Redeemers (58 page)

Marcos had surely read Mariátegui. His writings would have been on the required list in courses on Marxism or Latin American history. But Marcos may not at first have consciously and deliberately adopted the Peruvian's premise of indigenism. It may have been a natural result of the situation as it stood on January 2. From that time on, Marcos and the Zapatistas, brilliantly sensitive to the power of the media and capitalizing on the fortuitous blossoming of the Internet, made a truly amazing use of high-tech communications (their hostility to capitalism notwithstanding) and placed the question of Indian rights squarely on the international agenda. They also succeeded in linking indigenism directly to two powerful currents: multiculturalism and the worldwide antiglobalization crusade. In 1996, in a message from the EZLN to the American planning committee of the Intercontinental Meeting for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, Marcos proclaimed: “We are neoliberalism's maximum defiance, the most beautiful absurdity, the most irrelevant delirium, the most human madness.” For Marcos, neoliberalism is the great evil of the postcolonial world. In his closing remarks at that meeting, he castigated it in biblical terms as a supra-totalitarian power: “In the world of those who live and kill for power there is no room for human beings . . . slavery or death is the choice their world offers all worlds.”

Mariátegui would have welcomed the use of the media to advance the cause of the Indians. It fits in perfectly with the surrealist techniques for the “demolition” of bourgeois society, and with Mariátegui's proposal for a creative return to indigenous origins. There are many other elements of Zapatismo that he would have applauded within the Gramscian creativity of Marcos's cultural revolution. The use of the mask is one example. The black wool ski mask that Marcos always wore is an extraordinary conception, a symbol with all the advantages of a magnificently successful brand: different, mysterious, simple, cheap, useful, reproducible in itself or on posters and T-shirts. As an instrument of revolutionary marketing, its success was assured, because this was an instrument truly “made in Mexico,” a country in which the mask has been a vital cultural artifact for centuries. And yet until Marcos, no one in Mexico had thought of using it to achieve such effects.

The next surprise took place in the discourse itself, especially in response to a question that was the title of a significant statement by Marcos published in newspapers on January 18, 1994, after the government had offered him a pardon and amnesty. His message was simple and thoroughly indigenist: the Indians, oppressed for five hundred years, had done nothing that required forgiveness. “What do they have to forgive us for?” The echo in the left-wing press and from university podiums was immediate, and it lingered more or less intensely for years. Here was a writer somewhere out in the jungle, a storyteller and a weaver of intricate moral fables (some of his writing praised by Octavio Paz), a powerful pamphleteer in the eighteenth-century tradition, uneven, overly prolific, emotional, incisive, hilarious, at times (as Fidel Castro noted) far too focused on death, but always a writer. Given the degree to which the Mexican left (even up to the present day) has been more cultural than social and more social than political, the discourse and symbols of Marcos had a truly revolutionary impact.

His writing often had a strong biblical tone and his use of quotations, especially from poetry, seemed natural and effortless, ranging from Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll, from Paul Éluard to Neruda, the indigenous oral tradition, Walt Disney, comic books, and the Latin American writers of the left: a real postmodern cocktail. Despite his talent, however, the writer in Marcos was only incidental. His literary skills were entirely at the service of his cause. The opposite was true of his master Mariátegui, who was an authentic writer of the avant-garde: rigorous, well informed, original, and whose writings on literature and art read just as well now as they did in 1928. They have not lost interest or relevance.

Within Mexico's borders, Marcos's words stirred the feelings of several indigenous groups in other southern states, though nothing similar to the events of January 1, 1994 occurred elsewhere. Outside Mexico, and especially in Italy, they energized the Western left for a time, after the trauma for many socialist movements that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. The writer José Saramago wrote a rapturous prologue to the collection of Marcos's writings called
Our Word Is Our Weapon
. For Saramago, Chiapas was the new Jerusalem, the Zapatistas were the children of Israel, Marcos was their savior, Don Samuel was John the Baptist. He was not alone in this belief. Highly respected intellectuals from all over the West were of the same mind. “Marcos has earned his indignation like few men alive,” Norman Mailer noted on the jacket of
Our Word Is Our Weapon
. Kurt Vonnegut likened Marcos to “our own Tom Paine.”

Saramago, at least, visited Chiapas many times. But in his wanderings he had seen only what he wanted to see: a polarized society of Indians and soldiers. What he did
not
observe was the complicated reality of the place, a predominantly Indian society sharply divided for many political, religious, economic, and cultural reasons. Mexico was not and is not a country split between exploited Indians and non-Indian exploiters. The truth lies elsewhere: Mexico is very much an ethnically mixed country. Its biggest problems were and are decidedly not racial.

In keeping with the doctrine of his Peruvian predecessor, Marcos had brandished a direct appeal to Mexican history, which he called “our historical protection,” creating an explicit link with the original Zapatismo (1910–19) but also with many other moments, figures, and episodes of the Mexican Revolution. The congress that he convoked in 1994, for example, took place in a village in the jungle that Marcos renamed Aguascalientes. Acting as the editor of living history, Marcos was seeking to re-create the convention of 1914 in the city of Aguascalientes, a high point in the struggle of popular leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata against Venustiano Carranza's more conservative forces.

He regularly situated himself within the Mexican tradition of revolution, as if to borrow legitimacy from the very country with which he is at war. Since his first communiqué from the Lacandón Jungle on January 2, 1994, his historical references had been constant: the comandantes are “insurgents,” they are like Hidalgo and Morelos, the leaders of the independence movement and the country's founding fathers. Marcos's own models were the leaders of the Revolution: Villa, but especially Zapata, around whom Marcos created his own innovative legend. Merging Zapata's struggle for land with an ancient Mayan belief about the first man (called “Votán,” which means “the hearth of the people”) sent by God to divide up the earth, Marcos tried to create a myth that would be both Indian and Zapatista. He postulated a spirit called “Votán Zapata,” who incarnates all the popular heroes of Mexico: “He is and he is not everything in us . . . he is walking . . . Votán Zapata . . . keeper of the night . . . master of the mountain . . . he is one and all. No one and all. The guardian and hearth of the people.”

“A postmodern guerrilla,” the writer Gabriel Zaid called Marcos. There was a movie director behind this rebel's mask, a filmmaker waiting to seize his opportunity and exchange his mask for a camera. His life is his best movie. In his interview with Monsiváis, Marcos made this explicit. He called for a Gramscian program for the regeneration of the left that will enable it to confront the neoliberal hegemony: “The problem facing the left is the construction of a cultural, historical, intellectual, and political framework. That is where there is a need for intellectual labor . . . We believe that the intellectual, progressive left must work to clear a path for itself. The challenge is great and richly rewarding,” and so on—all rather banal assertions, except that it ends on the subcomandante's distinctive note: “And not just on an intellectual level, but on a cultural level as well, in film.”

 

IV

La Realidad
: this is the name that Marcos gave to the small village where he had his headquarters. The appellation expressed a certain hope and a certain arrogance. The problem is that La Realidad was not the same thing as reality. It was one thing to create a myth, and quite another thing to operate in a demythified world. Marcos's La Realidad was real enough. The indigenous people who built it and lived in it were actual and aggrieved, and they were led by an extraordinarily creative and determined man. But how did La Realidad translate into reality?

Marcos had been many things, but he was not an ideologue. Mariátegui prescribed agrarian reform for Peru as a first step in the adoption (the re-adoption, he would have called it, given the Inca antecedents) of socialism. But Mariátegui was a product of his time: he could admire the Russian Revolution as the dawn of history. Such radical idolatry was not available to Marcos and his generation, who have witnessed the final collapse of Eastern European communism. Marcos too was a product of his time, and the Marcos who was a conventionally pro-Soviet Marxist probably expired, belatedly, on January 1, 1994, three years after the Soviet Union. A day later the other Marcos was born, the indigenist Marcos, the media Marcos, the Marcos we knew.

The collapse of Soviet communism could not be denied by Marcos, his training in revolutionary Marxism notwithstanding. And so this expert in revealing the hidden and in hiding the obvious settled on another utopia, on a different salvation: “The essence of our struggle is the demand for the rights and culture of indigenous peoples, because that is who we are. Here we stand, we hold to our path, we resist.” With the weight of these and similar words, Marcos—like such currents as the Black Power movement in the United States of the late 1960s—aimed at transforming identity politics into a revolutionary program.

But what did his assertion, floated from La Realidad, mean concretely, in reality? It expressed an admirable moral standpoint, but in practice it seemed to be confused and contradictory. “We don't need anyone to give us anything,” Marcos had said, disdaining “handout politics,” which yields only “one more store, one more clinic.” The old criticisms of “reformism,” of “economicism,” of those who “sell their soul and dignity for a few coins” resounded in pronouncements that tended toward the spiritual and the messianic, and away from anything practical and possible. This suspicion of politics was the consequence not only of Marcos's radicalism, but also of his indigenism. He wanted his people to be saved but to stay the same, to experience a transformation without being transformed. It is no coincidence that Marcos had nothing to say about the Indians who had chosen not to stay the same, who did not accept his politics.

The late Alberto Flores Galindo, a brilliant writer of the Peruvian left, warned against visions that fail to breed effective economic and social progress—the kind of progress that involves investments, schools, stores, clinics—and instead assume the permanence of archaic ways of life that are supposedly superior but actually oppressive. “Only those who have never been at risk of contracting typhus,” he wisely observed, “lament the arrival of a highway or the establishment of a medical center in a town.” Of course Marcos had known human suffering—he had been surrounded by it in the jungle for almost twenty years—but his rejection of restitution that he considered unworthy (“we want things to change, we don't want charity”) made it difficult to bring his struggle to a satisfactory conclusion. After all, who decides when an act of reparation—the sort of justice that most of Mexico desires—is genuine or sufficient? Had all the Indians of Chiapas been freely consulted?

 

V

This brings us to the heart of the matter: the question of democracy. Beginning with their first communiqués, Marcos and the Zapatistas had constantly reiterated their commitment to democracy. Almost all their statements ended with the phrase “democracy, justice, liberty.” But their support for democracy remained abstract. They constantly interfered with the electoral processes in the corrupt local elections of 1995 and 1997, and Marcos urged his followers to abstain from two national elections, even the critical and closely contested presidential campaign of 2006, when the left-of-center candidate appealed for his support. From the viewpoint of Zapatismo, democracy meant that the nation should constitutionally recognize the right of the indigenous communities to be different, and up to this point their reasoning was democratic, since it appealed to the basic respect that majorities (in Mexico mainly mestizo) owe minorities, in this case, the Indians of Mexico. But what happens when some essential aspects of the cherished “practices and traditions” of communities infringe on those of their resident minorities, such as women, and Indians of other ethnic origins, and those of different religious faiths?

Questioned about this issue by Carlos Monsiváis, Marcos replied that “some practices and traditions do indigenous communities no good: prostitution, alcoholism, the exclusion of women and young people from collective decision-making processes—processes that are actually more collective than in urban areas but also discriminatory. Alcoholism, prostitution, machismo, and domestic violence must all be eliminated.” He insisted that these changes should not be forcibly imposed, a position that showed respect and understanding for the way traditional cultures function, since some of these evils are rooted in strongly felt, religiously supported custom. But if they damage lives, by what process are they to be changed? And by acknowledging the need for such changes, Marcos shifted his ground. If the Mexican majority must concede to the indigenous minority their right to difference, then the indigenous majority in any region or community must concede the same rights to their own internal minorities: the inalienable individual rights of freedom of religion, expression, movement, and residence. Yet frequently in Indian communities, these rights are not honored, and people of differing faiths or opinion may be excluded, ostracized, or even killed.