An Untaken Opportunity

My stomach twisted and turned with the old VW bus that served as a combi for several Indian villages in the mountains of Chiapas high above the town of San Cristobal de las Casas. The rough wool of the traditional poncho worn by the old Tzetzil-speaking man beside me scratched my arm as he helped his wife out of the bus with their now-empty egg crates. The driver leaned around to tell me that the next stop was Oventic, the Zapatista camp to which I had been invited to meet the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN) Commission.

I had arrived in a world that had long been ignored by most of the outside world, save when its exploitation proved profitable. Mexico has seen an odd combination of civilian rule and illiberal policy, of great growth and modernization and extreme poverty and remnants of an old system, which created a constant tension between the successfully co-opting government and those few who sought to protest the lingering injustices. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) long held virtually complete power and brought many changes to larger Mexico, but few to Chiapas.

Sparked by uprisings and protests around the world in the late 1960s, movements throughout Mexico began calling on the government to fulfill the commitments of the Mexican Revolution by reducing poverty and inequality and achieving greater level of democracy. These movements, however, were initially ineffective because the government simply repressed them harshly as soon as they occurred. The EZLN represented the culmination of a twenty-year tradition of grassroots organizing to solve the problems of underdevelopment and poverty that plagued Chiapas. The Catholic Church, the indigenous movements in the area and the socialist theorists from Mexico City joined forces to create this movement that broke into the Mexican political scene, as well as the international media scene, with its declaration of war against the state and its violent attacks in January 1994.

The EZLN was not militarily crushed as other movements had been in Mexico due to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) agreements that were in U.S. Congress for debate during the attacks. The international media was scrutinizing Mexico to find any issues that might compromise the free trade agreements when the EZLN appeared, protest flier in hand. In order to achieve the passage of the NAFTA agreements, the government had to take this group very seriously, and it did. One of the many concessions given to the group was an assortment of autonomous regions placed under EZLN control. Usually consisting of pueblos like Oventic, where I visited, these regions showed just how seriously the government took the EZLN.

I stood waiting for what felt like hours in a large field between wooden buildings with bright murals depicting socialist utopias in Mexican villages. My hands shook as a man approached wearing a black balaclava that disguised his identity despite his brightly-colored traditional peasant garb. He led me into a barn that was only lit by the sun filtering between the cracks in the rough boards of the walls. My eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness to reveal two other men and a woman seated on a bench in the corner who were similarly dressed and disguised. As I sat in front of them I noticed an AK-47 leaning just to the left of the first man. Even as my hands shook harder, I took out my notepad and pen to interview the EZLN Commission.

The EZLN I spoke to was disorganized and contradictory. The oldest man on the Commission talked on and on about the need for the movement to re-focus on running the autonomous zones it had been given in order to better the lives of the people for which it fought. The youngest spoke of the need for the movement to branch out and fight for socialism globally by whatever means necessary. Their conflicting viewpoints revealed an internal conflict that has undermined the largest opportunity to effect change ever given to a revolutionary group. When President Fox came to power in Mexico, overcoming the PRI, he called the EZLN to the negotiating table. But the EZLN, led by its ever-charismatic yet confusing spokesman, Marcos, retreated into the jungle. The EZLN had been given the opportunity few other revolutionary groups, especially those who have used terror, would ever have, due to its position in such a crucial time for Mexico. Yet it had let the opportunity slip away either because, as it claims, it wanted changes so big the government could not make them, or, more likely, because its diversity of causes and interests—the very characteristic that had brought it to such power—had finally fractured and broken its strength.

The EZLN has been relegated to the sidelines of Mexican politics today. Marcos issues statements regarding the Basque Separatists in Spain, while the people turn towards more conventional leaders who focus less on their needs. The timing of the EZLN gave it the unique opportunity to possess real power as a rebel group, and it still has a chance to overcome its terrorist past and become a legitimate political party. In order to do so, however, it will need to serve the people I visited not just in moments of glory, but in their everyday concerns.

Ayla Matanock ’05 is a Social Studies concentrator living in Eliot House. She spent the summer doing thesis research on rebel groups in Mexico, Peru, and Spain.