One No, Many Yeses Read online

  ‘They grow it here,’ says a Spanish guy with dreadlocks and a scraggy beard. ‘Good, isn’t it?’ It is. The other peace observers turn out to be, like us, European. There are a couple of Spaniards, two Basque separatist women who say they identify with the Zapatistas, and a smart-looking, in relative terms, German man, here with his girlfriend.

  ‘It’s wonderful here,’ says one of the Basque women. ‘Very beautiful. But not much happens. It’s good if you want to relax.’

  ‘The soldiers aren’t relaxing,’ says the German. ‘Three trucks of them came past today. Moving towards the military base a couple of miles up the road. We don’t know why.’

  ‘There’s a big new military influx into all the bases, apparently,’ I say. This is what we were told before we left San Cristobal by the civil rights organisation that had arranged our stay here. ‘But nobody’s sure why.’

  ‘Then it is good we are here,’ says the Spaniard. ‘Is anybody yet hungry?’

  Everyone pitches in to make dinner, and in an hour or so, our clothes smelling deliciously of woodsmoke, we all have plates of beans, rice and, naturally, tortillas, to go with our plastic cups of water. This is virtually all we will eat for the next ten days, and I will not tire of it in all that time.

  ‘It’s a bit . . . well – I mean it’s a bit quiet here, isn’t it?’ I say to one of the Spaniards, who seems to have been here the longest. ‘I was expecting a bit more . . . life.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ he says. ‘But they don’t have much reason to use a lot of these buildings now. The school was built by the government, and hasn’t really been used since autonomy. The teacher ran away. And a lot of the other buildings were put up for the Encuentro and haven’t really been used since. It’s a gathering place, and apart from the villagers there’s no one really to gather here right now.’

  The Encuentro – encounter – that the Spaniard is talking about has already become legendary. It created the key corridor down which the ideas and principles of Zapatismo began to inspire and create a global movement of political resistance.

  In January 1996, the Zapatistas issued an invitation to ‘rebels from all continents’ to join them in Chiapas later that year for an ‘Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism’. The Zapatistas built the five Aguascalientes to accommodate their visitors, and anticipated the arrival of perhaps a few hundred people. But they had underestimated just how far the words of Marcos and the ideas he was communicating, facilitated by the newly spreading Internet, had travelled. Over 3,000 people from more than forty countries arrived in Chiapas in August 1996. They came from Europe, from the USA and Canada, from all over Latin America and from places that the Zapatistas could never have imagined their word being heard in: countries from Iran to Haiti, Japan to Kurdistan, Zaïre to the Philippines.

  Groups of delegates shuttled between the five Aguascalientes, discussing every aspect of ‘life under neoliberalism’. They shared experiences, argued, and above all, planned. Planned what they would do, together, internationally, about what was happening to the world. For they saw, as the Zapatistas intended them to see, and as I saw when I arrived in Chiapas, that the forces affecting south-east Mexico were the forces affecting the world.

  The EZLN, meanwhile, sat and listened. They refused, despite requests, to provide any of their visitors with a blueprint for change or a plan for a global utopia, and when asked by people from other nations what they should do about the problems they faced, they told them to work it out for themselves. The Zapatistas, they told their visitors, were here to learn, not to teach. They had no one idea that could be universally applied, nor did they want one.

  The Encuentro sent Zapatismo global. The 3,000 delegates returned to their countries with new ideas, new ways of thinking about the future, and above all, new links. The next year, another Encuentro was held, this time in Spain, which would cement those links even further. From it, more than any other single event before or since, would grow the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement as it exists today.

  At the end of the Chiapas Encuentro, the Zapatistas issued a declaration, written, of course, by Marcos. Ever since, it has followed the movement wherever it goes. It followed me as I travelled the world and heard it quoted back to me from South Africa to California. It is as near as this movement has ever got to a statement of intent, a manifesto, and it still sends shivers down my spine.

  On the one side is neoliberalism, with all its repressive power and all its machinery of death; on the other side is the human being. There are those who resign themselves to being one more number in the huge exchange of power . . . But there are those who do not resign themselves . . . In any place in the world, anytime, any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes resignation has woven for them and cynicism has dyed grey. Any man or woman, of whatever colour, in whatever tongue, speaks and says to himself or to herself: Enough is enough! Ya basta!

  A world made of many worlds found itself these days in the mountains of the Mexican southeast . . . Let it be an echo of our own smallness, of the local and particular, which reverberates in an echo of our own greatness . . . an echo that recognises the existence of the other and does not overpower or attempt to silence it. An echo that takes its place and speaks its own voice, yet speaks the voice of the other . . . Let it be a network of voices that resist the war Power wages on them.

  *

  For the first couple of days at La Garrucha it’s almost possible to forget where we are, and why. To forget, among the butterflies and the banana palms, that we are in a war zone. Every day I hang in my hammock, drinking coffee and watching nothing much happen. Lucy and I make friends with the local children, who announce their presence by throwing crab apples at us from the bowing branches of low trees. We watch the La Garrucha football team training on a pitch in a jungle clearing; the goalposts are logs and the pitch is dotted with the pyramidal nests of leafcutter ants. I wait in vain for Marcos’s summons to come from the hills. And every night, we are awakened by the local dog pack, howling their lungs out as they storm the kitchen door in pursuit of the food they can smell on the other side. We all take turns to get up and throw things at them.

  It’s only on the third day that we get a rude awakening. Lucy and I are on observation duty, sitting in a couple of hammocks by the roadside, chatting, when a low rumble fills the valley. It’s a good two minutes before we see its source crest the hill from Ocosingo and move down the dirt track towards us. We scramble for our notebooks, pens and cameras and shout for the others, who come running from the kitchen and the barn.

  ‘Give us a hand!’ I yell. ‘There are too many!’ Twenty minutes later we have logged, between us, 31 military vehicles with around 650 soldiers, ammunition, explosives, guns and equipment, passing just feet away from us, moving towards one of the military bases that dot the Cañadas, surrounding the Zapatistas on every side. Some of the soldiers flash ironic peace signs at us. Others take our photos as we take theirs. Some smile, others just stare, coldly, through their mirrored sunglasses. They’re just passing, for now, but they’re a potent reminder of why we’re here. Every day, for the rest of the week, we see similar scenes, though never as big or as unexpected. There is certainly a military build-up going on. If I needed an explanation for why the General Command are not answering my letter, this is probably as good as any.

  For the villagers, though, life goes on much as normal; they have, as they tell us, seen worse than this since 1994. I have asked one of the village leaders if I can interview him and his colleagues, and ask them what life is like here, why they are Zapatistas, what they will do now. It takes him a day to come back to me with an answer: he has consulted all the members of the village council, and they have voted on it and they’re sorry, but right now they don’t want to talk.

  They are in a bit of a quandary about their international visitors at the moment, they have told us; a week or so before my arrival, a woman peace observer from Spain accused one o
f the village men of sexually harassing her. The villagers voted to stick him in the village lockup for a few weeks as punishment; he is still there now. This has never happened before, say the village leaders, and they don’t like it. This may be why they don’t want to talk to me; whatever the reason, Zapatista democracy is thwarting my ambitions.

  Instead, I talk to the villagers that I meet every day. I talk to the man who runs one of the small shops in the mural-swathed building, which he opens when he wants to. His name is Aurelio, and he is a militante; one of a number of people here charged with defending La Garrucha in case of attack. Somewhere, Aurelio and his colleagues probably have a cache of guns which, if the community agreed, they would use if necessary in self-defence. They have never used them yet, though, and Aurelio isn’t talking about them.

  He will talk about other things, though, sitting behind the counter of his shop. He will talk about ‘resistance’, a word I hear everywhere, and about how the villagers find it hard to live every day in rebellion.

  ‘What can we do but keep struggling?’ he asks. ‘What we want is for the government to let us speak, and to let us live. But we have seen that only through joining together can we have a hope of this. They promised us an indigenous law, but the law they have passed treats us as objects, not subjects.’ He is a big man, and he doesn’t seem given to whimsy. But he knows what he wants, and what his community wants; and he knows they’re not getting it.

  ‘We have been here for five hundred years,’ he says, almost plaintively. ‘How long do they expect us to wait? Perhaps they would like us to go away, to be silent. But there are Zapatistas elsewhere. In other states in Mexico; perhaps in other places too. They struggle, like us, and like us they will not stop.’

  Across the green, in the women’s co-operative shop, which sells much the same stock as Aurelio’s – old bags of crisps, soft drinks, rice, beans, staples – the woman behind the counter tells me the history of La Garrucha. Prior to 1994, she says, before the Zapatistas rose up, took over the land and declared it autonomous, it was a cattle ranch. The landlord sent in hired gunmen to drive them off the land, but they fought back and won.

  ‘When we worked for the landlord,’ she says, ‘he paid people fifteen pesos a week [slightly more than £1]. Many times he would pay in drink, not money. Many people were peons. We felt like slaves. Today, most of us have land, animals, and crops. Life is still hard; we need some machinery to help us farm, and it is hard to sell anything. But life is also much better now.’ Now, she said, they are in control of their own destinies, and the difference is immeasurable.

  It is twilight, and I am standing in the meadow behind the barn, gazing across the spidery canyons to gardens of mango and banana beyond the darkening river. In a couple of days we will be leaving La Garrucha, and I will miss it. A villager saunters past me slowly, going nowhere in particular.

  ‘Buenos dias,’ I say, in bad Spanish.

  ‘Buenos tardes,’ he corrects me, smiling.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Peaceful, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ He stops and gazes slowly at everything and nothing. ‘We have had a lot of rain, but it is beautiful rain.’ He ambles off again, in the direction of the shop, which is lit by a hissing gas lamp.

  Back in the barn, Lucy has been fiddling with her radio alarm clock.

  ‘Hey, listen,’ she says, emerging from the doorway and waving it in my face. Very faintly, through the crackle of a thousand miles of teeming air, comes a voice, speaking in English. A journalist and an economist are discussing ‘the future of the IT sector in Mexico’. The faint breeze of words comes sweeping down into the valley like a Martian invasion.

  And it suddenly seems to me that, yes, this is a war zone, and it is a war. A war against the real. Against the real places and real people that have been passed over in a great planetary rush towards something we don’t even know that we want. A war waged by economists, sophists and calculators, IT experts, clean-shoed intellectuals, cut-and-paste politicians and bean-counting corporate buccaneers. A war waged against people like the Zapatistas – ‘people the colour of earth’, as they describe themselves. And the war is hard because those people, and everything they stand for, stubbornly refuse to die.

  And perhaps, I think, as the fireflies begin to wink in the trees – perhaps, underneath, all of them, all of us, are the colour of earth. Perhaps no amount of growth and progress can wash away that colour. Perhaps it’s too deep, too old, too ingrained. Perhaps what Zapatismo has to teach – perhaps the first thing it has to teach – is that the war against the real, however hard we try, can never be won.

  And perhaps I am beginning to understand – beginning to feel, now – what this is really all about.

  The Plaza in Oaxaca City is similar to the Plaza in San Cristobal, but its orange stone cloisters are lined with restaurant tables, where tourists and locals sit drinking beer and eating tacos in the much-needed shade, to the sound of an army of roving buskers. Oaxaca City is the capital of Oaxaca state, the next state up from Chiapas. I am on my way, with a lot of regret, back to Mexico City, my month in Chiapas over, and I have stopped in Oaxaca on the way to talk to a man I’ve been wanting to meet since I arrived in Mexico.

  Gustavo Esteva is an old man, with wisps of grey hair remaining on his head and a kindly smile on his face. The author of over a dozen books, he describes himself as a ‘deprofessionalised intellectual’ and has been working for years with Indian communities in Oaxaca. He is buying me dinner at one of the Plaza cafés and explaining to me why the Zapatistas matter.

  ‘The world is clearly shifting,’ he says to me. ‘I think that if you look at the wild reception the Zapatistas get in Mexico – well, we know that people have been disillusioned with the ballot box for a long time, here and all around the world. And yet they are disillusioned too with rebels who come with guns and say “give us the state, we will do it better”. So what are we seeing in Chiapas? It is an alternative to both – a new notion of doing politics. You could call it radical democracy. People take their own destinies into their own hands – this is what autonomy is about in Chiapas. And it is legitimate.’

  Esteva is getting at what I have experienced many times in the years I’ve been involved in radical politics, but have never quite been able to put my finger on: a new energy, a new idea of what politics is, and should be. But how does it work, I ask? What does he mean?

  ‘Well,’ he says, chewing slowly on a green enchilada, ‘here is a new way of looking at the world. Take the Zapatistas. They call thousands of people down here to Mexico for the Encuentro, and when they get here, the EZLN say “don’t follow us, we will not be your vanguard”. Why? Because they say they don’t have the truth, and they should not lead anyone else. Perhaps they have a truth – a truth for Chiapas, but not a universal truth, that can apply everywhere. All over the world, there are other truths. In other places, perhaps the principles can be applied – radical democracy, at the grass roots, claimed by people who are linked together worldwide. But the way it manifests itself can be different everywhere.’

  A terrible busker who has been doing the rounds of the tables approaches us, bellowing ‘Oaxaca! Oaxaca!’ to the sound of a tuneless guitar. Gustavo waves him away with a patient smile.

  ‘I like to use the analogy of a telephone network,’ he says. ‘You can pick up a phone now and call anywhere in the world. This network is global and interlinked, but there is no centre – no controller, no one person or company that runs it. It is local and global, it has rules but no ruler. You see these “anti-globalisation” groups everywhere now and they operate like that. So do the Zapatistas.’

  ‘For a long time,’ he goes on, ‘I have worked in Mexico with many other groups, opposing the system that we have today. And there have always been many different people with many different ideas, many different struggles, but one common objection. When the Zapatistas appeared and said “Ya basta!”, millions of people, na
tionally and then globally, came together to support them. And we see all those people, from very different traditions and backgrounds and places, saying basta to the same thing. Basta to globalisation, basta to neoliberalism, basta to big corporations – basta to a specific set of global policies that are creating this world. Basta! We cannot wait any more!’ He takes a sip of water and carries on.

  ‘This basta,’ he says, ‘is a collective cry of No! from these many different people and groups, in many different places. And the people who shout it, the world over, have many of their own ideas about how to replace this system, or change it, how they want to be, their own alternatives. And they have perhaps learned from history that no one ideology can provide for all – no one system can integrate the needs of all the different people in the world, who all want different kinds of things. There is no one alternative to one bad system. So we ally to fight this system, and at the same time create our own, different worlds in opposition to it. And these worlds – they are different but connected, united but distinct. The Basta is the no, and the alternatives of the many different people are yeses. One no, and many yeses.’

  One no, many yeses. ‘A world made of many worlds.’ This is it. This is what connects the movement I know to the people in Chiapas, the people the colour of earth. It is what links me to Marcos and Marcos to everyone; what draws together millions of dissidents from many different worlds. One no, to the homogenising power of an undemocratic market. Many yeses in its place – many different worlds, cultures, economic and political models, within a shared humanity.

  And I can see, now, what this is about. It is about redistribution: not just of resources or wealth or land, but of the power from which all these flow. It is about democracy: real, local, participatory democracy – economic, as well as political; it is about different worlds within one world, the vitality of the human rainbow. And it is about resistance – resistance to a system that steps over, and steps on, people like the Zapatistas in the name of growth.