THE CAPTURE OF TWO SPIES IN CHIAPAS
by Christy Rodgers
© 1994
El grito de Chiapas va más allá de México. --Bishop Samuel Ruiz
Chiapas is Now on the Map
Imagine that you are one of the Powers That Be. By force of will, through massive deployment of resources human, material and capital, over decades of effort you have succeeded in shaping an empire. A handful of gleaming, stateless trusts staffed by an army of interchangeable citizens of no country in particular deploys its capital, plans and executes its commerce. These entities function beautifully, in great cities from towers of glass and steel with fountains playing in the courtyards hundreds of stories below their executive suites. They work.
And then, in a small backward province, in a land which you conceived as a chip just about to fall strategically into place, what happens? A rebellion. Again the masked hordes with rifles and homemade grenades. Again the terrifying, demagogic rhetoric, the demands for justice, land, democracy. Again these violent phantoms invoking the people-- what do they mean, "the people?"
You ignore the rebellion. You wait for it to fade like a mirage caused by the heat in hot country. But on some nights your sleep is troubled....
I came to Chiapas, Mexico across the mountains from Guatemala, exhausted and burnt out, having just spent five months of travel chasing the White Rabbit of Central American revolutionary movements down the rabbit hole of the New World Order. Chiapas, which had erupted in armed rebellion at the beginning of the year, was my last stop on the trip.
I thought it was fitting; my journey had begun in Cuba, benchmark of the region's radical social movements. The sweep of Central American revolution was like a tidal wave that the tropical currents pulled in from Cuba, whose social contours it had first altered permanently. For two decades the wave swept northward up the isthmus, over Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. For two decades, implacable reactionaries tried to beat it back and couldn't. I was one who came to believe, proudly, triumphantly, as if it were my own struggle, that it couldn't be stopped. I then watched, uncomprehending, as it began to recede, having, after Cuba, transformed nothing. Now for five months I had found myself dispiritedly chronicling its full ebb. So I was seeking confirmation, or reassurance, really, that the Chiapas uprising was a new tide welling in the region. After all, it belonged not to the age of the Missile Gap, but the new era of Free Trade, Capital Triumphant. My trip had been a great circle, but not a closed circle, geographically or politically. It finished with a question: was Chiapas a beginning or an end?
Chiapas, like Guatemala, like much of Central America, has historically been ruled with the corruption and unreconstructed feudal contempt for its indigenous majority that the conquistadores brought with them five centuries ago. But the province has an equally long history of being barely governable. Revolt rankles in the souls of its people. And this is because in all that history no one has altered the basic fact of their lives: a bone crushing poverty that creates truncated lifespans eaten by illness and endured in ignorance.
On January 1st, these people gave us a new acronym to add to the lexicon of Third World liberation struggles: EZLN, the Ejercito Zapatista para la Liberacion Nacional . A friend joked that they sounded like the call letters for a muzak station: E-ZLN, home of the new "lite" revolution. But 2,000 Mayan Indian guerrillas in ski masks, who had been training for ten years in the Lacandon jungle, took over seven seats of local government that day.
Under whose name did they fight? They took as their inspiration the peasant general of the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata, illiterate, uncompromising revolutionary, whose dark eyes, filled with impenetrable sorrow, were forced to watch the betrayal of his ideals before they would see his own murder by treachery. With Zapata originated two tenets upon which peasant revolutionaries around the world came to base their struggles: that the land is for those who till it, and "it is better to die on our feet, than live on our knees."
In the manner of other third world events seen through a first world lens, the uprising was news for awhile, then it wasn't anymore. I wanted to know: what had happened since then?
This was easy to discover. You had only to walk around the streets of San Cristobal , the poorest province's richest town, an exquisite colonial city fattened by package tourism. When I arrived the hotels were empty, almost ghostly, but the streets were full. Posted leaflets were everywhere advertising political meetings, rallies, film showings about the rebellion. Peasant organizations were appropriating thousands of acres of farmland. There was a frenzy of organizing by groups supporting the "Zapatistas'" call to rebellion. A month after Mexico 's ruling political party, the PRI, had stolen the elections through intimidation and blatant fraud, steps towards setting up a parallel, progressive government in Chiapas were already being taken.
Nine months after the uprising, Chiapas was in open insurrection. San Cristobal was the hub of the movement.
I began almost immediately to feel a connection to certain key places and times, none of which, I realized as I catalogued them, I had ever experienced directly. I thought of liberated cities: Havana in 1960, Santiago de Chile in '70, Managua in '80. I had experienced something similar inside tierra libre, rebel territory in El Salvador in the late 1980's, where my own passion for revolutionary movements culminated. In these places you learn to breathe with a lightness that I think few people ever know. This is what liberated means: it is a headiness, an elation at the idea that you are riding history like a wave, that your destination is inevitable, and it is a new land.
The physical loveliness of San Cristobal , surrounded by cloudy mountains, gave an added gloss to the insurrectional spirit. It felt as if here you could have the flowering of freedom and possibility without the destruction of the elegant colonial backdrop against which the insurrection was taking place, and nothing was compromised. One day I sat in an arched courtyard of ancient stone, reflecting on William Morris' vision of the just society as aesthetically beautiful. If it could be realized, perhaps it would be in such a place as this. Now that the hordes of slick, golden oligarchs had disappeared in terror, the 400 year-old city seemed more beautiful than ever. It was not utopia, of course, but a moment that felt utopian, or pregnant with a possible utopia.
Thirty thousand federal troops in the province, most of them just outside the principle towns ringing Zapatista territory, where an estimated 4,000 armed insurgents moved freely, did diminish the utopian cast somewhat. A tense ceasefire had been in place since mid-January. But in the intervening time both sides had increased, not reduced their military strength. Tourists were beginning to return, however, ineffably confident that the shooting war was over. I watched them blandly face the grueling series of army roadblocks between San Cristobal and anywhere else with the arch attitude of sophisticated travelers. They did not seem interested or aware that the place was still in a ferment, as long as the restaurants and markets were open.
It was hard to take the soldiers seriously, if only for the fact that, in the fashion of soldiers everywhere, they took themselves so seriously. At one checkpoint I passed ten men stood around wearing green vests and helmets with leafy branches sticking out of them. They looked, in their innocuous surroundings, like oversized elves waiting to go on in a school play. But only the sheltered children of the First World have the foolish idea that there is nothing happening when you see that many soldiers anywhere, whether or not they are firing at anybody at the moment.
Palenque
After four days in San Cristobal , I went to Palenque . Where San Cristobal , in the highlands, is cool and misty, Palenque is a sultry place, swimming in the languid, lowland heat. Eight kilometers from the town, backed against perfectly conical mountains that rise above it like larger, jungle-clad versions of its temple pyramids, is the site of one of the greatest ancient Mayan cities. Tourists come from all over the world, and generally endure the drab new town only to visit the ruins.
I had heard there was to be a demonstration in Palenque to protest the fraudulent theft of local elections the month before. It was the kickoff of a campaign of civil resistance, as it was called, which had the express goal of preventing the PRI's man Eduardo Robledo from assuming the governorship in three month's time and instating the legitimate winner, Amado Avendaño. He was a progressive newspaperman, new to politics, who vowed to implement the political changes the Zapatistas were seeking in the province.
When I arrived, the demonstration was underway. In the midday sun, a thousand people carrying banners and handwritten signs denouncing the elections, Robledo and the PRI had spread out around the small central park fronting the cathedral.
At first glance there was nothing out of the ordinary in the protest. Most of the demonstrators were Indian campesinos, peasant farmers, but there were also bespectacled Mexican intellectuals and pony-tailed university men. A white-haired man wearing a denim shirt and a red bandana around his neck was addressing the crowd from the back of a high-sided cattle truck mounted with loudspeakers. A boy with a wooden cart was selling cups of ice water to the demonstrators, and a foreign photographer, a tall balding man who looked like a gringo, was taking pictures. The heat was brutal.
And then I noticed something odd. There was a knot of grim-faced Indian men very close to the truck. A debate of some kind seemed to be going on among them. I looked around me, and the eyes of many spectators were riveted on the truck itself. I followed their gaze. Inside, through the slats, I could see two men sitting side by side, their heads down. They were blindfolded. As I watched, their arms were roughly yanked over their heads, and unseen men lashed their wrists with rope to one of the wooden slats. I began to try to pay attention to what the man with the red bandana was saying.
"We have disarmed them," he announced. "It is being taken care of. We need your cooperation. We will prove it to you in just a minute. Here--" He held up an object which I first thought might have been the handle of a folding knife. Then I recognized it as the clip of semi-automatic pistol. In his other hand he raised a cartridge.
His appeals for calm appeared to do nothing to ease the tension. The group of grim men moved not an inch, murmuring in their own language. The truck was being rocked and shaken by young men jumping up on the sides to take slaps at the heads of the bound captives.
I backed out of the relentless sun into the shade of a pillar in front of the City Hall. A man was staring at my legs; I noticed that sweat was pouring down them in rivulets. As I stood there, the gringo photographer came up beside me carrying a metal card table. I couldn't imagine where he'd produced it from--it seemed as incongruous and surreal as a melting clock. I wanted to ask if he were planning to set up for a hand of bridge.
"Would you mind leaning or sitting on this for me?" he asked without preamble, in flat, midwestern English. I did so. He jumped on the table and began focussing his lens on the scene inside the truck. "Come to see the ruins?" He tossed the question absently down as he snapped and wound, snapped and wound.
"What is happening here?" I asked.
"Those two guys were caught taking pictures of every license plate on the square. They'd been photographing the march the whole way along, but so have I, of course. It was the license plates. They put up a hell of a fight when when some of the marchers grabbed them and hustled them onto the truck , and in the tussle they found the one guy was armed--did you see our friend hold up that clip?"
A young Mexican man came up at this point, and offered a cup of ice water to the photographer, who waved it away. He then offered it to me and I took it gratefully. "Put some ice in the back of your mouth, it really cools you off," he told me, as if I were just another member of their party. He directed himself to the photographer again. "I got up inside the crowd," he says. "They want to lynch these guys. They want to kill them."
"What's the deal?" the photographer said.
"Well, they say if they turn them over to the police it's as good as letting them go, because they are the police."
"But if they kill them, they're screwed."
"The organizers know that. They're trying to come up with another plan, but nobody's buying it."
"Listen," the photographer said, "Can you get me up on the back of that truck?" He leapt down from the table and they disappeared into the throng. I marveled that the photographer--a head taller and ten shades lighter than anyone else in the crowd, had so agilely become lost in it.
Around me was the smell of tightly packed bodies, the campesino smell of sweat, leather and woodsmoke. In a minute I could see that the photographer had reached the truck and was inside. Someone pulled back the heads of the two men so that he could get a full face shot. He jumped down, and the door swung closed, as the organizers inside debated, gesticulating.
When did the soldiers arrive? While this was going on, an armored jeep filled with troops had sealed off one side of the square. The soldiers, in riot gear, legs spread, submachine guns held across their chests like truncheons, blocked the street. From a sidewalk café behind their line, a number of florid-faced, hard-eyed men and women, all of whom seemed enormously fat, some wearing some kind of press badges, were watching the marchers, their faces tense, hostile. A tanned, elegant- looking man in loafers and pressed denims, with the out of context aspect of a Hollywood agent got out of a white compact which bore the inexplicable logo "Anderson, Clayton and Co." He stood chatting quietly with the commanding officer by the jeep for some time. They did not look at eachother, eyes fixed on the demonstration.
"These men are military men," someone was saying over the loudspeaker. "They are the secret police, the White Guards who have been murdering our people for years. But we will not sink to their level. We are peaceful, this is a peaceful march. Who called the soldiers? We don't need them here, there will be no violence. We will hold the city authorities responsible for any incident if these troops are not instructed to respect that this is a peaceful movement."
And while all this is going on it is still Sunday afternoon, families stroll, ice cream vendors sell creamsicles, a few tourists wander past, glancing momentarily at the gathered faces, the closed truck, not hearing the unintelligible words, then dismissing them all as they look for a cafe or souvenir shop. Life goes on, around.
The photographer and his friend reemerged. The young Mexican soon circled back in among the people, his face glistening, his eyes wide with excitement. The photographer came and stood beside me. I introduced myself then, and asked his name.
"There'll be time for that," he answered vaguely. "I think I need some lunch. Not too far from the action, though. How about checking out that place across the square?"
We sat down at a window table just inside the café, from which we could still see the truck, from the front, as it was rocked by the young men jumping up and hanging from the slats which separated them from the spies they wanted to kill.
"Ignacio's terribly caught up in all this." He pointed at his friend. "He's so stressed out by what's going on he can't pull himself out it for a second. I'm an old man now--" he gave a sardonic grimace--"I guess I've learned you've got to pace yourself in these situations. But he's a wonderful kid. He's from here originally, y'know. Been living in the US for eight years, studying. But when he heard all this was going on in his homeland he had to get down here, and I said I'd come with him. I didn't really think he should come on his own, y'know. Too dangerous."
I zeroed in on my original query: "And where are you from?"
He introduced himself then, Don from Wisconsin . He'd been a freelance photographer for many years. "Did a lot of work with AIM in the seventies. Some Central America stuff-- Nicaragua for the elections, y'know. I've been around a bit."
We sat and talked, engulfed in the irony of our situation. A large, gregarious party of Dutch tourists was at the next table, the café was full of chatting tourists and Mexicans. Fifty feet away the truck rocked and rocked, and occasionally garbled words floated towards us over the loudspeakers.
Finally we left, feeling ourselves sufficiently "paced." We found Ignacio, who reported that an entire town meeting had been held during our lunch. The real work of the organizers, which was to record the public testimony of people who had been witnesses to incidents of PRI fraud and intimidation, could not be accomplished until the issue of the spies was resolved. At last an organizer proposed a solution that seemed to satisfy everyone (minus the captives). It was announced that they, having been interrogated by the people and found to be military spies (besides the army-issue pistol, there were their dogtags) would be driven deep into the jungle, inside guerrilla territory, and left there.
Here was a plan which seemed, emanating as it did from a potential mob, to be humane, just, and even somehow symmetrical. Unfortunately, it was also impossible. The town, not to mention the square, was ringed with soldiers. A car carrying the peoples' prisoners wouldn't even make it to the city limits.
Then a third man was caught. The first two had been strangers; they had told their interrogators they were "only tourists, on vacation" from the neighboring province of Campeche. The last man was a local. When more angry protesters led him struggling to the truck, brandishing a sheet of written license plate numbers they had wrenched out of his hand, his mother appeared. As the crowd watched, she pled for his release, sobbing and wringing her hands.
Something had to be done to get the situation in hand. Everyone had now been standing for hours in the relentless sun. One of the two spies was bleeding heavily from a wound to the head. The soldiers waited on the sidelines, their weapons at ready.
There is an invisible line, like a membrane, which becomes almost palpable, at times when the real possibility of violence is present. At such moments you sense that it is possible to come infinitely close to that line and never cross it. But it is impossible to predict and thus prevent the action that will break the delicate barrier-- a cough, a shove, a shout, the twitch of a single finger. Once it is broken, the result is never less than horror.
This time, the line was not crossed. The angry men agreed, glumly, to allow the captives to be taken to the police. The soldiers, shamed by the protesters that they were wasting their time, withdrew. Testimonies were taken, further protests announced, the protesters dispersed. Don, Ignacio and I returned to the Hotel Kashlan ("It means 'White Man' in Chol," sneered Ignacio) where we ate, drank and were, somewhat distractedly, merry, as passengers might be who'd been bumped from a flight only to discover later that it has crashed.
The local paper informed us, superfluously, that tensions were rising in the region. Sub-comandante Marcos, Zapatista spokesman and military strategist, their most visible leader, declared to the press that his troops were on red alert. They were facing increased military provocation throughout their territory, in the form of both harrassment of the civilian movement and tightening of the military cordon choking the zone.
Marcos was a master of rhetoric, and his rhetoric was dark. "Today we say to you that once this war begins again, nothing will hold it back, that days, months, years, decades will pass as death continues to haunt the table of the glutton, the mansion of the arrogant, the footstep of the powerful."
The next day, Don drove me in a rented yellow Volkswagen back along the road to San Cristobal . He was headed there; I was getting off at Ocosingo, a conservative market town at the edge of the Zapatista-controlled zone, site of the deadliest fighting during the uprising. Ignacio was taking Don's film back through the four intervening checkpoints on the bus.
For an hour and a half, driving on the fresh asphalt of the only paved road bisecting the territory, Don told me stories from the fringe: mostly he recounted his experiences during a bizarre trip to Libya ten years before, with a huge, clandestine foreign delegation.
At the checkpoints we spoke only very broken Spanish, gave the thicknecked soldiers beaming p.r. smiles, and were waved along.
At Ocosingo Don left me off, and I went to look for the men who, the next day, were to take me into the Lacondon jungle, to visit the communities behind guerrilla lines.
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