[R-G] Zapatista Code Red

[Anthony Fenton]

Zapatista Code Red

December, 22 2007 By Naomi Klein

ZNet

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.

This article was first published in The Nation.