San Andres Larrainzar - 2
May 12th 1995
At midnight, our first shift began. After the bustle and crowds of the day, it was pleasantly quiet.
I'd always liked working at night. Driving taxis in Melbourne, i only ever did night shift. It was so much more peaceful and calm - especially in the city. Here it was the same. It was partly because most people were asleep and not generating that vast quantity of psychic energy which interfered with my own thought processes and increased my level of confusion and agitation. This is probably why so many artists and creative thinkers work mainly at night. The air is clear or interference. Those sorts of people are the ones most susceptible to it, as it's their sensitivity to the non-physical that allows them - or more likely compels them - to be creative.
I've got no idea how many people are aware of all this psychic "noise", but i'd say that most people are affected by it to some extent - all except the extremely insensitive. It's probably an over-sensitivity to this noise, combined with a cultural inability to grasp what it really is, that produces serious paranoia, schizophrenia and other so-called mental "illnesses" which our culture has no way of dealing with except to pump the poor bastards so full of drugs they can't hear their own thoughts, let alone other peoples.
Anyway, the Zócalo was quiet. There were people around, but not so many. Oscar was there, by his fire. All the cordons were still in place, of course, although the people in them had changed since earlier on.
We went for a stroll right the way round the perimeter of the dialogue site, just outside the cordons. It was a very weird scene. The front of the buildings - the zócalo side - were all lit up and seemed vaguely lively, although nothing was happening, but the other sides were a totally different story altogether.
The streets that the cordon occupied were reasonably well-lit, but still only normal street light level. The four rows of people, standing motionless and silent in the half darkness gave the thing the feel more of a vigil than a physical guard. The red cross seemed a bit more relaxed, but they stood with their backs to the buildings, looking outwards, which is not quite such an oppressively claustrophobic perspective. The next two cordons - the indians and the civil society - were facing the buildings, just standing there, looking straight ahead mostly, or turning round to watch us pass. The army were alternately facing in and out. The silence, the stillness and the darkness combined to produce a strong effect that i really can't describe, but you may be able to imagine. We wandered slowly round the block, stopping to say hello to someone somewhere, and ended up back in the Zócalo.
We spent the shift mainly in the Zócalo, sitting around talking - in spanish only, as Jabi didn't speak any english. A lot of the time we passed sitting near Oscar's fire - maybe he was sitting there too, adjusting the exact form of the fire, possibly singing a song to it, or maybe he was lying in a blanket asleep. Every so often, probably about every half an hour or so, we'd go for a wander around the cordon.
Alvaro, from Vera Cruz State and Raúl, who came from Chiapas, were doing a shift on the Cinturón de Paz. Alvaro had his jarana with him - that's a guitar-like instrument, a bit bigger than a ukelele, that comes from his state. He had it strung up with single strings top and bottom and the middle two double like a twelve-string guitar. I don't know if this is normal, or if he'd just broken a couple of strings along the way! Anyway, he was playing the jarana and singing - songs which i had difficulty following at first, as my spanish was still a bit creaky. But as the next few days passed, i got accustomed to his accent and began to understand a lot more of the songs.
We had a sort of little party there, on the corner, at the back of the block, in the middle of the cordons. Us three foreigners were outside the army lines and they were inside, but there was only a few feet between us. In fact, round the back, the army cordon wasn't quite so strict as it was at the front, where all the focus of attention was and more people were watching them.
We all stood there, Alvaro singing songs and making jokes, and the rest of us cracking jokes too, everybody laughing. Even some of the other people in the peace cordons allowed a bit of levity to penetrate their serious vigil. This was the way the pattern was set for the remaining nights of the dialogue. As the days passed and we got to know more people, we ended up wandering around, stopping here and there, chatting, cracking jokes and laughing all night. These night shifts were really the most pleasant part of the whole thing for me.
Then at four o'clock it was back down to the market to try and get some sleep before the next shift, in eight hours time, at midday.
Everything was quiet in the market - for a change. This was about the only time of day when there was anything approaching peace in the sleeping quarters of the peace cordon!
The other two, Joserra an Blanca, were getting up, as they were on the next shift and us three went to bed. I managed to get to sleep reasonably easily, although i woke up again at six as the peace cordon shift changed, which was always an incredibly noisy event! The barn-like architecture of the place made things worse, as all the sound would resound off the roof and the concrete walls. But those people seemed quite unconcerned that others had to sleep. I managed more or less to get a total of four hours sleep that morning, which wasn't much but it would do.
I spent the day wandering around, talking, meeting people, watching what was going on, with four hours from midday on "patrol". Nothing drastically exciting was happening. It reminded me a lot of being on a forest blockade, where most of your time is taken up with hanging around, just being there ready in case something happens.
At about one in the afternoon, someone from the government came out, stood on the steps in front of the press podium and made an announcement about how the talks were going. I could understand the words, but i couldn't get any sense out of what he was saying. I came to realise it wasn't worth listening to those people, as they never said anything at all - and they used a lot of big words and long complicated sentences to do it with. When you have to make an effort to understand it, you just switch off as soon as they start rambling on with meaningless filler - which, of course, is the moment they first open their mouths.
Later on, after dark, they did the same thing. But this time, after the government talking machine had read out his telephone directory speech, some of the EZLN delegates came out and spoke. In complete contrast to the government, they spoke simply and clearly and i had no difficulty following what they were saying. Nor did i lose interest in listening to what they had to say.
I managed to get a few more hours sleep before the next shift at midnight.
- - -
The following day, Sunday, it was pretty much the same sort of thing. I met quite a few interesting people during my wanders around the town centre. There were a lot of foreigners there, fully aware of the politics involved in the event they were taking part in. There seemed to be a high proportion of Basques amongst us, including a few journalists from Basque Country publications. It was really good to meet all those people from around the world who had the same sort of views as i did.
That night, when i was just getting up and about to go up the hill for the midnight shift, the woman that was co-ordinating the stuff at the market came round waking everyone up. She said the EZ delegates had asked for everyone to be ready for trouble. She didn't know what was going on, just that some kind of trouble was possible.
I went up to the town and nothing much seemed to be amiss. The only noticeable difference was that the soldiers had taken down their stupid metal detecting arches. There were three of these - the same type you find in airports - one on the church side of the square and two on the other side. they were set up as kind of doorways in the army cordon. No-one was allowed to cross the cordon except at these points. They were switched on and functioning all the time, and they bleeped for about half of everyone who went through them, but the soldiers never took the slightest bit of notice of the bleeping. They didn't care who carried what in or out. The arches were there partly for show and partly because the soldiers needed to be able to see where the doorway in their imaginary wall was...
Anyway all that was different, as far as i could see, was that these arches had been removed. The soldiers were actually in the process of putting them back when i got up there.
There were still quite a few people about and the press were hanging around on their stage waiting for an announcement to be made, which eventually happened at about one in the morning. It was very late and all that was really said was that the talks would continue the next day.
Later that morning, i discovered what all the weirdness the previous night was about. Apparently that evening the Zapatistas had had enough of having to try and deal with the nonsensical talking machines of the government. They were worn out from having to wade through the sea of meaningless words and try and extract some form of sense out of it, when there clearly was no sense there to extract. The government representatives were deliberately running them round in circles with their unintelligible and complicated ravings, knowing quite well that for most of the EZLN delegates, their first languages were tzotzil, tzeltal, tojolabal, chol and other indigenous languages. They would have all grown up speaking the language of the community they came from and would have learnt spanish with some effort later. Because of this, it was even harder for them to sort out the confusing drivel they were being bombarded with, so they left the meeting room.
The government had ordered two more battalions of armed troops to come from a nearby garrison - probably San Cristobal - and completely surround the village. We never even noticed this and i don't know how far from the town they were.
The soldiers in the cordon around the dialogue broke up the cordon and gathered in large groups of a hundred or so, on either side of the buildings. The red cross left their positions and grouped around the main exit doors - probably to make sure the government people could escape safely, but who knows?
At the same time, the indigenous people mobilized themselves and grouped up ready to defend the delegates. This could easily have been the beginning of a civil war in Mexico. It was full moon that night - and full moon in Scorpio, for what that's worth!
Anyway, the intermediaries managed to get the two sides talking again and things slowly got back to normal. If you could describe this bizarre situation as normal that is!
No doubt there was a fair bit of disappointment in U.S. government circles when they knew that this had got so far - and no further. They were almost certainly waiting for something like that to happen to give them an excuse to send in their troops and take control. A civil war in Mexico would have suited them perfectly right then, they were running a bit short of scapegoats now the USSR had turned capitalist. As i wrote in a report for community radio station 4ZZZ in Brisbane:
There might be better prospects for a positive outcome if it wasn't for the U.S. government, like a hungry wolf panting at the border, waiting for an opportunity to march in and exert military control in addition to the economic power they already have. It's only 150 years since the U.S. forcibly took over half of Mexico and incorporated it into their country, and of course they're not happy with just half, they want the whole bloody lot!
- - -
That morning i met Pramila. She was born in Canada of (asian) indian parents and had lived in New York most of her life. She was in Chiapas for a week or so and was trying to make a video of what was going on there at that time. She was an interesting person with a lot of ideas similar to my own and i spent the afternoon chatting with her.
That evening, the talks ended and there was nothing left to do except wait for the Zapatista delegates to leave, and then we could go too.