San Andres Larrainzar to San Cristobal
May 16th 1995
At about one or two o'clock that night, the Zapatistas invited the civil society cordon and the international observers in to meet them. In groups of half a dozen or so, we filed into the room where they were standing in a sort of semicircle. We passed along the line, shaking hands and mumbling inconsequential words to each other and then filed out again. It was a bit weird and a bit rushed, as there were so many of us and they were all really tired. But it was good. It was an event that i'll remember for a long time.
They were all masked up as usual, but to get to look into the eyes of those people and divine some vague sense of who they were was interesting. Of course, they're just ordinary people - and they don't act any different to ordinary people. They don't put on any pretensions or anything. I guess if they weren't like that though, i wouldn't have been there anyway...
Eventually, at about four o'clock, they left in the same convoys as they'd arrived in and in reverse order. And that was that. The peace cordons had to stay there until the army'd gone for some reason, but we went back down the hill to the market to try and get some sleep.
However, there was no such luck! Within an hour, the whole place was deranged noisy chaos as everyone began to leave as quickly as they could. We were virtually thrown out around six or seven and we wandered up to the town to find some transport back to San Cristobal.
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When we got back to San Cristobal, Ana invited me to stay at her house, as i had nowhere to go except a hotel. Jabi was going to be staying there too. She lived just around the corner from the Conpaz office, not very far from the market. It was a really nice house, in what i guess is spanish colonial style.
You came through the street door into a courtyard. This had a small garden with a large peach or almond tree (i'm not sure which it was) in the middle. On two sides of the courtyard there was a roofed cement verandah with three doors off it. One went to the kitchen and a back room, one went to a larger bedroom and the other went to a room with a fireplace that was obviously intended as the living room, with a smaller bedroom off that. Out the back of the kitchen there was a garden and a small back yard with a water tank - like an asian mandi - outside the back door. There was another similar tank just inside the street door too. These were essential as, in that part of San Cristobal there was no running water between eleven in the morning and eleven at night, presumably because the mains water system isn't good enough to supply everyone all the time and they have to take it in shifts.
I lay down and tried to get a bit of sleep and then i went out to have a look for Pramila, who was going to be staying at the Casa Margarita. She wasn't there when i called by, but i caught up with her at the Fray Bartolome Human Rights Centre, where she was arranging accreditation to go out to the selva (bush) for a few days. She wanted to go and film some of the villages which had been destroyed and occupied by the army. Her, two american journalists and a japanese journalist were all going off the next day in a car that the american women were hiring.
I spent most of the afternoon sleeping and then went to El Puente, which was a sort of international community centre. It was mainly devoted to teaching languages and cross-cultural exchange of one sort and another. There was a restaurant which served a good selection of fairly simple vegetarian food - including brown rice, which was a very unusual find in that part of the world! That evening there were a lot of people from the dialog - pretty well all the international observers as well as some of the mexicans, including Oscar, Raúl and Alvaro.
There was a Zapatista video being shown - an interview with Tacho, who'd been one of the delegates at the dialog. It was really badly made, the sound was terrible as whoever had made it had used automatic recording level, which made it really noisy in between bits of speech. It was visually really boring too, just a talking, balaclava-masked head. I couldn't really follow it as i was having trouble staying awake, so i went out to the restaurant part to have a beer.
The following day, Pramila went off to the selva in a flurry of chaos - like she was off to film a video in the forest, but she'd forgotten to charge the battery of the video camera... She left me with her ticket to New York, which was for Saturday from D.F., so i could confirm it for her, as she hadn't had the time.
In the evening i went to El Puente again. Part two of last night's video was on. Again i tried to watch it, but i didn't get very far that time either. That evening at El Puente, too, there were a lot of people from the dialog, mainly the foreigners - i suppose most of the Mexicans had gone home.
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Here's a couple more bits from my report to 4ZZZ, which might give you a bit more of an idea of what was going on around those parts at that time:
These dialogues are a complete farce, with the government deliberately setting out to confuse the Zapatistas, whose first lanugages are the local indigenous ones, rather than Spanish and to buy time in which to increase the pressure on their communities. But the EZLN has no choice except to try and get some positive results from them. Their communities want them to talk. They don't want the war which seems to be the only alternative. And whether or not they really have any faith in a government which is just another force of colonialism in a five hundred year long history of european colonization, they seem to see it as the only solution.
[......]
Meanwhile, the work of rebuilding the indigenous communities destroyed by the army in February is well underway. Made possible by the organization of encampments of foreigners and civilian Mexicans who are keeping an eye on the army, all but one of the villages have been reoccupied. However it's a massive task to recover from the damage done. Rebuilding houses, planting crops and finding ways around the problem of poisoned water supplies is enough in itself, but the biggest problem is that they haven't got any food. Because they were driven out of the villages, they've been unable to plant crops and therefore there's no harvest to live off. There's a disatrous level of malnutrition, with a lot of the children showing bloated bellies as a result.
However, from what i've heard these problems are being overcome somewhow and the villages are being rebuilt, still along the political lines of the old autonomous zone. There is hope, but there's a great need for outside help. Support, both personally and financially from independent overseas sympathizers will play an important part in helping the indigenous people of Chiapas overcome the latest in a long series of imperialist attacks.