Top Zapatistas Begin 2,000-Mile Trek to Capital

Rebel leader Subcommander Marcos handed over his assault rifle and silver-plated revolver and left his jungle stronghold here Saturday on a risk-filled 2,000-mile caravan to Mexico City, raising hopes of an end to the seven-year-long Zapatista uprising and of greater rights for all of this country’s indigenous peoples.

Serenaded by a string trio and hundreds of villagers singing the Zapatista anthem, Marcos stripped off his ammunition belt and his weapons but retained his trademark ski mask and pipe during a brief departure ceremony in this Lacandon jungle hamlet. Then he and other rebel leaders boarded vans for the 140-mile first leg of the motorized “Zapatour” to San Cristobal de las Casas, the small colonial city that the guerrillas briefly occupied before dawn Jan. 1, 1994, the first day of their rebellion.

Saturday evening, several thousand Zapatista supporters crowded the area around the red-and-white cathedral in San Cristobal awaiting the arrival of Marcos and the other commanders for the first public rally of the march. A total of 33 public events are planned during the caravan, which aims to pressure Congress to adopt constitutional amendments that would broadly extend indigenous rights.

On Friday night, President Vicente Fox extended an olive branch to Marcos and the thousands of Indians expected to participate in the 16-day caravan, saying he welcomed the march and that “this is the hour of our indigenous brothers.”

The march dramatically raises the stakes amid what has been a flurry of initiatives by the new federal government and the Zapatistas themselves in an attempt to end a five-year stalemate in the conflict in the southeastern state of Chiapas.

Fox, whose inauguration Dec. 1 ended seven decades of one-party rule at the national level, has made peace in Chiapas his top priority. He has submitted legislation to Congress to grant indigenous peoples more autonomy, closed four army bases in the conflict zone and released more than 50 Zapatista prisoners.

His language and actions have marked a reversal of the previous government’s policy of virtually ignoring the rebels, who pose no military threat but have galvanized domestic and international support for Mexico’s indigenous peoples.

The risks flowing from the march are great both for Marcos and for Fox. Fears for the rebels’ security as they journey through 12 heavily indigenous states have grown as opponents have promised counterdemonstrations. For Fox, the renewed prominence that Marcos suddenly enjoys, thanks in part to the attention Fox has paid to him, could backfire if peace talks fail to materialize and Marcos ends up a strengthened foe.

But the payoff could also be substantial for both sides.

Fox has staked his presidency on a return to the rule of law in Mexico and respect for human rights, and a quick solution in Chiapas could resolve a nagging rights dispute and raise Mexico’s international stature. Although the rebellion itself involved less than two weeks of combat before a cease-fire was declared, scores have died in periodic skirmishes between Zapatistas and the rebels’ foes, many of whom are themselves indigenous Maya residents in the highland villages and eastern jungle of Chiapas.

Marcos, in turn, could revive his reputation as the heir to 1960s leftist revolutionary hero Che Guevara and, in the process, give a boost to leftist causes worldwide after years of steadily declining interest in his boxed-in movement.

The departure from La Realidad was one of four that occurred Saturday from rebel “autonomous municipalities,” where Zapatista followers have established rival local governments. The journey is being made by all 24 commanders of the rebel movement, in which Marcos’ title of subcommander is meant to show that the leader serves his supporters.

Foreign sympathizers and residents of other pro-Zapatista villages joined the rousing send-off, including three female members of Las Abejas (The Bees), a pacifist group that supports the rebels’ demands. Las Abejas were the victims in a December 1997 massacre of 45 people, mostly women and children, in the Chiapas village of Acteal.

When asked what she hoped the march would achieve, one Abejas member, 16-year-old Faustina Gomez, replied: “Justice, peace and dignity for us all.”

Marcos himself, who the government says is former professor Rafael Sebastian Guillen, is not an Indian but a mestizo, of mixed Indian and Spanish blood, like the majority of Mexico’s 97 million people. He is believed to have gone to the jungle in the 1980s to organize the Maya of Chiapas for an armed revolutionary struggle.

Comparatively tall and slender, Marcos towered over the half a dozen commanders who gathered with him and left from La Realidad.

The media-savvy subcommander held up his weapons for photographers before handing the guns over to Maj. Moises, one of his close aides, who was to remain behind in the village. Dozens of Zapatistas, including women in traditional blouses and masked or hooded men, all wearing backpacks containing two weeks’ worth of clothes, then clambered aboard a yellow school bus and several open trucks for the pilgrimage to Mexico City.

Marcos’ skill as an innovative communicator, adept at using the Internet and a string of poetic communiques to foster the indigenous cause, has helped him win an international following.

Angela Bellei, a former Communist member of Italy’s Parliament, is among 300 Italian militants participating in the march. She said the caravan “will break the isolation of the Zapatistas. The Chiapas question has returned to the public agenda.

“The march sends a strong message to all the movements fighting for human rights in the world,” Bellei added. “The world left is in crisis and must find new forms of practicing politics [that] adjust the struggle to the changes that have occurred in the world.”

Marcos’ La Realidad redoubt, a bone-crunching two-hour drive from the nearest paved road, nestles in a humid valley surrounded by steep fog-shrouded mountains near the border with Guatemala. The village of several hundred people, all rebel supporters, was largely off limits to the media for years, with Zapatistas manning roadblocks not far from rival military checkpoints that discouraged outsiders.

Since Fox’s inauguration, 53 roadblocks have been dismantled, and the Zapatistas allowed scores of reporters in Saturday for the start of the tour.

Roosters crowed and donkeys brayed in the otherwise silent village. Women in the communal kitchen prepared a breakfast of eggs, beans and chicken stew for Zapatistas and the flock of visitors.

The walls of the simple wood-slatted huts were adorned with revolutionary posters, one portraying Marcos with Emiliano Zapata, an indigenous leader of the 1910 Mexican Revolution, who fought for Indian rights and from whom the Zapatistas take their name.

The tour will pause in Morelos, the state where Zapata was born, and other places where Zapata waged his war nine decades ago.

After a closing rally in the capital’s main square March 11, the Zapatista commanders are scheduled to meet a day later with the congressional peace-negotiating commission, which has endorsed the march. Marcos is to discuss with the commission how he can make his pitch to Congress to adopt the Indian rights legislation, submitted by Fox in December and based on a 1996 accord that the previous government shelved.

Passing the bill won’t be easy, given some legislators’ anger over the Zapatistas’ sudden prominence and their concerns that indigenous autonomy could undermine individual rights and cause conflicts with existing levels of government.

Marcos on Thursday accused Fox of trying to co-opt the march and suggest that peace is at hand even before negotiations resume. But Fox replied: “If the true struggle is for the rights and the restoration of our indigenous peoples, then we are in the same struggle.”