"Army!" came the shout. A line of women, dressed in the traditional red and white blouses of Chenalho region, stood up across the side road stretching their rope barrier. Above them a sign read "Welcome to Polho, a new autonomous, rebel municipality. Liberty, Justice, Democracy. Zapata Lives! The fight continues!"
Below in the valley the sun glinted off the new tin roofs of refugee shacks, home to those displaced by the Mexican army’s "low intensity" war against the Indian peoples of Chiapas.
The army jeep sped by on the main road and the women sat back down and resumed their chatting and needlework. One dandled a crying baby and smiled at me encouragingly, "He’ll be back soon with your papers". Sure enough, within a couple of minutes my passport was returned and I was escorted down the dirt track into Polho.
My guide was Fernando. He came from Colonia Miguel Utrilla Los Chorros, only a few kilometres away. "We’ve been here less than a year," he told me. "It was after the massacre at Acteal 1.
"The PRIistas2 in ‘Paz y Justicia" were boasting about what they had done there, about how much they had been paid to do it. They burned us out. Our animals, furniture, everything that could be moved was stolen, and then they set fire to our houses.
"Acteal was on December 22 1997 and they burned us out on December 25. Seventy eight families had their houses burned, so we came here. Two hundred and fifty people in all."
Driven out
In the last two years, despite the signing of the San Andres Accord by the Zapatistas and the Mexican government, at least seventeen thousand people have been forced from their homes by the army and the paramilitary groups which operate in Chiapas. The paramilitaries are controlled by the PRI, which has ruled Mexico’s for over sixty years.
The PRI’s plan for tackling the Zapatista insurgency is simple: create paramilitary groups, use them to terrorise and displace the population, and so destroy the bases of support for the EZLN3.
Five days before Acteal the Governor of Chiapas gave more than half a million dollars to Paz y Justicia to "support and encourage agricultural production"4.
The similarity of this strategy to that pursued in El Salvador and Guatemala is no coincidence: governments and army are being advised by the same U.S. counterinsurgency ‘experts’.
In 1998 Mexico sent more soldiers for training in the United States than any other country. In 1980 115 Mexican soldiers went, while from 1996 and 1998 3,200 Mexican soldiers have been trained there as ‘rapid reaction troops’. Many of those leading the war against the people of Chiapas received their training in the U.S.
Juan Lopez Ortiz trained there in 1959 and was in charge of the war against the EZLN in Ocosingo in Jan 94 when Zapatista prisoners were publicly executed in the market square. 5 Between 30,000 and 40,000 soldiers are now concentrated in Chiapas, a state with just over 2 million inhabitants. 6
The Subcommittee for the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities recently passed the first United Nations resolution against Mexico’s breaches of human rights. This resolution demanded that the Mexican government bring to justice those who carried out the killings of civilians in the autonomous areas.
The government responded by denouncing the Subcommittee for being made up of ‘experts’ rather than politicians and therefore as unrepresentative of international opinion.7 Meanwhile the numbers murdered by paramilitaries grow. Human rights groups state more than 500 Indians were killed between 1995 and 1997 8 .
In November last year Gilberto Lopez y Rivas, deputy president of Cocopa9 and member of the PRD10 presented to the Mexican Senate the names of the main leaders of Paz y Justicia. None have yet been charged.
The state deals differently with those thought to be leaders of the autonomous Zapatista municipalities, declared illegal in April 98. Since then, through raids on the Zapatista communities and arrests and jailing those thought to be in positions of leadership, the number of political prisoners in Chiapas has doubled, from 49 to 95.11
Language
Miguel Angel de los Santos, defence lawyer for many accused Zapatistas, has denounced this. "In many cases the only proof offered for serious crimes such as kidnapping, assault or even murder has been the statements made by members of the PRI in these communities. …They have also ignored the requirement to presume innocence and the right under the constitution for indigenous accused persons to have translation from Spanish into their own language."
When Chol speaking Indian Adolfo Lopez Vazquez was charged with homicide, the judge justified the fact that there was no translation saying: "My origins are also Chol and I speak Spanish well". Adolfo was convicted on the basis of a three page statement in Spanish which he could not possibly have dictated."12
The wives of the political prisoners of the Cerro Hueco have organised protests against the framing of their husbands. On August 9, 70 women accompanied by their children began a ‘strike of the machetes’ in front of the town hall in Tuxtla Gutierrez. Each carried a wooden machete bearing the name of a man detained in Cerro Hueco and so unable to work in the fields.
"Our husbands are prisoners because they want a democratic change in the country, because they demand that our autonomy is respected. They are in prison because they have been named as representatives of our communities" 13
In Polho too, many women are without men. "They are dead, or in prison, or with the EZLN" explained Fernando, "It’s very hard for them.
"They have absolutely nothing and since arriving here no one has received a peso from the Mexican government". Around us canvas shelters made from hoarding adverts flapped in the breeze. "Marlborough Man" sheltered one family while "Things go better with Coke" – or did they? – for another.
The Red Cross had laid temporary water pipes from the river and occasionally delivered planks and the canvas from which to make shelters.
Three men were clearing a patch of ground. It had taken them a week working with pick axes to level the site but they were worried about what they were going to use to build their ‘house’ now that the site was prepared.
"The last delivery of planks, tin and canvas was two to three months ago. There is nothing here to use unless the Red Cross delivers materials. Our tent is full of holes so we need something more permanent."
Many of the children suffer from gastrointestinal disorders, and when it rains the whole camp turns to mud with paths becoming treacherous. The streams in which people wash clothes and bodies becomes red with earth.
We passed the clinic, "Autonomous Clinic, Emiliano Zapata". Like the school it was built of breeze blocks and was painted with an impressive mural.
"People decided it was important that we built our own school, clinic and meeting space," explained Fernando. "There’s also a court for the young people to play football or basketball. "
The wall of the meeting space was decorated with symbols of the forest: deer, birds, trees and flowers. The school bore two murals; one with the familiar ski-masked figures of the Zapatistas while the other showed masked women, the beribboned hats of San Juan Chamula and coffins.
On many walls bright stalks of maize – the staple food of Southern Mexico, and the material from which Mayan beliefs say the first people were made – stretched towards the sky.
I had to leave. The Mexican government deported more than 200 foreigners in the last year for alleged political activities, and in January told the International Red Cross to leave Chiapas.
Questioning
On the way to Polho the collective taxi in which I had been travelling was stopped by the army, and the Mexicans inside ignored while an officer ordered me to a small, hot office. All my details were recorded and I was interrogated as to my travel plans in the region.
My story – that I was travelling to Pantelho (the last town on the road that runs through Polho) because I was interested in its traditional weaving – had fallen on sceptical ears.
It now seemed sensible that I should get to Pantelho that afternoon in case there was another checkpoint there. Heading up again to the main road, the barrier of women was again on its feet as yet another army truck thundered past.
On the main road to Pantelho army jeeps passed every five minutes. Acteal was a kilometer passed Polho. Next to the sign reading ‘Autonomous municipality "Las Abejas"’ were sandbagged army posts and a military base.
"Dentist" read a sign over one heavily armoured post, while inside a soldier in full gear, hard hat and machine gun gave a new frisson to the thought of a dental visit. Signs reading "Social work" and "Doctors available" seemed a poor window-dressing for the campaign of repression being waged against the people of Chiapas by the Mexican army and government.
Notes and References
(1) 45 Tzotzil Indians, mainly women and children, supporters of the autonomous group ‘Las abejas’ – the bees – were killed and dismembered by paramilitaries in an attack on Acteal planned and supported by the army and the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party, the ruling party in Mexico).
(2) La Jornada, 12/8/98
(3) As revealed in documents uncovered by El Proceso 3/1/98
(4) La Jornada 17/12/97
(5) La Jornada 16/8/98 with data reprinted from The Washington Post
(6) International Viewpoint, February 98
(7) "En realidad esta es una comision integrada por un grupo de expertos, que no tienen responsabilidad politica’, Antonio de Icaza, permanent representative of Mexico at the U.N. quoted in Cuarto Poder, 21/8/98
(8) La Jornada 31 Dec 97.
(9) Comision de Concordia Y Pacificacion
(10) Partido Revolucionario Democratico, liberal bourgeois breakaway from PRI, founded by Cauhtemoc Cardenas. Have defended Zapatistas.
(11) Information given by La Voz de Cerro Hueco, voice of the prisoners of Cerro Hueco prison.
(12) La Jornada 21/8/98
(13) quoted in Tiempo, No. 80.