Dance of Democracy Picks Up Tempo

The Zapatistas are dancing with the future of Mexico. In a last-minute effort to salvage peace, the Mexican Congress has agreed to receive a delegation from the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army. Today, for the first time in history, masked but unarmed rebels will appear before Congress.

For Mexicans, it is a hauntingly familiar dance. In 1914, Emiliano Zapata rode into the capital at the head of his rebel campesino army. His proved to be an unfinished revolution. Now, Subcommander Marcos, military leader of a rebel army that carries Zapata’s name, and 23 other Zapatista comandantes have returned to Mexico City.

Their objective is simple and politically loaded: to convince congressional legislators to implement the San Andres Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture. The accords were signed by the Zapatistas and the government in 1996. The previous president refused to implement the agreement, and peace talks broke down.

Yet politics brings together curious dance partners. Newly elected President Vicente Fox needed a political victory. Marcos and the Zapatistas needed to get out of the jungle. Perhaps they are made for each other.

Three weeks ago, Fox assured safe passage for the Zapatistas to travel from Chiapas to Mexico City so they could bring their message to Congress.

Like Zapata 87 years before, the Zapatistas arrived to a hero’s welcome in Mexico City’s main square. Marcos spoke of the Zapatistas as being a mirror reflecting an indigenous image of “Mexicans who are the color of the earth.” With the presidential palace looming over his shoulder he warned: “It is the hour for the fox to listen to us. . . . It is the hour when this country ceases to be a disgrace, clothed only in the color of money.”

Fox indeed needs to show Mexicans that his government is different from the previous ruling party that gripped Mexico in a stranglehold for 70 years. Perhaps the new president also feels compelled to negotiate a peace to show his free-trade partners that Mexico can be stable and democratic.

Marcos has said the Zapatistas are eager to put down their guns, remove their masks and legally fight to free indigenous Mexicans from systemic oppression and poverty. But before peace talks can begin again, the comandantes have made three demands: the release of Zapatista political prisoners; closure of seven military bases in the Chiapas conflict zone; and the constitutional implementation of the San Andres accords. This last demand is where the rubber hits the political road.

Fox has sent mixed signals to his potential partner. During his election campaign, he boasted he could clean up the situation in Chiapas in “15 minutes.” Once elected, he extended his projected time frame and announced there would be peace in three weeks. His time is up. More to the point, what assumptions lie behind these absurdly optimistic remarks? Is it possible the president sees the Chiapas conflict as simply a small regional dust-up, easily solved, easily forgotten?

It appears, however, that right-wing members of the president’s own party see the Zapatistas as potentially kindling fires far beyond the borders of Chiapas. The San Andres accords deal with, among other items, the free determination of indigenous peoples and the use of natural resources on their lands. It is language that makes capitalists reach for their lawyers. While the president is attempting to dance with the Zapatistas, members of his own National Action Party, or PAN, are doing their best to turn off the music.

A week after the Zapatistas arrived in the capital, the Mexican Congress--led by deputies from PAN--refused to receive the Zapatista delegation. Marcos and the comandantes angrily threatened to return to the mountains of Chiapas. Twenty-four hours later, the president promised to personally lobby Congress to change its mind.

If the president’s party seems in disarray, Marcos and the Zapatistas have carefully paved the road from Chiapas to Mexico City, brick by organized brick. They knew it would not take 15 minutes. Some say it is taking 500 years, if you start counting from the time of Cortes.

The Zapatistas say their movement is about returning Mexico to Mexicans. The San Andres accords are a first step. While the accords remain limp words on paper, 38 autonomous municipal councils have been created within Zapatista territories. Indigenous systems of justice and resource management are in place. It is another form of government--this one built from the ground up.

Since the uprising in 1994, a deadly ring of Mexican army, state police and paramilitary groups have encircled the Zapatistas in an attempt to contain them and their infectious ideas of democracy and justice. It hasn’t worked.

As the Zapatistas made their 15-day journey to Mexico City, the roads were lined with indigenous people. They came down from mountain villages and held up their children to get a closer glimpse of the comandantes who were riding out of history and into a future that finally included them. By the time the comandantes entered Mexico City there were 200,000 people waiting for them. Many in the crowd were indigenous and many of them were mestizos, of mixed blood. All were cheering for a new Mexico.

Who knows what the next step will be after the rebels’ historic address to Congress today? Whatever happens, it will be difficult for Fox as he attempts to continue to dance with Marcos and the Zapatistas. He must keep in step not just with one man, or 23 comandantes. Instead, he must dance with ideas of democracy and dreams of liberation, which refuse to remain trapped in the mountains of Chiapas.