We Are Here

Eye-witness report from Mexcio City of Zapatista march

By: Scott Handleman, CounterPunch

MEXICO CITY - Beneath a glaring sun, the Sunday crowd in the Zocalo was in a festive mood as it awaited the arrival of the caravan, with music, puppets, banners, and vendors selling tamales, quesadillas, corn, tacos, snowcones, popsicles, cotton candy, toys, parasols, sodas, useless cardboard periscopes for viewing the stage, binoculars, and abundant EZLN paraphernalia: lighters, banners, kerchiefs, ski masks, pins, calendars, hundreds if not thousands of t-shirts.
  They were young and old, indigenous, foreign and mestizo. Ezequiel Fernandez Carrasco, a Tlapanecan youth, walked to Mexico City from Guerrero with a band of Nahualtecans, Mixtecans and Tlapanecans to be at the rally. They left Chilpanzingo on February 24, and arrived in the Zocalo on March 3, where they slept. Among their demands: electricity, roads, water, work; a health center with medicines and someone knowledgeable to dispense them; a worthwhile price for coffee (this year it sold for as little as 1.5 pesos a kilo); information about their comrade Gregorio Alfonso Alvarado Lopez, disappeared since 1996; "that they recognize us as indigenous".
  Stop after stop, the caravan had been generously welcomed. In the small town of Milpa Alta, for example, the community freely served food for 20,000 visitors: "200 kilos of meat, 180 of rice, 120 of beans, 220 of nopales, 500 of tortillas, 9,000 pieces of cocol, 1,000 liters of coffee," prepared over 36 hours, according to La Jornada.
 

They 'civilized us' yesterday and today they want to 'modernize' us

  The EZLN has stipulated three conditions that the government must meet before it will resume peace negotations, which broke off in 1996: the closure of seven military bases out of the 259 in Chiapas; the release of Zapatista political prisoners; approval by the legislature of the San Andres Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture, as modified by the Commission for Concord and Pacification (COCOPA). When Vicente Fox took office last December, he forwarded the COCOPA proposal to Congress for ratification.
  The proposal would insert into Mexico's constitution a recognition that Mexico's indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. Further constitutional modifications would grant them autonomy: to decide their own forms of social, economic, political, and cultural organization; to solve internal problems according to their own norms, while always respecting the rights of women; to elect their own authorities; to agree on the collective use and enjoyment of the natural resources in their territories; to preserve and enrich their languages, knowledge, culture and identity; acquire and operate their own news media.
  Development programs would take into account the needs and culture of indigenous populations, the state would guarantee them fair access to the distribution of national wealth, and the elected indigenous authorities would have the right to administer public funds assigned to their communities.
  Speaking to a crowd of several thousand in San Pablo Oztotepec on Friday afternoon, Marcos articulated the justice of the indigenous demand for autonomy: "For them, [indigenous] history is myth, our doctrines are legends, our science is magic, our beliefs are superstitions, our art is craft, our games, dances and dress are folklore, our government is anarchy, our language is dialect, our love is sin and degradation... For them, to give us a place is to show us the tomb, the jail, oblivion... They 'civilized us' yesterday and today they want to 'modernize' us. They tell us that their world is better. That we should leave our land, our home, our history. That we should come to their land and live underneath it. That we should live in their house and serve in it. That we should be part of their history and die in it. They offer us this: to live under their foot, obey their will, die in oblivion.
 

"We women suffer three times, one for being woman, two for being indigenous, three for being poor." - Comandante Esther

  "For the indigenous of Mexico today there are only two options: to resist or to 'modernize'. Those of us who resist 'modernization' live in houses with dirt floors, plank or mud walls, cardboard or thatch roofs. Our table is full of wants. Those of them who 'modernized' live in houses with dirt floors, walls of pieces of nylon, roofs of cardboard or plastic. Their tables are full of wants... We live equally badly, we indigenous who resist and those who 'modernize'. But some of us are who we are, and the others pretend not to be what they are. Facing these two options, the march for indigenous dignity, the march of the color of the earth tries to construct a new one: the recognition of our difference. This difference organizes itself in autonomy... Autonomy is integration. What exists now is disintegration."
  Addressing Sunday's assembled multitude, Comandante Esther spoke of the poverty, marginalization and oppression that bred their rebellion. "We had to cross hills and mountains to get here because the bad government has not paid attention to our pain... The women die in birth, they see their children die in their arms for lack of medical attention because in the indigenous villages there is no health center and if there is we don't receive genuine treatment as a person.
  "We women suffer three times, one for being woman, two for being indigenous, three for being poor. To be able to survive we have to work from childhood. We see ourselves obliged to do it because otherwise we would die of hunger, because for our little production that we sell, they pay us very cheaply, while what we buy is so expensive: medicine, clothing, our tools and other things.
  "... Not to die on our knees and begging, we took the decision to organize ourselves in rebellion, to demand what is lacking, our right... We do not come to kneel nor to implore that they pity us. We do not want little stores, beetles, or tv [here there was a mighty applause as this was a reference to Fox's flippant comment during his campaign that all indigenous Mexicans want is to become micro-businessmen with little stores, Volkswagen beetles and tv sets], we want them to recognize our rights as indigenous persons and as women."
  After Esther spoke the Comandantes Zebedeo, Tacho, and David. Tacho gave the big picture, reminding us of 500 years of the oppression of indigenous peoples, that the time had come for them to take their place in history. David made the argument in favor of the three preconditions for dialogue, receiving applause when he contrasted the impunity of high-level criminals with the imprisoning of those who committed no crime other than to stand against oblivion.
  Marcos spoke last. He opened by noting that the stage where they stood was in front of the old national palace, a government building: "... it is no accident. It is because from the beginning, the government has been behind us. Sometimes with artillery helicopters, sometimes with paramilitaries, sometimes with bombers, sometimes with tanks, sometimes with soldiers, sometimes with police, sometimes with offers for buying and selling consciences, sometimes with offers of surrender, sometimes with lies, sometimes with strident declarations, sometimes with forgetting, sometimes with expectant silences. Sometimes, like today, with impotent silences."
  He went on with more or less the usual talk that he has been giving throughout the caravan: that now is the hour of those who are the color of the earth; those who are the color of money tremble in their boots. A theme that recurs throughout the discourse of the comandantes and Marcos is the affirmation of difference, the assertion of dignity, the negation of oblivion: "we are here, and we are indigenous." The giant crowd in the Zocalo is proof that the EZLN has succeeded in drawing the world's attention to Mexico's indigenous people.
  If the Congress approves the COCOPA law and the government meets the other preconditions of dialogue, the EZLN may decide to abandon the military path and emerge as a legal social organization.
  "A soldier (and I include myself among them) is an absurd and irrational man", Marcos remarked the day before the final rally, " because he has the capacity to resort to violence to convince. That is why we say that soldiers should never govern, and this includes us. Because whoever has had to resort to arms to make his ideas prevail, is very poor in ideas. Armed movements, however revolutionary they may be, are fundamentally arbitrary movements. In every case, what an armed movement must do is plant the problem and move to the side."

This article is excerpted, with permission, from CounterPunch, volume 8 number 5, March 1-15, 2001

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