The Uncomfortable Dead (25 page)

But elections are coming up. The chief opposition again is the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. To confront it with a new electoral fraud while a civil war is brewing would throw gasoline on the flames.

X

In post-1968 Mexico, the forces of the new left opted to work for social organization among the masses. Thousands of students were mobilized by the union movement, the struggle in the slums, the slow work of assistance to campesino insurgent movements. A minority took up arms. There was never much sympathy between the two groups, who accused each other of being “ultras” and “reformists.” The guerrillas, caught up in a crazed spiral of minor confrontations that led to new clashes until their final annihilation by the police, never took any interest in working with the people. They heated things up, and years of union or campesino work were often endangered by their sectarian adventures. In short, the majority of the left was never attracted to the idea of armed struggle. But the Zapatista uprising generates a wave of sympathy.

“How could I not like them? Ernesto, a university union organizer, tells me, “since I agree with their program for a new democracy, and since they’re not some tiny group, they don’t want to be anybody’s vanguard, they don’t impose their path, they’re indigenous, they’re an uprising of the masses, and on top of that they’ve been screwed over even worse than I have.”

XI

The army deployed 10,000 soldiers in the first days of the conflict, and the figure slowly rose to 17,000, one-third of the Mexican Army. Jeeps with machine guns, tanks, helicopters, German G-3 rifles, Saber planes.

XII

The dead will always be dead. The horror draws nearer. In the face of horror, political explanations are not moving. Reasons are harsh in wartime. I’m disturbed by the repeated sight of the bodies of campesinos, riddled with bullets, lying in ditches along the road. I see terrible images of a baby girl killed by a grenade fragment, her body lying in a cardboard box.

XIII

An enormous demonstration is held in Mexico City against the government’s policy in Chiapas and for peace, with close to 150,000 attending. One of the chants: “First World, ha ha ha.” Again we see the faces of the old and new left, but also of thousands of students joining the movement for the first time. The Zapatistas are not alone. Their program and the faces and motives of the indigenous rebels are greeted with a massive outpouring of sympathy that is reflected in the press. Something new, something different, is happening.

XIV

The Department of Gobernación has decided to invent an enemy phantom. The real phantoms, the Chiapan rebels, aren’t of much use in the great propaganda war that is being launched—they’re too likable. One of the ski-masked
comandantes,
the one who led the occupation of San Cristóbal de las Casas and who said his name was Marcos, is chosen. He is useful because he appears to be from the city; he isn’t indigenous and might even be foreign. A verbal portrait is disseminated across the country. His vital statistics: six feet tall, blond hair, green eyes, speaks three languages (where the hell did they come up with that one? and why not four languages, or five?). The newspaper-reading sector of the country laughs at the absurdity. People call you on the phone to tell you that Marcos is their cousin, that he’s the milkman. The phantom is welcomed in a wave of affection. The news magazine
Proceso
has just sanctified him by putting a close-up of him on the cover of its first issue on Chiapas. A Venezuelan biologist doing research on the endangered jaguars of the Lacandón jungle—and whose closest contact with a jaguar to date was the sight of some excrement—is arrested and beaten. The
judiciales
want him to confess to being the guerrilla commander in chief. Marcos himself laughs at his popularity in a joking letter to the media.

But does Commander Marcos really exist? Interviewed in the municipal palace of San Cristóbal at dawn on the first day of January, after the Zapatistas had made a clean sweep of the
judiciales,
the phantasmagoric Marcos avows that he is there to carry out the policies of a committee of indigenous campesinos; he is only a
subcomandante,
and he warns that the name “Marcos” is interchangeable—anyone can put on a ski mask and say, “I am Marcos.” He invites people to do so.

XV

“It’s like Vietnam,” says a soldier talking on the phone, overheard by an alert
La Jornada
reporter standing in line behind him. “They come out of the mist.” The jungle air is full of messages. At night, 150 short-wave radio stations saturate the ether over the ravines and footpaths with cryptic messages: “Six for Uruguay, do you copy?” “Truckloads of green cement passed in Paris.” Zapatista bases identifying themselves as Two, Zero, and Thunder are the most important. The helicopters try to avoid the antennas that rise through the trees.

XVII

Bombs in the Distrito Federal of the capital. The war comes nearer to the monster city. The “bombers” aren’t Zapatistas. A mini-sect of the extreme left, said to be fully infiltrated by the Department of Gobernación, is responsible. Even so, the feeling that the war is getting closer and could burst out of the TV screen and explode on the corner of your street sweeps the city for a week.

XVIII

The government tightens its grip. A general mobilization of the army has been ordered. Then, the armed resistance of the Zapatistas and the almost unanimous response of the intellectual community (with the lamentable exception of Octavio Paz, who weeps for a lost “modernity”), along with the demonstration in Mexico City, force the government to draw back. It changes its line, changes its personnel, dismisses the Secretary of Gobernación, the Attorney General, the governor of Chiapas. The soft line takes over. Manuel Camacho Solís, whom Salinas recently rejected as the PRI candidate for the presidency, is now Salinas’s man once more and becomes a negotiator. An amnesty is proclaimed.

In a desperate quest to end the conflict, economic support plans rapidly succeed one another, institutions are created to protect the indigenous people (from whom? from themselves?), and the official discourse adopts the critiques of the left and incorporates them, chameleonlike. The jaguar is a Mexican species. The Venezuelan biologist should have known that.

A cease-fire is declared—a tense cease-fire.

XIX

On TV there are images of soldiers vaccinating children and distributing food. The women standing in line for food in Ocosingo’s plaza don’t get any the second day if they don’t bring their husbands. The soldiers distributing food are there to identify Zapatistas.

XX

Rumors again. Phone calls from journalist friends, low-voiced conversations during a Cárdenas rally on the esplanade of the Insurgentes metro station. Provocations are expected. There will be armed clashes. Does the army want to avenge the affront? The country grows uneasy once more. In Quintana Roo, only four kilometers from the Disneyland with real sharks known as Cancún,
the judiciales
arrest campesino leaders supposedly because they were armed. A secretary photographs a
judiciale
taking AK-47 bullets out of his sock and putting them inside a roll of toilet paper in the offices of the campesino union: this will be the proof.
The judiciales
unleash an enormous operation in the state of Guerrero. During the meeting of a powerful organization of agrarian unions on the Isthmus of Tehauntepec in the state of Oaxaca, many voices are heard protesting against the pacifism of the leaders: “If we’d rebelled, people wouldn’t have died from the epidemic, there would be a hospital by now, and the fraud would have fallen flat on its ass.” The states of Tabasco and Michoacán are worried. The Cárdenas-led opposition won the elections there and a spectacular fraud was carried out. During the past two years, campesino community leaders who were members of the PRD have been assassinated.

XXI

The Zapatistas aren’t in any hurry. They’re waging a masterful media war, keeping up the pressure while dissidents across the country go on the alert and mobilize. The pressure must be kept up in order to establish nonfraudulent conditions for the next elections.

A space for the social movements opens. Some of the townships that were occupied in the coastal region of Chiapas throw out mayors accused of fraud; indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Michoacán, and Puebla mobilize; 10,000 teachers in Chiapas march to demand a 100 percent increase in salary. During this impasse, Zapatismo acquires social legitimacy through T-shirts, posters, continuous declarations of allegiance.

The electoral campaign of the left and center left, a broad front led by Cárdenas, is growing and has adopted the Zapatistas’ program as its own. A ring is forming around the PRI that will make it difficult for the party to stage more fraudulent elections in August.

Are we nearing the end of the oldest dictatorship in the world? From 1920 to 1994 they have governed this country in the name of modernity and a betrayed revolution. Has their moment passed?

XXII

For now we’re walking on shadows, disturbed and filled with hope. We are waking up with the distinct feeling that we slept among phantoms.

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