Pubdate: 08 Mar 2001
Source: Boston Phoenix (MA)
Copyright: 2001 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group.
Contact:  http://www.bostonphoenix.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/54
Author: Al Giordano

REBEL RAINMAKERS

After seven years in the Chiapas jungle, the Zapatistas are finally on the 
road to Mexico City

" Therefore, according to this declaration of war, we give our military 
forces ... the following orders: First: Advance to the capital of the 
country, overcoming the Mexican Federal Army, protecting in our advance the 
civilian population and permitting the people in the liberated area the 
right to freely and democratically elect their own administrative 
authorities. "

-- from the Zapatista Declaration of War

December 31, 1993

Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas, Mexico

IT WAS AN incredible claim for a poorly armed movement of Indian women and 
men to make seven years ago. But this Sunday, March 11, the Zapatista Army 
of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish acronym) and millions of 
supporters will arrive at the gates of the National Palace in Mexico City, 
without having fired a shot since 1994.

Twenty-four masked Zapatista delegates, including the revolutionary 
organization's spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, left the jungle in Mexico's 
southernmost state of Chiapas on February 24 and are making their way 
through 12 Mexican states toward Mexico City. Multitudes of Mexicans, 
indigenous and non-indigenous, have assembled at every stop along the way, 
and joined the advance on the capital.

The objective, when the caravan reaches Mexico City, is to force the 
Mexican government to keep a promise it made in 1996 when it signed the San 
Andres Accords for indigenous autonomy.

"We're going to Mexico City to speak with the congressmen and senators to 
demand compliance with indigenous rights and culture," says Comandante 
Mister, a delegate from an indigenous ethnic group known as the Tojolabal, 
"so that the San Andres Accords are complied with."

If the Zapatistas succeed in steering the Mexican Congress to implement 
this heretofore ineffectual treaty, it could lead to negotiations between 
the indigenous army and the new government of Mexican president Vicente Fox 
to end the seven-year conflict between Zapatista rebels and the government 
in Chiapas.

But Fox is frustrated. In spite of his calls and invitations to meet with 
Marcos and the Zapatista command, the rebels are bypassing him and going 
directly to Congress. History may bypass him too; for Fox, the son of ranch 
owners, it may come down to a question so basic that most world leaders 
haven't ever thought about it: how to tell when the rain wants to fall.

Fox isn't likely to learn that from Texan political consultant Rob Allyn, 
who produced the Bush campaign's anti-John McCain attack ads during last 
year's GOP primaries. Fox's political future -- the success or failure of 
his presidency -- would be better served by somebody like Don Andres 
Vasquez de Santiago, a man who knows something about rain.

DON ANDRES was born in 1910, the year of the Mexican revolution led by 
General Emiliano Zapata. Four summers ago, when he was 87, he trekked 2400 
kilometers from his cornfield in San Bartolome, Guanajuato, to the Chiapas 
highlands, to be with people who made him young again.

There, above the Zapatista rebels' base camp of Oventik Sakamch'en de los 
Pobres, he sat on a hill beside his cane, his sombrero, and a gringo a 
half-century his junior, who was struggling with spoken Spanish. Don Andres 
raised his gnarled wooden cane up at the clear afternoon sky and commented 
to the foreigner, "Quiere llover" -- "It wants to rain."

"You mean it's going to rain," his companion tried to correct.

"Yes, it's going to rain, because it wants to rain," insisted the 
octogenarian.

"But I don't see any clouds," the younger man replied, constructing a 
sentence in rudimentary Castilian that probably came out something like, 
"But clouds not I see, Don Andres."

Don Andres smiled at the gringo's garbled syntax, patted him on the knee, 
and reminded him, as if to excuse his twisted tongue, "It's my second 
language too!"

"The rain," continued Don Andres, speaking slowly and watching the eyes of 
his companion to make sure he understood, "always comes from over there." 
He pointed to the south. "Can you feel the wind? It comes from over there." 
He pointed his dark brown workingman's finger back at the sky, repeating, 
"It wants to rain."

Moments later, the clouds attacked from over the hill and doused the 
encampment, leaving at least one very wet gringo scratching his head, 
trying to remember the lesson of how to tell when it "wants to rain."

FEBRUARY 28, 2001: Don Andres was still walking with the Zapatistas and 
with the Indigenous National Congress, of which he is the eldest member. 
That night, he and his cane were in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, north of Mexico 
City, to greet 23 indigenous Zapatista comandantes and the rebel army's 
Subcomandante Marcos, who on New Year's morning back in 1994 rose up in 
arms against the Mexican state, the nation's neoliberal economic system, 
and 500 years of conquest.

In this region, known as the Huasteca, February is part of the dry season. 
The barren hills, more brown than green, wait until May to receive seeds 
for corn, beans, chilies, peanuts, and other staples. In this state of 
230,000 Mexicans, one-fifth of the residents are Indians, many of the same 
ethnicity as Don Andres -- Otomi-Naehnu -- and most of them, peasant 
farmers, do not earn even a dollar a day. Those who don't have access to 
communal lands must work for the large plantation owners, who treat them 
and pay them badly. Many of their sons and daughters have already headed 
north to the United States, in search of work. Without rain, there are no 
crops. Without crops, there is no money. February is a season of scraping 
by -- a long, hungry anticipation of the water that means life.

This night, 20,000 citizens of this community awaited the Zapatistas' 
caravan the way the cracked and baked soil of Ixmiquilpan (an indigenous 
word that means "barren clouds") awaited the rain.

A burst of laughter escaped Don Andres's parched, dry lips as he watched 
the crowd arrive to greet the Zapatistas. A younger member of the 
Indigenous National Congress, Miguel, looked into the old man's eyes, now 
with 90 years' experience of watching the evening skies, as Don Andres 
smiled and pointed toward the stars. "Very funny, Don Andres," said Miguel, 
wiping the dust from his face with a red-and-gold kerchief. "I suppose that 
now you're going to joke that it wants to rain in the place of the barren 
clouds."

Soon after, when the Zapatistas arrived and took the platform to address 
the assemblage, the skies exploded in thunder, and a torrent came washing 
down from the dark heavens. Within minutes, everyone was soaked, but the 
people refused to leave. The farmers were ecstatic.

All night -- and probably for years to come -- they would repeat: "Marcos 
brought the rain!"

And there, at the microphone, his black ski mask already soaked, 
Subcomandante Marcos began to speak, ignoring the torrential downpour.

Marcos criticized the government's idea of "peace" and repeated what he'd 
said at every stop during the previous four days and nights through six 
Mexican states -- that the Zapatistas will not be tricked into signing a 
false peace.

He explained for the umpteenth time the three signals from the government 
he considers necessary before peace talks can begin. First, the government 
must comply with the San Andres Peace Accords, signed in 1996, restoring 
the rights of indigenous communities to autonomy over their lands and their 
ways of life. Second, the new government of President Vicente Fox must 
retire just seven of the 259 military bases that surround the Zapatistas in 
the jungles and highlands of Chiapas. Thus far, Fox has shut down only 
four. "Seven," Marcos insisted, "is a special number for the indigenous. We 
will not dialogue until all seven are gone." And third, that the Fox 
government must release the remaining 53 Zapatista political prisoners. 
"Then," said Marcos, "the Zapatistas will negotiate the peace."

MARCOS AND FOX are the two most commonly spoken names in Mexico today, 
largely because both men are skilled at using the media to reach the 
public. But in recent weeks, Marcos and the Zapatistas have begun closing 
in on Fox. Now they are literally circling Mexico City for a triumphant 
taking of the giant city square known as the Zocalo on March 11. From there 
they will launch a citizens' lobbying campaign at the Congress to implement 
the San Andres Accords.

Like Marcos, Fox often uses the word "freedom." During last year's Mexican 
presidential campaign, the conservative National Action Party (PAN) 
candidate compared himself to Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa, and called 
for an end to 70 years of one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary 
Party, or PRI. Fox also boasted that he could end the Chiapas conflict with 
the Zapatistas "in 15 minutes."

But 90 days after taking office, President Fox has been unable even to 
bring the Zapatistas to the negotiating table. He recently visited the 
editorial board of the left-wing national daily La Jornada, begging the 
journalists to persuade Marcos to meet with him, but to no avail. And since 
a February 16 visit by US president George W. Bush, Fox has hardened his 
public stance toward the Zapatistas -- although State Department press 
secretary Richard Boucher insists that the US does not meddle in Mexican 
affairs. "Poor Mexico," as a popular saying goes, "so far from God, so 
close to the United States."

Realistically, it's no secret that the bankers, stockbrokers, agribusiness 
barons, and, above all, petroleum interests are not thrilled with the 
concept of local autonomy -- "home rule," as it is called in some regions 
of the States -- in the Mexico that has had them salivating for profits 
since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994. 
Autonomy was not part of the business community's plan to market Mexico's 
natural and human resources under free trade.

Although he welcomes this week's Zapatista march as a gesture toward peace, 
Fox, himself a former Coca-Cola executive, has increasingly criticized the 
Zapatistas for placing conditions on the dialogue. The rookie Mexican 
president still leaves 53 innocent Indians in prison as political hostages, 
while continuing to talk about "peace" and "freedom."

AT IXMIQUILPAN, Subcomandante Marcos, standing in the pouring rain that 
turned the dust below to mud, leaned into the microphone and explained, 
"There is another difference between their freedom and our freedom. For 
them, freedom is the freedom to buy or sell. They want us, we who are 
already screwed, to be able to buy and sell as well. The only things that 
we can sell are our blood and our hands, and even still we have to sell 
them very cheaply. This is not the freedom that we want, not the freedom 
that they tell us means that somebody can put up a little store when he 
wants. It's not the freedom to buy what we want. In sum, it's not 
neoliberalism that we want."

"The freedom that we want is our own," continued the fortysomething Marcos, 
who entered the Chiapas jungle in 1984 and remained there, clandestinely, 
for a decade until the 1994 uprising. "It is the freedom to choose and to 
decide -- being well-informed. To be able to choose and to decide who 
governs us and which plans of the government we accept, and which ones we 
refuse. It is being able to choose and to decide how they are going to 
govern us, how they are going to organize us, what kind of work is most 
important. The power to choose and decide, for example, to listen to what a 
group of masked outlaws come to say from the Lacandon Jungle."

On that fifth night of the two-week Chiapas-to-Mexico City caravan -- 
marking Marcos's first appearance outside Chiapas in seven years; some say 
his first trip out of the state in 17 years -- even his trademark Sherlock 
Holmesian pipe was soaked. "I'm going to be quiet now because the longer I 
speak, the more it rains," he said.

But the mass of supporters would not let Marcos stop. " Duro!  Duro!" they 
chanted, as if to say, Be tough, be strong. The subcomandante continued, 
"There is a difference between their justice and our justice. Their justice 
is a prostitute, and beyond that, she is very poorly paid. Let's see: how 
many bankers are in jail? How many industrialists? How many plantation 
owners? How many landlords ... ? No, sir, the prisons are filled with poor 
people -- with Indians, with workers, with employees. That's their justice 
-- justice from above that has a price.... And he who cannot pay it becomes 
the crime. Our justice is for everyone according to his work. He who works 
more can receive.... The justice that we, the indigenous, practice is much 
more advanced than the justice that they offer."

SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS is many things to many people: outlaw, hero, hated or 
beloved gunman, writer, sex symbol, feared warrior, a mestizo who learned 
from the indigenous, a white man who manipulates the indigenous, author of 
children's stories, crazy poet, priest figure, a revolutionary in 
counterrevolutionary times. Sometimes Marcos seems to be all things to all 
people. A masked face -- "a mirror," Marcos likes to say -- in which 
millions of Mexicans and a good many citizens of the world see reflected 
their hopes and fears.

Perhaps above all, Marcos is an educator, a student of the indigenous 
turned teacher to a nation, who has painstakingly -- step by step, 
communique by communique -- created a new vision of Mexico from ancient 
indigenous code. In the seven years following the Zapatista uprising, 
Marcos would sometimes be silent for long periods of time. Months would 
pass without a word. The media would spread rumors that he was dead, or 
ill, or taken prisoner by his own rebel army. The silences became 
unbearable even to his adversaries. Then suddenly Marcos would return, 
crackling like the lightning bolts above him on the rainy night in 
Ixmiquilpan, to speak and write again. In this over-mediated world, Marcos 
has developed a way to break through the banal consumer frenzy of the mass 
media. Through that media, without spending a peso on advertising, he has 
educated much of a generation in the art of social struggle. Recently, Fox 
himself cited Marcos as an example of "successful use of the Internet." 
Today people in every corner of Mexico, and indeed many parts of the world, 
share the vision of the Zapatista rebels.

The indigenous of Chiapas, of all of Mexico, have tried to speak for 
centuries, tried to make themselves heard by the governments and economic 
forces that exploited them and their lands, that kept them poor and 
uneducated, without access to basic medicines or sufficient food. Before 
1994, the simple act of speaking out, or organizing a union or a farmer's 
organization or a student movement, led hundreds each decade to prison 
cells, torture chambers, disappearance, and assassination.

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation had to take up arms to establish 
the platform from which they speak today, and, more significantly, from 
which they are heard. In the pre-dawn of that New Year's Day, seven winters 
ago, the Zapatistas took four Chiapas cities and then slipped back into the 
jungles and highlands, from which they shot ideas, instead of bullets, into 
the Mexican and international psyches.

Latin America's most legendary guerrilla fighter, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, 
once said that the United States should not be afraid of communists in 
Latin America. "What they should fear," said Comandante Che, "is a 
communications expert."

The long-overdue Mexican national movement for indigenous rights and 
culture, as Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago recently 
commented to President Fox, is now "unstoppable."

Still, every day, the Mexican press spits out the desperate words of 
bankers, chamber-of-commerce presidents, politicians, columnists, and other 
men of power trying in vain to discredit the indigenous movement. "Marcos 
is not for the indigenous," these educated men who have not spent a night 
on the mountain claim of the man who has spent 17 years on indigenous 
lands. "His goal is national." The indigenous, and much of Mexican civil 
society, are not bothered by the specter of a national movement. Indeed, 
they are excited, mobilized. And today they have joined the Zapatista march 
to the heart of their country.

The 15-day Zapatista caravan to Mexico City finds the indigenous movement 
at its hour of truth: the conquered on the verge of conquest. It is a 
defining, transcendent moment in this movement, similar to Gandhi's Salt 
March for the independence of India from British rule or Martin Luther 
King's "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Ten 
percent of all Mexicans speak an indigenous language. Most Mexicans have 
some indigenous blood. Over the past seven years, people without any 
apparent indigenous roots have begun to think more like the indigenous of 
Chiapas, and less like the TV newsmen.

"Who are the indigenous?" asked Marcos in Tehuacan, Puebla, on February 27. 
"The indigenous are we who remember."

OVER THEIR seven years of struggle, the Zapatistas have inspired 50 of the 
nation's 56 ethnic groups to unify in the form of the Indigenous National 
Congress. Their number-one priority: that the government comply with the 
San Andres Accords and recognize the indigenous customs and ways of life as 
rights under the federal constitution. This movement will not allow another 
treaty with the Indians -- this one signed five years ago -- to be broken 
by the government.

On February 24, 20,000 masked Zapatistas flooded the streets of San 
Cristobal, Chiapas, to send off the 24 delegates to Mexico City. On 
February 25, 10,000 citizens in Latin America's largest indigenous city, 
Juchitan, Oaxaca, greeted the Zapatistas, chanting, "You are not alone!" On 
February 26, 30,000 awaited them in the city of Oaxaca, in a city square so 
loud with screams of joy -- " Marcos!  Marcos!  Maaaarcooooos!" -- that if 
you closed your eyes you might have thought this was the arrival of the 
Beatles on American soil.

The caravan that represents the realization of the Zapatistas' long-awaited 
advance on the Mexican capital has been organized and orderly. It moved 
like a cross-country motorcade -- the bus that carried the Zapatista 
command, escorted by police on motorcycles, leading a convoy of cars and 
more buses carrying the media, international observers, civilians, and even 
filmmaker Oliver Stone. At each stop en route, throngs of supporters mobbed 
the Zapatista bus, anxious just to touch it.

In the daylight of February 27, multitudes greeted the Zapatistas in 
Orizaba, Veracruz, and Tehuacan, Puebla. At all these stops the indigenous 
ethnic groups along the way passed the baston, the cane that signifies 
political-military command, to the Zapatista comandantes. (In Oaxaca, the 
cane was specifically passed to the four female Zapatista comandantas, 
named Susana, Yolanda, Fidelia, and Esther.) On the night of February 28, 
the seven indigenous ethnic groups, comprising one million of the state of 
Puebla's five million residents, were met by tens of thousands of young 
people -- 50,000 poblanos in all -- filling the city square, singing the 
Zapatista anthem, "Vamos, vamos, vamos, adelante" -- "Let's go, let's go, 
let's go forward ... "

"The San Andres Accords will be ratified," Marcos told the mainly 
indigenous crowd earlier that day in Tehuacan, "so that Mexico will never 
be lost again."

 From Hidalgo, in the heart of the Huasteca, where the Zapatistas had 
brought the refreshing rain of "our freedom" the previous week, the 
Zapatistas drove toward the state of Queretaro. As the caravan entered that 
state, a bus carrying observers lost its brakes and hit several vehicles, 
including the Zapatista bus. A number of civilians were injured and one of 
the motorcycle escorts was killed. The caravan's itinerary was suspended 
for the day, and the Zapatistas issued a statement that they lamented the 
death of the officer.

The following day, the caravan continued through Fox's home state of 
Guanajuato and on to a three-day Indigenous National Congress in Michoacan 
with 10,000 participants to organize the final advance upon Mexico City and 
Congress. From there, the caravan planned to move on to the states of 
Mexico, Guerrero, and Morelos, to follow in the footsteps of Zapata's own 
march into the capital, under the watchful growl of El Popo, the volcano.

By the time it gets there, according to the announcements of hundreds of 
social organizations of farmers, workers, and students, an unprecedented 
mass of people, including more than 1000 tractors and horsemen, will have 
joined the caravan. "Advance to Mexico City," the Zapatista Command ordered 
its troops when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1993. On March 
11, Marcos and the Zapatistas and millions of Mexican supporters will be at 
the gates of the national palace, an audacious promise kept.

WHETHER THE Mexican government keeps the promise it made when it signed the 
San Andres Accords will decide whether the long Chiapaneco drought of war 
and conflict will be replaced by the rain of a new era of peaceful struggle 
for democracy, justice, and freedom -- an order wherein the indigenous and 
the non-indigenous can work peacefully "to choose and to decide" what 
constitutes "our freedom."

President Vicente Fox, who also embodies the hopes and aspirations of much 
of Mexico, has three major challenges as he takes the helm of this nation 
of 96 million people: improving an economy that is chained to the rise and 
fall of foreign economies, restoring public safety in this era of the 
US-imposed drug war that fuels the violent narco, and bringing about peace 
in Chiapas.

The last is the most attainable -- perhaps the only attainable -- goal 
among the top three on the national agenda. If Fox can't steer the San 
Andres Accords through a Congress dominated by his party, his long drought 
will have only just begun. Fox may find himself compared more to Aleksandr 
Kerensky, the Russian leader who raised the expectations of his nation, 
failed to meet them, and was swiftly overcome by the communist revolution, 
than to Nelson Mandela. And the Chiapas conflict could explode nationwide. 
One need only look at the multitudes who have come to greet Marcos and the 
Zapatista Command on their journey to the center of the country: the energy 
of youth, the experience of social fighters, the indigenous heart of 
Mexico, together as never before, will not allow this mission to fail. If 
Fox does not match his words of "peace" and "freedom" with concrete acts, 
his six-year term will soon turn into a nightmare not much different from 
those of his immediate predecessors Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto 
Zedillo, both now disgraced and hated by their own nation.

Don Andres is an elder in an Indigenous National Congress made up of 
cultures that still respect elders. For almost his entire life, he has been 
a social fighter. He has watched presidents come and go like dry seasons. 
Today he walks alongside hundreds of thousands of Mexican youths on the 
Zapatista Caravan, and alongside 24 masked guerrillas who, more than any 
politician or political party, made the defeat of the ruling PRI possible 
after 71 years. Don Andres, too, is advancing on Mexico City.

Don Andres, his baston tapping the earth on this long march for "our 
freedom," peers over the mass of young people who now walk with him and 
with the indigenous movement, and says to the president, "It wants to rain."