The seams burst in the air. It was a murmur hidden for years, centuries of anger, deep in the Lacandona jungle, in the mountains, the villages, the cornfields. An open secret, cooked over slow heat. The dispossessed, without a decent roof, without land, without work, without health, without food, without education, without freedom, without rights, without peace, without justice. Nobody expected this because nobody wanted to listen to them. Them. The starving dead. The usual dead.
—Today we say enough!
A young indigenous woman watches the guerrilla parade marking the 75th anniversary of the death of revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata on April 10, 1994.Douglas Engle (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Thirty years ago, a faceless army with old rifles and machetes descended from the mountains of southeastern Mexico. It was Saturday, the first day of January 1994. Columns of indigenous Tzotzils, Tzeltales, Choles, Tojolabales, Mames and Zoques, their faces hidden behind red headscarves, and a guerrilla group whose eyes looked defiantly into the cameras, took over the main capitals of Chiapas, the poorest state in Mexico: San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, Ocosingo, Oxchuc, Huixtán and Chana. They screamed everything they said for years without anyone listening. They demanded the withdrawal of the Mexican government. This time everyone turned to see her.
– Join the insurgent forces of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN).
It is said that President Carlos Salinas de Gortari celebrated the great triumph of his government with his loved ones on New Year's Eve 1994. On this day, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force, the culmination of the neoliberal turn after a six-year phase of privatization. Someone warned the leader that a group of indigenous people was rising in the south. Nobody knew who they were or what they wanted. Both the US and Mexican secret services had discovered the presence of a group of armed farmers in Chiapas years ago, but did not want to pay attention to the evidence that had been laid since 1983 about the skirmishes between unknown guerrillas and the army in Lacandona. An insurrection would have been bad press for the economic deal of the decade, and so a conspiracy quietly took shape.
On January 4, L'Unitá, a historical Italian communist newspaper, interviewed one of these anonymous guerrillas, “the only one who is not Indian,” a man wearing a balaclava, his cap pulled down, and a pipe always hanging from the side of his mouth and from the Face of an intellectual “used to communicating with common people.” The journalist asked:
—Why did you choose January 1st and the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas?
—It was the steering committee that made the decision. It is clear that the date is related to NAFTA, which is a death sentence for Indians. The entry into force of the treaty marks the beginning of an international massacre.
Subcomandante Marcos, on March 9, 1998 in the Zapatista community of La Realidad. PEDRO VALTIERRA (Cuartoscuro)
When the television cameras asked for the name and position of this speaker – charismatic, mysterious, shrouded in the smoke of legend – he answered: Subcomandante Marcos. Salinas de Gortari preferred to call him a “professional of violence.” He didn't know it, but the nickname would make history in one of his most memorable statements to the country. The Mexican army counterattacked and for less than two weeks, Chiapas became a war zone with fierce battles like the one in Ocosingo. The government assured that the conflict claimed more than 100 lives. Years later, the EZLN reduced the number of victims: 46 Zapatistas and 27 soldiers.
An Ocosingo resident supports an EZLN guerrilla who was wounded during clashes on January 4, 1994. Damian Dovarganes (Associated Press)
Dirty war, globalization and a face without a hood
Chiapas began to fill with journalists. All conflict reporters wanted to be there and report on an unprecedented indigenous uprising. The support was huge. In Mexico and abroad, thousands of people took to the streets to support the guerrillas and demand an end to the war. “The EZLN has a dichotomous calculation. Either the people of Mexico rise up with us, or they destroy us, they destroy us. If January 1st was a surprise for the rest of the country, January 2nd was a surprise for the EZLN, not only in Mexico but around the world,” Subcommander Marcos said many years later in the 1994 documentary, one of his last previous interviews.
The EZLN was a guerrilla with no history that declared war on the state but promised to do so in accordance with the laws of the Geneva Convention. They spoke in black and white of a miserable Mexico, of Chiapas as a vast hacienda of chiefs, landowners and slaves, of a parched land and a malnourished population dying of curable diseases. They pushed for more modern women's rights laws than in many Western democracies today. On the front page were the names of the commanders Ramona, Esther and Ana María. Although the bias of history outlined above all the character of Marcos, his acerbic prose, his sharp writings, the veiled charisma with which famous intellectuals, politicians and young revolutionaries from all over the world fell in love.
Mexican Army tanks in action near El Momón, in the municipality of Las Margaritas, Zapatista territory, on January 12, 1994.Douglas Engle (Associated Press)
The better equipped and trained army surrounded the guerrillas who sought refuge in the wall of the Chiapas mountains. Outside the region, the EZLN led the battle for public opinion. On January 12, the situation escalated and reached its climax for the government. The press accused him of indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population and other war crimes in his attempt to liquidate the rebels. The National Human Rights Commission investigated the summary execution of five members of the EZLN.
Under international pressure and what was knocking on the doors of his home, Salinas de Gortari declared a unilateral ceasefire, which the EZLN celebrated. The foundations were laid for a dialogue between the government, which appointed Manuel Camacho Solís as its representative, and the guerrillas, in which Samuel Ruíz, then Bishop of San Cristóbal, would also take part.
There were two years of disagreement and dirty war. While both sides talked, the government developed a parallel strategy. A new president, Ernesto Zedillo, took command at the end of the year and tightened the siege on the guerrillas through a counterinsurgency campaign, more soldiers sent to the region and paramilitary groups. Zedillo called the rebels “terrorists” and ordered their arrest. In a desperate attempt to redirect the affections of public opinion, he stripped the enigmatic figure of Marcos and revealed his identity: Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, a philosophy professor originally from Tamaulipas who went to the mountains. Nothing worked. The EZLN's influence continued to grow. In December 1994 they announced the autonomy of thirty municipalities without firing a single shot.
Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, in a photo from 1980, when he taught graphic design at the Metropolitan Autonomous University. Anonymous (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
The global alter-globalization movement, the youth organized in a desperate cry against globalization, looked intently at the Zapatistas. They were the lighthouse that illuminated the left in a dark decade. The covered faces of Marcos and Commander Ramona became a symbol of the possibility of another world that did not fit into the G-20 summits or the International Monetary Fund's agreements. The Che Guevaras of an increasingly commercialized planet. The flag of a generation that believed in the words of Marcos when he proclaimed that freedom was contagious and addictive.
The criminal police remove the EZLN flag on December 20, 1994 in Puerto Cate, in the municipality of El Bosque (Chiapas).Joe Cavaretta (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Agreements and disagreements
In early 1996, the government and the rebels signed the San Andrés Accords, a pact that promised, in the words of the EZLN, “the recognition of our free choice, our autonomy, our right to freely associate, to apply for our spaces, the indigenous Right to the concepts of people and territory; of our right to national political representation and in the states, to some basis for legal pluralism.” They remained a dead letter. Zedillo didn't keep his word.
The military siege and paramilitary attacks intensified. On December 22, 1997, the most memorable attack, an open knife wound, occurred in the region. That day, a paramilitary force entered a church in Acteal, in the highlands of Chiapas, and massacred 45 people. 18 were children. The massacre was directed against the indigenous human rights organization Las Abejas. Zedillo always denied his involvement, but more than two decades later, current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledged the state's involvement and declared that the killers belonged to “paramilitary groups with the complacency of the authorities.”
Relatives of the Acteal massacres carry their coffins, December 25, 1997. Elizabeth Dalziel (AP)
The PRI, the ossified dinosaur that had ruled Mexico for more than 70 years, had collapsed. In the 2000 elections, the right-wing PAN came to power and overthrew the old party for the first time. Vicente Fox was elected president and, in a sign of humility, promised to resolve the conflict in Chiapas “in 15 minutes.” Despite everything, the Zapatistas decided to talk to him. Subcomandante Marcos left Chiapas in a caravan with 23 other high-ranking officials, including Commander Esther, traveling more than 3,000 kilometers and breaking into a crowded zócalo on March 10, 2001.
The best of the Mexican state entered the symbolic center of national power unarmed on the trailer of a truck. He was welcomed with songs, flowers and applause. The EZLN called the journey “The March of the Color of the Earth” and thereby demanded the autonomy of the indigenous peoples. Before the end of the month, they were received in the absence of Marcos and the 207 PAN deputies in Congress.
Commander Esther took a stand. “My name is Esther, but that doesn’t matter now,” she began. “I am a Zapatista, but that doesn't matter at this moment. I'm local and a woman and that's the only thing that matters right now. This stand is a symbol. That's why it caused so much controversy. That's why we wanted to speak there and some people didn't want us to be here. And it is also a symbol that I, a poor, indigenous and Zapatista woman, am the first to speak,” she continued. “We want our way of dressing, speaking, governing, praying, healing, our way of working in groups, respecting the land and understanding life to be recognized,” he also said.
The Zócalo receiving the EZLN order on March 10, 2001. Christian Palma (Cuartoscuro)
Silence, autonomy and the death of Marcos
The speech wrote a chapter in the indigenous history of Mexico – the history of Mexico. Esther, Marcos and the rest of the entourage returned to the mountains of Chiapas. Congress passed a law that recognized the rights and cultures of indigenous peoples but turned its back on their autonomy. The EZLN saw this as a betrayal and broke with parliamentary politics. For two years there was silence behind closed doors. Changes were being prepared within the movement. In 2003, they announced the creation of the Caracoles, or Good Government Boards, five regions that brought together their 39 autonomous municipalities and formed a kind of civil structure for the movement.
In the years that followed, Marcos came into conflict with the same intellectuals who had supported Zapatism from the beginning. They accused him of arrogance, of shutting himself off from the outside world and not listening to anyone. The deputy commander lost some of his public influence and fell into sullen silence. At least it seemed that way. In 2005, the EZLN published the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, the definitive revision to date of the movement's founding text: its DNA, its roots, its ideology, its future. In 2006, he decided to leave his borders again and toured the country as part of the “Other Campaign”, a commitment to a left-wing alternative outside the official parties that were competing in the presidential election that Felipe Calderón and his party would win. fateful war on drugs. A new way to spread the message, demand autonomy and denounce the desolate living conditions of indigenous peoples.
The Macheteros of San Salvador Atenco (State of Mexico) receive the EZLN in April 2006 in Teotihuacán.MARCO UGARTE (AP)
They then returned to seek refuge in the mountains. The organization focused on working behind closed doors, strengthening its self-government, building hospitals and schools, and educating a new generation born and raised in its independent territories. Marcos disappeared from the map for years. There were unfounded rumors that his health was deteriorating. In 2014, two decades after the uprising, the deputy commander announced his own death, a metaphysical hara-kiri that symbolized his first step back. “With my voice, the voice of the EZLN will no longer speak,” he said, taking the new name Galeano in honor of a murdered Zapatista teacher.
Return to stillness. In 2016, the news came from outside even though no one expected it anymore. The Mexican justice system acquitted the subcommander formerly known as Marcos – and 12 other members of the organization – of charges he faced during the Zedillo administration. A year later, the EZLN supported the independent candidacy of María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, Marichuy, spokesperson for the National Indigenous Congress, in the 2018 presidential election, which Andrés Manuel López Obrador won. And in 2021, when Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico 500 years ago, one of his delegations sailed to Europe on a sailboat to carry out “a reverse conquest” aimed at seeding the ancient world with ideas and knowledge rather than death and Looting.
National Indigenous Congress presidential candidate Marichuy accompanied by Zapatista women in October 2017. Eduardo Verdugo (AP)
“Chiapas, on the brink of civil war”
Chiapas has not improved much since 1994. It remains the most miserable state in the country, with more than 75% of the population, mostly locals and farmers, living in poverty. The armed conflict of the last decades has intensified. The state never disarmed the military groups and, on the contrary, increased the militarization and siege of the EZLN. The rise of organized crime in the region, attracted by new drug trafficking routes from South America and the opportunity to make money from mega-projects like the Maya Train, has unleashed a maelstrom of violence that claims new victims every week. The guerrillas speak of a predicted civil war that could break out again at any moment due to the inaction of the federal and state authorities.
In 2023, the year that marks the 40th anniversary of the movement's founding, the EZLN has returned to the front pages. First, with the second metaphorical death of Marcos, who thereby shed the name Galeano and reassumed his own, albeit with a lower rank: Insurgent Captain. The guerrillas are reorganizing themselves in the mountains of southeastern Mexico, pursuing a new strategy that has prevailed during the long years of silence. As a prologue to the anniversary of the uprising, celebrated these days in the “Caracol Resistencia y Rebeldía: Un Nuevo Horizonte”, they announced the disappearance of the “Autonomous Zapatista Rebel Communities and the Good Government Juntas” in favor of a more direct orientation towards democracy, in which communities will be the basis for decision-making. In the 21 statements they have released since October, written by Marcos and Subcommander Moisés, the current command, there are those who have seen the indications of a generational change with a greater presence of women. In one of the texts, Moisés advised against attending the anniversary celebrations due to the insecurity and lack of protection in Chiapas, “unless, of course, they organize themselves very well for it.”
It is still too early to know what new directions globalization's most iconic guerrilla will take. At the moment it is celebrating three decades of survival against the state; about his own way of understanding politics and life, dignity and freedom. The future of the EZLN is uncertain. Whatever happens, its present and past are an invisible fable of resistance that has rewritten Mexico's history forever.
A man observes the deployment of around 500 army units in the municipality of Frontera Comalapa on September 27th. Toño Aguilar (Cuartoscuro)
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