The Other Side of Paradise
In his essay on Gandhi, George Orwell ridiculed pacifism, explaining that the method Gandhi used to achieve independence for India could only succeed against a country like Great Britain, which was obliged by democracy to act within certain limits. Would it have worked against someone like Hitler or Stalin, whom nothing prevented from committing genocide? Turning the other cheek may mean a moral triumph, but it is completely useless when confronting totalitarian regimes. In certain circumstances, the only way to defend freedom and human dignity, or to survive at all, is by meeting violence with violence.
Was this the case in Mexico on January 1, 1994, when Subcomandante Marcos rose up in arms with his Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) and occupied several Chiapas villages? The corrupt dictatorship of the PRI, which since 1929 had enjoyed an all but absolute reign, had begun to lose ground; as the result of growing internal pressure for democratic reform, the dictatorship had ceded some of its power to opposition forces and begun slowly but surely to open up. To some of us it seemed that this process would be seriously hindered by the guerrilla actions and that, rather than aiding the Indians of Chiapas, these actions favored the PRI regime, giving it a welcome excuse to present itself as the guardian of peace and order to a middle class doubtless anxious for democracy but allergic to the idea of a Mexico devastated by civil war, in which the situation of Guatemala or El Salvador during the eighties might be reprised.
No one could have suspected then the peculiar evolution of the “first postmodern revolution,” as Carlos Fuentes dubbed it, or the transformation of the masked subcomandante, with his pipe and two watches, one on each wrist, into an international star, courtesy of the sensationalistic frenzy of a media eager for exoticism and the irresponsible frivolity of a certain brand of Western progressive. This story should be told in great detail sometime, as testament to the delirious heights of alienation to which ideological parti pris can lead and the ease with which a Third World clown can compete with Madonna and the Spice Girls in seducing multitudes, so long as he has mastered the techniques of publicity and the political fashions of the day.
One has to thank the journalists Bertrand de La Grange, of Le Monde, and Maite Rico, of El País, for having contributed the most serious work written until now on this subject, with their book Marcos: La genial impostura (Marcos: The Brilliant Hoax; Aguilar, 1998), in which they patiently and bravely try to untangle the myths and lies surrounding the events in Chiapas. Both have covered these doings on the ground for their respective newspapers, both have firsthand knowledge of the devilish complexity of Mexican political life, and both display—I take my hat off to them—an independence of judgment not common among press correspondents reporting from Latin America. Their account paints a pitiless picture of the situation of the Chiapas Indians from colonial times and describes the terrible marginalization and exploitation they still suffer today under the current economic and political system. But it also proves unequivocally that the Zapatista uprising has not improved the condition of the native communities at all; rather—the other side of paradise—it has made things worse for them, socially and economically, creating great rifts in Chiapas’s indigenous society and raising the level of violence that oppresses the Chiapans.
The first myth this investigation explodes is the idea that the Zapatista movement is indigenous and peasant-led. In reality, since the era of the National Liberation Forces, which gave birth to the EZLN, the EZLN has been led—like all its Latin American counterparts—by whites or mestizos of urban origin, strongly influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideology and seduced by volunteer work in the service of the Cuban revolution. This was the case of the university student Rafael Guillén Vicente, the future Subcomandante Marcos, who trained in Cuba. There, rather than focusing on military matters, he assiduously collected information about the life and personal habits of Che Guevara, out of which he later constructed a cloned persona for himself, although with the added trait of a mania for publicity, something the sober Argentinean revolutionary always disdained. In the Zapatista movement, the Indians are tools to be manipulated—“simply guinea pigs,” say Rico and La Grange—window decoration, troops supplying the inevitable dead, and sometimes the executioners of other Indians. But never the protagonists; or, better said, the protagonist, because that is always Marcos, especially when he confesses, with effusive rhetorical self-criticism, that he has put himself forward too much and promises to surrender the stage to his “brother and sister Zapatistas” (he has yet to do so).
The second myth to be dismantled is the supposed “nonviolent” character of the Zapatista movement. True, military actions ceased two weeks after the uprising, when President Carlos Salinas, in a typical instance of fine-tuned PRI political Machiavellianism, decreed a “cease-fire” and began a dialogue with the Zapatistas that his successor, Ernesto Zedillo, has continued. This dialogue has primarily revealed that the rebels lack a minimal program of reforms, a lack for which they have compensated with vague and confused claims in support of an indigenous “identity.” These claims have made multiculturalists from North American and European universities delirious with enthusiasm but do nothing to alleviate in the slightest the miserable living conditions of the Chiapas peasants. A distinguished Mexican anthropologist, Roger Bartra, has explained that indigenous fundamentalism and the Church’s return to the political arena—two consequences of the Zapatista movement—represent “a setback of the first order.” A setback in Mexico’s progress toward democratization, no doubt. But the events in Chiapas have been of great assistance to the PRI regime, as this book demonstrates, which means that the EZLN has become, despite itself, the “principal validator” of the system. For now, raising the specter of imminent danger, the Mexican army has obtained a “substantial increase” in budget and troops—it has made frequent purchases of light arms and armored vehicles from the United States, Russia, and France in recent years—and the military has come to play a central role in political life, a typically Latin American tragedy which Mexico had been spared until now.
Though news of the crimes against Zapatistas, like the savage assassination of forty-five Tzotil Indians, almost all women and children, in Acteal on December 22 last year, has been broadcast around the world and roused just indignation, another kind of violence in Chiapas has been deliberately silenced, because to condemn it would be politically incorrect: that committed by the Zapatistas against Indians resistant or hostile to Subcomandante Marcos. The most dramatic pages in the book by Maite Rico and Bertrand de La Grange are those reproducing some of the hundreds (possibly thousands) of letters sent by Indians from various Chiapas communities to parish priests, NGOs, and local authorities, denouncing—in rudimentary and sometimes barely comprehensible language, which betrays the humble origins of the sender—the thefts and plundering, the expropriations, the physical maltreatment, and the blackmail to which the Chiapas Indians who refused to submit to the designs of the masked Marcos were subjected. More than thirty thousand peasants—almost half the population of Las Cañadas, say the authors—have been forced to flee their places of birth because of the “political cleansing” operations ordered by the individual the distinguished French sociologist Alain Touraine has called—with not a quiver in his voice—“the armed democrat.”
It is understandable that Touraine, and Régis Debray, another Marcos champion (in his euphoria he has called Marcos “the best Latin American writer of our times”), and the tireless widow of François Mitterrand should still have their heads in the clouds after a visit to Chiapas as tourists and that they should confuse their desires with reality. What is not comprehensible, however, is the conduct of the slippery Samuel Ruiz, bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas, who has an in-depth knowledge of what is really going on in Chiapas, because he has lived there since 1960 and has himself received some of these desperate accusations. Why has he systematically hidden them or, when he had no way of dodging the matter, downplayed them as much as possible? Not out of sympathy for Marcos and the Zapatistas. Though he helped them in the early years—in his praiseworthy eagerness to protect the Indians from the depredations of the caciques, he called on a group of militant Maoists as advisers!—he later kept them at arm’s length, not, as this book records, because of differences of principle, but for purposes of emulation and hegemonic competition. The bishop suffers, like Marcos, from a weakness for publicity and is as sensitive as a blushing violet to political opinion.
The book exudes affection and admiration for Mexico, a country whose spell is certainly difficult to resist. At the same time, a righteous wrath burns in its pages at the way events in Chiapas have been twisted and cannibalized by those who shamelessly seek Third World Robin Hoods to placate their consciences, alleviate the political boredom induced by humdrum democracies, or slake their thirst for revolutionary romanticism. The description of an idiot in Bermuda shorts called John Whitmer, who gave up anthropology in Connecticut in order to serve as a Zapatista commissary and to vet the political orthodoxy of journalists who come to Chiapas, is, in and of itself, a clear denouncement of the species. He is just one of the many in this book who sadden and irritate those of us who really do want to see Mexico free at last from the manipulative and abusive—and often brutal—PRI political monopoly that has functioned for more than seventy years. The first and indispensable requirement for improving the living conditions of the Chiapas Indians and the Mexican people in general is the democratization of the country’s political life, the opening up of its society, the reinforcement of its institutions, and the establishment of a justice system that protects all of its citizens from the abuse of any kind of power, without exception.
Subcomandante Marcos has not aided this process of Mexican democratic reform in the slightest; he has hampered and confused it, leaching legitimacy from the democratic opposition and giving the system he claims to combat excuses for continuing to remain in power. Of course, the virtual hero he is today might be killed tomorrow, either by his adversaries or by some envious ally, and he might then take his place in the pantheon of heroes and liberators: history is peppered with these prestidigitations. But as this book proves many times over, that is not the fate he deserves. More appropriate might be that augured by the offers he has received from two of his most enthusiastic admirers: the filmmaker Oliver Stone, who would like him to star as himself in a film, and Oliviero Toscani, Benetton’s top adman, who sees him as a model in a “United Colors” ad campaign. Toscani’s triumph will be the image of the subcomandante—mask on, machine gun over his shoulder, pipe in his mouth—in the center of a company of armed Indians in uniform gazing trustingly into the glow of the sun on the horizon.