Published by the Colorado Daily 4/21/95
AS THE MILLENNIUM TURNS by Evan Ravitz
(still 5 years ahead of its time)
THE EAGLE AND THE SNAKE
I didn't really understand why my friend Octavio Juarez
had not one but three mounted photos of Emiliano Zapata on his
wall in Mexico City. I only knew Zapata was the Indian hero of
Mexico's 1910-1920 revolution. Octavio died 4 years ago, but Zapata
and now Zapatista leader Marcos live in the dreams and prayers
of most Mexicans. Not just the 89% of Mexicans who are poor, but
the 10% who are middle class, like the Juarez family.
(Octavio died in a freak rockfall while guiding some Americans
near the top of Pico de Orizaba, Mexico's highest at 18,850',
where I met him in 1987. He had previously guided ascents of Denali
and Huascaran.)
His mother has me saying the Lord's Prayer for Octavio, but we
honor him best in the here-and-now by supporting the revolution
named for his hero. We must. In a strange way we are responsible
for the revolt's causes, and our taxes support its continuing
repression:
Ever wonder why bananas from Southern Mexico and further South
are cheaper than apples from Colorado's Western Slope? It's because
field workers down there slave for $0-2 per day. That's also why
Mexicans will repeatedly risk arrest crossing the border to come
up here to pick apples...for $3 an hour. Your coffee and sugar
have similar origins.
US residents live near the top of the global food chain,
rather splendiferously, at the expense of our neo-colonial suppliers.
To keep this status quo, our government spends billions keeping
down democracy: from sending the CIA's mercenaries to Guatemala
in 1954 to remove the democratically elected President Arbenz
to bailing out the corrupt Mexican government and its bankers
this February. As regards corruption, Adan Cristobal Largo observes,
"The government of Mexico really has no alternative but to
adhere to the custom of its big brother government to the north."
20% of Chiapas workers are not paid at all, receiving pitiful
room and board for their long days. Some who escape from labor
camps are hunted down and beaten or killed. These are mostly Mayan
Indians whose prime land was stolen centuries or years ago. Some
places, there's not much land left for native agriculture. In
next-door Guatemala, Mayans grow their corn right up to the tops
of the volcanoes, on 45-degree slopes, hours hard walk from home.
So "free trade" is no level playing field when NAFTA
throws these folks into direct competition with American agribusiness
growing corn and beans with giant tractors and center-pivot irrigation
subsidized by US taxpayers. NAFTA means the world's cheapest
slaves compete against the world's best machines. Only those
who own the slaves and machines win. This is why the Zapatistas
call NAFTA a "death sentence" for the poor.
Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's leading author and former Ambassador
to France, says that current events in Mexico are enough to make
one give up fiction. He calls the rebellion "the world's
first post-Communist revolution". Here is some non-fiction
poetry from Zapatista spokesperson Subcommandante Marcos:
"We bet the present to have a future; and to live...we
died." Several hundred died in the bloody first eleven
days of 1994, until international pressure forced the government
to negotiate.
"We repeated that we wanted democracy, liberty and justice,
and they made a face like they didn't understand, and they reviewed
their macroeconomic plans and all their neo-liberal points, and
they could not find these words anywhere, and 'we don't understand'
they said to us."
The Zapatistas held hundreds of square miles of the mountainous
jungle of Chiapas for 13 months. Marcos said the women fighters
"'convinced' us to accept their laws", including no
alcohol, hunting, logging, prostitution or drug dealing. After
carrying out health campaigns, he says, "the infant death
rate went way down, and became very small, just like the children
are."
"And we made all of the major decisions, or the 'strategic'
ones, of our struggle, by means of a method that they call the
'referendum' and the 'plebiscite'." This form of decision-making
'by the people' was the long-range goal of our 1993 "Voting
by Phone" ballot issue for the City of Boulder. If it were
all Americans deciding things, not just our 535 federal
"representatives", NAFTA wouldn't have passed, according
to all the polls.
This February 8th the Mexican army attacked the liberated area,
apparently under pressure from the Chase Manhattan Bank of New
York and others. Chase's leaked internal memo reads "The
government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate
their effective control..." Chase was afraid their investors
would bail out otherwise. The memo says "Financial markets
might not respond positively to increased democracy because it
leads to increased uncertainty."! Clearing out natives
to get at their oil may well be the real motive, however.
Marcos: "And behind the war tanks of the government came
again prostitution, drinking, theft, drugs, destruction, death,
corruption, sickness, poverty."
The School of the Americas in Georgia is training Mexican
officers in "insurgency tactics and low-intensity repression",
according to Mexico's La Jornada (8/17/94). This is the infamous
"School of Assassins" which trained the CIA's
Julio Roberto Alpirez, finally now under Federal investigation
for the 1990 murder of a U.S. citizen and the 1992 torture/murder
of the Guatemalan husband of a U.S. citizen. (Over one hundred
thousand other Guatemalan victims of our 41-year "low-intensity
repression" are never mentioned.)
The Mexican flag is unusual: it features an eagle devouring
a snake. This is said to represent one's higher nature conquering
one's base ego. Marcos says they are the eagle. The snakes are
legion.
We whose national symbol is the eagle should aid these inspired
but tired revolutionaries. You can send contributions to: Mexican
Exiles for Democracy, PO Box 13665, La Jolla, CA 92039-3665. Please
make out checks to "MEPD" for "Chiapas". I
can tell you how to confirm their legitimacy. You can also send
checks made out to "IFCO/Pastors for Peace" to local
activists Tom Moore and Nancy Sullo, 2830 5th St., Boulder CO
80302.
My friend Octavio is dead. But his brother Leonardo and his girlfriend
Anabeli are married and have a new baby...named Octavio. Octavio's
mother Cristina is sending me one of the Zapata photos from his
wall. For the future of all the Octavios and Cristinas and Leonardos
and Anabelis in Mexico, and to enable real democracy to devour
the snake of ego-bound politics, please help. Beg your representatives
for what mercy they've got. Copy this and send it to your friends.
The revolution is not being televised. But it is being Interneted.
If you'd like to be on the "chiapas-l" e-mail list,
message me at the address below, and I'll tell you how.
As Bishop Samuel Ruiz of Chiapas, set to mediate the upcoming
peace talks, and now the foremost exponent of "liberation
theology", says: "To be neutral in Chiapas is a sin."
Evan Ravitz is director of the
Voting by Phone Foundation,
board member of the Boulder, Colorado chapter of the American
Civil Liberties Union, and a founding member of
Bolder Bicycle Commuters. He entertains on the tightrope on the Pearl St. Mall
as "Evan from Heaven". Reach him at: (303)4406838
or evan@welcomehome.org
Bolder