Redeemers (56 page)

The historian Juan Pedro Viqueira argues that this war left an indelible trace on the Tzeltal zone of Los Altos, one of the two strongest centers of Zapatismo along with the Lacandón Jungle. The rebellion served to discourage the growth there of a mestizo population (called
ladinos
, especially in Chiapas) and helped to create the desire among its Indians to maintain themselves as a group apart. And it strengthened the fear and contempt in which they were held by the
coleto
and
ladino
population of San Cristóbal.

For Samuel Ruiz, and for his diocese, the
tuhuneles
were an important step toward the future, imagined largely as a return to primitive Christianity, to the Church before the Council of Nicaea (325
A.D.
), the watershed moment when it adopted an institutional structure and turned away from its origins as a communitarian constellation of apostles and congregations. “Without vainglory,” Don Samuel said to me in an interview, “I can affirm that if an anthropologist were to visit these communities, he would see that the figures of the catechist and the
tuhunel
almost belong to the tradition and form part of [the communities'] own culture.”

In practice, Samuel Ruiz reflected a longing for both the communitarian primitive Church and a commitment to the Church's structure as it later developed. By the 1970s, Ruiz was fully exercising the three implicit aspects of his office: prophet, priest, and king. As a prophet, his preaching lashed out at injustice and announced the hope of liberation. As a pastor and priest, he cared for his flock, offered them consolation, and guided them toward an awareness of the holy. As king, he accepted a measure of treatment as a sovereign to whom his people rendered homage. He had become known among the Maya—and addressed in person and writing—as
Tatic
, the Tzeltal Mayan word for “father.” Villages would prepare a month in advance for his visits. The women sewed special dresses for the occasion, while the men worked to prepare, as is usual in Mexico, a proper house for Tatic's stay. On the day of his arrival, a line of men and a line of women formed to kiss his ring. They slaughtered cattle for a large meal in honor of Tatic and when he celebrated Mass, they sang praises for the prospect of liberation through God and the Gospels.

In 1974, when Ruiz turned fifty, he published a brief book of glittering erudition:
The Biblical Theology of Revelation
, in which he described the Indians of Chiapas as the collective body of Christ, devoted to saving society and themselves; he envisioned reality (or at least the reality of Chiapas and the Third World, the heart of his liberation theology) as involving on the one hand, oppression and oppressors, and on the other a poor, oppressed people and a God who deals with injustice and offers them liberation.

But the teaching of the Word of God also excluded those who disagreed. In some of the annual reports submitted by the catechists of the Tzeltal area and stored in the diocesan archives, there were various references to those groups who could easily form part of the growing community, but who must “change” in order to be included. There were, for instance, those who resisted the teaching method, those who had ideological blockage, those who were being influenced by Protestant sects, those who disagreed politically, those who did not speak their minds in discussions, those who thought the mere letter of the Bible was to be followed, “which does not give us life.”

 

V

The expanding movement of the catechists and, later, the deacons—both involved not only with sacred matters but with the harsh daily problems of the poor—seemed to point to the need for a political organization capable of harnessing the increasing energy within the Indian communities. This was clear enough to a man as intelligent as Samuel Ruiz. Early in 1976, during a visit to Torreón, in the border state of Coahuila in the north, Bishop Ruiz met a group of young militants who called themselves ideological “maoists,” having been influenced by the Chinese Marxist belief in the importance of organizing the peasantry (but not a commitment to armed revolution). Their leader was Adolfo Orive, a left-wing economist who had spent time in China. His organization,
Política Popular
, advocated the transformation of social relations rather than armed struggle. These young militants were university graduates who had worked as organizers among poor squatters living in Torreón, Durango, and Monterrey. They focused mostly on practical matters, such as trying to improve the squatters' housing, increase their water supply, and bring electricity to their colonies. “It seemed to me that he [Orive] possessed clarity of thought,” Ruiz remembers. He was impressed.

He invited the group, some thirty young activists, to Chiapas. Orive's group began to work in the villages, alongside representatives of the diocese. Orive told the priests they could dedicate themselves to pastoral work while his “brigade” of workers would take care of political organization. They began small projects, such as helping the peasants to produce honey that they could sell, and negotiating with the federal government to enable the Indians to sell coffee without the participation of rapacious
coyotes
(middlemen).

By the middle of 1978, Orive's
brigadistas
or “northerners” had won the support of a few thousand catechists, who felt that these people could make tangible social improvements. But problems arose between the diocese and the
brigadistas
. The northerners at first had relied upon the structure of the diocese and its representatives in order to gain the confidence of the local population. But then they began to bypass the agents of the Church and move directly into the communities. Moreover, the diocese saw any contact with government as “compromising.” They accused the
brigadistas
of being
reformistas
and compared their projects to the Golden Calf of Exodus, a “deception” that would only delay the struggle of the communities to liberate themselves from “the system” of oppression.

In the battle for the peasants' liberation, another small group, the CIOAC (
Central Independiente de Obreros Agrícolas y Campesinos
), some of them Communist Party members, succeeded in organizing hundreds of peasants. In contrast to “the struggle step by step” (
lucha paso a paso
) of the
brigadistas,
they favored a “struggle by forceful action” (
lucha al golpe
), such as occupying land that formed part of the haciendas.

The
brigadistas
continued their activity into the early 1980s, despite the distrust with which they were now regarded by Ruiz and his followers because of their willingness to work with government and their increasing distance from the Church. They founded the
Unión de Uniones
, which was able to conclude agreements with the government for a credit union to help finance grassroots projects for the production and sale of coffee. Many Indian peasants became small stockholders. But the crisis of 1982 (which bankrupted the Mexican government in the wake of a collapse in the oil boom) destroyed the project's economic basis, as the price of Chiapas coffee plummeted. The
brigadistas
lost much of their popular support; Orive (and some of his comrades) would go back north, but behind them they would leave a functioning organization in place, which would prosper again—with government aid—under the Salinas administration (1988–1994).

The political radicalization within the diocese intensified. Events in Central America during the late 1970s and '80s seemed to make an ever stronger argument for the
lucha al golpe
: the growth of military terror in Guatemala, the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the upsurge of guerrilla action in El Salvador, and the assassination there by a right-wing militant of Samuel Ruiz's friend, Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero (while he was celebrating Mass). In 1980, the diocese created a more radical doctrinal arm, known as SLOP (“root” in Tzeltal Mayan) and drawn from among the catechists closest to Samuel Ruiz and his teachings. They had the major assignment of organizing armed “self-defense” for the Indian villages but, lacking expertise in weapons, they would eventually turn to another group of outsiders, who established themselves in the Lacandón Jungle in 1983. They were the remnants of a guerrilla movement, the FLN (
Frente de Liberación Nacional
), founded in 1969 in the northern city of Monterrey. Once in the Chiapas jungle, they created the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and for six years (1983–89) SLOP and the Zapatistas worked together. Many catechists began to believe in the prospect of an armed uprising, in the idea that “the Word of God,” the need to change society, led naturally toward a religious imperative to take up arms. In her book
Religión
,
política y guerrilla en Las Cañadas de la Selva Lacandona
, María del Carmen Legorreta Díaz, who was an advisor for many years to the
Unión de Uniones
, collected statements by former partisans of Zapatismo that show how the preaching of catechists was sliding toward a call for armed rebellion: “You would come to the conclusion that the people of God fought with weapons, not because it said so in the Bible but because that's the direction they developed out of the questions, about arms, about all the old prophets, they also struggled in Egypt, they rescued the native peoples who were suffering in their work like servants, like slaves; so, what could they do to liberate themselves. Why were they able to free themselves? Because they believed in God, they believed in the armed struggle.”

Lázaro Hernández, the most important Indian leader of the diocese (he had been the “deacon of deacons”), joined the EZLN in 1983, taking the nom de guerre of “Jesús” while remaining a leader of SLOP (he would leave the Zapatistas in 1988). Soon many Zapatistas adopted biblical names: David, Daniel, Moisés, Josué—and, of course, Marcos. Within a few years, a new confrontation would develop between the diocese and this new movement of Zapatismo.

By 1988, Subcomandante Marcos was the second in command within the clandestine Zapatista hierarchy. Aside from the obvious question of where the power would rest (similar but much more serious than the problem a decade earlier between the Church in Chiapas and the
brigadistas
), the problem with the Church had much to do with the “unmasking” of Subcomandante Marcos' antireligious attitude. Marcos was known to have officiated at “revolutionary marriages” and to have commented frequently that “God and his Word aren't worth a damn” (
valen madres
). According to Legorreta, the diocese, faced with the growing influence of Zapatismo, decided to turn SLOP itself into an armed organization for “self-defense” to offset the influence of the Zapatistas. Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico, in their
Marcos, la genial impostura
, a book highly critical of Zapatismo, said that the SLOP leaders intensified their criticism of the Zapatista leaders, asserting that “Marcos is a
mestizo
, he is not poor, and why should we let him give us orders?” SLOP tried to buy more arms, to strengthen their position for whatever the future might hold and so as not to leave the armed option (the
lucha al golpe
) as the sole prerogative of the Zapatistas, but Marcos acted forcefully against those who doubted or opposed Zapatismo. Whole families were expelled from their villages or shunned by their neighbors, even to the point of pro-Zapatista deacons refusing the sacraments to some Indians who refused to join or support the EZLN. As for Ruiz, there is no evidence that he ever directly preached in favor of the armed struggle, but the activities of SLOP, led by those closest to him, clearly indicate that he was not totally opposed to the
lucha al golpe
. In the most radical official document issued by the diocese, the
plan diocesano
of 1986, there is a mention of present unjust conditions pointing toward “a new explosion . . .”

The Zapatista movement would go into crisis after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which undermined faith in its traditional Marxist ideology, not yet fully charged with its later “indigenist” arguments. But it still retained its strength among the young, the sons of those who had made the great exodus to the jungle. These young men dreamed of a transformation in their lives: “After the war, it is we who will give the orders.” As for Samuel Ruiz, Marcos is said to have called him a
modista
, a word that can mean “seamstress” or “fashion designer,” because the bishop followed the “fashions”—
modas—
of the moment. Marcos was implying that Ruiz in 1986–87 had looked with some favor on the possibility of a “just war” in order to move his flock to the Promised Land but had changed his mind with the fall of Eastern European communism. It is perhaps more accurate to say that Ruiz now saw the world differently and was reacting to the new geopolitical context of Central America, with the prospects growing weaker for a successful
lucha al golpe
.

Shadowing their relationship was the old conflict between the armed prophet and the prophet without arms, between Marcos and Don Samuel, the knighthood and the clergy, two medieval orders and both of them critical of the modern world, of the civil order—which of course was virtually nonexistent in the feudal state of Chiapas.

 

VI

Events were steadily moving toward January 1, 1994. Marcos had made his famous statement back in 1990: “ . . . here there will be no Word of God, here there will be no government of the Republic, here there is going to be the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.” Samuel Ruiz, speaking of the Zapatistas, lamented that “these people have arrived to mount a saddled horse.” Some of the acts of the Salinas government gave the Zapatistas verbal ammunition. They argued that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada threatened to flood Mexico with cheap farm products from the north, cutting the income of Mexican peasants. The changes in Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, permitting members of the collective
ejidos
to sell their land to private owners, seemed to be even more threatening. The Mexican
ejido
, a form of land tenure dating back to the last years of the Revolution but firmly established during the agrarian reforms of the 1930s, involved a combination of collective ownership and individual family farming; land could not be sold, nor could creditors seize the land to pay off debts. In the eyes of some, laws that permitted sale or debt seizure of
ejido
lands were a “betrayal” of the Agrarian Reform, the “supreme achievement” of the Mexican Revolution. The Zapatistas spread the idea that the government was deliberately provoking the impoverishment and “collective death” of the peasants and Indians of Mexico.