ZAPATISTAS ON THE MARCH

Mexico City

Many compared it to marching through a dream.

After seven years under siege by 70,000 Mexican Army troops in the jungles
and highlands of Chiapas, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)
sent twenty-four delegates, including its pipe-smoking writer-spokesman
Subcomandante Marcos, on a triumphant two-week motorcade that landed in
Mexico City on March 11.

"I don't believe that in any place, in any space in this world--and I have
the memory of my own revolution twenty-six years ago--I don't remember a
more moving moment than I lived yesterday," declared the septuagenarian
Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago the next morning.

The US press coverage of the march, limited though it was, hinted at such
an apotheosis: the cheering multitudes that greeted the Zapatistas from the
roadsides and at mass rallies in twelve states along the route, the flowery
words of peace and civil rights coming to Mexico's mythical newfound
democracy. But for the Zapatistas and Mexico's indigenous movement, the
struggle now turns into a battle to codify the movement's progress into law.

The caravan came to demand constitutional recognition for Mexico's 10
million indigenous citizens, subjected to generations of repression,
poverty, racism and exploitation of their lands and labor.

As Mexico's President Vicente Fox passed his hundredth day in office, he
reiterated calls to the Zapatistas to negotiate a peace.

Not until the government fulfills the promises it has already made,
answered the rebels: release of Zapatista political prisoners, closure of
seven of the 259 military bases in Chiapas, and congressional passage of
the law that would ratify the 1996 San Andres peace agreements signed by
the government [see Jerry W. Sanders, "Two Mexicos and Fox's Quandary,"
February 26].

The geographical advance was accompanied by a steady rise in the popularity
of Marcos and the Zapatistas in opinion polls, an average gain of two
percentage points per day, with over 50 percent in support.

The implementation of the San Andres Accords is now the sticking point.

Marcos and the Zapatistas, with more than 1,000 delegates from the
Indigenous National Congress, encamped at the base of Mexico City's
Cuicuilco pyramid--a circular, 370-foot-diameter stone monument that has
survived at least 2,600 years of lava flows, earthquakes and urban sprawl.

Underscoring their credo, "We will not sign a false peace," the Zapatistas
caused a fierce uproar when, as the caravan was launched from San
Cristobal, Chiapas, they named architect Fernando Yanez Munoz as their
representative to the federal Congress. Mexican police agencies have long
claimed that Yanez is Comandante German, the feared national guerrilla
leader of the 1970s and '80s who, they say, helped found the Zapatista army
in the jungle in 1983, a charge that Yanez has denied.

The Zapatistas have also, for the first time, called upon other guerrilla
movements to protect their journey and remain alert, implying that if the
state doesn't keep its word, an armed guerrilla response could explode
nationwide.

Maria Luisa Tomasini, 78, a Chiapas native designated by Marcos as the
"grandmother of all the Zapatistas," analyzed his call to the other
insurgent groupsas she was returning from the March 7 Zapatista rally in
Iguala, Guerrero, a state with at least sixteen armed clandestine guerrilla
organizations. "Clearly," she said, "it was a threat to the government that
it had better comply."

The powerful sectors that have always gotten their way in Mexico--bankers,
chambers of commerce chiefs, right-wing clergy, the TV networks and key
legislators--are working furiously to sabotage the road to a genuine peace.
Fox's party, the PAN, teamed up with the former ruling party, the PRI,
against the left-wing PRD party to propose that the Zapatistas meet with
twenty congressional leaders instead of the entire Congress. Marcos, noting
that the indigenous of Mexico have always been hidden "in the kitchen, on
the back porch," rejected the offer, arguing that the Zapatistas and the
Indigenous National Congress deserve to address the whole Congress.
Hard-liners continue to seek any roadblock to passage of the full
indigenous rights bill with hysterical claims that autonomy would fracture
the nation, and they vow radical surgery to the initiative.

On March 19 the Zapatistas announced they will return to the jungle, citing
the "close minded" attitude of "cavemen politicians," saying, "Nothing will
be able to stop the popular mobilization" that stems from the Congress's
failure to act. "We will return with everyone who we are." Immediately,
thirteen national peasant-farmer groups pledged nationwide marches,
students plotted direct action and five major indigenous groups in Oaxaca
vowed to close the Pan American Highway until Congress passes the accords.
Congressional leaders begged the Zapatistas to stay, Fox urged the Congress
to meet with the rebels and the drama now moves in unpredictable directions.

The guiding principle of the San Andres Accords is autonomy.

The word has galvanized many beyond Mexico's indigenous populations. The
battered Mexican left--peasant farmers, urban workers and especially the
nation's youth--view themselves, too, under the banner of autonomy.

Indeed, the popularity of the Zapatista struggle around the world derives
at least in part from the coherent language of opposition to globalized and
savage capitalism that they have constructed. French sociologist Alain
Torraine, who accompanied the caravan, praised the Zapatistas during a
March 12 discussion with Marcos and the comandantes in Mexico City,
marveling, "The entire world, and we are speaking of the left, is looking
for a new language." Comandante David, a Tzotzil delegate who was a chief
negotiator and architect of the San Andres Accords, acknowledges that the
demand for autonomy goes far beyond indigenous rights. "We are going to
explain directly to the indigenous and nonindigenous brothers of the
country that indigenous rights are for the good of all the peoples," he
said while preparing to leave on the caravan.

Autonomy--what might be called "home rule" in other parts of the
world--includes local control of land use, a sore point for big business in
Mexico, its eyes on natural resources.

Beyond Mexico, US investors and corporate interests, with expectations that
Fox will be the most effective deliveryman yet of Mexican resources under
NAFTA, are stoking the subterfuge. Former US Ambassador to Mexico James
Jones, now a railroad baron and rainmaker for the Manat, Phelps and
Phillips law and lobbying firm in Washington, is on the board of directors
of TV Azteca, the most notorious manipulator of public opinion among all
the Mexican media.

TV Azteca joined the other broadcasting giant, Televisa, to present a March
3 Concert for Peace live from Aztec Stadium, featuring a laser light show,
a Woodstock-style logo and the usual condescension toward "our indigenous
brothers." The prepackaged video aired with the concert didn't mention
autonomy, or indigenous political prisoners, or 500 years of
conquest--certainly not justice in connection with the 1997 massacre of
unarmed indigenous peasants at Acteal. The only proposed solution was to
send aid to the poor, barefoot indigenous communities, an approach known in
Mexican politics as "clientism." Many analysts saw Fox's fingerprints on
the TV peace show, as both stations rely on state permission to broadcast
in Mexico. Indeed, one of the demands of the San Andres Accords is the
right of indigenous peoples to break that control by forming their own
media, including the use of radio and television frequencies.

The question of indigenous autonomy also has consequences for the
US-imposed "war on drugs." The San Andres Accords would restore indigenous
rights to the use of currently illicit sacred plants and codify the
pre-eminence of ancient forms of community justice.

Luciano, a spokesman for the Zapatista community of Polho, explained to me
in 1998 how the autonomous system works without constructing a single
prison cell: "If a young man grows marijuana, he goes before a municipal
judge to be disciplined and oriented so that he won't ever do it again.

If the youth does it again, there is no response whatsoever: He cannot be
pardoned a second time. He would then be expelled from the community."

That the Zapatista communities have had far more success in driving out the
narcotraffickers and preventing drug and alcohol abuse than any other
region of the Americas is of little concern to the big talkers of law and
order. Opponents charge that autonomy in matters of criminal justice would
"balkanize" the country and subvert the "rule of law."

Indigenous and social movements across Latin America--in Ecuador, Colombia,
Bolivia, Peru, Panama, Brazil and other nations--had representatives
quietly observing the caravan.

In spite of the powers stacked against them, the Zapatistas, newly
strengthened, their national support deepened, have many cards yet to play
in forcing legislative victory.

In the latest of the ironies under NAFTA, autonomy may thus, and soon,
become Mexico's leading export product.