Fences and Windows, page 17
“This non-self,” writes Juana Ponce de Leon who has edited Marcos’s writings, “makes it possible for Marcos to become the spokesperson for indigenous communities. He is transparent, and he is iconographic.” Yet the paradox of Marcos and the Zapatistas is that despite the masks, the non-selves, the mystery, their struggle is about the opposite of anonymity—it is about the right to be seen. When the Zapatistas took up arms and said “¡Ya bastaf! in 1994, it was a revolt against their invisibility. Like so many others left behind by globalization, the Mayans of Chiapas had fallen off the economic map: “Below in the cities,” the EZLN command stated, “we did not exist. Our lives were worth less than those of machines or animals. We were like stones, like weeds in the road. We were silenced. We were faceless.” By arming and masking themselves, the Zapatistas explain, they weren’t joining some Star Trek-like Borg universe of people without identities fighting in common cause, they were forcing the world to stop ignoring their plight, to see their long-neglected faces. The Zapatistas are “the voice that arms itself to be heard. The face that hides itself to be seen.”
Meanwhile, Marcos himself—the supposed non-self, the conduit, the mirror—writes in a tone so personal and poetic, so completely and unmistakably his own, that he is constantly undercutting and subverting the anonymity that comes from his mask and pseudonym. It is often said that the Zapatistas’ best weapon was the Internet, but their true secret weapon was their language. In Our Word Is Our Weapon, we read manifestos and war cries that are also poems, legends and riffs. A character emerges behind the mask, a personality. Marcos is a revolutionary who writes long meditative letters to Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano about the meaning of silence; who describes colonialism as a series of “bad jokes badly told;” who quotes Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and Borges. Who writes that resistance takes place “anytime any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes resignation has woven for them and cynicism has dyed grey.” And who then sends whimsical mock telegrams to all of “civil society” : “THE GREYS HOPE TO WIN STOP RAINBOW NEEDED URGENTLY.”
Marcos seems keenly aware of himself as an irresistible romantic hero. He’s an Isabel Allende character in reverse— not the poor peasant who becomes a Marxist rebel but a Marxist intellectual who becomes a poor peasant. He plays with this character, flirts with it, saying that he can’t reveal his real identity for fear of disappointing his female fans. Perhaps wary that this game was getting a little out of hand, Marcos chose the eve of Valentine’s Day this year to break the bad news: he is married and deeply in love, and her name is La Mar (“the Sea” —what else would it be?)
This is a movement keenly aware of the power of words and symbols. The twenty-four-strong Zapatista command had originally planned to make their grand entrance to Mexico City riding in on horseback, like indigenous conquistadors (they ended up settling on a flatbed truck filled with hay). But the caravan is more than symbolic. The goal is to address the Mexican Congress and demand that legislators pass an Indigenous Bill of Rights, a law that came out of the Zapatistas’ failed peace negotiations with former president Ernesto Zedillo. Vicente Fox, his newly elected successor who famously bragged during the campaign that he could solve the Zapatista problem “in fifteen minutes,” has asked for a meeting with Marcos but has so far been refused. Not until the bill is passed, says Marcos, not until more army troops are withdrawn from Zapatista territory, not until all Zapatista political prisoners are freed. Marcos has been betrayed before and accuses Fox of staging a “simulation of peace” before the peace negotiations have even restarted.
What is clear in all this jostling for position is that something radical has changed in the balance of power in Mexico. The Zapatistas are calling the shots—which is significant, because they have lost the habit of firing shots. What started as a small, armed insurrection has in the past seven years turned into what now looks more like a peaceful mass movement. It has helped topple the corrupt seventy-one-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and has placed indigenous rights at the centre of the Mexican political agenda.
Which is why Marcos gets angry when he is looked on as just another guy with a gun: “What other guerrilla force has convened a national democratic movement, civic and peaceful, so that armed struggle becomes useless?” he asks. “What other guerrilla force asks its bases of support about what it should do before doing it? What other guerrilla force has struggled to achieve a democratic space and not taken power? What other guerrilla force has relied more on words than on bullets?”
The Zapatistas chose January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force, to “declare war” on the Mexican army, launching an insurrection and briefly taking control of the city of San Cristobal de las Casas and five Chiapas towns. They sent out a communiqué explaining that NAFTA, which banned subsidies to indigenous farm co-operatives, would be a “summary execution” for four million indigenous Mexicans in Chiapas, the country’s poorest province.
Nearly a hundred years had passed since the Mexican revolution promised to return indigenous land through agrarian reform; after all these broken promises, NAFTA was simply the last straw. “We are the product of five hundred years of struggle & but today we say “¡Ya basta!” Enough is enough.” The rebels called themselves Zapatistas, taking their name from Emiliano Zapata, the slain hero of the 1910 revolution who, along with a ragtag peasant army, fought for lands held by large landowners to be returned to indigenous and peasant farmers.
In the seven years since they stormed onto the scene, the Zapatistas have come to represent two forces at once: first, rebels struggling against grinding poverty and humiliation in the mountains of Chiapas and, on top of this, theorists of a new movement, another way to think about power, resistance and globalization. This theory—Zapatismo—not only turns classic guerrilla tactics inside out but much of left-wing politics on its head.
For years I have watched the Zapatistas’ ideas spread through activist circles, passed along second- and third-hand: a phrase, a way to run a meeting, a metaphor that twists your brain around. Unlike classic revolutionaries who preach through bullhorns and from pulpits, Marcos has spread the Zapatista word through riddles and long, pregnant silences. Revolutionaries who don’t want power. People who must hide their faces to be seen. A world with many worlds in it.
A movement of one no and many yesses.
These phrases seem simple at first, but don’t be fooled. They have a way of burrowing into the consciousness, cropping up in strange places, being repeated until they take on this quality of truth—but not absolute truth: a truth, as the Zapatistas might say, with many truths in it. In Canada, indigenous uprising is always symbolized by a blockade: a physical barrier to stop the golf course from infringing on a native burial site, to block the construction of a hydroelectric dam or to keep an old-growth forest from being logged. The Zapatista uprising was a new way to protect land and culture: rather than locking out the world, the Zapatistas flung open the doors and invited the world inside. Chiapas was transformed, despite its poverty, despite being under constant military siege, into a global gathering place for activists, intellectuals and indigenous groups.
From the first communiqué, the Zapatistas invited the international community “to watch over and regulate our battles.” The summer after the uprising, they hosted a National Democratic Convention in the jungle; six thousand people attended, most from Mexico. In 1996, they hosted the first Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism. Some three thousand activists travelled to Chiapas to meet with others from around the world.
Marcos himself is a one-man web: he is a compulsive communicator, constantly reaching out, drawing connections between different issues and struggles. His communiqués are filled with lists of groups that he imagines are Zapatista allies: small shopkeepers, retired people and the disabled, as well as workers and campesinos. He writes to political prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier. He is pen pals with some of Latin America’s best-known novelists. He writes letters addressed “to the people of the world.”
When the uprising began, the government attempted to play down the incident as a “local” problem, an ethnic dispute easily contained. The strategic victory of the Zapatistas was to change the terms: to insist that what was going on in Chiapas could not be written off as a narrow “ethnic” struggle, that it was both specific and universal. They did this by clearly naming their enemy not only as the Mexican state but as the set of economic policies known as neo-liberalism. Marcos insisted that the poverty and desperation in Chiapas was simply a more advanced version of something happening all around the world. He pointed to the huge numbers of people who were being left behind by prosperity, whose land and work made that prosperity possible. “The new distribution of the world excludes ‘minorities,’” Marcos has said. “The indigenous, youth, women, homosexuals, lesbians, people of colour, immigrants, workers, peasants; the majority who make up the world basements are presented, for power, as disposable. The distribution of the world excludes the majorities.”
The Zapatistas staged an open insurrection, one that anyone could join, as long as they thought of themselves as outsiders, the shadow majority. By conservative estimates, there are now forty-five thousand Zapatista-related Web sites, based in twenty-six countries. Marcos’s communiqués are available in at least fourteen languages. And then there is the Zapatista cottage industry: black T-shirts with red five-pointed stars, white T-shirts with EZLN printed in black. There are baseball hats, black EZLN ski masks, Mayan-made dolls and trucks. There are posters, including one of Comandante Ramona, the much loved EZLN matriarch, as the Mona Lisa.
And the Zapatista effect goes far beyond traditional solidarity support. Many who attended the first encuentros went on to play key roles in the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and the World Bank and IMF in Washington, D.C., arriving with a new taste for direct action, for collective decision making and decentralized organizing. When the insurrection began, the Mexican military was convinced it would be able to squash the Zapatistas’ jungle uprising like a bug. It sent in heavy artillery, conducted air raids, mobilized thousands of soldiers. But instead of standing on a squashed bug, the government found itself surrounded by a swarm of international activists, buzzing around Chiapas. In the study commissioned by the U.S. military from the RAND Corporation, the EZLN is studied as “a new mode of conflict—’netwar’— in which the protagonists depend on using network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy and technology.”
The ring around the rebels has not protected the Zapatistas entirely. In December 1997, there was the brutal massacre at Acteal in which forty-five Zapatista supporters praying at a church were killed, most of them women and children. And the situation in Chiapas is still desperate, with thousands displaced from their homes. But it is also true that the situation would probably have been much worse, potentially with far greater intervention from the U.S. military, had it not been for international pressure. The RAND Corporation study states that the global activist attention arrived “during a period when the United States may have been tacitly interested in seeing a forceful crackdown on the rebels.”
So it’s worth asking what are the ideas that proved so powerful that thousands have taken it on themselves to disseminate them around the world? They have to do with power—and new ways of imagining it. For instance, a few years ago, the idea of the rebels travelling to Mexico City to address the Congress would have been impossible to contemplate. Masked guerrillas entering a hall of political power signals one thing: revolution. But Zapatistas aren’t interested in overthrowing the state or naming their leader as president. If anything, they want less state power over their lives. And, besides, Marcos says that as soon as peace has been negotiated, he will take off his mask and disappear. [When the Zapatistas finally did address the Congress, Marcos stayed outside.]
What does it mean to be a revolutionary who is not trying to stage a revolution? This is one of the key Zapatista paradoxes. In one of his many communiqués, Marcos writes that “it is not necessary to conquer the world. It is sufficient to make it new.” He adds, “Us. Today.” What sets the Zapatistas apart from your average Marxist guerrilla insurgents is that their goal is not to win control but to seize and build autonomous spaces where “democracy, liberty and justice” can thrive.
Although the Zapatistas have articulated certain key goals of their resistance (control over land, direct political representation and the right to protect their language and culture), they insist they are not interested in “the Revolution,” but rather in “a revolution that makes revolution possible.”
Marcos believes that what he has learned in Chiapas about non-hierarchical decision making, decentralized organizing and deep community democracy holds answers for the non-indigenous world as well—if only it were willing to listen. This is a kind of organizing that doesn’t compartmentalize the community into workers, warriors, farmers and students but instead seeks to organize communities as a whole, across sectors and across generations, creating “social movements.” For the Zapatistas, these autonomous zones aren’t about isolationism or dropping out, sixties-style. Quite the opposite: Marcos is convinced that these free spaces, born of reclaimed land, communal agriculture, resistance to privatization, will eventually create counter-powers to the state simply by existing as alternatives.
This is the essence of Zapatismo, and explains much of its appeal: a global call to revolution that tells you not to wait for the revolution, only to start where you stand, to fight with your own weapon. It could be a video camera, words, ideas, “hope”—all these, Marcos has written, “are also weapons.” It’s a revolution in miniature that says, “Yes, you can try this at home.” This organizing model has spread throughout Latin America and the world. You can see it in the centri sociali (social centres), the anarchist squats of Italy; in the Landless Peasants’ Movement of Brazil, which seizes tracts of unused farmland and uses them for sustainable agriculture, markets and schools under the slogan Ocupar, Resistir, Producir (Occupy, Resist, Produce). These same ideas about mobilizing the economically disappeared run through Argentina’s Piquetero movement, organizations of unemployed workers whose hunger has driven them to find new ways of winning concessions from the state. In a reversal of the traditional picket line (you can’t shut down factories that are already closed), the Piqueteros block roadways into the cities, often for weeks at a time, stopping traffic and the transportation of goods. Politicians are forced to come to the road pickets and negotiate, and the Piqueteros regularly win basic unemployment compensation for their members. Argentina’s Piqueteros (who often can be seen sporting EZLN T-shirts) believe that in a country with 30 percent of the population out of work, unions have to start organizing whole communities, not just workers. “The new factory is the neighbourhood,” says Piquetero leader Luis D’Elia. And the Zapatista ethos was forcefully expressed by the students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico during last year’s long and militant occupation of their campus. Zapata once said the land belongs to those who work it; their banners blared, “WE SAY THAT THE UNIVERSITY BELONGS TO THOSE WHO STUDY IN IT.”
Zapatismo, according to Marcos, is not a doctrine but “an intuition.” And he is consciously trying to appeal to something that exists outside the intellect, something uncynical in us, that he found in himself in the mountains of Chiapas: wonder, a suspension of disbelief, plus myth and magic. So, instead of issuing manifestos, he tries to riff his way into this place, with long meditations, flights of fancy, dreaming out loud. This is, in a way, a kind of intellectual guerrilla warfare: Marcos won’t meet his opponents on their terms, he changes the topic of conversation.
Which is why, when I arrived in Mexico for March 11, I saw something different from the big history moment I had imagined when I first got that e-mail. When the Zapatistas entered the Zócalo, the piazza in front of the legislature, with 200,000 people cheering them on, history was certainly being made, but it was a smaller, lower-case, humbler kind of history than you see in those black-and-white newsreels. A history that says, “I can’t make your history for you. But I can tell you that history is yours to make.”
The Zapatistas’ most enthusiastic supporters that day seemed to be middle-aged women—the demographic that Americans like to call “soccer moms.” They greeted the revolutionaries with chants of “You are not alone!” Some were on break from their jobs at fast-food outlets, still dressed in matching striped uniforms.
From afar, the popularity of the Zapatistas—the forty varieties of T-shirts, posters, flags and dolls—may look like mass marketing, the radical chic “branding” of an ancient culture. Yet up close, it feels like something else: genuine, anachronistic folklore. The Zapatistas have got their message out not through advertising or sound bites but through stories and symbols, painted by hand on walls, passed through word of mouth. The Internet, which mimics these organic networks, simply took this folklore and spread it around the world.
As I listened to Marcos address the crowds in Mexico City, I was struck that he didn’t sound like a politician at a rally or a preacher at a pulpit, he sounded like a poet—at the world’s largest poetry reading. And it occurred to me then that Marcos actually isn’t Martin Luther King Jr.; he is King’s very modern progeny, born of a bittersweet marriage of vision and necessity. This masked man who calls himself Marcos is the descendant of King, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Emiliano Zapata and all the other heroes who preached from pulpits only to be shot down one by one, leaving bodies of followers wandering around blind and disoriented because they had lost their heads. And in their place, the world has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than he speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn’t show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas we have not one dream of a revolution but a dreaming revolution. “This is our dream,” writes Marcos, “the Zapatista paradox—one that takes away sleep. The only dream that is dreamed awake, sleepless. The history that is born and nurtured from below.”
