On the Plain of Snakes
Page 41
The roadblocks on this highway had a history. They were occasionally teachers’ roadblocks, but more often they were Triqui roadblocks.
The Triqui people are an indigenous group of about twenty thousand fluent speakers who live in and around San Juan Copala, a small town in the municipality of Santiago Juxtlahuaca, in the mountains to the west of Oaxaca state. San Juan is about eighty miles from Oaxaca city as the crow flies and many more miles by the winding roads. The tenacious Triqui decided that they had had enough of being cheated, sidelined, and ignored by the federal government and the Oaxacan state government. In 2006, inspired by the 1994 uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the Triqui distanced themselves from the Mexican state and declared the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala.
Popular resistance in Mexico is nearly always met with deadly force: demonstrations often end in brutality, now and then with the murder of demonstrators, and occasionally in massacres. Not long after the Triqui declaration of autonomy, the federal government formed a paramilitary group to suppress the dissenters, and it gave the fierce group a picturesque name, the Union for the Social Well-Being of the Triqui Region, its acronym the almost jocular UBISORT.
“Social well-being” became a Mexican euphemism for oppression or targeted assassination. Twenty protesters were killed by police or paramilitaries in 2006, a year during which the state was frequently challenged by demonstrations. In 2008 two Triqui women were murdered by UBISORT. And a year later the Mexican government tried to starve out the Triqui by blockading San Juan Copala, shutting off water and electricity and preventing the delivery of food. This led to demonstrations in Oaxaca’s Zócalo, which, in the course of the police action to shut the protesters down, became a pitched battle, with many wounded.
When in 2010 an aid caravan attempted to help the besieged town of San Juan Copala, it was ambushed by UBISORT, the irresistible Union for the Social Well-Being of the Triqui Region. Two people in the caravan were murdered, twelve went missing, and scores were wounded. The murder victims (shot in the head) were a Mexican woman who directed a human rights group and an observer from Finland; a journalist was pursued and shot in the foot, and two Triqui women were kidnapped. The Triqui people were prevented from entering or leaving the town. This resulted in more protests, more attacks, more roadblocks, and the rise of another resistance group, called MULT (the Unification Movement for the Triqui Struggle). Eight years later, the Triqui trying to return to their land were foiled by the government—foiled in a Mexican way, the government agreeing formally to resettlement but preventing it from happening. This “Yes, then again, no” maddened the Triqui and inflamed their defiance.
San Juan Copala lies in a remote mountain fastness. So in order to gain headlines, protests have to be held in the most prominent places—the city center of Oaxaca or on a major road. In June 2017 a large, well-organized series of protests occurred all over Oaxaca state, as sixteen blockades shut down the main highways. Route 190 is a central artery where any disorder is bound to be a headline. The most recent ones had been about eight months before I arrived here, but since the issue of Triqui autonomy had been left unresolved, there was always the possibility of more roadblocks and more mayhem.
I was driving down a road that had been a site of barricades and paramilitary opposition, a thoroughfare of delay and confrontation. I was also driving to meet the Zapatistas. Juan Villoro had asked me, on behalf of Comandante Marcos, supreme leader of the Zapatistas, whether I would be interested in attending a Zapatista event, announced as a “Conversatorio” of the EZLN, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
I had the pamphlets and discussion papers in my bag, with a personal invitation from the Comandante himself. This would be catnip for the paramilitaries if I were stopped and searched.
The road south glittered in the sun, and there was little traffic, the motorists scared away by rumors of Triqui defiance. There were only big trucks for me to contend with—empty roads on the switchbacks and zigzags through the barren ranges in the shadow of Cerro El Labrador.
But as with all travel in Mexico, which I thought of as life on the plain of snakes, you can take nothing for granted. The amiable policeman might be a thief, and around the bend of the serene-looking road there might be a roadblock manned by carjackers or furious protesters. Not long after I arrived in Chiapas, a group of round-the-world cyclists was deliberately rammed by a car; two of the cyclists were killed and all of them robbed. To the natural anxieties of road travel (breakdowns, flat tires, dead ends) I added a heightened awareness of looming shadows. Mexicans speak of this all the time, especially to the gringo on the road. No one is more cautious or more prompt with warnings than the Mexican away from the security of his pueblo.
Weaving through the canyons, I came to the small town of San Pedro Totolapan and stopped for a cup of coffee in a roadside café. It was empty except for four whispering men at a table, who fell silent as I passed and—unusual in Oaxaca—with no exchange of greetings. I made a point of not lingering, and drinking my coffee outside, felt the melancholy of the isolated town, its sunlit desolation, an improvised place for travelers on the road, stopping for gas or a garnache—street snack—such as a taco or a tamale or, here in Oaxaca, a tlayuda.
The river below, deep in the canyon I saw on my map, was the Rio Grande—very wide but mostly dry, not much more than a trickle of water in the middle. I came to more opportunistic villages, offering food and tire repair, Las Margaritas and El Camarón, and at the latter place the road began to descend and straighten, so that I could see an expanse of flat plain ahead, dust brown and dotted with cactus and trees withered in the heat of the Isthmus.
That plain gave onto tropical lushness, the sea-level foliage of palms and cane fields and mango orchards. Seeing signs to the main town of the region, Tehuantepec, I thought: I made it—as though I’d squeezed through the gauntlet of the mountain passes and was here among other cars, on my way to Juchitán.
Juchitán was a detour, one of those places that look convenient on the map, but on arrival a place of pure horror.
Terremoto
I entered my room in the Hotel Xcaanda (the word means “dream” in Zapotec), the only hotel left standing in the city of Juchitán de Zaragoza, and I put down my bag. In that moment of releasing it, the room shook as though thumped by a giant fist, and jogged my body. A sickly threat of upchuck stirred in my throat, and a wiggle under my foot soles loosened my legs, the floor of the room briefly fluid, as if I was up to my ankles in liquid, sinking and flowing sideways. A moment later the floor was solid again, firm under my tremulous body.
“An aftershock,” Francisco Ramos told me later.
Francisco was a photographer, a friend of Toledo’s daughter Sara, who put us in touch. He meant of the earthquake—or rather, quakes: this was six months after two deadly quakes shook the city.
I asked, “Do you get many aftershocks?”
“Thousands. We get them every day. It will happen again today, more shakes. You’ll see.”
I had seen the results of the Puebla quake that damaged the buildings in Mexico City in the month before I began teaching there, the cracked facades and exposed rooms where walls had fallen, the piles of rubble in the streets—the damage had been particularly severe in the neighborhood of my classroom. The same earthquake that had disrupted parts of Mexico City had destroyed much of Juchitán, toppling most of its buildings. Less than two weeks later another one rocked the city, and houses that had been cracked but had withstood the first one tumbled to the ground when the second hit. And so the city was wrecked.
They were the worst earthquakes in Mexico in a hundred years, the first one on September 7, 2017, registering 8.2 (“Great” on the Richter scale, causing “Major Damage”), and for a full minute the movement was so violent that people said they were unable to stand, and fell, or were banged into walls, terrified by the earth rolling under them. And there was the noise—screams mingled with the dry rumble of thudding blocks of co
ncrete. Most of the thirty-one arches gave way in the Palacio Municipal in Juchitán’s central plaza. The bell tower of the city’s main church, the Parroquia de San Vicente Ferrer, crashed to the ground, and a whole thick wall of the church collapsed, flattening a car. Houses cracked and fell, suddenly dropping in their heaviness, becoming a heap of irregular masonry under a dust cloud.
A minute later, thousands were made homeless and many died. And as the residents began to dig out their belongings and bury their dead, the second earthquake, on September 19, shook them again, with a force of 6.1 (“Strong” on the Richter scale, characterized by “Violent Shaking”), flinging more houses to the ground, killing again, until the death toll reached over 100—it climbed to 380 dead in the country at large. A third of the homes in Juchitán were uninhabitable—thousands of structures in a city of 100,000 people. And there were aftershocks, often two or three a day, some of them severe enough to knock pots off shelves or dislodge tiles from a roof.
Months later, the commonest sounds in the streets of the city were the scrape of shoveling and the rhythmic crack of pickaxes against fallen cement. People were scooping their ruined houses into the street—in front of every plot where there had once been a house, there was a heap of shattered brick and stone.
“No international money is coming in now,” Francisco Ramos said. “But people are slowly rebuilding.”
The early stages of rebuilding involved digging out debris, clearing the broken brickwork, and creating a pile of rubble to be hauled away; only then could a house be raised. It was all pick and shovel work. And because the roads were filled with these rubble piles, they were impassable. Local transport in Juchitán was mostly three-wheelers—moto-taxis, scooters refitted for passengers; but even these small, nimble vehicles couldn’t squeeze through the bottlenecks. After a hundred yards the driver would say, “I’ll drop you here. You’ll have to walk the rest of the way.”
In many respects, because of the extent of the destruction, Juchitán looked as though the earthquake had just hit. No houses had been rebuilt—at best, they’d been braced with timbers against the possibility of another tremor, and many people were living under canvas or plastic shelters, open-sided, their sleeping mats and stoves visible, children picking their way through the broken rock. The whole city was in a state of disrepair, a sensational disorder so irrational and shocking it had the dangerous look of great ugliness—a face of violence.
The damage was not only to the structures in the city—old solid buildings smashed to bits, thick walls lying in chunks, historic structures propped up by logs. The social fabric had also been torn to shreds. Something seismic had affected the mood of the people, in the way the aftermath of a natural disaster creates mayhem, offers opportunities to the lawless, or feeds a sense of anarchy.
“I need to warn you about a few things,” Francisco said. “This city is not safe.”
“Tell me.”
“Don’t walk in town alone.”
“Why—is it bad?”
“People are robbed all the time.”
“Often?”
“Every day,” he said. Cada día. And repeated it. “Every day.”
What added to the sense of insecurity, the vulnerability of the Juchitecos, was the outdoor life that people had begun to live since the earthquake: spending the day in the open air, under trees, on folding chairs in the street; sleeping under canvas awnings; cooking over wood fires; washing in buckets or plastic basins. People were exposed, easy targets in all their pathetic helplessness.
Yet in the daylight hours, the men, and many women, toiled at their ruins, disposing of the fragments of their houses, heaping them in the street. The whole town was unfinished, dusty, noisy, cluttered with temporary fences and improvised shelters.
“And these moto-taxis,” Francisco said of the scooters. “Don’t take them at night. Take a car.” Seeing that I was looking for an explanation, he said, “If someone sees you in a moto-taxi, they’ll reach in and grab you and take your things.”
It was late afternoon. We walked around the side streets, busy with diggers, shovelers, and laborers slamming pickaxes against chunks of debris, and men steering wheelbarrows piled with broken bricks. Women and children washed clothes in buckets, the younger girls holding the family infants. The worst of the quake had struck the center of town, or at least that was how it looked—it was the area with the oldest buildings, the biggest ones, now broken apart. The covered market had been moved to an open space. The church was heavily cracked, and the remaining steeple had shifted sideways and was held up with thick scaffolding. Because the church was too dangerous to enter, services were held nearby in an open-sided makeshift ramada, canvas stretched over poles.
On the corner of a crossroads in the Cheguigo neighborhood, an old man stood before a new whitewashed two-room house. He was Cándido Carrasco, and said he was an artist. He showed me his paintings—Zapotec legends of birds and deer, romantic scenes of women in diaphanous gowns on the battlements of castles. But he was a local hero as a painter of banners, which are worn by captains in the Juchitán fiesta called the Watering of the Fruits. Known locally as Don Cándido, he had won prizes for his artwork and was celebrated for his banners.
“What happened, Don Cándido?”
“My house fell on me,” he said. “I was trapped for five hours. My neighbors rescued me. But now, see, my new house.”
The market sprawled—not a specific location in the center, but penetrating the side streets, tumbling through the town. A balding man in a yellow dress—men wearing women’s clothes, it seemed, were common in Juchitán—twitched his skirt and offered me mangoes piled high at a stall. Elsewhere an egg seller called my attention to tin washbasins filled with pinkish eggs, golf-ball-sized, some of them smooth, others sun-dried and shrunken, hundreds of them to a basin.
“Turtle eggs,” Francisco said, and explained that they were gathered from turtle nests on the coast, a mile away.
“Isn’t collecting turtle eggs illegal?”
“Nothing is illegal here,” Francisco said with a crooked smile.
Olive ridley turtles laid these eggs every year in the dunes just above the tidemark on the coasts of Oaxaca and Chiapas; hawksbill turtles did the same. One glance at the basins of turtle eggs in the Juchitán market was a vivid explanation of the reason these two species were on the verge of extinction.
The market sold iguanas, too. They were also endangered, and so popular, the six or seven women who had iguana stalls sold all the carcasses first thing in the morning. They were a Zapotec delicacy, specific to Juchitán; the market women caught them in the fields and rivers, sometimes using hunting dogs. They caught and sold another endangered creature, the bird they called the alcaraván—the Eurasian stone curlew—excellent when roasted and served with salsa (so people said).
“They sell armadillos, too,” Francisco said. “But they’re strange. If you don’t kill them right away, no sooner have you put them on the ground than they’re like El Chapo. They dig a tunnel and they’re gone.”
Tureens held spiced and cooked goat heads, staring with sightless eyes, defying you to eat them. And fried cow’s blood, the blood poured into a comal and sizzled, then served up as a side dish called simply sangre, blood. Stalls with sports clothes, stalls with ducks and chickens, stalls displaying the arts of the Isthmus, including the elaborate embroidery called caveira, flowers picked out on blouses and skirts, touches of pictorial color amid the gray devastation. And some of the market women were dressed in the Zapotec style, with lacy petticoats and huipils—tunics brilliantly set off by embroidered flowers or birds.
Tucked beneath one of the reinforced arches of the Palacio Municipal, a man was selling ice cream. Farther along a man was plunking a guitar, watched by a small group of people, and in another archway at the end of the palace—city hall, actually—a bedsheet had been hung up and a movie was being shown.
It was a flickering black-and-white film—a comedy, it seemed, judging
by the laughter of the people squatting on the cobblestones of the plaza or sitting on folding chairs. I took a seat.
“An old movie,” Francisco said. “That man was very popular.”
The man was singing, flirting with a doe-eyed beauty in a frilly blouse.
“Pedro Infante,” Francisco said.
“You’ve seen this movie before?”
“Everyone in Mexico knows this movie. It is Nosotros, los Pobres.”
We, the Poor dated from 1948, which made it seventy years old, but Pedro Infante, who died in 1957, had enduring fame in Mexico—one of his nicknames was El Inmortal. Given the travails of its hero, Pepe el Toro, a carpenter with a ramshackle shop in a Mexican slum—his spell in jail, having been wrongly arrested, his devotion to his dying mother and his small daughter—this was a perfect movie for Juchitán. In this scene of devastation, a city so broken by the earthquake that everyone lived in the streets, and ate and slept under trees, for entertainment the Juchitecos sat in folding chairs in the ruins and watched a splotchy black-and-white movie about people who were worse off than they were, and laughed through their tears.
Some of the women watching the movie wore heavy makeup and tight skirts—legs crossed, kicking their high heels—their upswept hairdos gleaming with oil, their big fingers laced together on their thick thighs. Those old-fashioned Mexican beauties, like the mango seller in the yellow dress in the market, were not women. They were muxes—“mooshes”—for which Juchitán is famed, men who dressed as women but were physically male. As Francisco remarked to me of the muxes watching the movie, they had probably just ended a shift at a beauty parlor, where muxes were often manicurists, or had closed their stall at the market, because many of the market women were muxes, or they were prostitutes—because many muxes ply their trade on back streets; when night falls, they linger in the shadows of the shattered arcades.