July 23, 1997: San Cristobal.

So now I have the opportunity to meet Zapatista leaders, and live and work on a community in a Zapatista controlled zone. They have a digital camera, so they will be doing their own web pages. There is no phone but the pages can be saved onto disk, and it is a one hour drive into the next town where they can be loaded up onto the internet. It should be quite exciting.

When I say it is Zapatista controlled, I mean it is really organised! Perhaps more so than the FMLN guerrilla controlled 'liberated zones' in El Salvador. They even have their own system of ID -- I had to get a passport photo made up in the nearest city, and pick up a plastic coated Zapatista ID card. The idea is, I am told, that if you screw up or upset them, you don't get accepted into their zone again!

As it turned out I was let in. It was a little bit like passing customs at an airport. Except that the the guys at the gate were wearing the red patterned Zapatista masks to check my ID, and question me thoroughly. I had a message to pass on, so they sent for that person to talk to me. And when I was invited to come into the settlement and check a few things, I had to show my passport again, be frisked down, have my bag thoroughly checked, with my pockets, and even my wallet!

Now this might sound as if they are going bureaucratic, but I think it is because the Zapatistas recognise the sensitivity of the indigenous population, and of course, their own need for self protection, against misrepresentation, amongst other things. They are linking up ideologically, and in their communications, in a very global way. And there is an awareness of danger, as well as a consciousness of the negative impact of being overrun with all kinds of 'tourists'. And it is, above all, a policy decided upon by the indigenous communities themselves.

Once in, the settlement was pretty impressive! There were about four or five sleeping barracks, each about 100 foot long. then there was a sort of rough timber town hall, with a wonderful mural of Che Guevara on one side, and another of Emiliano Zapata on the other. A long shelter -- about hundred yards long, with a huge mud oven, that was the kitchen, and the new building which was a sort of office, small meetings room, and computer room, which was lined with plastic to keep the rain off the computers.

The original settlement was the sleeping barracks. Now these have an interesting history. Back in the early nineties when the government wrote the 'ejido' laws out of the Mexican Constitution [modified Article 27: ed.note] (these were laws from the original Mexican Revolution which guaranteed the peasants survival plots of land, sufficient for them to grow their own food needs, which could not be sold, or used as security for loans) a lot of indigenous campesinos were forced off their plots by the big landholders using private armies called the 'white guards'. The Zapatista movement developed as a land rights movement. And what they would do would be to 'prefabricate' basic dwellings secretly and hide them in the jungle -- that is, poles cut to the right length, bales of thatch and bamboo, etc.

Then when they were hunted off their existing plots, they were prepared to erect a settlement overnight on some unused land, miles away and settle there, laying claim to it on the principles of the old ejido laws -- and when a government team came to inspect the claim there would be a fully built village, and there was some kind of legal claim they could make. And the white guards, and government forces would all be deployed somewhere else, and the landholders couldn't claim that he indians were squatting on 'their' land.

The landholders hate this of course, because they have been accustomed to use the indians as dependent cheap labour in literally serflike conditions -- payed with tokens which they would have to exchange for products at the 'company store' -- usually liquor. This is still going on in many areas not controlled by the Zapatistas. I have a whole stack of clippings from the last week's papers about an estate run by a German family called 'Liquid Ambar' where a whole lot of [maldito] has been going down, and some human rights groups were able to establish that they were breaking all kinds of labour laws, including this sytem of payment with tokens.

Anyway -- these sleeping barracks are still there, as semi-permanent structures, the original settlement, erected within a day or two. It is also historic because it is where the Zapatista leaders held the first of their famous 'encuentros' or large meetings where they formed policies and announced them to the world at large.

They (or at least Marcos) are making some interesting claims of going beyond the 'older' revolutionary, and guerrilla movements. They make a point of distancing themselves somewhat from other revolutionary movements, including the EPR in the state of Guerrero, and the 'Villistas' (named for Pancho Villa, Zapato's brother in arms, and also a land reformer) who have a radical campesino union here in Chiapas. At the Puebla University conference, you occasionally heard the term "the first postmodern revolution" bandied round. [Ed. note: The Puebla conference was the 1^st International Conference of Mexican, Canadian and U.S. Philosophers and Social Scientists co-organized by the Radical Philosophy Association.

Perhaps we should think a while about that one. As the mural of Che Guevara, and Marcos' professed admiration of Che and his ethical principle of 'the new man' indicate; in going beyond other, and earlier, revolutionary struggles the Zapatistas do not reject them in their entirety.

(c)1997 Warwick Fry

Warwick Fry's reflections on El Salvador and Nicaragua.