In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  In her smoke-filled cooking hut, three women sit spreading corn dough into thin circles and toasting them on a flat metal plate. When I kneel down and ask if I can try making tortillas myself, they laugh in disbelief, saying, 'Women are creatures of fire, so they belong in the kitchen.' I persevere and spread out my lump of dough, slapping and twisting it. I make a passable tortilla shape, but the girls take great delight in taunting me. I place my dough on the griddle, burning it in several places before it's finally cooked. It tastes awful, and I humbly take my leave. Maria hands me her CV. I've never read a witch's CV before (it's very much like an ordinary mortal's, but heavier on the miracles).

  Still on the Trail of the Zapatistas

  I drive for hours away from the cool air and smart courtyards of San Cristobal and down into the baking hot, dirt-poor plains of Chiapas. The land is parched and windblown – more like the Mexico I'd imagined. Crooked fences guard vast tracts of worthless, wasted earth, and the sun burns like the breath of a massive, moustachioed dragon.

  In this land crops are failing, yet the price of corn has been pushed so low by subsidized US imports that it's no longer worth planting. People are leaving this place in droves for the USA, prepared to take their chances as illegal aliens. I stop in a raggedy town square and chat to a few elderly gents about how difficult it is to make a living here, and they despair at so many people leaving.

  I stumble across Jesus and Aramore, two impoverished farmers, and offer to buy them breakfast. They blame the free trade agreement for rural poverty, and America for treating Mexicans worse than dogs, despite the fact that 'the USA needs Mexican labour and Mexican oil'. They sympathize with the Zapatistas rebellion – how else can people succeed against a government that has abandoned them?

  I ask if either of them has had any experience of the emigration tragedy, and Jesus breaks down in tears. His daughter escaped to the USA years ago and he doesn't think he'll ever see her again. I think how devastated I'd be if one my own daughters left, and Mexico's simmering national sadness suddenly becomes clear. Rural poverty tears communities apart leaving behind fragmented families and social catastrophe. I feel sick at the thought of a countryside that can no longer sustain its people.

  I call Jose, my Zapatista contact, and ask him to make a last-ditch attempt to get us a meeting with the Zapatistas. I have to leave tomorrow for Tijuana, and I'm getting desperate. Jose is hopeful, and makes a provisional arrangement to meet me tomorrow.

  That night I meet a group of men who were kicked off their land by the Zapatistas in 1994. They were wealthy landowners (and look as though they still are), but they haven't been able to set foot in their old homes. They are calm and structured in their responses, but when I ask if they understand why the Zapatistas have invaded their lands, they claim ignorance. I push the point – surely they are doing this as a way of correcting historic injustices – but the landowners aren't willing to let their guard down. They say that the indigenous people are being manipulated by the Zapatistas for political gain.

  I feel cautious sympathy for them – landowners are not historically renowned for their fair treatment of indigenous people, but these guys have clearly been forced off land that they owned. They say that they were only small landowners, not the wealthy oligarchs the Zapatistas claim they are. However, one of them gives us a lift back to our hotel in town, and during the journey he mentions that he's now doing pretty well in the cosmetics business and that the Zapatistas took only a small proportion of his land – he still owns a lot more.

  I'm getting desperate about my lack of success with the rebels now, and I'm not feeling optimistic as I head towards the camp where I'm hoping Jose has wangled us an interview. I am supposed to meet him at a road junction, but after an hour, I hear that he's driven straight past me and entered the camp – he didn't see us waiting. Sod it. I hope we haven't blown our last chance.

  I dump the car, hike to the top of a dramatic valley and finally come across the Zapatista camp. It's pretty grim: in a scrappy clearing 20 or 30 listless men and women sit or lie around a large wooden-frame shelter covered in torn black plastic sheeting. A few of them get up when they see me, but it's clear that we pose no threat. I carry a box of fruit that I've brought as a peace offering.

  A short-wave radio fizzes and quacks every now and then, and smoke drifts from a couple of fires. Outside a separate cooking shack a young couple stop snogging for a second to look at us without interest, then go back to snogging. So this is what a land invasion looks like. The people here are occupying land that they've invaded mainly to make sure that no one comes to take it back. There's little to do, and there are no crops growing. All they can do is sit and wait.

  I find José and run to greet him, but he's furious with me. 'Where were you?' Apparently I shouldn't have entered this place on my own – I've made him look untrustworthy for leading me here. It looks as though the whole interview is in jeopardy, but after talking to him for a while, and offering the box of food to the rebels, he calms down and agrees to make an introduction for me.

  Miraculously the rebels agree to an interview. They single out a young boy who will act as their mouthpiece. I'm slightly crestfallen – I don't want to speak to a mouthpiece. The boy sits me down next to a roaring fire and begins to talk. In fact he doesn't stop talking for 15 minutes straight, and that's just him introducing himself and his comrades. The rest of the rebels stand around in the background, listening in and posing for the camera. I ask a few questions about Zapatista aims and feelings, but the boy just wants to drum out the manifesto. I ask about the free trade agreement, and what the Zapatistas feel about Mexico's relationship with the USA. He starts to stumble a bit here, and one of the adult rebels gets frustrated and takes over. The free trade agreement was the catalyst, he says, and both capitalism and the USA are to blame for the Zapatista revolution. Ultimately, this revolution is all about food, hunger and land.

  It's weird interviewing someone in a balaclava, much more so than interviewing a woman in a burka. It could be the fact that 20 blokes are staring at me whilst I talk, and without knowing their expressions, I can't tell if they're happy, angry or just bored. But as we continue to talk, other men butt in to take over the discussion and express their frustration and anger. 'We are all landless peasants, indigenous people whose rights have been trampled on by the government. In the 1960s, land was redistributed to many poor people, but soon afterwards the big landowners just bought it up again when they shouldn't have been allowed to. We are angry, and for years the Mexican government has ignored us.'

  I tell them that I met a group of landowners whose land had been invaded, and wondered how they could justify forcing people off their farms.

  'They say the land is theirs but they are illegal lands, they belong to the peasant. We always say we are the guardians, we are the ones who look after the land like a mother.'

  I ask why the Zapatistas have an issue with the USA. He says that they blame the Americans for forcing NAFTA onto them: 'We indigenous people don't accept the free trade agreement because it will destroy our livelihoods. We are already seeing many indigenous people head across the border where they are killed like little birds. That's the end result of the poverty we have here.'

  After talking over a blazing fire in baking sunshine for a couple of hours, I am stressed, hot and sticky, but elated that I've finally got to speak to the Zapatistas. I feel comfortable enough to ask the question that every journalist wants to ask, but never dares: 'We've been sitting in the blazing hot sun for two hours now, and I can't help feeling that you're wearing inappropriate headgear for a climate like Mexico's. Aren't you hot underneath all that wool?' My belligerent interviewee lets out a chuckle, and it spreads gently around the camp.

  I race back to San Cristobal to meet Maria Urvina, a woman in her 60s whose land was invaded by the Zapatistas four years ago. She wears glasses that are held together by glue and hope, and she has a sad but kindly face. She flusters around her kitchen when I turn u
p, tidying and shooing children out into the courtyard.

  Maria is, it's fair to say, emotionally crippled by the experience. She frequently bursts into tears when talking about the life she used to lead, and she's lost hope of ever getting her farm or her life back. She spends all her time working in a beer shop and looking after her sick brother who has gigantism. 'I'm too old,' she says, 'my life is over now.'

  Whilst making me guacamole, she shows me the letter she received from the rebels back in March 2003. It makes terrifying reading: in three terse paragraphs she is ordered off her farm, and the Municipio Autonomo en Rebeldia claims it on behalf of the indigenous people: 'The earth has no owner, it cannot be bought or sold. It does not belong to whoever claims to be its owner, or to the government. This land will be worked collectively for the good of everyone.'

  After the letter arrived, she had to leave her farm, never to return. She passionately hates the Zapatistas, and the indigenous people who invaded her land in particular. 'They are lazy, unlike other indigenous people from San Cristobal, and they haven't done anything with the land' – just left it to decline so much that it would take years of work to make it productive again. I ask why the government didn't help or protect her, but she dismisses them out of hand. 'The government doesn't help any of us.' Certainly, the government seems to be too weak to resist the Zapatistas here in Chiapas. Had she bought her land illegally, I ask? 'My grandfather bought the land,' she says, 'but it wasn't illegal.' And now she has nothing, and the Zapatistas occupy land that has apparently been rendered useless.

  Grossing the Border

  I leave Chiapas and fly to Tijuana, adjacent to the USA. It's not just near the border – it is the border. When you exit the airport, the border wall is 50 metres away. It must be overwhelmingly tempting for poor Mexicans when just over that line of concrete and plexiglass lies wealth beyond their dreams. Around 800,000 people cross the border illegally each year, many of them from rural areas like Chiapas. I'm planning to make the crossing (legally) late tomorrow, but first of all I'm going on a whirlwind tour of Tijuana.

  There are now an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living inside the USA. It seems ironic that whilst the USA exports corn, Mexico exports illegal immigrants. Of course, this hasn't been going down at all well with conservative Americans.

  My guide on the tour is Lupe, quite possibly the worst driver in Mexico, if not the entire world, and his car is the most flea-ridden, cracked-of-windscreen, shabby and unsafe jalopy I've ever clapped eyes on. A deep funky smell rises up from it, and the smell evolves and worsens the hotter the day becomes. Only the passenger door opens, so I clamber over the passenger seat to get in the back. He's been employed because he's in touch with illegal emigrants and the 'coyotes' who extract exorbitant sums to take them across the border and supply them with fake passports.

  Lupe is an ex-addict. He's kind and gushing in his affections, but full of nervous energy and wild twitches.

  'What were you addicted to?' I ask.

  'Toto,' he screams. 'Everything! Crack, marijuana, heroin, coke, crystal meth, glue, speed. You name it. Oh yeah, man, I was a baad person, but I'm clean now, been clean for ten years.'

  We narrowly miss colliding head-on with an old VW Beetle taxi-van filled to the brim with a fat family. There's no time for recriminations or horn-honking – I just spot the startled expressions on their faces as they whiz by. 'Oops,' Lupe says.

  He takes me at breakneck speed to a Casa del Migrantes – a night shelter for migrants who are on their way from rural areas to the USA. These men (only men) have often travelled days or weeks from their home towns, and they stop here to rest, gather themselves together and work out their means of crossing the border. If you jump the wall in or near Tijuana it's quicker to get to civilization as the US towns lie just over the border, and family or friends can easily pick you up. But there's a higher risk of capture. If you head off into the desert before crossing there's a lower chance of being caught but a much higher chance of dying from exposure in the desert sands. Either way it's dangerous – the wall by the airport is decorated with hundreds of crosses to mark all the lives lost by would-be emigrants.

  In the Casa del Migrantes, we meet another man Jose, who tells me that he's planning to jump the border in three or four days, as soon as he's ready. He's been over a few times before, but spent time in prison for drug offences when he was younger, so he's very unwelcome.

  There's no food, no work and no life worth living here in Mexico, he wants to go back over and join his mother. But America doesn't want or like him, he says. 'They need our labour, and they need the money we pay them for corn, but they hate us. Why can't they open the borders? No one in the USA wants to do the tough, filthy jobs the Mexicans are prepared to do, but they need someone to pick their tomatoes, so we are forced to work illegally.'

  He's desperate to go, but he's not willing to pay the coyote rate of $3,000 – he'll take his chances in the desert. I wish him luck.

  • • • • •

  It's our last night in Mexico so we go out for a drink. Tijuana is a gruesome place, full of strip bars and shockingly young prostitutes in unfeasibly short skirts. We go to a horrible, empty bar built for American frat boys to get tanked in. A deafening mixture of rap and R&B pumps out of the speakers, and we order a bucket of beer. We make use of the bar's novelty sombreros for a team photo, and then make a break for our hotel – we've got an early start tomorrow.

  The next day I try to meet some of Lupe's coyote contacts, but when we arrive, everyone in the room is shooting up heroin, and no one's in any fit state to talk. Come back later, they say. I give up, and Lupe takes me to a part of the wall that he's jumped in the past. From a bank at the top of a flood-channel that's straight out of the movie Grease, we can see across to the US. There's a McDonalds, a vast Nike store and a gleaming shopping centre just over the wall – it could have been built specifically to taunt the Mexicans. It's clean, ordered, spacious and dull, in wild contrast to the relatively lawless Mexican side, which is a mess of filthy buildings crammed together in a kaleidoscope of vibrant colour.

  Lupe looks longingly over the wall, 'I was deported from the USA for selling drugs. I spent three years in a US state prison then I spent a year in a federal prison in Texas.'

  I finally take my leave of Lupe and head for the border crossing point. It takes ten minutes with my UK passport and I'm in the USA. The difference is apparent from the moment I emerge from the border crossing: it's clean, wealthy, high-functioning, smart and civilized. It's also boring, faceless, generic and corporate, but that's hardly the point. It's easy to romanticize rural Mexico with its beauty and simplicity of life, but I know which lifestyle the emigrants prefer.

  I visit groups of migrant workers standing by the roadside at a large intersection, next to a fast food joint. They come here every morning to wait for work, and stay until I p.m. before giving up to go home. Often they'll get a couple of days' work in a week, three if they're lucky. Few of these people are willing to talk to us, worried that they'll just attract more attention from the police and from a semi-vigilante group called the Minutemen. These are people who try to highlight illegal immigration, and have recently been accused of attacking and harassing migrant workers.

  I find a group of luckier workers who've been given work for the day. They are exhausted from working on a tomato farm, and they are slumped by the roadside eating cheap pseudo-tortillas from a food van. None will say if they are working legally or illegally, but those who will talk all say the same thing: America hates us, but needs us.' Do they sympathize with the Zapatistas and their aims? 'Of course. No one else is prepared to stick up for us against the Americans.'

  The truth is that the Zapatistas are a long, long way from here, busy occupying land in a place that these men have abandoned.

  They get up and trudge back to the tomato farm to continue living their dream.

  I hope that all this border crossing has prepared me for my next trip, wh
ich looks like being the most dangerous one of my life. Burma.

  BURMA

  Cooking with Rebels

  POPULATION: 49 million

  PERCENTAGE LIVING BELOW THE POVERTY LINE: 25%

  UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX: 130/177

  CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION: 160/163

  GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA: $230 (173/179)

  FOOD AID RECIPIENTS: n/a

  MALNUTRITION: 5% of the population

  I'd make a crap spy: I get excited way too easily. And right now my shabby attempts at nonchalance could have catastrophic consequences. It's 4 a.m., and I'm about to spend the most dangerous night of my life trying to cross the border illegally from Thailand into Burma with Marc, my producer and good friend. We're standing in a pitch-black hotel car park in Thantend somewhere near the border surrounded by several conspicuous-looking bags of kit. We've just been dropped off by C_____, the BBC's International Man of Mystery and Risk Assessment, and our high-risk consultant for visits to dodgy places, with instructions to wait until our contacts arrive and not to draw attention to ourselves.

  We could get caught by the Thai army and be deported, or we could get caught by the Burmese army, in which case heaven knows what might happen. Hopefully, though, we'll slip through unnoticed and spend the next two weeks living with the Karen rebels and refugees, trying to find out how they survive whilst the Burmese government uses food as a weapon against them.

  I've been lucky over the last few months of bullet- and dystentery-dodging not to have had any major accidents, not to have got shot or kidnapped or brought home a vicious bout of the runs to share with the kids. I hope to God that this isn't the trip where I screw up.