On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  “Hola!” I called out again, and waited.

  After some minutes two Zapatista men in black masks stepped from the veranda of a distant building and trudged slowly toward me. Facing me from behind the iron gate, but without a greeting, the one holding a clipboard said, “Who are you?”

  Seeking his eyes in the slits of the mask, I told him my name and added, “I am here to visit the tomb of Luis Villoro and to say hello.”

  He passed me the clipboard through the bars and said, “Write your name.”

  When I had written it, the two men conferred for a moment, then trudged away, back to the distant building.

  I waited at the gate in bright sunlight, a soft breeze freshening and lifting the leaves on the thick boughs of nearby trees. I could see into the valley and beyond, to another mountain range, bluish under a clear blue sky. Apart from the faint birdsong and the flutter of leaves, there was no sound. I was not conspicuous, standing at the locked gate, because there was no one to observe me.

  It was a historic place, a caracol given the sonorous name Resistencia y Rebeldía por la Humanidad. In 1996, two years after the Zapatistas emerged from the jungle, an event was held here, the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. Thousands attended, from more than forty countries.

  “Behind us are you,” Marcos said at the time. “Behind our face masks is the face of all women excluded. Of all the indigenous people forgotten. Of all homosexuals persecuted. Of young people belittled. Of all migrants beaten. Of all people imprisoned for their thought or word. Of all workers humiliated. Of all who died in oblivion. Of all the simple and ordinary men and women who don’t count, who are not seen, who are not named, who have no tomorrow.” And he ended with, “Today thousands of little worlds in the continents practice a principle here, in the mountains of southeastern Mexico: the principle of building a new and good world, one world in which many worlds fit.”

  Now, after ten minutes, the men were trudging back. They went to the side and opened a smaller gate, with a step like a stile, and I passed into the self-contained and secret settlement of Oventic. Saying nothing, the two men walked slowly toward a building, gaily painted with birds and rainbows and Mexican dancers on the outside, stark and shabby inside—the anteroom of an office.

  One of my masked men knocked softly on a door, and when it opened a crack I saw the averted face of a man inside. I could not understand the whispers, speaking Tzotzil probably, and then the door shut. After more minutes, a man emerged from the room—possibly the same man, but he wore a bandanna around the lower portion of his face, like a desperado in an old cowboy movie.

  “You want to see the tomb?” the masked man said, a mild voice that did not match the forbidding mask.

  “Thank you, yes.”

  He led me outside to a narrow path that descended to a grove of trees, and as we walked, two women began following. They too were masked—the black knitted ski masks favored by Zapatistas. They kept their arms folded.

  “No pictures of people,” the man in the bandanna said.

  “What about these lovely painted houses?”

  “Yes, you can take pictures of those.”

  The side of the house with the pair of staring long-lashed eyes enclosed in a mask. The upright ear of corn, a masked head at its tip, and the banner SOMOS RAíZ, We Are the Root, an allusion to the fact that the indigenous people here, and elsewhere in Mexico, believe an ear of corn to be essential to their creation myth. On another white exterior wall, an outline map of Africa enclosing a poem beginning, “Le rêve d’un monde / Immense et en eau profonde, / Où les mensonges immondes / Qu’on diffuse sur les ondes,” and the initials JKK. A poetic snippet, sounding like the work of a novice creative writing student: “The dream of a wide world and in deep water where unclean lies are scattered on the waves.” Much later I discovered that JKK stood for Joseph Kokou Koffigoh, a Togolese politician who had served as prime minister of Togo for three years in the 1990s. Driven from power, he believed himself to possess a lyric gift, and perhaps he had been present here, twenty years before, at the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism.

  Another mural, Vivan las Luchas de los Kurdos y los Zapatistas, asserted solidarity with the Kurds, mustached Middle Easterners in kaffiyehs dancing around a fire with Zapatista women.

  Another: rugged mountains with women’s eyes peering from just beneath their summits, and the message, Somos la Tierra Creciendo la Autonomía, We Are the Land, Growing Autonomy.

  A huge black slogan on the side of a big building was lettered Oventic Sakamchen Territorio Libre, flanked by masked figures. Near it was a portrait of Che Guevara and a series of upraised fists beside a fluttering dove of peace.

  And more: women masked with bandannas, Zapatistas with rifles, Zapata himself looking benign under the brim of his vast sombrero, and another iconic one of his face with fierce eyes, brandishing a rifle, and still another, a whole door, his sombrero off, bandoliers of bullets crisscrossing his chest. The entire town was painted in bright primary colors: snails, rainbows, lovely children—some of the murals depicting men dancing across a wall, with the circus quality of Fernand Léger or the fanciful weightlessness, toy-like shapes, and floating figures of Marc Chagall, especially so in their aquatic colors.

  It seemed that Oventic also had administrative offices for other caracoles in the vicinity, and these offices’ exteriors were brilliantly painted. Apart from the portraits of Zapata, every face was masked, even the woman painted on the front wall of the Women’s Office, the Oficina de Mujeres por la Dignidad: she was holding a flower in an upraised hand, steadying a rifle in the other, and had a child slung on her back—the child was masked. On one vivid wall a large brown snail was shown wearing a ski mask. It was a village not of faces, but of woolly balaclavas.

  Beautiful paintings. They were not the indignant narrative murals of Rivera or Siqueiros, but decorative and cheery, the rifles like toys, the animals in them joyous, many of them bordered with flowers.

  The masked man took me to the grave, under a tree, enclosed by an iron fence—I suppose to keep the goats or cows away.

  “A special tree,” I said, because that’s what Juan had told me.

  “It is a zotzte,” the masked man said.

  “What is its name in the Mexican idiom?” I asked.

  “I only know its Tzotzil name. I don’t know any other name.”

  With star-shaped reddish leaves and spreading boughs, it was an American sweetgum, prolific in the Deep South, so I discovered later.

  On the concrete marker of the tomb were these words: Compañero y Filósofo Don Luis Villoro Toranzo, 1922–2014—Tu ejemplo siempre vivirá!

  I wrote this in my notebook, watched by the slender masked man and the two masked women, their arms still folded in postures of impatience.

  “May I see more of Oventic?”

  “If you wish,” the masked man said.

  Gesturing tentatively, I began to say, “Does it extend—”

  Interrupting, he said, “It is everything that you can see,” and his more expansive gesture took in the whole valley, the foothills beyond, and the mountain range in the distance. Then he became exasperated and said, “Go with her,” indicating the stouter of the two women, and gave her an order.

  As she led the way, I began to ask a question. I wanted to know how many people lived here.

  “I don’t speak Spanish,” she said in mumbled Spanish.

  We walked in silence from building to building, from mural to mural, downhill to where larger buildings loomed, the wider walls allowing for more ambitious murals. Even the grocery stores were painted, one with snails, another (Tienda la Resistencia) with Zapatista guerrillas. We passed an auditorium, a broad, one-story, flat-roofed structure as big as a high school gym. The entire floor was covered with rows of simple benches, hundreds of them. It was just a room, but cavernous, and the benches indicated that it might accommodate the whole community
of Oventic. The many hard benches inspired in me two opposing thoughts: the prospect of a people’s democracy, like a New England town meeting, and the dreary one of people having to sit for hours listening to speeches about political theory. Perhaps the room represented a mixture of both.

  Farther down the hill I saw a terrace with a basketball court and what were obviously school buildings, because at the grassy periphery of the schoolyard, boys and girls, none of them masked, sat in groups or sprawled, chatting among themselves. It was a rest period for the hundred or so students, all of them neatly dressed, smiling when they saw me, but subdued in their greetings. They displayed none of the gusto, the shrieks and teasing, I’d seen among village schoolchildren elsewhere in Mexico. This reserve made them seem more watchful, and the intensity of gaze suggested intelligence.

  I said hello. They said hello back. But none were prepared to hold a conversation with the gringo. It seemed obnoxious for me to intrude on them during their recess, and the aura that enclosed their whispers and their repose was peaceful: no music, no loud talk, no contention, a great calm, so odd yet so welcome in a schoolyard.

  In contrast to their formality and restraint, a slogan on the wall of the school exhorted, RESISTIR ES EXISTIR. To Resist Is to Exist.

  Surrounding the school, the village proper lay on side streets and lanes, small woodframe cottages and modest houses, most of them with vegetable gardens adjoining them. Deeper in the valley the communal gardens were well tended and fruitful. Another building housed a health clinic.

  The masked woman trudged ahead, silently leading me, stopping when I stopped, moving on when I resumed walking.

  I had never been in a place like this, a community that was a kind of sanctuary, wood-plank buildings elaborately painted, quiet except for birdsong. I saw no machines, no motorized vehicles, nothing new. The simplicity impressed me. The absence of modernity made it seem gentle and earnest—a community built by hand, carpentered houses, colorfully painted walls, and no sign (as in the other Mexico) of American products or American influence, an utter indifference to El Norte.

  I was free to go anywhere in Oventic—the gardens, the chicken farm, the basketball court, and I could even buy a hand-knitted Zapatista mask in one of the shops. But it was impossible for me to engage anyone in conversation.

  After my circuit of the place, I started up the hill. Passing another exuberantly painted building, I saw two men sitting on the porch, and recognized from their shirts that they were the men who had admitted me (“Sign your name”). But they were no longer masked. I stopped to say hello.

  “No masks,” I said.

  They shrugged. Though it was a place painted in bright colors and slogans, those colors and slogans had to suffice for explanations. For the visitor, an un-Mexican atmosphere, almost of a cloister: no idle talk, no chitchat, with the subdued and serene mood of an ashram.

  “But you were wearing them before.”

  This observation was met with silence. So I said, “Why?”

  “For security,” one of the men said.

  I thanked him and walked away, grateful to be here, to have a glimpse into an important Zapatista caracol. It was a self-governing community of resistance, and to my question, “How can Mexican people protect themselves from criminals and crooked police and wicked government?,” the answer was: In a Zapatista stronghold like Oventic, and there were thirty-seven more just like it all over Chiapas.

  Zapatistas

  The rebellion, now thirty-five years old, had begun modestly, as dialogue, talk, and preparation in jungle villages, the cataloging of grievances. Then came the training of soldiers, the organization of communities, searching for common ground and unity—years of this in the depths of obscure settlements in the cloud forests and mists of the Lacandón jungle. It was not Che Guevara marching with his men into Katanga, rousing the reluctant Baluba, and within weeks opening fire on Congolese troops and white mercenaries—and failing miserably. In Chiapas, the instigator was a scholar with a knack for writing parables, part of a delegation, who conducted seminars on the tactics of rebellion, and this went on peaceably for a decade.

  “For ten years we prepared for the first few minutes of the year 1994,” Subcomandante Marcos, the scholar-rebel, wrote in his introduction to The Fire and the Word, a detailed history of the Zapatista movement by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, published in 2008. And Marcos had met receptive people: years before the Zapatistas entered the jungle, the peasants of Chiapas had openly objected to their being despised by the government and exploited by mining and logging interests. “When the Zapatista Army first came to our villages, around 1984, 1985, we had already taken part in peaceful struggles,” Comandante Abraham says in Ramírez’s book. “The people were already protesting against the government.”

  “The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on a hillside,” Joyce writes in Ulysses. “For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother.”

  The first Zapatistas to penetrate the Lacandón jungle with rebellious intentions, in late 1983, were six indigenous men and women from Chiapas, who camped under trees and in mountain meadows, keeping apart from traditional villages, naming their little band the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the EZLN. Other like-minded Mexicans joined them a year later, including Rafael Guillén, who on rusticating himself changed his identity, adopting the nom de guerre Subcomandante Marcos. “Sub” because he saw himself as taking orders from the indigenous comandantes who’d preceded him.

  These men and woman circulated among the villages, befriending the campesinos, educating and arming the farmers and woodcutters, who taught them the Tzotzil language and familiarized them with their beliefs. One central Tzotzil tenet affirmed harmony with the natural world, asserting that trees and bushes have souls, and every human has two souls. One soul is in the body and the other resides elsewhere, in an animal—a possum, a monkey, a jaguar, a bat (“Tzotzil” comes from the Mayan word for bat)—the power animal and protective creature, a spirit companion. In the peaceable kingdom of Lacandona, Tzotzils could not harm an animal without harming themselves.

  By degrees the Zapatistas won converts, and an army began to form. Ten years passed, and then the drama of confrontation began. Led by Marcos, the Zapatista army marched on San Cristóbal, electrifying the country and precipitating violence—the killing by the Mexican army of Zapatista soldiers, and later the massacre of civilians, mainly women and children, at a place called Acteal. In 2001, provoked by the intransigence of the Mexican government over a peace agreement, Marcos led his masked army north, two thousand miles by a roundabout route through the major cities of Mexico, and finally to the Zócalo in Mexico City, where, cheered by a crowd of hundreds of thousands, he raised his fist in the air and gave a rousing speech.

  “We are here to shout for and to demand democracy, liberty, and justice,” he declaimed. “The government thinks that today marks the end of an earthquake. They think that we are just a photograph, an anecdote, a spectacle. Those in high places know it but do not want to say it. After today, the people who are the color of the earth will never again be forgotten.”

  What those well-wishers in the Zócalo did not know was that this triumphant arrival had taken seventeen years of preparation. Only after three years, enduring the rigors of the rainy jungle, the insects, the mud and discomfort, were the Zapatistas invited to enter an indigenous village—a vivid example of how long it takes to ganar la confianza. It was not until 1989 that an army was raised, a core group of 1,300 soldiers, men and women. When the Mexican government began privatizing traditionally communal plots of agricultural land (known as ejidos), the indigenous people, landless and hungry, began to appeal to the Zapatista movement for relief. In 1993 the number of EZLN soldiers numbered about 3,000, and the high command of the EZLN approved a military offensive, deciding to come into the open.

  The day the Zapatistas declared themselves was a significan
t one, January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. NAFTA was regarded by the Zapatistas (and many others) as exploitative, and disastrous for small farmers all over Mexico. On the morning of his appearance in San Cristóbal, Marcos said to some tourists, “We apologize for the inconveniences, but this is a revolution.” He later clarified, saying it was a rebellion, not a revolution. “We are one people,” he said, and repeated, “We are the color of the earth.”

  The armed uprising shocked Mexico, the more so because seven towns were occupied, including San Cristóbal and Ocosingo, and hundreds of ranches. Marcos climbed to the balcony of the municipal presidential building in San Cristóbal and read the First Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle.

  “We are a product of 500 years of struggle,” he said. “First against slavery, then during the War of Independence against Spain led by insurgents, then to avoid being absorbed by North American imperialism, then to promulgate our constitution and expel the French empire from our soil, and later the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz denied us the just application of the Reform laws and the people rebelled and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men just like us. We have been denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food nor education. Nor are we able to freely and democratically elect our political representatives, nor is there independence from foreigners, nor is there peace, nor justice for ourselves and our children. But today, we say, ‘Ya basta!’—enough is enough!”