The Art of Flight

JOURNEY TO CHIAPAS

I. THE BEGINNINGS

2 JANUARY 1994

Ominous headlines appear in today’s newspapers: “Revolution breaks out in Chiapas. San Cristóbal de Las Casas and three cities fall into the hands of rebels.” A friend, who as a rule is very well informed, phoned me this morning to wish me a happy New Year. She answered my questions and told me that the situation had returned to normal, but that there had been wide-scale fighting and several deaths. Yesterday I went to my cousins’ for New Year’s dinner. Some of those in attendance expressed enthusiasm for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was coming into force. We would soon be like the United States and Canada. Well, not the country, it would still have to wait a while, they clarified; but everyone present agreed it would be a good thing for us. Someone claimed to have heard on a radio newscast something about the occupation of some cities in Chiapas. No one took it seriously. They tell him he must not have understood correctly. Some fanatical opposition groups have begun storming the city halls in some villages, only to abandon them after four or five days of anarchy…In fact, my friend in the know told me that the army had to intervene to liberate the occupied towns. She was sure that it was an act of revenge against the president. Someone had pledged to ruin the day that the Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Without a doubt we would find out who was responsible for the disturbance. Newspapers, for their part, are saying that someone incited the Chiapanec indigenous communities to revolt. But no one knows for sure who that someone is who is capable of ruining the President of the Republic’s day and making the Indians revolt. It seems to me that right now anyone who wanted to could organize uprisings in different parts of the country, because there is extreme poverty, and people in the countryside are desperate. As incredible as it may seem, the insurgents said they would advance on Mexico City and would not give up until they overthrew the government. They would not settle for being the protagonists of a regional insurrection.

4 JANUARY

What days! The rebellion in Chiapas has everyone on end. Contrary to what was said, it hasn’t been defeated. I watch television and everything seems unreal and quite terrifying…I’m exhausted, overwhelmed, in a foul mood…I’m almost certain this year will be horrible. The worst thing that could happen to Mexico would be the birth of a Shining Path. During a television newscast they said the leader of the guerrilla movement is twenty-four and speaks four languages. Surely some new information will come out soon. But how were these people militarily trained? That will also be made public soon, they say. I feel like going to live in Italy or Spain. Portugal. The Salinas era will wind down this year. But it will leave a lasting wound on the country.

5 JANUARY

Farewell dinner for John and Deborah, who will be spending a few months at Yale. The topic, like it or not, was the uprising in Chiapas. Later I went by Rodrigo’s house and the conversation was the same; then Braulio visited me at the hotel and went on about how complex the situation is. I went up to my room, turned on the television, and listened to the spokeswoman for the Secretariat of the Interior, Socorro Díaz, read a document on the insurgency’s structure: military training, weapons, recruiting, etc. It is incomprehensible that the authorities were not aware of these preparations. Either the guerrillas were protected by a powerful sector inside the government or had the full support of the indigenous communities who allowed them to create this army, or both. Everything seems to be in Chinese.

8 JANUARY

The fighting continues, and there were some terrorist acts in different parts of the country. No significant damage. Instead, they seemed intent on showing that danger lurks everywhere all the time. The television reports produced by the government, as usual, are very clumsy; they’re attempting to deny the main problem: the extreme poverty and contempt to which the indigenous population has been subjected. How did the government not know that something on this scale was going on? Army shelling continues near San Cristóbal in areas largely populated by Indians. There are constant marches for peace and for cessation of the shelling in Mexico City. I ask myself again: Did the army not notice anything during the year that, according to the Interior Secretariat, the preparations were underway? Or the secret service of the various police forces? Or the much-trumpeted military intelligence? Was the information intercepted, or was it received and then dismissed because of the leadership’s eagerness to reach the inflationary target? I stood in a long line at a newsstand today to buy La Jornada and El Financiero. I wasn’t able to work this weekend.

11 JANUARY

So far this month my life has been a bundle of nerves. A friend from Mexico City just called me. She was hysterical, bordering on delirious. There was something truly irrational about her excitement. The revolution was beginning to save the country from its sins and would deliver it from the many evils that afflict it! She spoke as if the guerrillas had already taken the National Palace. When I hung up the phone, I felt compelled to examine my conscience. I continue to be encouraged by the revolutionary uprising in Chiapas because it lays bare the official lie that had been nagging at me and many others. But that feeling of encouragement goes away as I think about the victims who will die: Indians and Indian children, whose constant presence on television has begun to haunt me, as well as the fear that the country is going to hell, terrorized by a group that could well prove to be (we know nothing about its leader or its members) a variation of the Shining Path. A unilateral ceasefire was declared yesterday. I was relieved to hear that Camacho Solís had agreed to attempt to broker a peace settlement. If he is successful, he will become a giant. A giant in a world of midgets who govern our country. My hate, my contempt for the whole lot of arrogant scum who have constantly boasted of their so-called macroeconomic successes, has grown more intense and more radical. What an immense waste of money and effort on that solemn buffoonery that was Solidarity, for example! Today we saw a new image of Salinas on television. He no longer looks like the President of the Century but a tiny man with shifty eyes and a look of defeat: the man who for five years has misled the nation and deluded himself into believing that he was Caesar is forced — by grace of a group of Indians whose miserable existence he denied — to look into a mirror that reflects his true dimensions. I’m reminded of Tosca’s words as she stands over Scarpia’s corpse: “E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!” All Rome trembled before him! The only thing we can hope for is that these ten ultra-enigmatic days we have lived not be forgotten, that they serve as a lesson, that they initiate a period of national reflection, that our leaders wake up to reality, that they realize how far we are, because of them, from the First World in which they believed they were already living.

13 JANUARY

Today in La Jornada there appeared an open letter explaining the Jesuits’ position on the Chiapas conflict. I find it surprising. Among other things, it says:

Violence that causes loss of human life goes against the will of the God in whom we believe. However, violence in Chiapas did not begin with the armed uprising on the first day of last January. A secular history of plunder, abuses, marginalization, and murders has made victims of the poor inhabitants of that state, particularly the indigenous. This is, perhaps, the origin of the indigenous groups’ desperation that manifests itself now in armed counter-violence. So our rejection of violence, if it is to be just, must tend to its roots. The first and fundamental violence to be condemned is the structural-social-economic-political-cultural violence of which the ethnic groups and popular sectors of Chiapas and much of the national territory have been victims. Not to acknowledge this would be to avoid the state of things that have led to the current confrontation.

And later:

We believe that the events in Chiapas are a wakeup call for the entire national consciousness and an invitation to reflect on the risks of continuing a modernizing policy that benefits the ruling elite while marginalizing the country’s popular majorities. They are also a call for the government to take seriously the path to democracy.

Let us therefore acknowledge that the problem is essentially social and political, although it has now been expressed through violence due to the absence of legal channels. For this reason, a military solution would leave untouched the root causes and not lay the foundations for progress toward an enduring harmony and peace in that state. Paths of dialogue and of real agreement on acceptable terms for the parties involved must be opened.

And it concluded:

Consistent with the above, we demand that:

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE REPUBLIC, in accordance with the political measures recently taken, establish an immediate ceasefire and lift the de facto state of siege that it has imposed on some two thousand indigenous communities of Chiapas.

We believe that at this time a political will is urgently needed to initiate means by which to place the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) in the hands of the civil society.

THE ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION take a clear and flexible position in favor of a dialogue of reconciliation with the aim of achieving the necessary changes that led it to the decision to take up arms.

ALL BELIEVERS, as part of the Church in Mexico, undertake the self-examination necessary to be more attentive to the suffering of our people, to be companions to them and find, with them, effective paths to achieve the justice they deserve as children of God.

ALL MEXICANS open their consciousness to overcoming the racism within us and accept the indigenous as brothers, children of the same Father, and as members of the national community, with equal dignity and rights.

SIGNED: José Morales Orozco, S. J. Provincial

This is perhaps the most surprising and most serious thing published during these hysteria-filled days: the violence was not committed by insurrectionary indigenous peoples, rather by those who have exploited them for five hundred years. Right, then, is on the side of the indigenous groups, whom despair has compelled to manifest themselves in armed counter-violence. The letter serves as a brake on the unbridled racism that has begun to spread. Recently, one hears unbelievable things said against the Indians; sometimes the most violent are spoken by people whose faces are marked with indigenous features. They are relentless. They advocate for extermination. I suppose they believe at that moment their listeners are seeing them in a different light: blue eyes and Viking hair.

15 JANUARY

In Cuernavaca, at the home of an industrialist friend and former classmate at university. For a while we talked about nothing in particular until someone mentioned the name of the president. My host almost jumped out of his chair. He got up from the table and began to pace the room, violently cursing him. He spoke of the murder of his servant, the slaughter of his mares, of his obsession with power, of his arrogance, and the problems of misgovernment we owe to him… I was dumbfounded. So the hatred toward him and the current group in power has taken root in the different strata of society! In some cases, and this may be one of them, it’s probably a matter of interests…

16 JANUARY

Another day without being able to focus on my work! I have done nothing but read newspapers. Hours and hours of consternation. I seem to understand the situation less and less. I’ve read all kinds of editorials. I went through some excellent parodies by Carlos Monsiváis, his incisive criticism of José Córdoba and his disciple Salinas in El Financiero, and the visceral feelings of some journalists from other newspapers who seem almost to be calling for the final solution for the Indians, the guerrillas, and their handlers; the latter, according to one of them, are headquartered in the UNAM and the state of Michoacán, where they are devising new plots against the nation and other evil deeds and things of that sort. I was dizzy and very exhausted. I still do not understand much. Who encourages and supports rebellion? The Church in Chiapas expresses support for the indigenous…The Pope himself has declared himself in favor of peace and relief for the extreme poverty in which the Chiapas Indians are living.

18 JANUARY

It looks like things are on a good and fast track. The government has declared an amnesty and the rebel army is beginning to send signals that they could initiate contact and later negotiations. Monsiváis says that the Zapatista positions are quite realistic. Perhaps we’ll be at peace again soon. What will happen next? Will Colosio continue his electoral campaign? Will the many questions that have been posed be answered? I find it impossible to think about anything else.

19 JANUARY

…Since the first of January, I’ve not been able to do anything except read newspapers, watch the news, and talk about Chiapas.

21 JANUARY

I’m copying a communiqué by the Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos that has been discussed widely today. It has impressed me more than any of his other statements:

Until today, 18 January 1994, the only thing we’ve heard about is the federal government’s formal offer to pardon our troops. Why do we need to be pardoned? What are they going to pardon us for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting our misery in silence? For not accepting with humility the enormous historical burden of contempt and abandonment? For having risen up in arms after finding all other paths closed? For not having heeded the Chiapas penal code, one of the most absurd and repressive in memory? For having shown the rest of the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists even among the world’s poorest peoples? For having prepared well and with conscience before beginning our uprising? For having brought guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For having learned to fight before doing it? For being Mexicans? For being mainly indigenous? For calling on the Mexican people to fight by whatever means possible for what belongs to them? For fighting for liberty, democracy, and justice? For not following the models of previous guerrilla armies? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell out?

Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Those who for years and years sat before a table of plenty and had their fill while we sat with death, so frequent and familiar to us that we finally stopped fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and our souls with promises and declarations? Or the dead, our dead, so mortally dead from “natural” death, that is from measles, whooping cough, dengue fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria and other gastrointestinal and pulmonary niceties? […] Those who deny our people the gift and right of governance and self-governance? Those who refused to respect our customs, our culture, and our language? Those who treat us like foreigners in our own land and who demand papers and obedience to a law whose existence and justness we don’t accept? Those who tortured, imprisoned, assassinated, and disappeared us for the grave “crime” of wanting a piece of land, not a big piece, not a small piece, just a piece on which we can grow something to fill our stomachs?

Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it?

The President of the Republic? The Secretaries of State? The Senators? Deputies? Governors? Mayors? The police? The federal army? The magnates of banking, industry, commerce, and land? The political parties? The intellectuals? Galio and Nexus? The media? Students? Teachers? Neighbors? Laborers? Farmers? Indigenous people? Those who died in vain?

Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Well, that’s all for now.

Health and a hug, and with this cold both will be appreciated (I believe), even if they come from a “professional of violence.”

Subcomandante Marcos.

This statement left me even more perplexed. The letter exudes an aura of Dostoevskian religiosity entirely different from the verbal habits of Latin American guerrillas. I do not detect traces of Castro or the Maoists. Nothing like the Shining Path; nothing that recalls that archaic lexicon from the manuals of Nikitin or Konstantinov, which were used so often in my student days. The statement by Aspe, the finance secretary, saying that we Mexicans had invented a great myth, that of our misery, is shattered before the torrent of extreme, excessive, and desperate poverty that the cameras capture every time they do a report from Chiapas — that is, every day — as well as the statements by Salinas about our entrance into the First World through the Free Trade Agreement. Who the hell is the masked Subcomandante! A seminarian, perhaps?

22 JANUARY

…A photo on the cover of the magazine Macrópolis sums Chiapas up for me: a child of seven or eight years old carrying a bundle of firewood on his back, his head toward the ground, a rope across his forehead, a mecapal, sustains the load. The picture moves me more than any description. All the images that appear on television nowadays, especially of children and old people, are terrible. It is the hidden world we were barely able or wanted to recognize. The press says that Marcos may be a Jesuit, a former student of the Polytechnic, a student expelled from the National University, a Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Venezuelan guerrilla, a retired professional soccer player.

23 JANUARY

I just saw an account of the events in Chiapas on television. Subcomandante Marcos, as well as the other rebel officers, insist that their army has been preparing for several years and that they have people positioned in many parts of the country, perhaps in order to look bigger in the eyes of the nation and to arrive at the negotiating table with a force otherwise difficult to verify. Because Marcos is apparently now willing to hold talks with the government, or at least that’s what I thought I heard. It’s at moments such as this that I despise my deafness. My impression, contrary to what some of my friends think, is that the solution to the conflict is still distant and so far the guerrillas have been able to play government just like they wanted, like a cat with a mouse. There is a lot of talk that the PRI will have a big surprise before the end of the electoral campaign. At least the greyish outlook we’ve lived with in recent years has completely changed. We find ourselves suddenly in something that, for better or for worse, is a different Mexico. In La Jornada, Octavio Paz criticizes intellectuals for their irresponsibility when speaking about the events in Chiapas. I have the impression it was a veiled rebuke of Carlos Fuentes for his recent statements about a first post-socialist rebellion. The reproachful tone at the beginning notwithstanding, it is an extremely nuanced text. Paz states that the Subcomandante’s letter of pardon moved him, and he recognizes that Mexican society, especially the landowners and politicians in Chiapas, owes a heavy moral debt to the Indians.

24 JANUARY

I watched the news this morning. Everything the President said about the path to peace being the only solution seemed farcical. In practice, they’ve begun to obstruct Camacho because he’s gained too much stature. Deep down, the politicians don’t give a damn about the country.

26 JANUARY

I’m stunned. I still do not understand what is going on in Chiapas. They say the government now knows who’s leading and protecting the insurgency and within a week everything will be explained. Already today Camacho Solís was not mentioned on the news. During dinner someone said there was an open break between him and the president. If I only knew for sure it was true! What in fact is true is that some of the journalists that receive money from the PRI or from government offices have pounced on him with renewed ferocity. There are times when one feels very discouraged.

27 JANUARY

The Zapatistas’ victory will not be military but moral. They’ve managed to produce a considerable upheaval, both nationally and internationally. Perhaps this will make a transformation in Chiapas possible that would otherwise be impossible to dream of. I’m not getting my hopes up about the acceptance of humanitarian changes by the Chiapas farmers and politicians. Or in the priístas. They still haven’t swallowed their fear and are already mobilizing to put an end to Camacho Solís.

II. WATER FROM THE SAME RIVER

Toward the end of January, I felt the need to visit the theater of events in an attempt to put certain things in order. It seemed to me that around those dates I was making too much in my journal of the circumstances as well as of the Subcomandante. I had many unanswered questions. Perhaps visiting the places where most of the action was taking place, learning the opinions of the witnesses to the occupation of San Cristóbal, for example, could help me see things more clearly. I mentioned it to Paz Cervantes, and she immediately joined the project. Paz knows Chiapas well. She began to organize the trip. We would fly from Mexico to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, and there, at the airport, we would rent a car to drive to San Cristóbal and everywhere the army would allow. She would be responsible for booking the hotel, flights, everything.

On February 3rd I traveled by car from Xalapa to Veracruz, where I would fly to Mexico City, spend the night, and start the trip to Chiapas with Paz early the next morning. A few hours before leaving Xalapa, I received from Italy Tabucchi’s last novel: Pereira Declares, the first book I would read after abstaining for several weeks. I started reading in Xalapa, continued in the car, then on the plane in order to finish it that night in Mexico City. It was the best preparation for beginning the journey, that pilgrimage deep inside myself I hoped to undertake. Tabucchi declares through his hero Pereira that every man harbors within his breast a confederation of souls, a theory that is not new; on the contrary, the concept that multiple personalities coexist for better or worse within the same individual has become a cliché of contemporary culture. Tabucchi, however, resurrects an all-but-forgotten theory of Pierre Janet in which one of the souls that inhabits us maintains hegemonic control over the others, without conceding to that hegemony the possibility of being eternal or immutable. An ego, one of the many that make us up, may, at a given moment and as a result of some stimulus, defeat the heretofore ruling ego, thus becoming the new hegemonic ego that will unify the confederation of souls that is each one of us. Tabucchi’s Pereira is a cautious man in the midst of a dirty and dangerous world; he attempts to remain outside politics, to not swim in murky water, to close his eyes to certain situations. The appearance of a young man who could be the same age as the son Pereira never had will allow the emergence of a new hegemonic ego, which will turn the old man whose only desire is to escape the ugliness of his time into an active enemy of the Salazar regime.

The book was predestined for me, and I read it at the most opportune moment, as I was beginning to feel the impulses that were a prelude to the emergence of a new ego. I would know when I confronted the signs of a new reality if this was true or merely wishful thinking. Four days in Chiapas were enough to shake off thirty years or more. Excitement, astonishment, enthusiasm, pain, and anxiety were some of the feelings I experienced simultaneously during those days. It was like witnessing the outbreak of a repulsive tumor and watching the pus furrow through its edges. The nation, the body where the abscess was located, was visibly trying to come out of its lethargy, to breathe, to dust itself off. The journey to Chiapas allowed me to approach reality; at the same time, the accumulation of diffuse and distant circumstances at times made the trip seem unreal, dreamlike, free from the ties of this world.

Traveling with Paz Cervantes, a friend par excellence, was a veritable godsend: she knew the area very well; but not only that, she also knew how to observe, she was able to separate what seemed fused and unite what was dispersed. What’s more, my being there with Carlos Monsiváis and Alejandro Brito for two of those days was another stroke of luck. Thanks to them, I was able to hear Camacho Solís’s statements as well as those of his entourage; we spoke at length with the historian Alejandra Moreno Toscano, who gave us guidelines to orient us in Chiapas’s intricate labyrinth, with politicians of different stripes, with priests, and local as well as foreign journalists. Paz and I also spoke to the everyday people of San Cristóbal. In all of them, we encountered hope for a quick peace, if not tomorrow then the next day. They wished for it, yet at the same time they hoped it would not mean a return to the situation prior to December 31, the day the uprising began. Most claimed that the uprising had been necessary so the world would know the climate of terror Chiapas had endured throughout its entire history, but above all — and they put special emphasis on this — during the last fifteen years. It was four solar days, painful, exhilarating, and hopeful. Paz and I attended with Monsiváis and Alejandro Brito a crowded press conference with Manuel Camacho Solís, in which he announced it would be only a matter of days before they knew when and where the peace talks would be held; we attended at the cathedral a mass for peace celebrated at night and officiated by Don Samuel Ruiz, Bishop of San Cristóbal, attended by the commissioner, several journalists, foreign observers, and hundreds of Indians, who saw in the bishop their most loyal defender, their father.

The four of us: Paz, Carlos, Alejandro, and I traveled one morning to Ocosingo. After passing countless military checkpoints and seeing hundreds of Indians of all ages huddled beside stationary trucks who apparently had been detained by soldiers, we arrived at the locale. I have known few cities as ugly, as lacking in appeal, as Ocosingo. Its ugliness and its clumsiness were, perhaps, the inevitable product of those days. The streets were empty, the shops were mostly closed; in the market some stalls were covered with black cloths. This was the place where the bloodiest encounters between the army and the Zapatistas took place. The city was still tightly guarded. The air was oppressive and detestable. That evening we returned to San Cristóbal in a very somber mood.

That night we spoke to priests whose stories of oppression inflicted on the Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Ch’ol, and Tojolabal people were so atrocious that the memory of the checkpoints on the roads, the Indian families standing in the countryside next to buses and trucks, the military who did not allow even children to sit on the ground, the tanks and patrol cars, the streets in Ocosingo, seem like the details of a delightful fairy tale. The Catholic Church in Chiapas, especially the Bishop of San Cristóbal, had begun to be attacked by journalists, politicians, and the “good” people of San Cristóbal, the coletos, the white elites among whom racism has been endemic. According to one of the priests, they are trying to implicate the bishop in the uprising, which is wholly false. The work of the Church in Chiapas began four hundred years ago with Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, the first great apóstol de los indios, and has continued until today. The bishop’s actions, another priest says, remain the same. We learned that a few years ago the Church sent out thousands of catechists (I thought I heard more than eight thousand) to live in the most inhospitable regions of Chiapas. They penetrated into the heart of darkness: the Lacandon jungle. They lived as poor as the Indians, in the same conditions; taught them to have faith in Christ, but also to be proud of being Indians. And for that the Chiapas ranchers, the cultural Hispanics of the state, and the coletos of San Cristóbal have never forgiven them.

The ideology of the current movement was amassed from the teaching of the catechists, from the action of some student groups who survived the repression of 1968, from the branches and stumps that broke off from the most radical leftist movement of the sixties and seventies, and from the despair and the abuse of the indigenous communities. It is not difficult to imagine the many controversies that have been produced, the suspicions, resentments, internecine ruptures, defenses of orthodoxy against the onslaught of the modern, over and over and again, until that once-unformed embryo succeeded in achieving a degree of coherent efficacy and manifesting itself in the armed movement that, as the Subcomandante said with undeniable awareness, was determined not to repeat the patterns of earlier guerrillas.

The next-to-the-last day of our stay in Chiapas, Paz and I visited San Juan Chamula, that is, his church, that indescribable place where among the assorted stench of alcohol, wax, incense, urine, and sweat one approaches ecstasy. It takes time to grow accustomed to that undulating chiaroscuro. The light comes from hundreds of candles, votives, and tapers placed in different places and at different heights. There are areas that remain forever in the shadows. It was Sunday. A mass baptism was being celebrated. Dozens of infants were screaming in unison. Entire families apostrophized loudly, furiously, before this or that altar, this or that saint, as they passed bottles of aguardiente from hand to hand. A decrepit old Indian woman carded the wool-like hair of small children who rolled nimbly on the floor, which made the task of picking their lice more difficult. A ceremonial procession of dignitaries, the village stewards, dressed in their Sunday best, roamed the premises. They beat the floor with their canes, made speeches in their language, bowed first to one side and then the other, then continued their rounds in ritual step. In a corner, a couple slept sprawled on the ground, the man still had a bottle of aguardiente in his hands; several children, surely theirs, intoned a sad, monotone song. And above and beside the crowd of the vivid, haggard, and moribund chatterboxes, the sacred was imposed. They must have prayed this way once in the Roman catacombs and temples built to the new faith in Antioch and Trebizond. The shepherds would arrive with their animals and skins of wine; they would pray and sing until reaching a delirium that united them with that which was higher than themselves. And in San Juan Chamula, beside us, all this continued to live and was amazing and terrible, luminous and crepuscular. I emerged from there as if I were far away, as if I were exiting a thick, mottled dream, and while still in this state Paz Cervantes put me in the car and took me to Zinacantán, a clean and prosperous town, which in those parts was a miracle.

In the village church, small and ascetic, unlike the whirlwind we had just left, there was only a couple, most certainly married; the husband and wife, very young, were wearing clothes embroidered in splendid colors. There were also in the church a couple of children, five or six-years-old, the children of that exceptionally attractive couple. When we arrived the husband and wife were kneeling before the main altar, praying; the children sat in the front row, behind their parents, just a step away. Suddenly, the man let out a horrible, terrifying howl. Upon hearing this, the woman began to wail in anguish. Later, it was she who howled; she became a thunderclap, a whip, a relentless storm, while he rolled on the floor, crying, babbling, and pleading. Later, both of them began to moan in unison, prostrate on the stone floor. This was only the introit. They recovered suddenly, jumped up, and began to run around the walls, each in opposite directions; they crossed and kept running, screaming and crying like two desperate souls. The pain was excruciating, indescribable, unbearable. It felt as if staying there would give me a heart attack. Paz’s cheeks were awash in tears. At one point, the children, who until then had behaved normally, like spectators at a play they had already seen, walked up to us as if they knew us, and one of them, the eldest, I think, said to me: “¡Dame chicle!” “Give me gum!” I said I didn’t have any, but he returned to the charge: “¡Dame un lápiz!” “Give me a pencil!” I gave him a disposable pen, and they returned calmly to their seat as if the parents’ wailing and mourning didn’t faze them. We, however, left the temple like cockroaches that had just been given a beating. What had just happened? What was that? Suffering caused by unavoidable misfortune? The death of a close relative? An unspeakable offense that brought terrible dishonor to them and their relatives? The knowledge that one of them was suffering from a disease from which he would soon die? Or was it merely a routine ceremony, a form of catharsis that was elicited from time to time and for which the community had left them alone in church that Sunday? Just as before in San Juan Chamula, I had the feeling of moving through a strange land, in Ultima Thule, where reason was reduced to the ineffable. The enormity of my gaps was revealed to me. One learns something always in fits and starts, in fragments, he’s aware of effects, but when he can’t identify the causes it is as if he didn’t know anything. When was the Christian liturgy that we know today standardized? What elements could be defined as Christian, and which were Quiché or Maya in these religious practices? Which were added in the last five hundred years? When everything has passed — and hopefully everything goes well! — I promised myself that I would return to San Cristóbal de Las Casas and San Juan Chamula and to Zinacantán. But then I will be better informed, with more readings to be able to discern a bit of its reality.

We returned that night to San Cristóbal. We dined for the last time in the restaurant in our hotel. We said hello to a great deal of journalists and members of non-governmental organizations, some friends from many years ago, and others we’d met during the last few days. The restaurant and bar are like a scene from a motion picture. It could be Saigon, for example, during the Vietnam War. There were war reporters and television teams from many countries. All the major languages were being spoken. According to what we heard, some of them had managed to penetrate the jungle and visit the Zapatistas. It was not clear whether it was in jeeps or on foot. They took on a mysterious air as they spoke about their experience; they seemed to imply that any misstep could jeopardize their contacts; it would be denouncing them. They themselves are amazed at what is happening. They came to Chiapas with little or no sympathy for the guerrillas. They were only interested in finding out what had happened, why that hiccup in the Mexican economic miracle and Free Trade Agreement had occurred. The guerrilla no longer enjoys the prestige that it did in the fifties or sixties. On the contrary, all of Che’s followers ended up being inept or fanatics. And suddenly they’ve found a person and a situation they did not expect. Of course, the monstrous presence of extreme poverty in which the Indians live and the always active racism of the white landowners are the appropriate framework for this young masked man whose language is different from all previous guerrilla leaders. Among the various registers he handles — and this truly is unbelievable! — is humor.

After talking about the still incipient charisma of the Subcomandante, the conversation in every restaurant and bar in San Cristóbal branches off, but not too far. When were the negotiations finally going to take place? What role would the Bishop of San Cristóbal play in them? Would it end in a win for Camacho Solís? Would Camacho still have complete official support? Could it be true that cracks had appeared in the Mexican political system?

Suddenly, I feel that everything that Paz and I have seen today are but pieces of the same puzzle. Foreigners in San Cristóbal with their bulky film equipment, the church of San Juan Chamula, the ceremony witnessed in Zinacantán, the Subcomandante’s invisible presence in the air, the indigenous mass that has come to San Cristóbal, fleeing the bombings, the Indians who surround the cathedral in vigil for their bishop are but particles, all of them fragments of the same phenomenon, water from the same river, moments from the same time.

III. FROM THEN UNTIL NOW

I left that day infected by the negotiating climate that existed in San Cristóbal. And, indeed, the meeting between the government representatives and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation took place shortly after in the city’s cathedral. There were three protagonists: Manuel Camacho Solís, Bishop Samuel Ruiz, and Subcomandante Marcos. Mexico watched in fascination as the Zapatista delegation entered and exited the cathedral. The ski masks covering their faces and the rifles and bandoliers strapped to their chests added intensity to the epic story. These were scenes that took us back seventy years or more, to the time of Zapata and Villa, whom we only knew from the movies, and not to one when treaties are signed today by attorneys in suit and tie. The Subcomandante was playing his cards for the second time. The tragic engine was granting him the force needed to fulfill his destiny, as it had done the first of January of that year. The image of the Subcomandante rose dramatically among both his admirers and his detractors. No one knew anything about him save his eyes, hands, and pipe.

The drive to engage in dialogue decreased suddenly, and did so in a dramatic fashion. Camacho Solís was replaced by gray, irrelevant characters — second- or third-rate bureaucrats. His lack of imagination complemented the superior orders perfectly. It had become necessary to bog down the dialogue.

The designs of power are always difficult to pin down. Politicians speak of peace as the only way to resolve the Chiapas conflict, but they also allow the growth of the paramilitary guardias blancas, encourage the most virulent racist groups, especially the coletos in San Cristóbal, harass the supporters of Zapatista Army, co-opt anyone they can, intensify the smear campaigns against the Subcomandante and the Bishop of San Cristóbal. Those campaigns are carried out without many successes, rather with setbacks. Because as time goes by — from the beginning of the uprising until today two and a half years have passed! — the Zapatista rebellion has acquired characteristics of both gale and spring; it has toppled gigantic fallacies, and has shown a vitality, a moral strength, and an admirable political imagination. It owes its existence still to these virtues.

The armed rebellion having just emerged, its leaders are already noticing that the struggle should be fought more in the media than on the battlefield. Marcos’s capabilities, his imagination, speed, humor, have allowed his figure to be taken seriously beyond our borders. Just a few months after his appearance as the Subcomandante of the Zapatista Army, Marcos announced that his destiny and that of his troops should be placed in the hands of civil society, ceding to it all his triumphs and attributes. It was civil society that should grow and take the great strides that would lead the country toward democracy. The action of civil society would cause the insurgent army to forfeit its raison d’être. The Convention of Aguascalientes, in the Chiapas jungle, in Marcos’s keynote speech, urged parties to the convention to move in that direction: “Fight to make us unnecessary, to eliminate us as alternatives!” And he insisted in the end: “Fight relentlessly. Fight and defeat the government. Struggle and defeat us!”

His thinking is fundamentally democratic. And prominent foreign figures saw that sooner than those in Mexico. On 2 March 1995, in La Jornada a letter was published signed by some prestigious Italian intellectuals, among them Norberto Bobbio and Michelangelo Bovero. Allow me to quote one paragraph:

The Zapatista movement with its demands for democracy, freedom, and justice, its proposals for constitutional and anti-authoritarian reforms, and, above all, its surprisingly persuasive ability to communicate and disseminate them has surpassed the paradigms of the old Latin American guerrillas. Even as the dramatic option for armed insurrection, in January 1994, has raised and continues to raise distressing questions, it is clear that during the course of events the movement has been able to position itself as one of the principle actors in the process of democratic transition that appears to have produced a response in a broad plan of reforms. Thus, the neo-Zapatista movement, by contributing to the debate on the different path to democracy, has benefited recently from a spirit of solidarity that once again has countered an attempted military liquidation of the insurgents.

One of the official obsessions was to identify the Subcomandante and reveal his true face before the country. They achieved it. They believed that the virtual unmasking would destroy the figure, eliminate his epic halo. The fiasco was tremendous. They were sure that they had found a fossil with an appalling criminal record. On February 9, 1995, what appeared to be his real name and a photo of his prerevolutionary period were shown on television. Officials said the man was a criminal, a fugitive from justice, and therefore should be immediately arrested. The information that then appeared in the press played against the persecutors: the Subcomandante “turned out to be the son of businessmen, a Catholic school student, a brother of a former member of the PRI, philosophy student, decorated by President López Portillo for academic achievement, a student at the Sorbonne. His thesis adviser was the philosopher Cesáreo Morales, who became Luis Donaldo Colosio’s chief of staff,” writes Juan Villoro. “The government needed an ideological troglodyte, enrolled in some ‘frequent flyer’ program to North Korea, or a psychopath willing to use a power saw at the direction of Quentin Tarantino. Instead, it found the perfect son-brother-in-law-boyfriend for the Gran Familia Mexicana.”

For several weeks Proceso documented the celebrity’s life through testimonies from family, friends, fellow students, and teachers. A photo of him taken from an experimental film impresses me because of its Beckettian loneliness, as well as the fact that during his adolescence he acted in several plays, including, precisely, Waiting for Godot. Despite the reports, no one calls him by name, neither his supporters nor his enemies, neither the press nor TV, not even members of the government. He continues being Subcomandante Marcos for all purposes.

It has been two and a half years, and we have yet to enter the First World, quite the contrary. We have experienced a permanent economic crisis. As for politics, if we look at the PRI party family, we seem to be witnessing something akin to the end of the world. There have been high-profile murders, that of Luis Donaldo Colosio, candidate for president of the Republic, Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the leader of PRI, others. The pressures to prevent the truth from coming to light must be immense. Investigations seem like very complex, byzantine amusements that do not allow us to get to the bottom of anything. Crimes committed by leaders and officials, tried and proven, go unpunished. Corruption among the leadership during the previous administration and its relationship to drug trafficking and organized crime have become public knowledge. This collapse, this decline in social morality, favors the development of a civil society that has rendered a military solution in Chiapas impossible. One must remember that all the public demonstrations have been for peace and none in support of the armed path. Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas understood this immediately. Now we have to achieve a just and worthy peace. Not only that: there is a desire to move toward a peaceful means and defend the causes they hold through political action. And the Subcomandante, “once granted, his glittering arms he will commend to rust / his barbed steeds to stables,” as a character says in Shakespeare’s Richard II.

Are there discernible victories in Zapatista actions? It seems to me that the strengthening of civil society is one of them. It is also important, although now less visible, to support publicly in Chiapas the problem of inequality and to demand that different sectors, including the indigenous, initiate a conversation on racism. The maturity with which this discussion is being carried out suggests that we are witnessing the beginnings of an irreversible phenomenon.

During the moments when a military solution seemed imminent, demonstrations for peace multiplied. At times the motto was, “We are all Indians.” The reaction of some journalists or broadcasters was sarcastic. To conceive of oneself as an indio? To want to be a Tzeltal, a Ch’ol, a Tojolabal? I suppose it seemed so preposterous to them that they weren’t even aware of the deep racism that their rejection implied. I do not know if this attitude has softened. It is possible that after seeing the violent reaction of the powers that be of San Cristóbal against the indigenous population of the city, the lynch-mob mentality of the ranchers and of their guardias blancas, they will remember the King of Denmark who, during the German occupation, went out into the street wearing an armband on which was sewn a star of David, the very day it was made mandatory for the Jews to wear it outside their homes as a visible sign of belonging to a despicable race. There will be a day, I imagine, when it will not be necessary to shout that we are also Indians. I think about Chiapas and about what it might become. I think about the Indians I saw in early February 1994 detained by the dozens at military checkpoints. I think about the hunt for girls to feed brothels, about the two Indians tied to huge anthills, as a priest from San Cristóbal told me, “to teach them how to behave.” I think that all of this needs to disappear. Or is that too much to ask? Maybe so. But we must think that if it is true that we are living in cruel times, it is also true that we are in a time of wonders.

Xalapa, June 1996