On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  I was headed to his territory, to the “Conversatorio” in San Cristóbal, organized by his people, where he might or might not appear.

  Bowling in my car through the savanna on the straight flat road: this too was a royal road, of the lowland Isthmus of Tehuantepec, sea level and steamy, a hot wind blowing from the northeast. The wind was so strong it rocked the chassis and pushed at the big trucks ahead of me, making them unsteady and hard to pass, as they seemed like buttocky hippos on wheels, ostentatiously sashaying on the road. But this wind, called the Tehuano, was useful, too—I passed numerous wind farms, miles of turbines like giant fans, their rotors whirring, pumping juice into the national grid.

  The Camino Real gained radically in altitude, from the coast to more than a mile high. After sixty or eighty miles of buffeting wind and blown-down grass, the road climbed out of Oaxaca state into Chiapas, at Arriaga—the migrant railhead. Still climbing, the road rose to almost 1,700 feet at Tuxtla Gutiérrez. This industrial and commercial city of half a million, enclosed in a high valley, was well known to air passengers, because in order to get to any of the towns beyond it in Chiapas—and that included San Cristóbal, and tourists going to Cancún or Mérida—one of the main hubs was Tuxtla’s international airport, named for one of its local heroes. This hero was Ángel Albino Corzo, who, after a life of sacrifice and idealism, headed to his hometown of Chiapa, about nine miles from Tuxtla, for a well-deserved retirement from the fray, and was murdered.

  My interest in Tuxtla was related to the Zapatistas. After their emergence in San Cristóbal in 1994 and the confrontation with police and federal troops, the Mexican government proposed a solution in a peacemaking pact, the San Andrés Accords of that year. But it turned out to be a ruse, and when the government reneged on it a few years later, more than ten thousand protesters mobbed the streets of Tuxtla to press for action—for reforms and elections. A Tuxtla politician and activist, Rubicel Ruíz Gamboa, was a supporter of the Zapatistas, a champion of indigenous rights, and a man eager to promote land reform, as well as the leader of the Independent Peasant Union. In 1998, as he was headed to his home in Tuxtla, a car drove up next to his and two men riddled his car with bullets, killing him. Mexicans, like Americans, have a habit of assassinating their benefactors—in 1919, Emiliano Zapata was murdered.

  The murder of Ruíz was thought to be a tactic to sabotage any renewal of the peace talks between the Zapatistas and the government. The San Andrés Accords remain in a legal limbo, unimplemented by the government and jeered at by the Zapatistas, another example of the Mexican government strategy of inaction, the political theory of doing nothing, on the assumption that humans have a habit of forgetting—a perverse assumption, since Mexico seemed to me a nation torn by total recall.

  It was obvious from the graffiti on the walls and the rock faces from Tuxtla to San Cristóbal that no one had forgotten the abuses of the government or the revolutionary fervor of the Zapatistas, soon to celebrate their quarter century of dominance in Chiapas, and still masked.

  A dramatic feature at the eastern edge of Tuxtla is a great cloven gorge, Sumidero Canyon, over the Grijalva River, near where Corzo was murdered and not far from where Rubicel Ruíz Gamboa was gunned down, and like many another place with a history of mayhem, deceptively beautiful. Birds twittered in the trees on this lovely day, hawks revolved in the sky, bushy trees and wooded slopes blanketed the sierra—no villages, and hardly a house on the autopista that circumvented the old royal road of the friars winding through the mountains. Less than an hour from Tuxtla, I was at the lip of a deep valley, looking down at a tight cluster of houses on the valley floor, and soon after was driving on the cobbled, one-car-width streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas.

  After the 90-degree weather of the coast, it was a relief to experience the misty heights and blobby, rain-fattened clouds of San Cristóbal—at night in the 40s, a city that experienced freezing temperatures in the winter, and sometimes snow. The city Graham Greene had found intolerable and primitive (“I want to get out of this bloody country”) was now bustling and chic, with curio shops and boutiques, or so it seemed.

  Oventic: Resistir Es Existir (To Resist Is to Exist)

  At first glance, San Cristóbal de las Casas seems a city of tourists, seeking the restaurants, the ecclesiastical architecture, the enormous, maze-like market, and the handicrafts (knitted shawls, jewelry of local amber, needlework, lacquerware, leatherwork), or headed by bus to the ruins of Palenque. Some represent Zapaturismo—drawn to the city that saw the emergence of the Zapatistas, and looking for appropriate caps and T-shirts. Look closer and it becomes clear that the tourists are flaneurs—paseantes, a local might say—and that it is a city populated mainly by Mexicans, of the many Mayan language groups, in this region the Tzotzil and the Tzetzal, murmuring in their own idiom. Look closer still, on foot in the outskirts, gasping from the altitude, and you see that its people are badly housed, with few social services, mostly poor, mostly indigenous.

  These are the sturdy but faceless folk in the Long March of Everyman, the descendants of indigenous people of the pre-conquest. In Aztec, Zapotec, and Nahuatl society they were the laborers and peasants. They were remote from the rulers, the tlatoani, the secret societies of the Eagle and Jaguar warriors, the elegant nobility, the various categories of priests and priestesses—all of whom were privileged.

  They were the maceualli, in Nahua society, indigenous commoners whose farms supplied the elite with maize, beans, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, sarsaparilla, and the pods they called chocolatl. They raised turkeys and harvested the buds of cacti, and medicinal herbs, and the sunflower, native to Mexico, and because it resembled a defensive weapon, known to the Aztecs as chimalxochitl, the shield flower.

  The farmer, unprivileged and poor, was for centuries overlooked by historians. An early exception was Jacques Soustelle, the great pre-Columbian scholar and anthropologist who, at the beginning of Daily Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest, wrote how it was necessary to speak of him, “because after the disaster of 1521”—the conquest—“and the total collapse of all authority, all concepts, the whole frame of society and all religion, he alone survived, and he alone still lives.”

  That was written in 1955. It remains true today. “Yes, we speak it [Zapotec] all the time. Our secret language!” the mezcalero Crispin García told me in San Dionisio, laughing, hinting at secret lives and secret histories. And I heard the same from Zapotecs in San Baltazar Guelavila and elsewhere. There are one million indigenous people in Chiapas, one third of the population, most of them Mayan related, twelve language groups, conversing in the same words as they have for a thousand years, many of them for whom Spanish is a second language, and some who do not speak Spanish at all. A third of Indian children never see a schoolroom, health facilities are scarce, and the per capita income in Chiapas is the same as in Kenya.

  Con la paciencia muda de hormiga, “With the silent patience of the ant”—in Samuel Beckett’s translation of Alfonso Reyes’s poem “Yerbas del Tarahumara”—the so-called Indians have experienced fits of rebellion from the days of the Spanish conquest, but have always been sidelined or beaten into submission. The city of San Cristóbal de las Casas memorializes the name of the man who denounced the slavery and oppression of Indians, the sixteenth-century Spanish friar (and bishop of Chiapas) Bartolomé de las Casas. B. Traven’s six jungle novels, especially The Rebellion of the Hanged and The General from the Jungle, are a dramatization, in the years of the Mexican Revolution, of unrest, debt slavery, and forced labor in Chiapas, where in the 1920s Traven spent many months living among the lumberjacks and peasants, and the indigenous people, whom he championed (and somewhat romanticized) in his work. His novel The White Rose describes the eternal Mexican struggle between the Indian, who has a spiritual feeling for the land, and greedy corporate interests (in this case American) that exploit the land to get rich and become overlords. When Traven died in 1969, his widow scattered his ashes from a plane
over the Lacandón jungle, and it seems as though the Zapatista movement rose from the ashes of the elusive revolutionary writer.

  On my drive from Juchitán into this mountain town I had reflected on the notion of how most Mexicans are unprotected in their lives and in their work, and are at pains to create strategies to avert the dangers they face. In this regard, no one is more vulnerable or exploited than the Mexican Indian. And the recognition of this vulnerability is at the heart of the Zapatista movement, which had its origin in the demand for dignity and justice for the indigenous people of Chiapas. I have also mentioned how important it is for the understanding and the safety of a solitary traveler in Mexico, especially a gringo alone in his car, to have Mexican friends. After my teaching stint in Mexico City, and earning the students’ respect, I had twenty-four good friends, with whom I was now in regular touch. Their characteristic greeting was “How can we help you, Don Pablo?”

  My friend the writer Juan Villoro had wangled an invitation for me to attend the secret Conversatorio, sponsored by the Zapatistas. I had agreed to meet Juan at a certain parador on one of those narrow San Cristóbal streets.

  Months before, in Colonia Roma, over a dinner of hog jaw, Juan had deflected my questions about his life and work, and had told me about his father, Luis, a philosopher. This exile from Spain, with a scholarly interest in the nuances of Mayan languages, had traveled widely in Chiapas and been a close observer of the indigenous people there. In 1950 he published his seminal book on the evolving consciousness of indigenous people, The Major Moments of Indigenism in Mexico.

  Now, in San Cristóbal, Juan became a bit more candid. In the last years of Luis Villoro’s teaching at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), one of his twenty-something colleagues, a professor in the School of Arts and Sciences, was a highly intelligent sociologist, born in 1957 in Tampico, Tamaulipas. As a youth he’d been educated by Jesuits at the Instituto Cultural Tampico. His name was Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente. The campus at Xochimilco was famously radical, at the forefront in protests. Of the hundreds of victims of the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968, many had been UAM students. A student at the time, Ilan Stavans (later the author of The Hispanic Condition and many other books), five years younger than Guillén, described this firebrand as “bright and articulate,” with a “sharp intellect and infectious verbosity.”

  This young professor, Rafael Guillén, was the man who entered the Lacandón jungle in 1984 and emerged ten years later in a ski mask, on horseback, with the nom de guerre of Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatistas, the head of an army of thousands, declaring his rebellion from the balconies of municipal buildings and, to seize the attention of the Mexican republic, occupying seven cities. The largest of the occupied cities was San Cristóbal.

  “My father was a friend and adviser to the Zapatistas,” Juan said. “He was close to Marcos and shared many of his ideas. I’ve sort of taken on this responsibility, which is why I’m here.”

  “What did the Zapatistas think of your father?”

  “They admired him, they read his books,” Juan said. “And he was passionate about their rebellion. Imagine, he asked to be buried at one of the important Zapatista villages, Oventic. He’s buried under a special tree there—I can’t think of the name of this tree in English, but it’s a rare one. We call it zotzte.”

  “Where is Oventic—in the jungle?”

  “No. At the edge of a valley in the mountains, a beautiful place. But one of those forbidden Zapatista caracoles.”

  I smiled because I’d seen the word on menus: caracol means “snail.” You might find one minced in your tasty ceviche. I asked Juan to clarify.

  He said, “It’s the Zapatista name for a village or settlement. A nice name, I think. They identify with the resolute, slow-moving snail.”

  “How far away is Oventic?”

  “A couple of hours’ drive. The road is good.”

  “I have a car.”

  “Querido Pablo, the traveler!” he said. “The tricky part is that strangers—non-Zapatistas—are not welcome.” He thought a moment. “But I can say you’re visiting the grave of my father, paying respects. That will mean something to them. I’ll call the comandante there who’s in charge, Compañero David. I know him. We’ll take a chance.”

  “Tell me about the Conversatorio.”

  It would be a clandestine EZLN meeting, held over some days, he explained, open to approved delegates and Zapatista sympathizers, with the theme “Miradas, Escuchas, Palabras: Prohibido Pensar?” (Glances, Listeners, Words: Forbidden Thought?) The place chosen for the meeting was a Zapatista college, CIDECI-UniTierra, a fenced-in location in a small, battered, ironically named colonia, Nueva Maravilla (New Miracle), at the northern edge of San Cristóbal. CIDECI stood for Centro Indígena de Capacitación Integral, the Indigenous Center for Integral Learning. It was effectively a university with a curriculum of alternative education, its courses ranging from practical farming to political theory—a place built and financed by the Zapatistas, where young graduates from the high schools in the caracoles went to study. There were about thirty caracoles—autonomous municipalities—located all over Chiapas.

  “I’m looking forward to the Zapatista event.”

  “Good. I put you down as a speaker.”

  This threw me a little. I said, “What subject?”

  “Whatever you want to talk about.”

  “Will Marcos be there?”

  “Lately he’s taken another nom de guerre, Galeano. And no one ever knows his movements,” Juan said. “But there’ll be some other Mexican writers, and you and I will be there!”

  That was another feature of Mexican life, a result of scarcity and the need to seize the day: spontaneity and improvisation. From a jaunt to San Cristóbal to attend a Zapatista conference, where I assumed I would be in the audience, I now found I was a speaker.

  And more spontaneity: the next day, Juan received permission from his comandante contact for me to visit the caracol of Oventic.

  On the way to Oventic I stopped at the town of Chamula, famous for its weird church observances, where the interior of the basilica of San Juan Bautista was ablaze with flames. Worshipers crouched on the floor arranging candles, fifty or a hundred in symmetrical patterns, then lighting them and, in the candlelight, drinking Coca-Cola and ritually burping—eructation believed to be salutary—and splashing libations of Coke on the church floor, which was covered with sand.

  There were no pews, there were no priests, there was no Mass or formal service. It was a gathering of curanderos—medicine men—and those wishing to be cured. Other solemn groups were chanting, passing hens’ eggs around the faces and bodies of prayerful pilgrims in a limpia—a purification—or holding a squawking chicken near a kneeling devotee, and a moment later the chicken’s neck was wrung, and the softened, drooping carcass placed near the candles.

  As I watched, a man approached me holding a bottle and a glass. He said, “Mezcal,” and poured me a slug and offered it. I drank it, blinked away the dazzle in my eyes, thanked him, and kept looking.

  It was a fusion of pre-Hispanic traditions and Christian dogma, the result an observance involving a mass of candles, throttled chickens, and soda pop. (But sheep are sacred, never harmed or eaten: the town of Chamula is full of grazing sheep.) Added to these rituals was a chance for retribution, because if the chosen saint did not grant the supplicant’s wish, the deity could be punished, just as the Zapotecs and Mayans punished their gods and saints, lashing their images with whips. In this church, the statues of saints, which had been ceremonially draped, with an uttered prayer, could be stripped of their robe if the prayer was not answered.

  A far cry from this fantastication of beliefs, and a sensible remedy, was in the mountains. Past the villages of Shanate and Callejón, the big town of San Andrés Larráinzar and the smaller one of Talanquita, was the Zapatista caracol of Oventic, behind a forbidding steel gate, heavily padlocked and chained shut. Its back turned to the ma
terial world, it was a stronghold of rationality and rebellion, where the casual visitor met large unwelcoming signs, printed with variations of Go Away and No Trespassing in red and black block letters.

  These were the cool forested highlands of Chiapas, of small farms where woodcutters were clearing the slopes for planting, and stacking the logs to be split for firewood or building material. The deep valleys were terraced for gardens and looked dark and fertile, irrigated by streams that were fed by the bridal veils of splashing waterfalls. The land was plowed and hoed by hand, the woodcutters wielding axes; this physical labor gave the workers the look of ownership. (“La tierra es de quien la trabaja con sus manos,” Emiliano Zapata had once said: The land belongs to those who work it with their hands.) It was like rural Mexico from another era. The lush hills and rugged mountains beyond looked like nothing I’d seen up to now in Mexico, but resembled the landscape I remembered from long ago in Guatemala, which was not far away.

  Oventic, the community, was a cluster of paved streets of woodframe buildings painted with murals—the face of Zapata visible on one, a woman in a mask, doe-eyed but defiant, on another. And a sign near the gate: PARA TODOS TODO, NADA PARA NOSOTROS. For All, Plenty—For Us, Nothing.

  The road I’d arrived on had been empty, no tourists, no travelers, no strangers; it was a back road that, had I stayed on it for three more hours, would have brought me to the town of Teapa, in Tabasco, which was nowhere. The roads in Oventic that I could see behind the gate were empty of vehicles, and when I called out, no human appeared to respond. Hearing my voice, a dog stirred, twitching his tail where he lay in the shade of a veranda. Among the No Trespassing signs was another, more forbidding one: ESTÁUSTED EN TERRITORIO ZAPATISTA EN REBELDíA—AQUí MANDA EL PUEBLO Y EL GOBIERNO OBEDECE, You Are in Zapatista Territory in Rebellion—Here the People Rule and the Government Must Obey, with the acronym MARZ, representing Municipio Autónomo Rebelde Zapatista—Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Municipality.