¡Basta!

Resting in the heart of the poorest state in Mexico (The 1993 United Nations Human Development Report mentions Chiapas as an extreme case of deprivation on the Human Development Index, obviously things have improved over time, but there is much to be desired) San Cristobal de las Casas is both alive and vibrant with revolutionary history and progressive efforts to empower the indigenous Maya descendants who live here.

In 1994 the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, (EZLN) marched into San Cristobal dressed in hand made uniforms and black masks, heavily armed and ready for whatever lay beyond them, and declared war "against the Mexican state." Most Zapatistas are indigenous people who are deeply concerned with the misrepresentation of indigenous peoples in government, as well as unfair distribution and exploitation of their land. Though their main spokesperson is a quirky, pipe smoking, non-indigenous masked man called "Subcomandante Marcos." The Zapatistas claimed they were "fighting against 500 years of oppression and injustice. ¡Basta! (Enough!) they cried, made the first public document the objectives of their armed struggle: work, land, housing, food, education, independence, liberty, democracy, justice and peace.

These demands were formulated the same day that NAFTA entered into force, and at the beginning of that fateful year in which presidential elections were to be held. No doubt the significance of the timing of the uprising was not lost on the Zapatistas, and it certainly spoiled the triumphant sense of entitlement with which the Salinas administration was entering its final year in office. Over the next few days a number of small battles were fought. The federal army overcame its initial surprise and retook the initiative. The Zapatistas withdrew their forces and retreated to the rural municipios in the region known as Las Cañadas (the canyons) whence they had emerged. Informed estimates place the number of victims killed in the fighting at around one hundred and fifty, not many by current genocidal standards of mass killings and ethnic cleansings, but enough to alert Mexican public opinion to the seriousness of the situation and the intentions of the revolutionaries."

After the war the Zapatistas actually appeared in the Mexican congress to voice their problems and demands. While, then, President Fox boasted he could solve the problem in 15 minutes more or less, Marcos was not the one to take the podium that day. It was an indigenous woman named Esther. Though most of congress either explicitly stated that they would not hear peasantry defiling the processes of the congressional tradition, or conveniently involved in some other affair that day, the Zapatistas stated their demands bluntly and simply: to release Zapatista prisoners, close seven military bases in Chiapas, and to recognize the San Andres accords (which granted Chiapas more power in how indigenous lands were handled and used.)

In 1996 the Mexican government approved the accords, though they never came into place (more on that at a further date). Thus through political forgetfulness and mishandling of funds directed into Chiapas to assess the problem of poverty by means of a complex peace process that is still being dragged out today, the indigenous here have become to most of the world, objects of mindless tourist photography. Even in its own birthplace the Zapatista revolution seems more of a postcard sentiment than an actual war that took the lives of more than 100 people fighting for simple human rights. But I am told that deep in the country side the Zapatista blood flows quiet and strong and the descended Maya are working with one another to provide a community by which sustainable living is possible and fruitful, and where indigenous life does not have to sell out to modernistic facades. These rumors are places where the old way coexists with the new way.

And at night when the fireflies begin to light up and cast shadows of the masked Zapatistas mounted on their horses into the dusk air, I find myself, in some form or another, regressing to morning and reliving the day in search of a beacon of hope in some disguise for my own being. Hope is indeed an ideal, but for the people here in Chiapas it is as real as the wind, constantly moving everything. The fresh wind that sweeps through San Cristobal each night seems so deeply reminiscent that it was even formed by the labored breathing of a race due 500 years of penitence, and I can feel that wind burning my cheek as I walk through these brilliant streets. Though I may be an idealist, I believe World history is evidence enough of great people, even civilizations dying for ideals and living for them too. This is a wind that will not cease to blow so long as solidarity retains its meaning. Hope remains not an ideal, but a manifested network of survival and struggle to live right, fighting daily to discover and keep sacred a dignity foreigners should never fully understand.