Waiting for Subcomandante Marcos in the Wake of Oliver Stone

At sunset, we rolled into this village of rank-and-file Zapatistas six miles from the Guatemalan border, our nerves raw after a close brush with a convoy of armored personnel carriers, each straddled by a Mexican soldier videotaping our VW van.

At the immigration checkpoint two hours earlier, I and one of nine students traveling with me were stamped “dudosos” (suspect) and cited for interrogation in San Cristobal de las Casas. The student’s mislaid visa and my naturalization certificate in lieu of a passport--I’d become a U.S. citizen only the week before--provided the excuse for the harassment foreigners are routinely subjected to when they visit the Zapatista outpost in the Lacandon rain forest. (In San Cristobal, we were advised that we had violated the terms of our tourist visa and were given five days to leave Mexico.)

More than two years after the Zapatista National Liberation Army seized San Cristobal and other Chiapas towns on the day Mexico ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement, the military phase of the rebellion has given way to negotiations between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government. Last February, the two sides signed a preliminary accord on indigenous rights and autonomy. As the indigenous comandantes take charge of the talks in San Cristobal, the “maximo lider” Subcomandante Marcos, whom the government claims to have unmasked as Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, keeps the Mexican army at bay by hosting one international conference after another in his jungle outpost of La Realidad.

We arrived in the village 48 hours behind Oliver Stone, who got through with an entourage to stage an encounter with El Sup, as Marcos is familiarly known. We had an appointment to interview the Zapatista leader ourselves, for a planned magazine feature. Photographs of Marcos and Stone on horseback wearing identical ski masks had been splashed all over the Mexican press, as they reportedly negotiated “Marcos,” the movie deal. Stone was a hard act to follow, but we were relieved to find that none of the Zapatista villagers who greeted us had the faintest idea who the filmmaker is. The explanation was close at hand: The Tojolabal Mayan village of La Realidad (Reality) is dirt poor, and no one here owns a television, much less a film projector.

We presented our letters of introduction to the village headman, who promised to deliver them to Marcos by courier. The headman, Maximiliano, sent news of our arrival by two-way radio, but since Marcos’ hide-out is several hours’ distance by foot, our letters would not reach him until the following day. The radio response was not encouraging, but we were invited to spend the night in a schoolhouse, where we could await further word. As we unrolled our sleeping bags, a marimba next door struck up a rousing ranchera and our apprehension melted away in the warmth of the villagers’ spontaneous welcome.

Our first 48 hours in Chiapas had proved so productive that we had become cocky and interviewed everyone in sight. We sat in on the last sessions of the “dialogue on democracy and justice,” sponsored by a Zapatista support group in San Cristobal and the nearby village of San Andres Larrainzar. In the conference halls and meeting rooms, we met with the chief players in the Zapatista drama, among them, the activist priest Pablo Romo, who heads the diocese’s human-rights center. The thin, wiry Romo is the Zapatistas’ electronic connection, and some suspect him of being the “real” Marcos because of his wizardry in publicizing their cause on the Internet. Another key figure is the maverick publisher and Zapatista-endorsed “rebel governor” of Chiapas, Amado Avendano, who lost a fraud-tainted election to the candidate of the ruling government party. Avendano publishes El Tiempo, the anti-establishment newspaper that ran Marcos’ famous “declarations from the jungle.” These manifestos, by turns poetic, witty and bombastic, spell out the Zapatista agenda and lay the foundation for their new Mexican constitution.

Twenty-four ski-masked Zapatista comandantes, most of them in colorful Mayan dress, attended the sessions on justice and democracy, and we met with them all. They bitterly denounced the government for sending a low-level delegation to monitor the proceedings rather than participate in the dialogue. But they had no answer to my question as to why President Ernesto Zedillo, hobbled by an ailing economy and murderous divisions within his ruling party, would trouble to send negotiators to an event whose stated goal was his removal from office and replacement by a popular democracy.

On the last day of the dialogue, campesinos, intellectuals and politicians drafted a resolution on women’s rights that helped elevate the tone of the discourse. The resolution covered everything from reproductive rights to equal educational opportunities, enfranchisement and legislative curbs on rape and domestic violence in a language inspired by the American and Mexican revolutions; it introduced elements missing from both constitutions, and its proclamation had a stunning effect on the attendance.

Interviews in a crowded room with “Tacho,” “David” and 22 other male and female Zapatista commanders were something else again. Tacho and David speak an earthier idiom marked indelibly by their indigenous ancestry. None of these masked spokespersons, by their own admission, had schooling beyond the first or second grades, and yet they parried our questions with aplomb. Tacho fielded allusions to Guatemala’s three-decade-old civil war, in which Maya communities like their own have suffered more than 100,000 dead and disappeared. “The roots of our struggle are the same,” Tacho conceded, sidestepping the delicate issue of Guatemalan intervention in the Chiapas conflict, “but our battleground is different.” “We all want the same thing,” Tacho reiterated at the end of each reply, his piercing brown eyes reaching out for understanding: “a dignified life (una vida digna) for everyone--rich and poor, white and indigenous, Mexican and North American. That is all our struggle is about.”

The following day, we awoke to the sound of hammering. The villagers were erecting wooden galleries and meeting rooms for 300 participants in a forthcoming international conference on neoliberalism. In his communiques, Marcos has denounced neoliberalism as the dark face of global capitalism, the free-market ideology of multinationals responsible for laying waste agriculture-based campesino communities throughout the Third World. A scheduled visitor to La Realidad was Regis Debray, advisor to the late Francois Mitterrand, who intends to anoint Marcos as the new Che Guevara.

I started composing a letter complimenting Marcos on his shift from armed insurgent to peace negotiator and raising some questions: Was his conversion to peacemaker merely tactical (or “conjunctural,” as revolutionary cant would have it)? Marcos’ Marxist-Leninist training is bred in the bones of rebels forged in Mexico’s revolutionary movements of the ‘60s. He is a poet and communications genius whose publicity coups have embarrassed the Mexican government’s efforts to isolate and discredit him. But had Stone’s visit gone to his head? The electronic dispatches flying in dizzying numbers between Marcos’ hide-out and the world have put a new spin on Clausewitz’s definition of war as the continuation of policy by other means.

The daily rhythms of La Realidad remained undisturbed by all the commotion. By 5 a.m., most of the men were in the fields, harvesting the cacao crop or weeding their milpas. The women were up hours before dawn to grind corn for the day’s tortillas. Across a creek, the pale foreign volunteers in the international “Peace Camp” collected water for cooking and washing.

At noon, Maximiliano delivered the expected news that Marcos was too busy with preparations for the neoliberalism conference to meet with us. We took a vote and decided to leave rather than delay another day. Before distributing the remainder of our gifts--batteries, lighters, condoms for the Zapatista women who don’t want to get pregnant--we cut up a watermelon and handed out slices to the kids who hung around us all morning. Ten minutes later, a radiantly smiling woman in a red-and-green woven blouse approached to ask if we had brought watermelon seeds.

“We brought a watermelon,” I admitted, flustered, “but we ate it all and spat out the seeds.”

“May we have them, then?” she asked, her smile remaining firmly in place. Seconds later, the woman and her son are bent over collecting the watermelon seeds from the tabletop, the school’s cement floor and the dirt courtyard.

“Thank you,” she said, “for introducing watermelon to our village.”*