UCI Students Get Up-Close Lesson on Chiapas Conflict

On a recent trip through rebel-controlled territory in Chiapas, Mexico--begun just days after paramilitary gunmen massacred 45 Zapatista sympathizers--five UC Irvine volunteers struggled to understand the generations-old animosity fueling the violence.

With 24 other Americans brought together by an Internet Web page, they went to help build a school and offer moral support to those caught in the middle of the conflict, essentially between impoverished Indians and wealthy landowners.

But the visit also stirred deeply conflicting emotions among the students--all Spanish-speaking Latinos who have been active in campus politics.

“I grew up seeing guns and violence,” said criminology student Norma Vega, 26, who was raised in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles and was shot in the leg eight years ago in gang cross-fire. “Down there, it’s different, but it’s still Mexican on Mexican. It broke my heart to see that Mexicans were doing this to the Mayan people.”

During the weeklong visit, the students slept in a cold, damp dormitory with a tar paper roof and walls of bundled straw, guarded by bandana-wearing Zapatista rebels.

They visited a refugee camp in the fog-shrouded mountains, where survivors of the Acteal massacre and hundreds of other stunned, dislocated Indians gathered for protection. For a full afternoon at Polho, the students listened to stories from those who saw wives, brothers and children shot and hacked to death.

“We were harvesting coffee,” one woman told them in testimony that later was transcribed. “I was with my children, who are 12, 13, 14 and 15 years old, when the shooting started in Aurora Chica. My four children were not able to escape. They died in the coffee field.”

“They killed eight members of my family,” said another woman, from the village of Tzajalukum. “First my father died, then my brother, my little brother, and then the rest of my family.”

The night before their scheduled departure from the Zapatista-controlled outpost of Oventic, the students themselves had a taste of panic. Warned of a possible attack by the paramilitary, the visitors and residents were rushed up a muddy mountainside, where they hid under plastic tarps and waited until morning brought news that the village was safe.

“I was scared, and I think everybody else was,” said Manuel Galvan, 24, arecent UCI graduate who now works in a university biochemistry lab researching Alzheimer’s disease. “But that was only one day for me, and those people have to live with it every day of their lives.”

Galvan and Vega were born in Mexico but moved with their families to Southern California when they were young. Long active in Chicano and immigrant rights projects at school, they emerged as leaders in Chiapas.

Photos show the boyish, soft-spoken Galvan, microphone in hand, somberly offering support to Zapatista sympathizers at Polho. The same day, Vega, hard-charging and passionately idealistic, confronted the state’s investigator as he traveled to the Acteal massacre site.

“Before, we didn’t know about Chiapas,” she told him. “But now, I assure you that across the United States and in Europe, we are going to take on the task of spreading the word about what is happening.”

The others, engineering student Melina Duarte, political science major Rosaura Tafoya and history student Adrian Neri, were born into immigrant families in Southern California.

None had been to Chiapas before last month’s trip. The students said they were struck by two opposing impressions: the beauty of the land--with its lush vegetation, waterfalls and rugged mountains--and the poverty, fear and misery of the people.

“It made me realize how lucky I am,” Vega said. “I take everything for granted--even stopping. When we were running up into the mountains, I was really tired and my leg gave out on me. But I couldn’t stop. That in itself was something big. They constantly live with the fear that somebody’s going to kill them.”

The students left Orange County for Mexico on Christmas, only three days after the massacre of men, women and children at a church in the Zapatista-controlled outpost of Acteal. News of the attack by masked gunmen, along with accusations that local police supplied the weapons, sparked international outrage.

It also terrified parents of the students, who were urged to cancel their trip. One student did drop out, but others said they were determined to learn about the violence firsthand.

“Even though I was scared, it made me want to go even more,” said Tafoya, 20. “I thought I could find out what happened.”

To save money, the students took a 48-hour bus from Tijuana to Mexico City, where they joined volunteers from New York, Wisconsin, Illinois and Kentucky. The group was organized by the San Diego-based Chiapas Schools Construction Teams, which has led several missions to Chiapas and announced the December trip on the Internet.

That team then joined about 200 Mexico City-based volunteers from another organization to form a caravan of buses called the Bridge of Hope. For 30 hours, the buses jostled and wound through Southern Mexico, arriving at Oventic in the middle of the night. The settlement is about an hour’s ride from Acteal.

Zapatista guards checked for alcohol, drugs and weapons, all banned in the territory they control, then escorted the weary volunteers to the damp and drafty room that would be home for a week.

Because transportation of construction materials was held up during the recent spate of violence, little work was done on the junior high school. Instead, the volunteers cleaned the camp, cooked, and above all, listened.

“People down there are in a state where school doesn’t matter much,” Galvan said. “Right now, they’re just trying to make it through another day.”

The students said they saw evidence of the low-intensity warfare all around them, in burned-out shells of houses and the vacant stares of refugees. They heard of children dying from the cold in refugee settlements, of a shortage of medicine to treat life-threatening infections, of families going for days without food.

“I knew it would be bad, but not that bad,” Galvan said. “The situation is really terrible for these people. They don’t have shoes or clothes. They’ve lost everything. They’re always having to run away. And this has been going on a long, long time.”

The fact that Polho was swollen with 8,000 refugees indicated how widespread the dislocation had been. And officials of that settlement told students that other similar encampments had sprouted up in the mountains as Indians were forced from their homes.

“You have heard the displaced people say they are not the only ones,” a Polho camp leader said, after naming half a dozen towns that had been emptied. “Thank you for showing we are not alone and for bringing us help.”

Such words have haunted the five UCI volunteers since they left Oventic on Jan. 2, after trudging down from the mountainside, covered in mud and shaking with cold and fear. “I felt I was leaving them alone, all of us as a group, and with our departure sad times were awaiting them,” Tafoya wrote in a journal as the bus pulled away.

They learned that the next night, Oventic was evacuated again. Army troops continued to move closer to that and other Zapatista encampments.

“The government says the role of the military is to protect them, but they told us the soldiers only harass them. When the internationals are there, the people feel really safe. That’s why we want to try to get as many people to go down there as we can.”

Galvan said he is now working with a Los Angeles-based group sympathetic to the Zapatista movement, and he is trying to organize volunteers and gather humanitarian supplies for a trip to Chiapas in February. He said he plans to spend a year in Mexico next year, volunteering to help the Indians of Chiapas.

Tafoya said the trip made her more determined to pursue community work after graduating. And Duarte, 20, who chairs UCI’s chapter of Mexican American Engineers and Scientists, said she has decided to teach math rather than pursue higher-paying work as an engineer.

Vega said she’s looking into fund-raising options--possibly selling T-shirts or bookmarks on campus. And she’s telling everyone she knows about the conditions in the Chiapas highlands.

“I learned so much from the Tzotzil people, I don’t think I can ever repay them,” she said. “One day, a Zapatista said to me, ‘Companera, you see that sun? You know it’s going to set. Well, it’s going to rise tomorrow. Because of that, there’s always hope.’ That’s what I really learned. There’s always the sun. There’s always the moon. It made a lot of sense to me. It was so simple but so true.”

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BACKGROUND

Four years ago, Zapatista rebels launched a rebellion for Indian rights in Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico marked by extremes of wealth and poverty. Sporadic peace talks and a cease-fire agreement have failed to stop the violence, which has caused thousands of impoverished Tzotzil Indians to abandon their homes in recent months. The situation drew international scrutiny last month when masked gunmen attacked residents, including women and children, during a church service at the outpost of Acteal, killing 45. Members of local police agencies later were charged with supplying assault weapons to the attackers, who came from a neighboring village. Survivors have said the attackers were backed by wealthy landowners and members of Mexico’s ruling political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. About 35,000 Mexican troops are reportedly in the Chiapas highlands to restore order, but the situation remains volatile.

Bearing Witness

Here are excerpts from journals written by several volunteers on their trip to the Chiapas highlands:

STUDENTS SPEAK

“Today I truly appreciate a warm bed, clean clothes, a shower and good friends. The saying you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone is very true. And it is very important that people learn to appreciate the things which we consider irrelevant, or just take for granted. It is when we realize that we have more than others that one begins to move toward the true spiritual nature that we hold inside. It is in our spirit to care for others and to lend a hand to those who are in need. El espirito hace la fuerza--when we tap into this spirit we are able to generate strength within ourselves.”--Manuel Galvan

*

“There is so much spirit in this humble place, rustic, crude, etc., but our elite, advanced society wishes we had the corazon [heart].”--Norma Vega

*

“Imagine when we leave, poor people are going to keep on suffering and I will go back to my couches and carpet. The first two days I was dying for them, now I feel disgusted about having to go back and enjoy all these commodities that only bring greed, jealousy, war, ambition, technology and death. These poor people are here right now outside the bus [as we prepare to leave] with serious faces, ghost faces, not knowing what will possibly happen.”--Rosaura Tafoya

VICTIMS SPEAK

And here are excerpts from testimony given by displaced refugees at the camp of Polho, where about 8,000 people are staying without shelter:

*

“Ihave an older sister who was shot in Acteal. She was pregnant. When she died, I personally saw how they opened her stomach to cut out the baby. They also shot my sister-in-law and took her body into the ravine.”--female survivor of Acteal, where 45 people were killed by masked gunmen while praying in a church

*

“When the shooting started, we didn’t know where it was coming from until we traced the trail of bullets. They were like rain coming from the sky. The paramilitary groups followed us. I had a daughter, and I lost her while I was escaping. The paramilitaries went into the coffee fields. They robbed us of all our belongings.”--displaced woman

*

“Since we escaped and went into hiding a week ago, we have been safe. But the state police arrived with many paramilitaries and have been shooting nearby. For a week we haven’t eaten for fear of being shot.”--woman from village of Bajoventic

*

“Where I was building my house, first they burned the house and then they sold the land. They sold it among themselves. They said that if we return to our community they will kill us.”--displaced man from Miguel Utria los Chorros