Redeemers (57 page)

On August, 6, 1993, five thousand Zapatistas had staged battle maneuvers in the jungle. By now Don Samuel was preaching against “that cursed organization which advocates war and death” and urging his catechists and deacons to teach that “the armed project is a project of death, contrary to God, who chooses a road of life.” But much of the sophisticated diocesan radio network remained available to the Zapatistas before, during, and after the outbreak of the rebellion.

The Salinas government began to funnel money into Chiapas. A moderate organization, the ARIC (
Asociación Rural de Interés Colectivo
), the new name for the
Unión de Uniones
, tried to carry on the reformist goals of the
brigadistas
, with some success: they created a new educational network, introduced new coffee-growing projects, and came to the aid of twenty-six communities hurt by the legislation assigning exclusive privileges to the Lacandones in their area of the jungle. Some Indians continued to believe in the
lucha paso a paso
. But others sold their cattle to buy arms, and the Zapatistas retained 40 percent of their followers, despite government money and Ruiz's now open opposition.

The newsmagazine
Proceso
had published an interview in September 1993 with Father Mardonio Morales in which he warned of the existence of a guerrilla army in Chiapas and complained that the modern radio communication equipment purchased years ago by the diocese was being used by these guerrillas. But he exonerated Samuel Ruiz of any blame: “he suddenly realized the existence of a whole military organization. He has clearly denounced it . . . I think that the situation moved out of his control.” In the next issue of the magazine, another cleric, Fray Gonzalo Ituarte, said: “it's a crazy fantasy, that a group of radicals from outside Chiapas arrived and through secret meetings manipulated and deceived the entire diocese, where we have people who are well educated, university trained, and among them no less than Don Samuel Ruiz.”

Both opinions had truth to them. Ruiz and his diocese were perfectly aware of the ideas and actions of the Zapatistas. SLOP had at least considered the possibility of an armed uprising since 1980 but then, with the repression of rebellions in Central America and of course the collapse of the Soviet Union, they realized “it was not the way, an armed struggle is dangerous.”

In some of their teaching sessions in the villages, Don Samuel and his vicar Ituarte used drawings of a tree to illustrate world and national politics. One drawing shows representations from the roots up of the elements of “the capitalist government which controls,” beginning with different types of potentates (landowners, bankers, businessmen, etc.), passing through the trunk of political parties and institutions, and rising to the crest, where the various forms of media—as the instruments of ideology—are represented. Another tree is much simpler. The diocese organization SLOP forms the root; the peasants are the trunk. And the summit of the tree is plagued by a
majanté,
a “parasite” strangling fig vine marked “Z” for
Zapatismo,
which threatens to consume both trunk and roots.

But the Church's visual and verbal admonitions were fruitless. The Zapatistas began their rebellion on New Year's Day of 1994. In his first public statement after the uprising, Samuel Ruiz seemed to give legitimacy to the movement, which had acquired considerable national and international sympathy: “The truth is that for the Indians, tired of the promises made by the government, there was no other way out but that of the gun. They were driven beyond what they could stand, though we do think that there are alternatives.” When the Salinas government unexpectedly declared a cease-fire after almost two weeks of fighting, both the government and the Zapatistas requested the mediation of Samuel Ruiz in the peace talks. He had spoken strongly in the preceding years against the armed rising, but his long-term pattern, while clear enough in the shifting policies of the diocese, had been one of ambiguity in relation to the
lucha al golpe
, a position that had a double and positive result. The Zapatistas still respected him, while the government recognized Ruiz as a valid intermediary. In 1994, Mikhael Gorbachev recommended him for the Nobel Peace Prize, which he might have won if peace had really come to Chiapas.

More than twenty-two thousand Indians opposed to Zapatismo, as well as members of the moderate ARIC, fled their villages in the Lacandón Jungle shortly after the uprising. Many of them later wrote to the diocese asking for protection of their property or complaining about Zapatista abuses. When I asked him whether this also was not an Exodus, Don Samuel replied, “They didn't understand. They thought the Zapatistas wanted to drive them out while in reality they wanted to defend them.”

Although the stalemate between government and Zapatistas dragged on well into the twenty-first century, the quarrel between the diocese and the EZLN now seems a thing of the remote past. Ruiz once referred to “guerrillas with peaceful tints” as an immense communitarian assembly, a new People of Israel on the march toward the Promised Land. Gonzalo Ituarte said to me, “Marcos still has the confidence of Don Samuel. There is an identity between them, except on the option of arms. Marcos has learned to respect the faith and the Zapatistas lift their masks to take communion.”

Samuel Ruiz himself, when I asked him directly about his involvement in the genesis of the guerrilla war, responded, “I knew all about the causes. The Indians lost their fear.” Was there a recruitment of catechists by the EZLN? “There is no mystery about that. The Zapatista cause deserved support. The country saw it that way. A direct order was given to the catechists: they had to resign if they joined the EZLN. Some of them sent in their written resignations. They were seeking the establishment of the Kingdom of God.” His statement seemed a return to the years when the diocese worked directly with the Zapatistas, in the belief that the Church could remain the leading force. As he had said to De la Grange and Rico: “We worked with them for six years. They trained the young men, and even women, for the armed struggle.”

Bishop Ruiz had shown no affection for electoral democracy. When I first met him, in 1994, he had commented on the impending national and local elections: the center-right PAN was a party that represented the interests of the upper and middle classes, he said. The center-left PRD claimed to speak for working people, but the experience of England showed that workers were fully capable of voting for conservatives. As for the governing party, the PRI, it wasn't even worth discussion. “There are no acceptable schemes,” he said quietly but in a prophetic tone; “we have to search for national articulation beyond the political parties. What is most important is that ‘civil society' manifest and express itself. I am hopeful that a miracle will happen. Or if not, there will be an immolation.” In 1998 he still believed that the electoral process in Mexico offered no reasonable alternative: “The PRD is the same as the PRI. They use the same methods of co-optation. As an advertisement for themselves, they used a picture of me embracing a female Zapatista soldier.”

Of himself, Ruiz spoke humbly: “Anyone who sees himself as a saint is no saint . . . All I have done is give a voice to those who had no voice, to the real subject of history, to the Indians.” When I said good-bye to Don Samuel, it was with the feeling that we belonged to two very different worlds. His was a world of redemption. His struggle for social justice had been impressive but his attitude toward violence had been ambiguous, occasionally in word and very clearly in action and practice. In my view, in societies where the sacred is absolute, the sanctification of violence by a sacred authority exacerbates intolerance and sows death. I also felt that I had stood before a true incarnation of Isaiah or Amos, the righteous prophets of God. There is no doubt of the appeal of his person, and his character. I had the strange sensation that if I stayed to speak with him a few more days, perhaps I would have become a convert.

The similarities between Samuel Ruiz and Bartolomé de las Casas perhaps extend beyond the issue of their true social fervor and commitment, their courage and their effect on history, to the ambiguity of their heritage. Without the “holy rage” of Las Casas, Indian slavery might have been established as the norm in Latin America. But there remains the paradox that it was Fray Bartolomé who advised the king of Spain to import the first black African slaves to Latin America, so as to relieve the burden on the Indians. He would later regret this petition. But from his famous dictum “Humanity is one” he had excluded Africans.

The danger I saw in a redemptionist doctrine such as Bishop Samuel Ruiz's preaching of the “Word of God” in Chiapas, despite its positive effects in awakening the consciousness of people suffering from deeply oppressive social conditions, is that it leaves little room for dissent. And it could also serve to intensify the exclusiveness of traditionalist communities like those of the Indians of Chiapas. A lack of goodwill toward the acceptance of difference and compromise leads to potentially explosive situations.

In the election year 2000, the armed Zapatistas and the unarmed followers of the “Word of God” could have allied themselves with forces on the Mexican left and struggled, electorally and democratically, for legislation that could have helped the many poor of Mexico and particularly the Indians, who are often the poorest among them. It did not happen. That year Mexico and Chiapas went to the polls. But neither Samuel Ruiz nor Subcomandante Marcos believed in democracy. They opted for redemption. And that commitment has led to the political demise of Zapatismo.

Samuel Ruiz himself retired from office in the year 2000 and would die on January 24, 2011. His memory is still respected, even revered by many. Given the present direction of the Church, there will be no official proposals to canonize him after his death. But for many of the Indians of Chiapas he will, like Bartolomé de las Casas, long be remembered as their Apostle.

 

 

11

Subcomandante Marcos

THE RISE AND FALL OF A GUERRILLERO

On January 1, 1994, the Mexican public woke up to disturbing and amazing news: the sudden violent outbreak of the Zapatista movement in the southern state of Chiapas, led by a mysterious man in a mask who would later come to be known as Subcomandante Marcos. Decades after the military defeat of the short-lived guerrilla uprisings of the 1960s and '70s in Central America, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was hard to believe in the reappearance of a guerrilla force in Mexico. The country had just concluded the NAFTA agreement with the United States and Canada and appeared to be on a fast track to modernity. Perhaps an even greater surprise was the fact that this was more than a political rebellion: it was a classical revolt and, as Octavio Paz has described the peasant movement within the Mexican Revolution, it was a “return to roots”—a resurgence of the past, and a resurgence of the most ancient of all pasts, Indian Mexico.

In the years after the uprising, news of the Zapatista movement, and the writings of its leader, appeared regularly on the front pages of national newspapers and in the international press. The character and ideas of this masked crusader are vital to understanding the nature, achievements, and failures of Zapatismo, as has been true of other moments in Mexican history, a narrative that at times has seemed like a social projection of the personal stories of its leaders, its men of power. And one must also understand the state of Chiapas.

“Everything in Chiapas is Mexico,” proclaimed a tourist slogan coined by the government of Chiapas at the beginning of the 1980s. One of the positive effects of the Zapatista rebellion that began in January 1994 was that it alerted the Mexican consciousness to the falseness of that statement. It is true that Mexico is not, except in some areas, a genuinely modern country, but very little in Chiapas is characteristic of Mexico. A truer assertion would be “Everything in Chiapas is Peru,” the other great viceroyalty of the Spanish Conquest.

Seen from a limited historical perspective, Mexico and Peru may seem very similar in their origins and their trajectories: both were the cradles of great civilizations, and both suffered traumatic conquests. Both endured a long colonial siesta, during which they were materially and spiritually dependent on Spain. In the nineteenth century, Peru and Mexico experienced independence movements, drafted liberal constitutions, lost wars with their neighbors, and alternated dictatorial regimes with democratic interludes. But the differences between Peru and Mexico are great and deep. Throughout most of Mexico, the gradual process of
mestizaje
(the “mixing of races”) greatly reduced the differences of color and ethnicity while in Peru such divisions continued to be very marked, and the source of conflicts and prejudices. And in Peru, fueled by geographical separation and a far more brutal history of conflict, the indigenous culture maintained its strength and its powerful myths. In 1956, José María Arguedas documented the persistent legend of the “Incarri” (the word is a fusion of
Inca
and
rey
, or king), which presents the image of the battered head of the Inca emperor lying on the surface of the earth while, buried deep below, the body silently reshapes itself to avenge the bitter defeat of its people and to reconstitute an archaic utopia.

The Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui, in an essay dealing with the early twentieth-century rebel Rumi Maqui, or Stone Hand, described his own experience of a revelation: an indigenous rebellion (despite the defeat of Stone Hand) could happen again, on a far broader scale, firmly based on “our oldest traditions.” Years later, Mariátegui worked out his central contribution to Latin American political thought, the linking of indigenism with Marxism. “We certainly do not wish socialism in America to be a copy and an imitation. It must be a heroic creation,” Mariátegui proclaimed. “We must give life to an Indo-American socialism reflecting our own reality and in our own language.” His objective was “the reconstruction of Peru on an Indian foundation.” But the revolution that Mariátegui proposed was not only economic, it was also spiritual. “The strength of the revolutionaries,” he wrote in 1925, “does not lie in their science but in their faith, in their passion, in their will. It is a religious, mystical, spiritual force. It is the force of myth.” He would never have suspected that his projected uprising would occur not in the Peru of his day but in late twentieth-century Mexico.

 

IN CHIAPAS
, the Peru of Mexico, the Marxist-indigenist program devised by Mariátegui was finally acted upon. In the region of Los Altos of Chiapas and the Lacandón Jungle (
Selva Lacandona
), Indians (which in Latin America means people who consciously live as Indians) comprised 79 percent of the population in 1990, similar to that of Peru at the time of Rumi Maqui. By contrast, 33 percent of the population of San Cristóbal de las Casas (the Lima of Chiapas) was Indian. The conditions were comparable: the same dual demographics; the geography of hate between the white city and the Indian highlands; the weak historical role played by the Catholic Church; the same hierarchical and bigoted nomenclature. And Chiapas had witnessed, in 1712 and 1867, two bloody Indian rebellions against the white minority, aimed at restoring the ancient Mayan government and religion. Elsewhere in Mexico, except in a few places, and despite the vast machinery of indigenist mythmaking (which is as exaggerated and as false as the mythmaking of Hispanicism), the purely racial problem has been resolved, to a reasonable degree, since the nineteenth century, by a process of mingling and convergence that is not just ethnic but also cultural. Economic nationalism and the drive for social equality, rather than race, were the central forces in the decade-long social upheaval that was the Mexican Revolution.

And nearly everywhere else in Mexico except Chiapas the problem of the land—“the elimination of feudalism,” as Mariátegui called it—was attacked at the roots in the way that the Peruvian thinker had hoped it would be, so that there was even a restoration on public land of “the elements of practical socialism that [existed in] indigenous agriculture and life.” And if the great land reform that President Cárdenas initiated in 1936—by expropriating the large landowners and dividing 17 million hectares, 10 percent of the country, among three million landless peasants—fell short of achieving a state of general well-being, at least it provided a measure of social and moral compensation for peasants of remote or recent indigenous origin. To understand the rebellion in Chiapas properly, it is important to recognize that
mestizaje
and agrarian reform occurred late and only partially in Chiapas, as in Peru. And in both places, unfortunately, ethnic prejudice still, up to a point, disrupts the course of daily existence.

 

II

After New Year's Day of 1994, Peru and Chiapas had something else in common: the almost mythical presence of a Mexican Rumi Maqui as foretold by José Carlos Mariátegui, the evangelist of the “spirit of the dawn.” In Chiapas, this “savior of the Indians” bore the pseudonym of Subcomandante Marcos. “The hopes of the indigenous peoples are absolutely revolutionary,” wrote Mariátegui. This is precisely what Marcos understood, and this is precisely what he put into practice.

It was clearly not his original intention. “Before 1994,” Marcos had declared, “no one had conceived of an indigenous movement.” The future subcomandante was born Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, in Tampico, a port city on the Gulf of Mexico, in 1957. In his own words, he “grew up and was educated” in the “traditional left of the catacombs.” His intellectual training in Althusser, Foucault, and the other radical scriptures of his student years, and his youthful association with the
Frente de Liberación Nacional
(FLN; the National Liberation Front) predisposed him to the rigid categories of academic and revolutionary Marxism. Yet early in his life—if we may trust the meager information that is available about the masked, pipe-smoking superstar of Chiapas—there were certain somewhat offbeat elements in his development (of a kind that would have pleased Mariátegui) and they would come to be very useful to him in his revolutionary career. He had a Don Quixote–like dreamer of a father, who was a reader of Balzac and also a humanist businessman, the owner of a chain of furniture stores that fell on hard times. (Rafael devised a mildly anticapitalist slogan for his father's business: “Visit us and relive the old-fashioned pleasure of giving.”) Like Mariátegui, he received a strict Catholic education (though for Marcos it was with the Jesuits), and also like the great Peruvian, he showed strong artistic and cultural interests.

The young Guillén made speeches, performed as a magician, and published a literary magazine premonitorily titled
The Hidden Root
. He sang songs by the popular Catalan singer Joan Manuel Serrat and devoured the socially and morally engaged work of the Spanish poets León Felipe and Miguel Hernández. He showed films, built sets, directed plays, and was an accomplished actor. He already had a strong sense of humor—rare in a revolutionary—and it was not mere irony, but a gift for the discovery of the ridiculous in human beings, beginning with himself.

Guillén's graduate dissertation on textbooks as instruments of power (signed and dated “somewhere very near the university campus”) and his shift toward graphic design—the making of posters, the composition of bulletins and pamphlets, and later the teaching of design in support of popular causes—may be seen as the embryonic beginnings of a revolutionary practice based on cultural criticism and artistic creation. Perhaps the subcomandante's great popularity with the Italian left owes some of its strength to a similar emphasis in Italian leftist history.

Guillén was in Nicaragua at the beginning of the 1980s, first with his teacher Alberto Híjar (a professor of aesthetics and Marxism) as a participant in a series of cultural courses, and later in the village of San Juan, where he is remembered for his austerity: “he was reserved and well-educated . . . almost priestly.” His next port of call was Cuba, where he appears to have acquired not only his knowledge of the art and the “science” of guerrilla warfare, but also his acquaintance with the revolutionary icon he apparently wished to emulate. A veteran of the Cuban Revolution who met him at the time, a friend and comrade of Che in his adventures in Africa and Bolivia, has said that Guillén “wanted to know every little thing about Che's life in the mountains, in Bolivia, in Africa: what he read, how he wrote, what he ate, how he distributed food, how he smoked his pipe, what tobacco he used, how he practiced medicine in the villages . . . He even wanted to know how he breathed!”

An important Cuban official, upon meeting him in Havana in 1982, remarked that “this is a new Che.” In fact, when he arrived in the Lacandón Jungle in 1983, Guillén (who had probably already adopted the name of Marcos in honor of a guerrilla fallen in battle who had formerly taught him Mexican history) wore the Che beret, smoked a pipe, told the Indians that he was a doctor, and dispensed medicine. But his Guevaran inspiration went beyond mimicry; it was the very essence of the guerrilla movement that he founded in Chiapas. This time the spark of rebellion, the
foco
, would catch fire—not just because of geography (the impenetrable jungle), but also because of the human environment. The indigenous community of the Chiapas highlands and especially of Las Cañadas was ripe for the ferment of revolution.

Marcos did not have to preach a gospel of indigenous redemption. For more than ten years he could concentrate on the military objective, which in Mexico was Marxist revolution, because the political-theological ground had already been prepared. Since 1971 the ideological instruction of the Indians had been the work of the diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas, which was headed by Bishop Samuel Ruiz. In what became the most successful experiment in liberation theology in Latin America, Don Samuel, assisted by Dominican, Marist, and Jesuit priests, created a network of eight thousand Indian “catechists” who carried “the Word of God”—in essence, a Marxist interpretation of the gospel—around the region.

The pamphlets that they distributed called the indigenous communities “the new children of Israel,” a people oppressed by world capitalism and its lackeys, the Latin American governments. In many cases these writings explicitly supported the guerrilla fighters of Central America. When Marcos, with the support of Don Samuel, came to the communities of the Lacandón Jungle, the Indians were mentally and spiritually prepared to embark on a long guerrilla campaign. Without this local indigenous elite, trained to struggle for salvation, the
foco
in Chiapas would likely have been extinguished before it had a chance to grow.

 

III

To his literary mentor, the writer Carlos Monsiváis, Marcos declared in 2001: “The EZLN prepared for January 1 1994, but not for January 2.” It was the truth, stripped of any masks. When a fascinated Marcos videotaped the Indians who, on October 12, 1992, pulled down the statue of the conquistador Diego de Mazariegos in San Cristóbal, he did not yet realize that he was a character out of Mariátegui. He still believed that he was a revolutionary descended from those bred in the Russian universities of the nineteenth century, or a latter-day Che in training. And yet he was already writing texts suffused with the rhetoric of redemption, which owe their tone and even their imagery to the indigenous world that for almost a decade had surrounded and welcomed him.

In the first EZLN communiqués the indigenist message was not stressed. The Zapatistas talked about socialism. Then, all of a sudden, just after the January 1 announcement, to his own astonishment and to the astonishment of a broad cross section of the Mexican public, Marcos noticed that “something new has been born,” “something else.” This something was not just the growing public sympathy or at least understanding toward the rebels, or the repudiation by those, such as Fidel Velázquez, the old working-class leader of the PRI, who called for “the extermination of the masked men.” It was the sudden recurrence at the end of the twentieth century of an old theme, an old Latin American or Indo-American prophecy (or melody): not only the “Word of God” but also, and primarily, the indigenist and revolutionary words of Mariátegui.