On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  He was masked. Some people asked who he was. He said, “I am only a mestizo—a man of the people who struggles so that these terrible inequalities will no longer be suffered in our country. I am a combatant.”

  All of Marcos’s listeners were attentive, many of them sympathetic, and even ones who were skeptical of his ability to change Mexico significantly were impressed by the inclusiveness of his message. One of my well-educated, middle-class students from the taller, Valerie Miranda, told me, “I am not a big fan of Zapatistas, but I always admired the way Marcos unified Mexicans under one identity—mestizo. ‘No hay ya el “ustedes” y el “nosotros,” porque todos somos ya el color que somos de la tierra. El color de la tierra!’ [There’s no more “you” or “us,” because all of us are now the color we are, the color of the earth.] The land, the earth, is such a huge deal here. There’s something beautiful in making it part of us.”

  The Mexican government’s response to such idealistic sentiments was to send planes to Chiapas and drop bombs on indigenous communities. They killed 145 people. In the next few days there were pitched battles in the towns of Ocosingo and Altamiranos, thousands shooting, many casualties on each side. On January 12, 1994, a ceasefire was proposed, and by the end of the year the Zapatistas announced that they had created thirty-eight autonomous indigenous municipalities in Chiapas. In The Zapatista Reader (edited by Tom Hayden), Jorge Mancillas—a writer, activist, and neurobiologist—quotes a Zapatista soldier’s response to being asked where the movement had arisen from: “We came from the depths of oblivion. From an abyss so deep, our voices could not be heard. So dark, we could not be seen. We emerged from the deepest depths of oblivion.”

  The Zapatista success, a result of shrewd organization, thoughtful planning, and rebel passion, alarmed the American investors in NAFTA to such an extent that, a year after Marcos declared his rebellion, Chase Manhattan Bank issued a memo on January 13, 1995, calling for the Mexican government “to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy.” The Mexican government responded to this memo by invading Zapatista territory and pushing twenty thousand peasants off their land.

  When, thereafter, tens of thousands of Mexican troops occupied Chiapas, the Zapatistas proposed peace talks and met in a town near Oventic to thrash out the details. This effort culminated in the San Andrés Accords on indigenous rights and culture, “outlining a program for land reform, indigenous autonomy and cultural rights.”

  As a delaying tactic, the Mexican government niggled over the accords, disputing parts of it related to issues of justice and democracy, and they ultimately succeeded in getting what they wanted—an impasse. Historically, the Mexican government and the drug cartels have often resorted to mass killing to solve complex problems—the massacre option. And so, in December 1997, paramilitaries linked to the governing PRI party descended on the Chiapas town of Acteal (about twelve miles north of San Cristóbal), surprising some people praying at a shrine. This was a community group calling themselves Las Abejas, the Bees, who supported the aims of the Zapatistas.

  The intruders attacked, slaughtering 45 of them with machetes and bullets, all indigenous campesinos, 21 women, 15 children, and 9 men. Hundreds were wounded in six hours of sniper fire. Soon after, about 150 foreign observers who were gathering information on the massacre were expelled from Mexico. More murders in the ensuing years culminated in the two-week, 2,000-mile Zapatista march to Mexico City, where 250,000 people cheered Marcos in supporting the peace accords.

  One of the observers in Mexico City was José Saramago, the Nobel Prize–winning Portuguese novelist. He wrote, “The Zapatistas covered their faces to make themselves visible and now in effect we have finally seen them.”

  “Here we are. We are the forgotten heart of the country, and we represent the dignity of rebellion,” Marcos said from his podium in the Plaza de la Constitutión—the Zócalo, the center of the city, the heart of Mexico.

  A few days before his speech, Marcos had given an interview to the French paper Le Monde. “This is not Marcos’s march nor the EZLN’s,” he said. “It is the march of the poor, the march of all the Indian peoples. It’s intended to show that the days of fear are over.” It was an ethnic rebellion, he said. “Of all the people in Mexico, the Indians are the most forgotten.”

  Marcos became a familiar voice, if not a familiar face. His favorite authors, he said, were Cervantes, Lewis Carroll, García Márquez, Brecht, Borges, García Lorca, and Shakespeare. Hamlet and Macbeth, he added, were essential studies in power. He was not interested in maintaining control as an army, explaining, “The military man is an absurdity, because he must always rely on a weapon to be able to convince others that his ideas are the ones that should be followed.” He went on, “Our movement has no future if it is military. If the EZLN perpetuates itself as a military organization it is bound to fail.”

  As for his mask: “It’s about being anonymous, not because we fear for ourselves but rather so they cannot corrupt us.” He also said, “We are the Zapatistas, the smallest of the small, those who cover their faces to be seen, the dead that die to live.”

  NAFTA, he said, was a tool of the sort of globalization that he characterized as a sinister power grab by international corporations to subvert governments all over the world. “The world’s new masters have no need to govern directly. National governments take on the role of running things on their behalf. This is what the new order means—unification of the world into one single market. States are simply enterprises with managers in the guise of governments, and the new regional alliances bear more of a resemblance to shopping malls than to political federations. The unification produced by neoliberalism is economic: in the giant planetary hypermarket it is only commodities that circulate freely, not people.”

  Corporate interests connive with third-world tyrants to supply goods and services and raw materials. The United States and Europe and China—everywhere: “the globalization of exploitation.”

  It was what I had seen on the border, the clusters of foreign-owned factories, exploiting their workers in distressed communities to save money and increase profits. In a prescient essay, Marcos wrote in 1997, “As a world system, neoliberalism is a new war for the conquest of territory. The ending of the Third World War—meaning the Cold War—in no sense means that the world has gone beyond the bi-polar and found stability under the domination of a new victor. Because while there was certainly a defeat (of the socialist camp), it is hard to say who won . . . The defeat of the ‘evil empire’ has opened up new markets, and the struggle over them is leading to a New World War, the Fourth.”

  As Apple Corporation was expanding in China, and Microsoft in India, and textile and appliance companies were setting up factories in Mexico, South Korea, and Thailand, Marcos was writing, “Vast territories, wealth, and above all, a huge and available workforce lie waiting for the world’s new master but, while there is only one position as master available, there are many aspiring candidates.”

  In his determination to be independent, and no one’s case or client, Marcos has also railed against the paternalism of many charities and NGOs. In the “Thirteenth Estela,” of the Zapatista Calendar of Resistance, in 2003, he denounced the sort of aid in the form of charity and handouts advocated by celebrities and church groups, and “a more sophisticated handout—the practice of some NGOs and international organizations [that] decide what the communities need . . . without even consulting them.” How they “impose not only certain projects but also the times and ways of implementing them. Imagine the exasperation of a community that needs drinking water, and what they get is a library, one that needs a school for children, and gets a course on herbal medicine.”

  This clear thinking resonated with me. All my adult life, beginning with my teaching in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, I have tried to understand how to reconcile the nature of poverty, the role of charity, the intervention of aid organizations, and the maneu
verings of governments, especially those in the third world. After repeated visits to Africa over fifty years, I concluded that foreign aid as it is conventionally practiced is essentially a failure, futile in relieving poverty, and often harmful, relieving the ills of a few at the expense of the many. Most charities are diabolically self-interested, proselytizing evangelists, tax-avoidance scammers with schemes to buff up the image of the founder—often someone in disgrace or mired in scandal or obscenely rich. Claiming to be apolitical, such charities allow authoritarian governments and kleptocracies to go on existing, because the charities do the governments’ work, and in doing so, prevent oppressed people from understanding how they are being exploited.

  The best example I have seen close up is the presence of China in Africa, offering rogue aid to despots in return for valuable commodities. The United States once did this in small and subtle ways; China now does it conspicuously and with impunity. When I took my Africa trips for Dark Star Safari and The Last Train to Zona Verde I saw how with backhanders or huge loans China bought dictatorships in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Sudan, and Angola, in order to obtain ivory, gold, bauxite, oil, and much else, leaving the countries in deep and sometimes unpayable debt—indeed debt slavery. But the United States still does the same in many countries, taking advantage of a government’s indifference to human rights abuses.

  This is the reason Apple (dodging taxes, exploiting Chinese workers, pretending to care) is a trillion-dollar company, one of China’s best friends. When someone like Bill Gates or Tim Cook makes noises about helping the poor, while conniving with China to use cheap labor and turning a blind eye to China’s human rights brutalities (a million Uighurs imprisoned to be brainwashed in Xinjiang, the persecution of gay men and women, the suppression of news, and other abuses), you just want to laugh. In the years Bill Clinton sold the American people on NAFTA, he did not say how it would remove manufacturing from communities in the United States (the many instances I recounted in Deep South), nor did he seem to know or care how it would destroy the lives of farmers in Mexico with genetically modified crops, as I heard from Francisco Toledo’s organization in Oaxaca.

  It took me years to see that charities and NGOs are profitable businesses, many of them subversive ones. The average Peace Corps volunteer gains greatly in experience by living for two years in, say, an African dictatorship, but the result is demoralizing rather than uplifting for the citizens of the host country: in my experience the Peace Corps volunteers’ students, instead of becoming teachers themselves, immigrate to Europe or the US. Subcomandante Marcos’s term for this seemingly well-intentioned but ultimately self-serving effort is neoliberalism, which in the United States is as rampant among Democrats as Republicans.

  Another humane aspect of the Zapatista struggle that has annoyed many other rebel groups is their refusal to engage in the killing of ordinary citizens. Bombings by the Irish Republican Army—cheered and often financed by some Irish Americans—were condemned by the Zapatistas as savage and inhumane, and of course the targeting of civilians is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, punishable as a war crime. (I recalled that whenever a bomb went off in a market square in Ulster, killing bystanders, either the IRA or the Ulster Defence Association took credit for it and crowed, or said nothing and let the innocent bleed to death.) And the same goes for the brutalities of ISIS and Al Qaeda.

  As for Basque separatists and their bombing campaigns in Spain, Marcos wrote in 2002, “We consider the struggle of the Basque people for sovereignty just and legitimate, but neither this noble cause, nor any other, can justify the sacrifice of civilian lives. Not only does it not lead to any political gain, even if it did, the human cost is unpayable. We condemn military actions that hurt civilians. And we condemn them equally, whether they come from ETA [Basque nationalists] or from the Spanish state, from Al Qaeda or George W. Bush, from Israelis or Palestinians, or anyone who under different names or initials, claiming state, ideological or religious reasons, makes victims of children, women, old people and men who have nothing to do with the matter.”

  This is the clearest possible statement of the dignity of rebellion and the limits of resistance, a rational way of looking at the world, and a means to go about fixing it: “to build a world in which many worlds fit.” In what has been described as the world’s first postmodern revolution, Marcos’s temperament—and actions—were those of a pacifist. I admired him for valuing the lives of civilians, I identified with him in his passion for writing, I was enlightened by his parables—the rabbit, the fox, Durito the beetle. I was in awe of his stamina in existing in one of the most inhospitable jungles on earth, and I was happy to be invited to the Zapatista event.

  The Road to Nueva Maravilla

  With time to kill in San Cristóbal, I made a tour of the restaurants; I sat in the cafés and drank Chiapas coffee or sipped mezcal; I wandered around the market, where women in the black goat-hair skirts that I’d seen in Chamula, and Indians from nearby valleys, were hawking their harvests of unfamiliar fruit: orange-fleshed mamey, papausa—a small scaly ball with sweet pinkish pulp—huayas, pear-sized guavas, the prickly pear they call tuna (but tuna fish is atún), the bitter xoconostle, granadilla, and mangoes. The altitude made me trembly and mostly abstemious. I concentrated on caldos—soups—bread soup, corn soup, tortilla soup, posole and the thick Chiapas stew, caldo tlalpeño.

  One of those dinners I shared with Juan Villoro, who said, “You know the presidential election is coming up in July?” (We were speaking in April 2018.) “One of Marcos’s proposals is to put up a Zapatista candidate for president. Marcos has the idea of supporting an indigenous woman, Marichuy Patricio.”

  “Does she have a chance?”

  “No, it’s a symbolic gesture,” Juan said. “But she’s a good person and she’d make a great president. You’ll meet her.”

  Marichuy was the name she was known by, but her full name was María de Jesús Patricio Martínez. She was in her fifties, from a Nahua community in Tuxpan, Jalisco. Fluent in Nahuatl, trained as a traditional healer, she had her own clinic. She was prominent as an activist for the cause of indigenous people to the extent that the Zapatistas, who normally distanced themselves from Mexican elections, saying they were a sham, supported Marichuy’s candidacy, representing the National Indigenous Congress, in the coming election. To appear on the ballot, she’d need to collect almost 900,000 signatures.

  “What about Obrador?” I asked, because Andrés Manuel López Obrador was said to be a man of the people and also the most popular candidate.

  “The Zapatistas have objections to him,” Juan said. And he listed them: Obrador had a lot of former members of the discredited ruling party, the PRI, on his team. One of them, Esteban Moctezuma, his secretary of education, had been in charge of the persecution of the Zapatistas, and though he’d also participated in secret peace talks with them, he had issued an arrest order for Marcos. Obrador would not change much; the most he’d do is enhance the same economic system, with a few popular corrections. Obrador had no program to address the Indian communities—worse than that, he had approved economic strategies that would destroy large indigenous territories.

  So much for Obrador—who later went on to win the election.

  As I was debating whether to go zip-lining or on a hike, take a day trip to the ruins at Palenque or a drive to Ocosingo, I got the word from Juan.

  “An unmarked white van will be parked at the Zócalo end of Francisco Madero at three o’clock,” he said. “The traffic is always bad, and the roads are terrible. It might take an hour to get to the Conversatorio in Nueva Maravilla.”

  The anonymous van was at the appointed spot. I got in and introduced myself to the others inside: an older woman lawyer, two men—a professor and a philosopher—and a gentle middle-aged Indian woman, who said, “I am Marichuy”—the presidential candidate.

  But the van lurching on the bumpy road prevented any further conversation, as we passed through the barrios—La Hormiga (the Ant), Pro
greso, America Libre—to La Cronistas Street, turned into Los Profesores, and on through narrowing side streets until we reached Calle Jon Chamula, hardly a street, potholed and badly paved to the end. This was the colonia of Nueva Maravilla. The van paused at a gate in a high fence, bearing a sign indicating that this was the Zapatista institute, UniTierra, low yellow buildings with red-tiled roofs and murals.

  Subdued but watchful, the attendees circulated among stands selling food or Zapatista emblems. They were all ages, some wearing ski masks or balaclavas, others looking professorial, still more in the casual clothes of college students, who I guessed were undergraduates here.

  Marichuy was greeted affectionately by groups of indigenous women in embroidered blouses and full skirts, and they escorted her toward a building that proved to be the auditorium.

  Juan called out to me, and I joined him to register.

  “Colectivo?” the woman at the registration desk asked.

  It usually meant a bus or taxi, but here it meant the political group to which I might belong.

  “None,” I said, and I was assigned a badge, the space for my colectivo left blank. Juan and I entered the building, taking seats up front, near the stage, where Marichuy and some other women were already seated. The auditorium was nearly full, with perhaps four hundred murmuring people. Two large murals at the back of the stage were brightly lit, one showing an indigenous woman in a white blouse and apron, kneeling with her hands clasped, the other a dark-skinned man staring across the top of his mask, a red bandanna covering the lower portion of his face.