The Zapatista March to Mexico City
'We Come Here to Name Ourselves'

by Wendy Call

MATIAS ROMERO, OAXACA, April 22, 2001. Comandanta Yolanda was the first of the Zapatista delegation to take the podium in Oaxaca City, before approximately 15,000 people who filled the cathedral plaza. Behind her, a huge banner painted in gleeful colors announced "Bienvenid@s EZLN" - welcoming both the 20 male and four female leaders of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. A police helicopter circled low overhead. As Yolanda approached the microphone, Comandante Abraham handed her three sheets torn from a spiral notebook. She leafed through the pages and their crisp rattle echoed through the speakers. Yolanda began to read, pausing in unexpected places and hesitating over some of the longer words. She made some of the same grammatical errors that I make; we both learned Spanish as adults. "The indigenous people of Oaxaca have made it possible for all indigenous people to feel proud to be so," Yolanda said. She pointed out that Oaxaca - the state that is home to one-quarter of all of Mexico's native peoples - has led the country's indigenous movement.

Yolanda was one of the Zapatista leaders who had left the neighboring state of Chiapas the previous day, February 25, 2001, to travel to Mexico City. Before Yolanda spoke, representatives of several of Oaxaca's 16 indigenous groups presented ceremonial staffs to the Zapatistas. The delegation had left Chiapas with seven staffs, one from each of the ethnicities in the Zapatista support base. They returned home five weeks later, on the first of April, with 28.[1]
    [1] "La paz con dignidad, un poco más cerca: Marcos," La Jornada, April 2, 2001, from the internet.

When it was Subcomandante Marcos' turn to speak, he held clean, computer-printed sheets in steady hands. He seemed less nervous than he had on the caravan's first day. As he did at the beginning of every speech, he greeted his audience: teachers, students, peasants, debtors, housewives and more than one thousand caravanistas - the Mexicans and foreigners who were accompanying the Zapatistas to Mexico City. Marcos saluted the indigenous movement of Oaxaca - the only state in Mexico that is poorer than Chiapas. "We have marveled at your organizing capacity, your combativeness, your sincere pride in the roots that give both name and color to these lands."

With each speech, the Zapatista leaders - and especially Marcos - molded their words into the form most likely to be understood and appreciated by the local audience. In Juchitán, a city known for its indigenous literature, Marcos read a story. In Puebla, a city that prides itself on its high culture, he saluted artists and intellectuals, giving a speech about the meaning of "dignity." In Querétaro, where the state's governor had said that the Zapatistas should be executed because they are traitors, Marcos issued insults: calling the governor an "idiot" and joking about the Zapatista leaders' executions.

East of the stage in Oaxaca City, several men from the town of Santa Cruz Tepenixtlahuaca, an indigenous Chatino village of 2,500, held a weathered banner. It spelled out their demands: classroom construction, potable water, a paved road to their town and expanded electrical service. These men had traveled with a group of 100 to the state capital from Tepenixtlahuaca - which is 40 miles and a world away from the Pacific resort of Puerto Escondido - to demand public services. They earn a living growing corn, beans, chilies, mangos and plums, but too often their harvest rots before they can get it to market. Alberto Bautista, one of the older delegates, told me that he liked Comandanta Yolanda's speech "because we are poor peasants; we don't have anything." His community wants economic development, but it also wants dignity. At the bottom of their banner, large letters demanded, "Respect for Indigenous People!"

On December 2, the day after Vicente Fox was sworn in as Mexico's president, Marcos sent a communiqué on behalf of the EZLN addressed to "the people of Mexico" and to "people and governments of the world" - everyone on the planet except for President Fox and his colleagues. (President Fox received his own letter from Marcos that day. Addressed to "Señor Fox," it said: "It is my duty to inform you that, as of today, you have inherited a war in the Mexican southeast...."[2]) The communiqué sent to the rest of the world announced that 24 Zapatista leaders would travel from their mountain communities to Mexico City, to address the nation's congress. They would request the ratification of the 1996 peace agreement between the Zapatistas and the federal government. This legislation was one of three prerequisites the Zapatistas gave for returning to the negotiating table - which they had abandoned when the government had refused to enact the 1996 "San Andrés accords." The other two demands were: release of all Zapatista prisoners from Mexican jails and closing of seven of the 259 military outposts in Chiapas.[3]
    [2] Communiqués from the EZLN-CCRI, December 2, 2000.
    [3] Communiqué from the EZLN-CCRI, December 2, 2000.

Meeting these demands would not be an end, but a beginning. The 1995 peace talks between the Mexican government and the Zapatistas (who worked with more than 100 advisors from all over the country and collected input from people all over the world) had begun with five negotiating tables. The topics were the civil and cultural rights of indigenous people, economic and social development, democracy, women's rights, and state-level issues (with the Chiapas state government). Only the first table finished its work. A congressional commission, called COCOPA for its Spanish initials, completed the arduous task of translating the San Andrés accords on indigenous rights and culture into legal language: the "COCOPA law." Zedillo refused to send it to Congress. Fox did so his first week in office. The other four areas of negotiation remain unfinished.

In the communiqués they sent out on Fox's first day as president, the Zapatistas called upon "the National Indigenous Congress,[4] national and international civil society, political and social organizations, and, generally, everyone" to support their march to Mexico City. Thousands upon thousands responded to the call. Hundreds of buses, trucks and cars filled with people from throughout Mexico and all over the world followed the Zapatista leadership's shiny white bus as it wound its way through 12 Mexican states. It was a moving press conference, an ever-growing public spectacle, and - most of all - an ongoing conversation with President Fox and the Mexican Congress. Marcos told the crowd in Oaxaca City: "If someone asks, 'What does this March for Indigenous Dignity, this March of the Color of the Earth, want?' Here is the answer: No more and no less ... [then] a future where all Mexicans, including the indigenous peoples, will have democracy, liberty and justice."
    [4] The National Indigenous Congress (CNI) was founded in October 1996, growing out of the gathering of indigenous people who participated in the Zapatistas' negotations with the government. At the third CNI meeting, attended by the Zapatista leadership on their way to Mexico City, 3,383 delegates from 41 of Mexico's 56 indigenous groups participated.

The next day, while in Cancun to give the closing speech at a World Economic Forum, President Fox said, "The march for peace is on its way from Chiapas to Mexico City, to the great Tenochtitlán to look for a way to work together with the federal government...." He asserted, "the moment for peace has arrived."[5] Fox continually called it the march for peace, but the Zapatistas never called it that. They called their caravan the March for Dignity, and they ended every single speech with a call for democracy, liberty and justice. First those things, then peace.
    [5] Milenio, February 28, 2001, p. 8.

While the caravan dominated the front pages of the newspaper every day and the television news every night, each of the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in it had a different impression of what it was, how it felt, what it meant. I attended planning meetings in host cities, painted banners for caravan events, took photographs, rode on a bus of US supporters for three days (and slept on it one night), shoved for a space in the press pen at some events, and stood on the margins and watched passersby at others. From each vantage point, the view was fantastically different.

In the twenty-four hours after leaving Oaxaca City, the caravan traveled to three large events in the states of Veracruz and Puebla, then spent the night in Puebla. At 5:15 the next morning, Day Four of the March for Indigenous Dignity, the water ran out in the huge stadium where we had slept. Roused at 4:40 in the morning (about four hours after we pulled sleeping bags or hand-woven cotton blankets over our road-weary bodies), we hurried to get cleaned up, dressed, and to the bathroom before another long day on the road. But there was no water.

More than 200 volunteers (nearly all students) organized the hospitality for the caravanistas at the Autonomous University of Puebla. They made sure that we had dinner, a place to sleep, bottled water to drink, medical attention, and breakfast (all in the space of six hours). The organizers had expected about 400 people, prepared for 800, and hosted something around 1,200. The water shortage was the only hitch. Several volunteers told me that the school administration had opposed hosting the caravan participants, but gave in to student pressure. Very few of the volunteers in Puebla were indigenous. Still, those I talked to felt that the Zapatistas spoke for them.

A few hours after our bus pulled out of the university parking lot, the houses blinking by out the dusty windows suddenly became more colorful and closer together. We had arrived in a city. It was 8:42 am, so it must be Tlaxcala, I thought to myself. This city of 130,000, capital of the small state of the same name, was on the agenda for eight in the morning. The caravan had been consistently, amazingly, only about 45 minutes behind schedule for the past four days. The mostly middle-class audience in Tlaxcala's center plaza waved small, white EZLN flags and cheered with more politeness than excitement. The event ended quickly and we rushed back to our buses. As the caravan rolled past by the plaza on its way out of town, emotion finally poured from the crowd. Several women cheered and yelled their good wishes to us, tossing bagged lunches into our outstretched hands.

There was something almost unbelievable, and therefore terribly hopeful, about it: middle-class, middle-aged women from a prosperous city in central Mexico offering food and affection to the supporters of a guerrilla movement from the mountains of southern Mexico.

Inside the bus, cultures mixed and eddied as we wound our way through southern and central Mexico. Although nearly all of us were from the United States, we came from different worlds. As we left Tlaxcala, in the seats behind me, Ben, a carpenter from rural, western Massachusetts told Miguel, a young Chicano activist from San José, California, that he builds timber-frame houses for a living. Miguel, who had never seen such a house, tried to match a mental imagine to Ben's description. "You mean, like Legos?" "Yes, kind of like that," Ben replied, sounding pleased.

For part of the trip, a poet from San Francisco sat next to me. Jeff spent several years in the mid-1990s building plumbing systems in Zapatista communities. In 1998, the Mexican government expelled him from the country - as it did nearly 400 foreigners living in or visiting Chiapas. Jeff returned to Mexico for the first time since then to join the caravan. His expulsion had been overturned by Fox's administration. When Jeff lived in Chiapas, he never attended political events, and even asked Mexican friends to buy newspapers for him. He spoke to almost no one about his (perfectly legal, nonviolent) work. Now, nearly three years after being kicked out of the country for installing water pipes, he was riding on a bus that waved EZLN banners out the window, in a caravan of hundreds of vehicles doing the same thing. Along every mile of highway, there were people - sometimes thousands, sometimes just one - cheering us on. He could hardly believe it.

Six hours and eight minutes after we left Tlaxcala, we arrived in the small town of Tepatepec, Hidalgo. Our route through Hidalgo folded back on itself; the visit to Tepatepec was a detour. Really, though, the "March for Dignity and for the People who are the Color of the Earth" included no detours. In one speech Marcos explained, "We are pleased, because we have found the most direct route to Mexico City. After looking at all the maps, we determined that the safest and surest route is the one that passes through the heart of the people."

A banner draped across the municipal building in Tepatepec declared "total support for the EZLN." Unlike the youthful crowd in Oaxaca City, many of the people in Tepatepec had brought their entire family to welcome the Zapatistas. Young children and elderly grandparents waited together. As the news spread that the Zapatistas were near, the crowd of perhaps 2,000 closed in toward the stage. They waved their EZLN flags, but stayed quiet. A young man on stage sang folk songs about the Zapatistas and about El Mexe, a teachers' school that was the site of Tepatepec's own rebellion a year ago.

In early 2000, students at teachers' colleges in eight Mexican states had staged strikes, protesting budget cuts at their already woefully underfunded schools. The students at El Mexe were among them. After hearing their school was to be closed, they camped out in their classrooms for more than a month in protest, while their parents and other community members brought them food. On February 19, 2000 the state government ordered more than 300 well-armed police to storm the school, arrest the students and guard the building.[6] Sixty-four striking students were carried off to jail while the police took over the building. Three days later, the community of Tepatepec - the same people who stood quietly listening to the Zapatistas a year later - decided to take their school back. They broke into the building, stripped the police to their underwear and forced them outside. La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López described the event: "There, in rural Mexico, in wild Mexico, in Tepatepec, in the municipality of Francisco I. Madero, in Hidalgo, the community confronted the arbitrariness [of power], and after degrading and bringing power to its knees, secured the liberation of the student prisoners, recouped the disputed student space, and opened a debate to seek real solutions to the conflict."[7]
    [6] "Dos líderes de El Mexe serían excarcelados," La Jornada, March 9, 2000.
    [7] Opinión: Astillero, Julio Hernández López, La Jornada, February 21, 2000.

The students of El Mexe wanted only the right to continue to study, to become teachers, to have a place in the educational system. The Zapatistas want only a place in Mexico. This is why, of all the slogans used by the Zapatistas and Mexico's indigenous movement, the one heard most often is Nunca mas un México sin nosotros - Never again a Mexico without us. At every event, the comandantes held the black-and-red EZLN flag and the red, green and white Mexican flag. Every event closed with the song that has become the Zapatista anthem, but also with Mexico's national anthem.

In Oaxaca City, the crowd had remained mostly silent while the national anthem played. Thirteen days later, in Mexico City, the event began with the national anthem. A good portion of the audience belted it out. Some sang with their right hands lifted across their hearts, others with their left hands raised in the air: clenched in a fist or with two fingers raised in a victory symbol. Mid-afternoon on March 11, I joined somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people who greeted the Zapatistas in Mexico City's Zócolo, or main square. Cameras lifted overhead, cardboard periscopes for watching the stage, toddlers - a few wearing black ski-masks - on their parents' shoulders, EZLN banners, and Mexican flags filled the long distance between me and the stage.

A conch shell was blown to begin the event, and the moderator welcomed "our masked brothers." Comandanta Esther spoke first, about the role of women in the indigenous movement. Mid-way through her brief speech, she declared "Never again a Mexico without the women!" A significant portion of the crowd yelled back to her, "You are not alone!"

Comandantes Zebedeo, Tacho and David spoke after Esther. Each of their speeches played a specific role in the Zapatistas continuing, public dialogue with the Mexican government. Zebedeo declared some of the Zapatistas' general principles, stressing, "Mexico is not private property." Tacho spoke of the long history of their struggle, first with the Spanish government and then with the Mexican government. "They were never able to kill our roots," he said. He repeated several times the sentiment that the Zapatistas had repeated throughout the seven years, three months and 11 days since they declared war on the Mexican government: they were not fighting to overthrow the government or to separate from Mexico, but to be an equal part of it. "We are asking that the Mexican constitution recognize us." David said that the Zapatistas would begin negotiating with the Mexican government "immediately" after President Fox fulfilled the Zapatistas demands.

Finally, Marcos spoke. He did not tell a story, like he did in Juchitán, on the first night of the caravan. He did not recite a homage to Mexico's indigenous movement, as he had in Oaxaca City on the caravan's second day. He did not reel off a long string of one-liners, challenges and insults, as he had on the fifth day in Querétaro. He did not even give a speech. He gave the people gathered in Mexico City's Zócolo a poem, dedicated to Mexico's indigenous people, workers, peasants, taxi drivers, fishermen, street vendors, gang members, journalists, transsexuals, soldiers, artists and bureaucrats. The poem included all of Mexico's indigenous nations. It began:

Indigenous brother, sister.
                                Tenek.
                                We come from very far away.
                                Tlahuica.
                                We walk time.
                                Tlapaneco.
                                We walk the land.
                                Tojolabal.
                                We are bow and arrow.
                                Totonaco.
                                Walking wind.
                                Triqui.
                                We are heart and blood.
                                Tzeltal.
                                The guerrilla and the guardian.
                                Tzotzil.
                                The embrace of a friend.
                                Wixaritari.
                                They presume us defeated.
                                Yaqui.
                                Mute.
                                Zapoteco.
                                Silenced.
                                Zoque.
                                We hold many years in our hands.
                                Maya.
                                We come here to name ourselves.
                                Kumiai.
                                We come here to say "we are.".
                                Mayo.
                                We come here to be seen.
                                Mazahua.
                                We come here to watch, to be seen, to be considerate.
                                Mazateco.
                                Here, our name is spoken by our passage.
                                Mixe.
                                This is what we are:
                                The one who blooms amidst the mountains.
                                The one who sings.
                                The one who spreads and nurtures the ancient word.
                                The one who speaks.
                                The one who is of corn.
                                The one who lives in the mountains.
                                The one who walks the land.
                                The one who shares the idea.
                                Our true selves.[8]
    [8] "The real us" or "our true selves" is the literal translation of several indigenous peoples' names for themselves.

"This movement, of the color of the earth, is yours, and because it is yours, it is ours...." Marcos said after he finished his poem. "We did not come to tell you what to do or to guide you.... We came to ask, humbly and respectfully, that you help us."

On March 28, 2001, the same four Zapatistas comandantes who had spoken in the Zócolo, David, Esther, Tacho and Zebedeo, spoke before the Mexican Congress. As they stood at the nation's most important podium, 260 of their supporters, nearly all indigenous, were there too, bearing witness.

When the members of the Zapatista delegation to Mexico City had been announced six weeks earlier, each was asked why they were participating. Comandanta Esther had said simply, "I am going to go with my compañeros to talk with the federal congress."[9] That was exactly what she did, as the primary speaker for the EZLN delegation and the first indigenous, Mexican woman ever to stand at that podium.[10]
    [9] Perfil de La Jornada, February 17, 2001, p. II.
    [10] La Jornada, March 29, 2001, p [ ]

The 23 EZLN comandantes and the Subcomandante Marcos accomplished what they had traveled to Mexico City to do. The next day, they set out for home. The caravan had ended, but the work had just begun. Most members of President Fox's National Action Party (PAN), and many members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) oppose the COCOPA law. President Fox has urged his party to vote in favor of the law, but his supplications have not yet had much effect.

Even if the legislative hurdles are overcome, day-to-day reality is something else altogether. "What does a law mean in Mexico? This is a country of laws," says Carlos Beas Torres, director of a 10,000-member indigenous people's association in Oaxaca and one of the advisors to the Zapatistas during the 1995 negotiations. On June 19, 1998, the state government of Oaxaca adopted the "Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Communities Law." It is the only state in Mexico to have such a law. Nearly three years later, many consider the legislation a dead letter.[11]
    [11] Noticias, March 28, 2001, p. 5A.

Legalities aside, Mexico is a slightly different place than it was on February 25, 2001, the day that the caravan left San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. A public discussion about racism - long a taboo topic - has sprung up. After decades of appropriation by Mexico's ruling elite, the words democracy, liberty, and justice have been reclaimed by Mexicans who have never enjoyed these things: the country's 10 million indigenous people and 30 million other poor people.

Almost every mile of road traveled by the caravan was occupied by people bearing witness:to the caravan, to the seven-year struggle of the Zapatistas, to 508 years of indigenous resistance to colonization, to their own belief that Mexico can and will become a better place. They all, in some sense, traveled with the Zapatistas to Congress: a woman standing in front of her tiny restaurant, waving a white handkerchief; a small group of men pausing from their construction job; clusters of students wearing bright blue uniforms, standing in front of their school; a man in a freshly pressed button-down shirt, holding a small camera; a woman with a determined gaze standing alone on a gravel path; and in a field of dry, crumbling earth, two men who straightened their backs and raised their hands as the caravan passed.

The Zapatistas said to the people of Mexico and to the people of the world: Detrás de nosotros, están ustedes - Behind us, are all of you.

People replied: Todos somos Zapatistas - We are all Zapatistas.

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Send comments to: Wendy Call <wendycall@world.oberlin.edu>

Her reports are published in hardcopy by the Institute of Currnent World Affairs as ICWA LETTERS, which include excellent maps and photographs. The Institute identifies her as a "'Healthy Societies' Fellow living and writing in southern Mexico." A somewhat revised, updated version of this report is in preparation. I will post it when it's available.

The Institute address is
ICWA of The Crane-Rogers Foundation
Four West Wheelock Street
Hanover, New Hampshire 03755 U.S.A.

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