In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  Chon finally waddles around the corner. He looks short and rotund and very grumpy. We drive to La Merced ('Mercy'), his favourite market, which he warns me is both vast and dangerous. People here don't like being filmed, but Chon has apparently convinced people to speak to me. There are stalls piled high with mounds of cactus buds, all manner of chillies and spices, bushes of leafy vegetables and flowers. Despite my wonderment, however, I feel very unwelcome as stallholders wave me away when I ask to speak to them, and I'm only allowed to chat to the specific people Chon's negotiated with. One guy sweats profusely whilst I talk to him, but he's passionate about the traditional foods he sells – poached duck tripe (very tasty – a little musky, but with a soft, liverish texture), tiny crayfish dyed red, fish wrapped in corn husks and baked. He says it's a shame that modern junk food has taken over the country.

  I convince a spice stallholder to give me a masterclass on chillies, and foolishly ask to try the hottest that the guy sells. At first, there's a little heat, but not the face-expanding slow explosion I was expecting, so I try a little more. Bad idea. These are quite dry chillies, so the first taste goes nowhere, and it's only when my saliva starts to break down the heat-packing capsaicin that my head is rapidly set alight. None of this is helping my stomach.

  I visit the fly egg man: I'm surprised that anyone has the patience to harvest them because they are minute, the size of fat grains of sand, and greyish-brown. I dip a finger into the pile and taste them: they are entirely devoid of flavour, and the only sensation is the tingle in my cortex at the thought of eating flies, and a crunch on my tongue, like I'm chewing grit. The whole flies are even weirder, like eating shards of straw. Again, they taste of absolutely nothing, and even though they are an historically important delicacy, I find it amazing that people will pay $80 per kilo for them. The stallholder admits that foods like this are in decline.

  I try to chat with Don Chon but he's getting grumpier and grumpier as we walk around the market, and I don't understand why – most chefs are happiest in places like this. He takes me to a food stall and orders chicken soup plus a side order of gestating hen with a string of half-formed eggs inside it. Neither tastes of much but it looks fun and the texture of the eggs is wonderful – a cross between hard-boiled yolk and hard-boiled white. He also offers me some chicken blood tortilla. Ah, I finally realize what's going on: he's trying to shock me, and his lousy temper only gets worse when I don't recoil from these strange foods. Oh dear, he's chosen the wrong person to try to shock – this is comfort food compared to half-fermented rotten walrus – and my interested reactions have been making him more and more irritable.

  We finally head off to his meat market to pick up escamoles (ant eggs), off-white and creamy on the tongue, and jumiles (large fleas), which have an extraordinary crunchiness and a flavour that's a cross between fennel and menthol. They'd almost be pleasant if they didn't leave my mouth full of irritating shards of flea legs. Don Chon takes me to his restaurant to start cooking.

  He serves me fly eggs fried with chicken egg, cactus and coriander; ant eggs cooked with green tomatoes, garlic and chilli; and whole flies cooked with red tomatoes, garlic, chilli and chicken eggs.

  Hmm. It's all quite interesting, but when prepared, the flies and fly-eggs taste like a sandy omelette and the ant larvae tastes like salsa omelette. I don't want to sound mean, and I'm all in favour of resurrecting ancient foods and breathing life into lost cultures, but I only really enjoyed his food for the novelty and surprise rather than the taste. I was hoping for a gastronomic epiphany so that I could come back to Britain with a renewed zeal to spread the word about eating insects. But even his deep-fried grasshoppers just taste of old cooking oil.

  Chon drops a few hints that he'd rather I buggered off, thanks all the same. He needs to get on, preparing braised snake and (allegedly) some armadillo.

  I get up early to visit a tortilleria and try to find out more about the tortilla wars. Funnily enough, no one is willing to take the blame for the recent fourfold price increase that sparked riots in Mexico City and brought 75,000 people onto the streets to protest. Mexicans eat 300 billion tortillas each year – that's 3,000 per person.

  The tortilla trail starts with the corn growers (usually the massive transnational corporations, such as Cargill and ADM), then leads through a web of distributors and wholesalers, processors and dough-makers until it arrives as a ready-to-bake dough at high-street tortillerias. These are where most people buy them, freshly baked on machines that churn them out at around 120 a minute. And it's here that the good people of Mexico pay through the nose, and where the government recently imposed price restrictions to try to keep them affordable. Trouble is, none of the people running tortillerias could care less about price restrictions and instead they charge as much as they can.

  The owner of the tortilleria, Emilia, is sweet and helpful and even lets me touch her cacophonously clanking and yelping tortilla baking machine. She explains that over 50 per cent of calories consumed by Mexicans come from tortillas: 'They are the basic food in Mexico because we hardly eat any bread.'

  We chat and make thousands of tortillas, and all is going well until I ask her about the riots and the price restrictions, at which point she becomes evasive and grumpy, and breaks away to argue with someone about Lord knows what on the telephone. Meanwhile, my driver is being harassed for money by some of the local hard men, who want a tax for filming on their patch. I give in and call it a day.

  Acteal

  I fly to Chiapas in the far southwest of Mexico where the air is clean and clear. Arriving at the airport, I breathe deeply, relieved to have left the filth and cacophony of Mexico City.

  Chiapas is one of the poorest places in the country and the birthplace of the Zapatista movement, with a high proportion of indigenous people who often don't see themselves as Mexicans, and resent central government exerting power over them.

  I drive to San Cristobal de las Casas, an incongruously wealthy Spanish colonial city of dappled courtyards in an otherwise deprived state. The well-to-do residents were rather surprised on New Year's Day 1994, when the Zapatista rebels chose San Cristobal to launch a Marxist revolution, capturing and ransacking government buildings for a few days before the Mexican army drove them out. Their dismay turned to joy, however, when they realized that they'd been put on the left-wing activist tourist map, and world travellers now come in search of righteous indignation, cheap indigenous crafts and decent coffee.

  Acteal, however, is a different story altogether. The town was the scene of a horrific massacre in 1997 when 45 people, mostly women and children, were brutally slaughtered by government-allied paramilitaries because the village sided with the Zapatistas in a dispute over land. It now lives in a state of perpetual mourning.

  I meet Miguel, the current village leader (leadership is constantly rotated to avoid corruption), who blames the USA for forcing Mexico to give up on co-operative land-holding and allow private ownership as part of the free trade agreement, and hence for the massacre itself. He explains that during the 1960s and '70s the Acteal peasants were given parcels of land as part of a widespread land redistribution. Soon after this, wealthier landowners started to bully the peasants away, or simply reoccupied the peasants' land (a common consequence of agrarian reform), but the Zapatistas encouraged people, including those in Acteal, to assert their rights and to occupy more land, and this put them in active conflict with the local landowners who ran a militia called Peace and Justice which, Miguel says, carried out the massacre.

  Miguel takes me to the church where the victims were first attacked, and then to the place where most of them died, starting with the village leader. We visit the tomb where the bodies now lie, and I shiver when I see the pictures of the dead: women, boys and girls, a few men, and most awful of all, a five-month-old baby. How could anyone do this?

  I ask if the village still supports the Zapatistas and Miguel says they agree with their aims, but not with their methods. After this vicious a
ttack destroyed so many families in the village, they now want peace more than anything. I notice they still talk in a Zapatista-esque language of struggle, though. 'Our struggle to retain our land will never be over,' Miguel says. 'It is our destiny. The government is too strong to be beaten, but we are too committed to lose.'

  We go to the village cornfields, and Miguel tells me that corn is their life. 'According to our Mayan tradition, we were created from corn, yellow, white and black.' He goes on to say that the conflict began because of the free trade agreement. 'They wanted to take away our lands so that we would become their slaves.'

  After exploring the cornfields, we return to the village and eat bean soup with tortillas and chilli with Miguel and the men of the village council. For every meal there's always a pile of tortillas to hand, wrapped in a cloth to keep them fresh.

  I leave Acteal, shocked at the scale and viciousness of the massacre.

  It's absurdly early when I get up to visit Petrona, a beautiful elderly woman who's renowned for her cooking. She's agreed to show me how to cook a classic Mexican food called tamales: steamed parcels of corn dough filled with bean paste. They're a Mexican classic but are only made for special occasions. Mention them to Mexicans living away from home and they will turn misty-eyed and start missing their mothers.

  Following Petrona's instructions I spread out a thin layer of corn dough onto a damp tea-cloth, enough to cover the whole thing in a large rectangle. I do it slowly and carefully using the palm of my hand whilst trying to ignore the wailing laughter of the five elderly Mexican women looking on. They find it bizarre that a gringo is daring to cook in a Mexican madre's kitchen. Petrona cackles at my cack-handed doughwork (which isn't actually that bad, thanks very much).

  Once I have survived the initial humiliation and made a passable base for my tamales, I spread an equally thin layer of cooked and mashed beans on top of the dough. Then I roll it up like a jam roly-poly, wrap it in corn sheaths, and steam for an hour or so over a wood fire. When I'm done Petrona charitably praises my work. We leave the tamales to steam and Petrona shows me how to make a drink from corn, water and sugar. My God, this corn thing is getting out of hand. We make a huge vat of corn drink, which tastes surprisingly good – although it's sickly sweet it also has a great citric kick – like Tokaji wine, but white and silky.

  Our tamales are finally ready, and they're extremely filling and soothing, although they don't taste of much except wet corn and wet beans. Luckily there's also an enormous smoked beef stew, so I fill my boots with that.

  On the Trail of the Zapatistas

  Making tamales is fun but I'm keen to tackle the big story: the Zapatistas. I head out to the remote countryside, leaving Mexican-administered territory and entering rebel-controlled land, though there's no border and it's hard to tell where the front line is. This, along with the fact that who's in charge in any one place is vague and shifting, makes rebel conflicts rather dangerous.

  As I drive further from San Cristobal, the countryside becomes more mountainous and eroded and the people are visibly poorer, living in wooden shacks. The bright, colourful Mexico I've got used to turns monochrome, sullen and ragged. People stare warily at us from their front doors and the plots of land get smaller and more crowded. The countryside around here is mainly steep hills and valleys, often too difficult and fragmented to farm, and fields of corn are small and scrappy. Despite this, there's a surprising density of housing and it's teeming with people, which puts enormous pressure on the land. Each family must have barely enough land to feed itself, which is partly why land ownership here has become a matter of life and death.

  I make my way to a village called Oventica, a Zapatista command centre, and it's here that I'm going to try to get access to the rebels. The Zapatistas are notoriously wary of mainstream media, and they like to exert tight control of their message. Since the movement began they have used the Internet and a network of international sympathizers to publicize their struggle, and their manipulation of the media has ensured their survival so far, despite the fact that they haven't had to fire their guns for several years.

  It also means that any attack on the Zapatistas by the Mexican authorities can be instantly broadcast to the world via the Web, ensuring worldwide condemnation.

  The rebels, and especially their leader, have become famous for their struggle and the way they devolve power and avoid the usual descent into internecine power struggles and corruption that other bedevil other rebel groups.

  I'm beginning to think that the Zapatistas might be one of the few Marxist groups it's cool to like – the old student poster boys such as Mao, Che and Castro have all been a bit compromised by their irritating habits of presiding over genocide and summary executions, stamping on rights, or simply by being dictatorial bastards. Marcos, though? Well, he's anonymous (balaclava), humble-ish (calls himself a subcommandante rather than leader), he's sexy (bullet belt), and cool (pipe). Oh, and of course he's dedicated his life to the struggle for rights for the oppressed.

  A team of scary-looking guys in balaclavas guards the Oventica Zapatista camp, and when I ask to enter, I'm told to wait outside. After an interminable, nervous wait, I'm led in to sit like a naughty schoolboy outside the hut of the main camp committee until I'm finally ordered in for an audience. The walls of the hut are covered in pictures of rebel groups, people in balaclavas and idealist paintings of rainbows and happy children. It reminds me of my childhood in the Woodcraft Folk.

  Seven men and women sit on the bench opposite, silently watching us from inside their black balaclavas. I can't help thinking that they must be terribly hot under there. They ask my name, grill me briefly on what I'm doing here, and then give a little speech about how pleased they are that I've come. I get up and leave. Well, that was easy, I think, until I realize that all they've done is grant me an audience with the communications committee next door who will consider my case. In the next-door hut two more hoodies interrogate me. They take some notes and then tell me to leave while they consider my case.

  I sit in the camp cafe for two hours before I get an answer and it's a simple one: 'No. We don't speak to any journalists.' Did it take them two hours to decide that? I have come a long way to talk to the Zapatistas, and I'll have wasted thousands of pounds unless I get to speak to one. I humbly tell them that I'm interested in the NAFTA disputes and it would be a tragedy if they aren't able to put their case. I hope it doesn't sound too much like a threat.

  That's lovely, they say. No thanks.

  I'm distraught. I ask if I can think about what they've said and then come back to see them later.

  'Sure.'

  I return to the cafe, tearing my hair out. Perhaps if we just sit here, something will happen. An hour later I spot one of the committee poking his head out of the door. Apparently they will reconsider their decision if I write down the exact questions I want to ask. I come up with a set of subjects that don't sound too threatening (I'll change them to specifics later), and they send me away again. This is becoming boring.

  I have lunch in the cafe and browse the camp shop, which sells all sorts of glorious Zapatista kitsch: tea towels, tortilla cloths, CDs, stuffed wool figurines of a pipe-smoking Marcos, Marcos on a horse, portraits of the Madonna wearing a balaclava (I kid you not), Zapatista snail purses, and all manner of lapel pins. It's extraordinary: this movement has become a brand. I buy one of everything in the hope that this will stand me in good stead for an interview.

  Four long hours later I'm still waiting. Finally Luisa the translator wanders down to see if she can poke her head around the committee-hut door. As she gets there, the committee are all leaving to play a game of football, and they tell her to come back tomorrow. They are clearly playing a power game. They know we need them to be in our film, and they don't care how much they annoy me. I leave downhearted, having wasted a whole day.

  While I'm waiting for the Zapatistas to give me an answer, I go to the San Cristobal market to find out about the local food. The ma
rket is jammed with people and I taste a few strange insects and try to talk to stallholders. I stop at a juice stall for a pineapple and banana drink and get talking to the owner, Maria, who points to the spice stall opposite. 'That's my husband, Fernandez,' she says.

  They are garrulous and friendly and when I tell them I'm investigating food and politics they open up. They give me their recipe for mole (a thick sauce flavoured with sweet chillies, chocolate and endless other ingredients) and tell me about the fights they sometimes have across the market stalls, which have occasionally involved flying oranges and cinnamon sticks. Maria makes me her favourite drink: the deep crimson Vampire, which contains beetroot, carrot and sugar. It's good stuff.

  Eventually I hear from the Zapatistas. The committee might let me visit another camp in a couple of days if I go with Jose, a guy I met when I first arrived in Chiapas.

  Perhaps I'll get an interview after all.

  • • • • •

  To pass the time, I head off to a town called San Juan Chamula to meet a white witch (also called Maria), who carries out a cleansing ritual on me. I've never been spiritually cleansed before so I'm not sure what to expect, and I ask her not to turn me into a chair or anything weird like that. She doesn't think this is funny.

  Maria takes me to her shrine room, which has a huge figurine of the Virgin Mary, plus crosses and corn symbols, and all manner of junk, where she unleashes pungent clouds of incense over me and then proceeds to whack me with leaves, and, most bizarrely, roll eggs over my body, all the while chanting and praying in a strange, indigenous language that sounds spookily similar to the Inuktituk that the Inuit speak.

  It's all very calming and uplifting, and I'm grateful for the sensation. I'm not a particularly mystical kind of bloke, but it's impossible to ignore the sense of being cleansed and enlightened. It might just be all the stroking, but I resolve not to give in to my mystic cynicism, and thank her profusely. She hugs me like I'm a long-lost son, and invites me to watch her daughters cook tortillas.