Journey through Chiapas

D. Trees -- Bristol Chiapas Support Group

While some of the momentum has been lost from the Zapatista uprising of January 1994, the shock waves are still shaking Mexico. Despite the government's best attempts at side-lining the Zapatistas, the spirit and the people carry on with their struggle.

Chiapas today is scattered with army troops conducting what amounts to a psychological war against the campesinos and indigenous peoples who live there. The local human rights organisation in San Cristóbal "Fray Bartolomé de las Casas" is still frequently visited by campesinos (some of whom walk for days to reach it) reporting arbitrary detentions, torture, unexplained disappearances, violation of personal security, illegal entry, plunder, harm to personal and communal property, and executions. Most of these outrages have been committed by the federal and state authorities. Rarely is anyone brought to task for the attacks! In the heart of Chiapas, San Cristóbal is still alive with tension not so much because of the presence of the EZLN negotiators, but more because of the ominous army base just outside the town. Deeper into Chiapas at Ocosingo another army base dominates the town. Ocosingo is the centre of Mexico's biggest municipality, and since it contains the EZLN heartlands, it's the most troublesome. Across the mountains and jungle of this area, army outposts are a constant reminder to villages of the state's desire to smash this uprising.

Recent trouble in the north of Chiapas has directed attention away from the EZLN and also forced the government to spread its troops more thinly across the state. The occupations of rancheros' cattle farms by campesinos intent on creating ejidos or collective farms is a historical phenomenon in Mexico, but since the uprising, greater confidence and desperation has meant that these actions have gathered momentum. At the same time a "civil group" calling itself Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice) has violently expelled and attacked campesinos, adding to the tension. Paz y Justicia operates with police protection. Recent concessions by the government on the way negotiations with the EZLN are to be conducted and the release of EZLN prisoners has raised hopes of civil progress. The armed EZLN has developed a civil FZLN wing to deepen and spread the spirit of the Zapatista uprising. Meanwhile, as government soldiers occupy mountain villages, the EZLN remain on Red Alert and have announced that they will not tolerate any more human rights abuses by the army in their territory.

If you go deeper into Chiapas and turn right at the tourist site and Mayan ruins of Palenque, the road runs along the Guatamalan border which is punctuated with army checkpoints and the camps of impoverished settlers. This is a Mayan area and split politically. While one group of Mayans has sold the logging rights of their land, those deeper in the jungle fight with the Zapatistas to defend their home, the tropical rain forest. In nearby Mayan Belize a major UK funded road threatens a similar "development" of the jungle, bringing mining, logging and poor settlers. The settlers desparately carve a living out of land too steep to grow maize. After three to four years of cropping, the rain washes the soil away, turning jungle to rock. These little slices of dead mountainside can be seen from the road, and everybody knows the jungle is dying.

The signing of a peace agreement between Guatemalan guerrilla groups and the government could well help the situation by allowing 50,000 refuges from Guatemala to return from Chiapas. These camps have been supported by their Mayan cousins in Chiapas because of the shared culture and the shared problem of land. The Guatemalan war was started by Indios who make up 70 percent of the population but have been refused rights to own land by the Spanish speaking elite.

Across the whole of Mexico, the spirit of Zapata has new energy. The central squares and main streets of towns across the south of Mexico have blockades and stalls of various groups opposing the state. This would not have been possible five years ago. In Chiapas, in late October, campesinos protested in over 80 municipal capitals about water and electricity prices, and were able to protest openly -- not because the state has had a change of heart but because it is terrified of the reaction it would get.

It is hard for Europeans to avoid looking at the insurgents in southern Mexico through anything other than Euro-centric eyes. For the Zapatistas, the armed struggle is not separate from the civil one. Without the armed uprising, the government would not have taken the Zapatistas' challenge seriously. Activists, radicals, campesinos, and indigenous peoples have been tortured and killed with equipment supplied by the West for decades. While activists in the West debate the issue of nonviolent direct action, the peoples of southern Mexico are gambling with their lives. Many in Chiapas fail to understand why Western radicals with all their freedoms achieve so little.

Chiapas is one small state in Mexico, the Zapatistas a small insurgency movement. What they have achieved is beyond anything they could have dreamed of before January 1994. What the Zapatistas and peoples in southern Mexico want us to plant is the seeds for this situation in our own countries. Now, as never before, the world is linked together, so that for things to change in Mexico, thing must change here. And if things can change in Mexico, things can change here.

Where there have been sparks of revolution in Mexico, the whole country is a dry wood pile waiting to go up in flames.