to try to intimidate, destroy, and break up communities who support the rebels. This strategy isn’t just the landlords. It’s the policy of the state and federal governments. The tactics include putting lots of Zapatista supporters in jail, for various pretexts, massacres, and especially displacement of people. ”

I asked: “So you’re saying that some of these Public Security officers might receive orders to remove their insignia, disguise themselves, and go and burn down a village?”

“Yes.”

Like cops who take off their badges and go to work for the narcotraffickers.

Raul went on. He said the gun and drug smuggling through Guatemala was mostly a pretext for the military and police presence: they were really here to break the rebellion, but couldn’t say so. Not that there wasn’t smuggling, but again it was paras who were doing it and the police and army looking the other way—not the guerrillas doing it and the police and army heroically trying to stop it.

Raul continued his talk by stressing the importance of the observers. He credited the presence of international observers with saving many lives and preventing an escalation of the conflict to even more devastating levels. Did bad things happen when observers were present? Yes, occasionally there had been attacks and intimidations and threats right under observer noses. But mostly no. Mostly more eyes and ears were a big help.

He went into details of how to travel.

“Is everyone here on a tourist visa?”

Nods.

“Then if anyone asks, you’re just tourists.”

We were to act as tourists. As long as we were tourists, we were protected by international law. If we ‘interfered in politics’, we were no longer protected and could be deported. My own passport had the standard 90-day tourist stamp on it: Hoffman could have gotten me something better but not on this kind of notice. Raul pointed out that there were plenty of American consultants who were working for Mexican politicians operating on tourist visas, so we needn’t feel bad. What we needed to remember was that we were apolitical tourists in our interactions with authorities. They would likely know our real intentions, simply because we weren’t going to tourist spots. But they couldn’t stop us unless we declared our intentions. That was the game, and I could play it. Of course, if one of the police from Seguridad Publica recognized me, all bets were off. I would have to hope to not run into Madero or Escalante in the hills.

Raul then asked us to split up into the groups we were traveling in so he could come around and check our credentials, tell us how to get to where we had to be, what to take with us, and all the other details.

He got around to Evelyn and me fairly quickly, but when he saw Hoffman’s, and then Chavez’s, letters, he told me we’d talk later. He still gave us the information—we’d have to get on a bus, then a minibus, carry our own food, and travel for about 8 hours: longer than the route I’d taken with Chavez and Seguridad Publica.

Raul made rounds through the rest of the room, sending people home as he finished with them. When everyone was gone, Raul and I left Evelyn in the courtyard and went to his office, shimmying our way around three desks, four chairs, a photocopy machine, and cardboard boxes overflowing with paper in stacks. A woman, almost invisible in the clutter, tapped keys almost inaudibly at an old white Dell desktop computer at one of the desks. Raul asked her very politely if she could leave us, then shut the door behind her.

“So you’re the unbiased investigator,” he said, smiling.

I said nothing, but smiled back.

“We have our own file on this case. We’ve been documenting human rights violations in that community for five years—but the history goes back much farther. The landlords have had their ‘white guards’ and paramilitaries operating since forever. In 1994, the army and police walked right in and started working with them openly. Actually they were working together long before that.”

He took my passport, took a photocopy of it, cut out the picture, and set about making a laminated credential card for me as he spoke. When he finished that, he sat at the computer and prepared a letter of introduction to the community for me.

“The Zapatistas have had a strong organization there from the beginning as well, since the 1980s. Most of the community is solidly behind them. That’s why the situation there is so volatile. Add the border with Guatemala and the fact that the community is probably on top of an oil reserve—“

“—I’d heard that. Is it true?”

“It was prospected by PEMEX a few years ago but there was no drilling. You were just there. What did you see?”

“I didn’t see the community. Just the base.”

“Did you see the encampment outside the base?”

“No. What...?”

“There is an encampment outside the base, the community camps there to protest the presence of the military. They’ve been there for years. Observers camp there too. You’ll probably spend a night there. Or should.”

“Interesting.” But I needed specific information. I leafed through the folder. It contained account after account of specific human rights violations, threats, and harassment by the army and paramilitary against members of the community. It didn’t mention paramilitaries’ names, since they were often masked, and any photos that were in the folder weren’t good enough for me to identify any of them.

“Raul, is there any way I could find out whether the murder victims, Diaz and Gonzalez, were working with, or as, paramilitaries?”

“Them specifically? The only way is if people in the community recognize them. The community has its own investigation, you know. They probably even have an investigation commission for these murders.”

“Are they likely to talk to me?”

Raul smiled again. “It’s possible.”

He printed off the letter of intro, and gave me the copy. “Raul, could I use your computer?” He nodded, then sat politely and read while I used it.

This would probably be a heavily monitored computer, but Raul already had the encryption program installed. I just needed to use the keys off the disk to decrypt Maria's message.

“Darling, I hope you are having a good time and missing us as much as we are missing you. Uncle's family has been asking about you and they'd like to see you soon. I told them you'd be in touch when you were ready, but don't be surprised if you run into them. Also, I got through to your friend. He didn't pick up, and I didn't leave a message, but I think he should be home in the next few days.”