Return to Left Curve no. 23 Table of Contents
Against Oblivion: Fragments from a History of Invisible Struggle
We have no books here, or few, and we spend hours constructing history from memory and invention, the only history available to us deep in the jungle. The deep jungle of southern Mexico, Chiapas, is where the Zapatistas live, where we live with them. Outside the board hut where we debate beneath a lightbulb that flickers capriciously, a pig squeals and slops in the mud. The phrase Tierra y Libertad, the land is for he who works it and freedom for he who takes it - who cameup with this phrase? It couldn't have been Zapata, we all agree, out of hand - he wasn't so radical. "He even believed in private property," Veronica, a petite, dark-skinned Catalonian woman reminds us.
Jesus, a Mexican, suggests that it was Ricardo Flores-Magon. Could be. He's generally credited by the anarchists with most of the worthy ideas that survived the Mexican Revolution. The zone we're in, in the new Zapatista geography, is on the eve of being baptized in his name. Flores-Magon was the bespectacled new world anarchist who noted that notions like Kropotkin's mutual aid and Marx's "to each according to his need" were put into practice centuries before the Paris Commune by the Zapotec people of Oaxaca, and probably by indigenous people all over the world. He died, murdered I believe, in Leavenworth Penetentiary in the first years of this century, and dropped like a hot rock out of history.
Sergio, a Mexican professor of art, surprises us by pulling a book of Flores-Magon's collected speeches out of his rucksack. While he looks, we continue the forging of history with pretentious zeal. "What about the Russians, I mean the Bolsheviks or the Trotskyites, maybe it came from them," I suggest and everyone boos me down. I recount Pancho Villa lamenting the death of John Reed in Russia, saying "if it wasn't for Reed, I never would have heard the word 'socialism'."
Most of the villagers here aren't familiar with socialism, let alone anarchism, and the ones I've asked about Flores-Magon think he was a guerillero from the 1970's or a schoolteacher from another village in the area. All know that he was a luchador por los pobres, a fighter for the poor, and it is the essence of the man, not his exact history, that has come down to these people. Like Magon's Zapotec forebears, the Tzeltal Mayans here who call themselves Zapatistas are constructing an experiment in anarchism whose theoretical base rivals any in the world, and whose roots go back thousands of years and down deep into the native earth. It is this revolution that draws the foreigners, like Veronica from Barcelona, Fritz from Belgium, the gang from Mexico City - as foreign to this jungle as any of us - and myself from faraway California.
Since Acteal there are more foreigners in Chiapas than ever. At the same time, since Acteal the pressure against foreigners has grown daily; we are embraced by the Zapatistas and the church, shunned and feared by the landowners and the government. Acteal is a word which means massacre, it means the death of hope, it means true barbarism, history turned ugly. Maybe you don't know about Acteal, the mountain village where one day the pro-government paramilitaries - boys with guns - shot down forty-five women, men and children praying in the church? They tore open the bellies of the pregnant women, ripped babies from their wombs and smashed them on the rocks or speared them on bayonets, hacked the men to death with machetes. Here in the deep jungle we make up history, we invent the distant past, but we have current events like this to go on.
Acteal received all the world's attention for a moment, and with it a ton of garbage and the shame of neglect and abandonment the next moment. The Mexican Red Cross delivered thousands of bottles of drinking water and thousands of plastic bags full of food to the refugees as emergency relief for a situation which is not a simple emergency but an ongoing crisis. Now the hillsides are littered with empty bottles and garbage, and the people there are equally frightened and equally hungry, yesterday's news and tomorrow's dead. The woman in the famous photo, fighting off a government soldier with her bare hands in the nearby village of Polho, is embarrassed and frightened by her fame; she would die of shame if she was not already destined to die of disease, or cold, or hunger, or bullets.
When I was in Acteal, we say, and we compare stories. Acteal is the My Lai of Mexico, 1990's, or the EL Mozote if you're familiar with El Salvador. It is an atrocity, a sign of what some human beings are capable of, a sign that we aren't doing enough to stop the war here. When I was in Acteal what impressed me most was not the house-timbers torn by bullet holes, nor the white crosses, pine boughs and lit candles making up the hillside shrine to the recent dead, nor the smiles on the faces of the bloated-bellied children playing near the church where their parents were murdered. The thing that impressed me most were the rainbow-hued pools of oil seeping out of the mountain, floating atop the wells we dug for drinking water. Oil that is at the bottom of all this, along with cattle, timber, cheap labor and free trade. They say they don't want foreigners here, on human rights watch, while U.S. geological survey satellites pinpoint a spot like this little hollow in the altiplano and a man in a short-sleeve dress shirt at a computer monitor somewhere says, let's have a look over here...
Refugee camp, Polho, Municipality
Since I was in Acteal innumerable foreigners have come and gone through the Chiapas highlands and the jungle. Crossing a tree-trunk bridge in the jungle, a friend of mine named Trinidad, a Zapatista now dead from the opening a machete left in his skull, said proudly, "People from all over the world have crossed this bridge - Canadians, Germans, Japanese, Spaniards, Gringos." Laughing, he added, "Even Tzeltales from Chiapas."
In San Cristobal de Las Casas, the colonial city where human rights workers, hardcore travelers and and tourists of all stripes go to bathe and have a soyburger and salad, history is a daily activity. The newspapers carry the stories you first hear in the street or the cafe, or, with discretion, over the phone. Even before the news-papers get the word, the news appears on the cracking, faded walls of Barrio El Cerillo, the little hill, or out along the PanAmerican highway, in scrawled graffitos saying "Zedillo - how many more?," "PRI = Murder" (the PRI is the state party that has ruled Mexico for nearly seventy years) or "Land to the People, Death to the Evil Government." Or simple drawings of ski-masked warriors, some particularly poignant: a pair of huge breasts, two hands holding a rifle and a ski-masked face above in an eloquent portrait of the Zapatista woman warrior like some Venus of Willendorf or armed earth goddess, reminding the passerby that this is a different sort of movement. Reminding you that, as the word revolution implies, and as other graffitis will tell you straight out, this is not about taking power, but about exercising power, about returning to the roots of power.
After the graffiti, after the rumors, the official news comes in. The details change, the number of killed or displaced, who attacked whom, what foreigner was expelled and for what infraction, real or invented; but the cycle remains the same: an urgent message, verification with the human rights groups, panic, response, acceptance, slow return to daily activities. The town is always busy with tourists haggling in the open market, journalists rushing from office to office and barefoot Indigenas in their colorful dress leading burros loaded with firewood or carrying costales of produce on their backs, weaving their way among the visitors down cobbled avenues or unpaved backstreets. The tourists may know nothing about the low-intensity war, while the Indigenas have known nothing but for five-hundred years. In an early communique, Subcomandante Marcos gives the figure for the number of hospital beds in San Cristobal; the figure is embarrasingly disproportionate in favor of the hoteleros, and speaks volumes about the success of government propaganda claiming that there is no war.
Still, the climate has recently become harsh for tourists because of a campaign to oust international witnesses to the conflict. Brown-uniformed immigration agents roam the streets of San Cristobal checking papers and detaining anyone even slightly questionable. Radio broadcasts recommend that "suspicious foreigners" should be reported to the police, and the normally reticent Indigenas become downright silent, turning this once remarkably hospitable Mexican town into a semblance of Guatemala, where the locals are too terrorized to even give directions to a stranger in the street. Guilt by association makes an incredibly effective weapon in disabling foreign activists and crippling the hopes of the once-legally-recognized Zapatista movement.
The government says it is the foreigners who are responsible for the massacre in Acteal (though they never say just how), it is foreigners who are inciting "our indians" to rebel, introducing Marx and Lenin, conspiring against the State. Basque terrorists, Gringo landgrabbers, German communists and Latin-American ex-guerilleros are manipulating the peaceful Mayan people, taking advantage of them for ideological ends, involving themselves in Mexican problems that are for Mexicans to resolve. Crowds of government supporters stare down the Italian hipsters and French tour groups that crowd the markets and narrow cobbled streets of San Cristobal. Local businesses, many of the smaller ones in favor of the rebels, say this intimidation is hurting the economy. Human rights groups fear that government propaganda will drive locals to aggravated assault. The U.S. State Department issues a travel advisory - they know the danger as well as anyone, as billions of dollars in U.S. military aid in the form of M-16's, helicopter gunships, electric cattle prods, bulletproof vests and riot gear are transferred to Mexico under the auspices of the War on Drugs. Some of these weapons filter through the corrupt Mexican bureaurcracy down to the level of the paramilitary groups - disenfranchised rural youth who are armed by the local and federal police and told to kill and take what they can from the Zapatista communities. In this sense it is, in fact, foreigners who are responsible for the massacre in Acteal, but not in the manner stated by the Federales.
We stood, the crowd of us, Americans, Spaniards, Canadians, Mexicans and Tzeltal Mayans, staring down the long dirt road at a humvee grinding its gears, stuck in the mud, its growl and screech echoed by the noise of the hundred vehicles waiting in its wake, their headlights piercing the darkened village. I'd been woken seconds before by shouts of "The army's here!" and leapt up from the boards on which I'd slept to find my companions and head for the hills. Most stood transfixed like game in the headlights, panicked but almost laughing at the blunder, the lead vehicle having run itself off the road, as my partner and I made a run for it up the hill. Turning as we ran, we counted the trucks as they passed, "one, two, three;" then we spotted foot soldiers running alongside. "They're down from the trucks, it's an attack!, four, five, six..." As we turned the corner I stopped in front of a house to tell the couple standing there that the army was invading.
"Get out of here or they'll kill you! Run for the jungle!," was the answer from the man, wide-eyed and trembling in his doorway, and we took his advice, running for another ten seconds, finding our way in the dark straight into a troop of commandos. What I saw first were the silhouettes, taller than your average Mexican, a barrage of silhouettes trudging uphill under the burden of their equipment.
"Halt!" one shouted as we were spotted. "Who are you?" and then I noticed the guns, sleek black M-16's, some mounted with grenade launchers and all trained on us.
"They're not from here!" another called as they noticed our pale faces and moved to surround us. They were breathing hard and their voices trembled and I realized they were scared out of their minds, patrolling in the dark inside enemy territory, far more frightened than we were. The thought of their fright, these nervous kids with their M-16's trained on me, fingers on the trigger, didn't do much to ease my already mounting panic. Their faces, all of them, were covered nose-down with kerchiefs and painted black or camouflage from the nose up. They were nearly invisible against the jungle foliage and the dark sky. I put up my hands but refused to say a word as the squadron commander ordered, "Get'em out of here" and I was grabbed by the arm and shoved with the butt of an M-16 back down the hill. The one behind put the mouth of his gun in the small of my back, marching me in the dark past troops of police in riot gear who had appeared out of nowhere.
"The gun in the back really isn't necessary," I thought of saying to my new companion, but I decided to keep my mouth shut.
The roar of vehicles grew louder as we were marched back where we'd come from, and the sheer number of troop transports and humvees, a caravan with neither head nor tail, assured us that full-scale war was upon us and that we, as well as our compañeros throughout Chiapas, as well as every man, woman and child in this and every other autonomous village in the State, were doomed. We had all come here because we had a hope, perhaps a very naive hope, that what the Zapatistas were demanding - justice, liberty, democracy - were real values, real possibilities, and that by lending a hand we could enact these values in the world. It is a truly revolutionary stance, and one that, we would see time and time again, was a great threat to the powers-that-be - so much so that they were forced to make all-out war on the Zapatistas, and on us. Now we were being marched at gunpoint, hands behind our backs, not knowing what terror and humiliation we would be subject to for our idealism.
"Like it says on my visa," I told him. "I'm a tourist."
"If you're a tourist why don't you have tourist types of things?" he spewed, as if notebook, camera and tape recorder are suspect, even illegal. He opened the camera and emptied the film into his palm, looking at me with eyes drawn tight like I was damned now, tried and convicted by what he would find on the roll.
A few hours later we were loaded like cattle into the backs of two pick-up trucks. We were told that everything would be straightened out with minimum complication if we'd only cooperate, that we would be allowed to speak with our consulates, that everything would be fine. We were not so trusting; everything was not fine.
During the hours that we were detained in the village, amid the general fear, we were largely prevented from seeing the destruction around us. We did see smoke rising from different parts of the village, and we heard occasional barrages of automatic weapons fire. Helicopters passed low over the hills. Although the entire village was under the control of the authorities, men passed us in a steady stream, walking on the road carrying axes, sledgehammers, or conspicuously wrapped bundles; they were not stopped or questioned and they carefully averted their eyes as they passed us, the witnesses, the observers. Some, from their haircuts, may have been soldiers in disguise; more likely they were villagers from nearby who had been trained by the soldiers and police to participate in paramilitary activities. On them rested the responsibility of the actual destruction and killing - the soldiers and police, most likely, had orders not to dirty their hands. After seeing the sledgehammers and axes pass, we heard them in action, sounds of destruction ringing out from all sides. We were later told that the municipal headquarters, with its new mural celebrating the establishment of autonomous rule, and the newly built public auditorium - both symbols of organized, locally-controlled civic power - had been reduced to rubble and ash. The smoke rising around the village was not merely from houses going up, as we'd imagined - the coffee fields, years of work supporting hundreds of families, their only income, their entire subsistence were being burned to the ground.
Thirty hours later, along with the other foreigners, I was in the airport in Mexico City, in a locked room, awaiting deportation and still awaiting an explanation of the charges against me. The sinister attitudes of the immigration agents, the constant presence of heavily armed guards, and the absolute refusal of anyone in authority to give us even the slightest clue as to what would happen to us kept us alert, disoriented and enraged during the entire course of our detention. The double-ham pizza and endless stream of coca-cola and cigarettes served us by smiling and silent immigration officials did little to ease the sense that we could still be beaten, jailed, or disappeared at any moment.
Without right to attorney we refused to speak, though we certainly had some points we wanted to get across. There were twelve of us, representing several Western European nations and all of the NAFTA partners, and it was obvious that we were considered a great threat. It was obvious as well that we were perceived as a group, some sort of international subversive organization, probably communists from cells all over the world with formal ties to some nefarious Mister Big. The truth, much different, was that we had just met, shortly before the invasion, but such circumstances bring about a certain closeness. This plus the fact of our common political ideals and our sense that we had to collectively resist, to the extent we could, whatever brutality was raised against us, undoubtedly presented us as a group who'd worked and lived together for months, if not years. What was startling to see was our quickness to organize, our willingness to work together, to laugh and fight together, contrasted with the fear and disorganization that marked the bureaucrats who held us captive.
At six in the morning on Easter Sunday, a squad of police with batons rushed through the doors of the immigration office where we were held captive, grabbed us from our sleep on desks, tabletops and the concrete floor, yelling and threatening us, and dragged us onto a bus waiting outside. A handful of photographers waiting outside snapped some shots of us being dragged out. Fifteen minutes out of town, the bus stopped, and the unarmed guards who had dragged us aboard in front of journalists and news cameras left the bus and were replaced by two police officers with AK-47's. Nobody on the bus, including the driver, would admit to knowing our destination.
Our final destination, of course, was our home country. We were put on private planes from Tuxtla Gutierrez to Mexico City, and at six in the evening we boarded a United airlines flight to Los Angeles. We were escorted out onto the tarmac and accompanied on the flight by two immigration agents - presumably so we wouldn't disturb the other passengers, hijack the flight or make a bold, mid-air escape. Landing in L.A., no officials were there from the embassy to greet us. On the contrary, coming through customs dirty, bearded and disheveled, I was subject to a near strip-search. The customs agent was so convinced that someone coming across the border in my state must be smuggling drugs that he taunted me with Drug War provocations - "they still smoke a lot of pot in Mexico?" - and examined every pocket in everything I had, repeating ad nauseum that non-cooperation was a crime and that lying under federal jurisdiction was perjury: "Are you sure you're not carrying any drugs?" I told him I was sure, and my anger at this low functionary of the U.S. War on Drugs assumed itself into the general disgust bred by all of the incidents of the past two days. He grudgingly let me go when his body search proved me innocent and I was once again a deliriously free citizen of the first world.
In the low sagebrush desert stretching westward as the sun goes, from El Paso to L.A., scotch broom blossoms along the highway and the yucca sends up its dirty white blossoms from the gravel beds bearing along the Santa Fe line where all day the long train, its boxcars and flatbeds hailing from another time, snakes across the low landscape at the continental divide carrying coal and cattle to market, somewhere. This is the divide that splits the continental waterways from East to West between the two oceans; the earth here gives the sense of a tired eternity - at least when you pass through on the highway - a flat brown plain dry and dull as old cardboard; faint blue and tan mountains like faded dungarees rise in the distances against the washed-out sky. On the highway seven out of ten vehicles, it seems to me, are the green and white jeeps of the U.S. Border Patrol, the congressionally authorized bounty hunters who've maintained the war on this frontier since 1848 when the line was painted here. Somewhere to the south is a fence marking the line on the map where we're told that border is, the only land border on the planet marking the division between the first world and the third, a sacrosanct bailiwick of barbed wire, armed men and carefully manned inspection stations running 2000 miles, from sea to shining sea.
U.S. citizens don't think much about this barren no-man's land with its polluted bordertowns and occasional flares of violence; the mythology resonates much stronger to the south, where poverty causes people to look northward with hope. U.S. citizens have never had much interest in moving south unless to steal land or do business. The south for us has never meant salvation (with its equal dose of fear and resentment), as the north means to many Mexicans; at best it has been a place to get away, a place to adventure for awhile, or a place to bleed dry - whether of tequila or of petroleum - before returning to a New York townhouse or New England mansion. I suspect that many North Americans imagine, as I once did, that the whole of Mexico is this parched and paper-dry scratch of land where the yucca blooms and dies and the rattlesnake sleeps in the shade of Nopal and Saguaro.
In fact, although I'd lived in California for several years, I first entered Mexico from the South, from Guatemala, where the border is lush tropical jungle, where it rains eight months out of the year and the low mountains are so green you can't imagine any other color, so lush you can't imagine a dry place on the planet. The night I crossed that border, three years ago, began an affair with Mexico that has ended in exile. Driving today through southern Arizona, on my way from El Paso to L.A., I look south with a gaze maybe not too dissimilar from the gaze of many Mexicans as their eyes wander north. Though my reasons are strictly political, while theirs are more, let's say, economic - though of course the line is fine and imaginary as any invented frontier - I'm told, as millions of Mexicans are told, that I cannot cross that line without risk of prison, or worse.
The night I crossed from Guatemala, as late as 1995, I'd been travelling for two months through Central America, on foot, by bus, by truck, under the weight of my backpack. My last stop before getting back to my job in California was to be Chiapas, where I knew a handful of people involved in the local struggle there. Arriving at the border after dark, I was told a truck would arrive maybe at nine o'clock to take me to the next town. When the border guard, a fat, moustached man in brown asked me my country of origin I told him the United States and he rewarded me with a demeaning look: "You mean the United States of North America. We, too, are the United States, the United States of Mexico."
"Right," I agreed, not eager to argue, eager to show my respect, "the United States of North America." I let him search my pack, finding the usual hammock, sleeping bag, books, Guatemalan clothes, and he waved me on. I walked across the line and sat down to wait by the immigration post, a concrete bunker of a building looming over the pockmarked roadway. Joining a handful of women gathered there, we began to talk, and on asking about the problems in Chiapas they told me, that, no, the problem wasn't bad, things had calmed down. "Todo tranquilo," they told me, "No hay problema." People all over the world, from New York to Baghdad, want to assure the tourist that he's welcome, that theirs is the safest most hospitable province in the world.
The nine o'clock truck never came, nor the eleven nor the one a.m., and as the rain started I lay down my sleeping bag on the concrete to sleep beneath the portico of the immigration office. As the rain came on stronger, the spiders came out - a habit of theirs, as I learned over the next few years - and I covered myself with a thick wool blanket to keep them from biting. As I half-slept I was woken every hour or so by the rumble and growl of a military caravan- trucks, tanks and humvees - driving down to the border and turning back, making the rounds. A soldier would shine his flashlight over me, noting nothing threatening, and I would fall back into my half sleep. When a pickup truck owned by local ranchers showed up at 5 a.m., charging a few pesos to take us to Comitan, the first town after the border, I jumped on board and began my travels in Chiapas.
A year later I had sold or given away most of what I owned in the U.S., left my job, and moved to Chiapas to work.
As I write, in California, the elections have just come and gone, leaving the state more divided than ever along lines of culture and race. The success of Proposition 227, banning bilingual education in California public schools, shows the unwillingness of this border state to foster a culture that combines the best of all worlds, in favor of the bigotry and anti-education stance that has made the U.S. an infamous island of xenophobia in a world where national borders are becoming less significant and more righteously defended than ever before. It's always a shock coming back from the mud and violence of the Chiapas jungle, where the war finds its most blatant expression, to find that, in the clean and fast environment of the urban first world, this same war is carried on at the ballot box, on the subway platform and in the op-ed columns, a war against tolerance, against diversity, and against the dignity of people who want to thrive and see their children thrive.
A half-hour before being boarded on the flight from Mexico City to Los Angeles on April 12, 1998, I was read the charges against me: I was responisble for establishing parallel authority within Mexican territory, in flagrant violation of the constitution and Mexican sovereignty, as well as leading the indigenous people to rebel. These same charges, levied against Mexican citizens, including Sergio, the graphic artist who had designed the mural, now destroyed, and who taught me about Ricardo Flores-Magon, brought them nine years in prison. In truth it was their own poverty, the injustice of the system into which they had been assumed, and their sense of dignity that led the indigenous people to rebel. We were simply there to aid and abet, as it were, so that they wouldn't have to die for what they believed in.
After that first trip to Chiapas, I had returned, dedicated to working in the indigenous communities to develop infrastructure, to help them out of the neglect and abuse to which they are subject. Working with a small group of compañeros I helped install potable water systems - digging trenches and laying pipe to carry water to the villages, so the people wouldn't have to carry it themselves, all day in buckets balanced on their heads, and teaching techniques to keep the water free of disease, to lessen the risk of death from cholera, typhoid, parasites and dysentery. We introduced organic methods of soil improvement, like composting, covercropping and mulching, into villages which had become dependent on pesticides and fertilizers. I had carried hundreds of pounds of soybeans on my back through Federal army bases for planting in rebel territory. We helped to build brick ovens to reduce the need for firewood, one of the few natural resources available to the people who live in the jungle, and one that is rapidly disappearing. And we introduced vegetable seeds in an effort to diversify the diet of people dying of malnutrition. Making an effort to build small-scale alternatives to large-scale development, we were taking on the same kind of work that got the American Benjamin Linder killed, over a decade ago, in Nicaragua. To undergo these projects, my compañeros and I had to be very careful to avoid arousing suspicion and open confrontation with the army and the police, whose job it is to starve the indigenous people off their land and encourage violent divisions within the communities so that multinational corporations can come in and take advantage of the resources there. We traveled by night, and we never revealed to strangers the nature of our stay in Chiapas. The Mexican government has branded people like us "revolutionary tourists." Really we are international human rights workers, establishing a front for the defense of rights - like healthcare, education, nutrition - where they are most endangered. In a country where the denial of basic human rights is established as public policy, the struggle for these rights is a political struggle, and in its most extreme form, it is revolution. It is not a local struggle, it is an international struggle, and it is the failure to understand this that has brought about the criminality of such international work.
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| Women marching in Polhó. April, 1998. Photo: Mariana MoraCourtesy of Alphonso Jaramillo, I Art Media, Berkeley, CA. |
I stay in a house in Oakland with a group of Chicanos, Mexicanos, Gringos and Chilenos whose families were exiled during the regime of Pinochet. Everyday the Mexican newspapers are reporting on the dangerous foreigners who hate Mexicans and are trying to overthrow the Mexican government; here we read the newspapers and laugh at the presumption, the ignorance, and the hate. We construct our own histories in stories and artwork, in talking about our experiences and turning them into lessons. My housemates Francisco and Carlos have just finished a video on the California strawberry workers; others work in cultural centers, or teach children, or play traditional Andean music. As Subcomandante Marcos has written, "we are engaged in the struggle of memory against oblivion; the market buys up our past and our present and runs it through the shredder to make way for municipal parking, industrial parks, commerial space."
My favorite response to my stories about the commando raid in the jungle, which swept me into fifteen small minutes of international infamy, is not that of gringos who are shocked and horrified - "I can't believe this happened to you!" - but of the Latinos and others who tell me, "Yeah, that's the way it is. Now you know." History repeats itself relentlessly but the mechanisms that churn it out, the daily press, the .monthly press, the government spin doctors - their job is to make it new, to make it news, give it surprise value and separate it from its past like a turtle thrown onto dry land. The Zapatistas, those who die in order to live, and their sympathizers all across the globe - their job is to keep memory alive against oblivion. Oblivion wields a lot of power, but memory has a human element that won't quit. To the old revolutionary quote which turns out, of course, to be from Emiliano Zapata, "The land is for he who works and freedom for he who takes it," the Zapatistas all over the world have added a third charge: history is for those who, with hope and tender fury, build it.
JEFF CONANT is a Bay Area-based writer, teacher and activist. He worked with human rights groups in Chiapas, Mexico from 1995 through April 1998 when he and many other international workers were expelled from Chiapas. He is currently involved in an effort to recreate a mural depicting indigenous autonomy which was destroyed in the invasion of a Zapatista village in April, 1998. The mural will be repainted on City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. A book of Jeff's poems, The Evacuated Forest Paper (Buck Downs Books, 1999) will soon be published, as well as a translation from Spanish of a book on contemporary Mayan medicine, Wind in the Blood: Mayan Healing and Chinese Medicine (North Atlantic Books, June 1999). Our thanks to Alphonso Jaramillo of I. Art Media (Berkeley, Ca.) for providing us the photos from Chiapas. The photographs were taken by Mariana Mora, who lives in Chiapas.