March 8–15, 2001

slant

On the Road with the Subcomandante

by Al Giordano

George W. Bush entered the White House with zero foreign policy experience except — as he’s boasted again and again — with Mexico: the country that shared his state’s border.

So, on February 16th, he made a visit to new Mexican President Vicente Fox’s Guanajuato ranch as his first foreign trip. That same day, he bombed Iraq, an act that sufficiently distracted him from having to solve any of those pesky immigration and narco-trafficking issues with his Mexican counterpart.

But don Dubya awakens one morning in the Lincoln Bedroom to find that Mexico’s preeminent leader glares from a black ski-mask as he and an army of indigenous rebels, students, peasant farmers and exploited Mexican workers advance on their National Palace this coming Sunday, March 11, in protest.

The man in the black ski-mask, known by millions as Subcomandante Marcos, said, as he prepared to leave the jungle last month to take Mexico City, "The struggle for indigenous rights is not just our own, it is of all the indigenous peoples of Mexico. It is not only for the indigenous, but also for all Mexican men and women. This country has to recognize its original peoples, to accept them as they are and respect them. Being indigenous today in Mexico means fighting for the respect and dignity of everyone who is excluded and under-valued. It means fighting for the indigenous, but also for women, youth, children, for homosexuals and lesbians, for the handicapped, for the elders, in the end, for everyone who is different."

Subcomandante Marcos and 23 indigenous commanders of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation left the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, on February 24th and have been joined by hundreds of thousands of Mexicans on their long march to Mexico City. By the time they enter the capital they will count millions, demanding indigenous autonomy and other unfashionable throwbacks to a quaint, pre-globalized world like democracy, freedom and justice.

Bush and Fox, to their shared political consultant, Rob Allyn of Texas, were slated to be the Dream Team of the new gringo president’s Pax Tejana. Both men were raised on ranches that they never had to work on with their own hands. Both are aficionados of wearing cowboy boots and offering photo ops on horseback. Fox, former president of Coca Cola in Mexico, was slated to be the long-awaited deliveryman of Mexico’s natural resources and cheap labor to U.S. business interests (that is to say, campaign contributors) in the late NAFTA era.

But within days of Bush’s Mexico junket, his compadre Fox is quickly losing the microphone in his own nation. Fox, a consummate showman, suddenly faces the reality that a better rodeo has come to town, and he hasn’t even been invited to the corral.

The indigenous Zapatistas, who rose up in arms against the Mexican state, the neoliberal economic system, and 500 years of conquest on December 31, 1993, have survived seven years in the Chiapas highlands and jungles, surrounded by 70,000 Mexican army troops, government-backed paramilitaries and other repressive police agencies.

Seven years of written communiqués, surprise jungle press conferences, even some poems and hand-scrawled cartoons by the Subcomandante — all promptly posted to the Internet and translated into many languages — have had a cumulative effect. The Mexican youth, in particular, have been educated in the art of social struggle, and the use of new technologies to translate ancient indigenous ideas about local autonomy and successful revolutionary warfare.

Fifty of the 56 indigenous ethnic groups who make up 10 million of Mexico’s 96 million citizens have now united, with the Zapatistas, to form a National Indigenous Congress. Their top agenda item: that the government comply with the San Andrés Peace Accords it signed in 1996 and quickly broke, yet another treaty discarded.

The San Andrés Accords are a marvel not just for Mexico’s indigenous peoples, but also for social fighters across the world. One word is its unifying banner — AUTONOMY — and with it the Zapatistas have developed a core principle for opposition to the global economic beast that seeks to impose profit-driven sameness on every people and land on this earth.

This week, autonomy-fever can be seen in the enthusiastic faces that greet the Zapatistas at every stop along their 12-state advance upon Mexico City. Internationalizing the story, hundreds of foreign observers, journalists and even filmmaker Oliver Stone are accompanying the caravan and shooting eyewitness reports across the globe.

They are bypassing Fox altogether, and heading directly for the federal Congress, in a massive citizen campaign to ratify the San Andrés Accords. And Fox — who defeated 71 years of one-party rule, in part, by claiming he could solve the Chiapas conflict "in 15 minutes" — seems a mere spectator on the sidelines of the parade.

Here’s the moral of this campfire story: Faced with a choice between manufactured Marlboro Men like Fox and Bush, and authentic rough-riders for democracy, freedom and justice like the hard-scrabble Zapatistas, the public will eventually abandon the phonies and embrace the originals.

Here, from somewhere in Mexico in 2001, the real cowboys are Indians.

Former Boston Phoenix political reporter Al Giordano is publisher of The Narco News Bulletin, www.narconews.com. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own, contact Howard Altman, City Paper news editor, 123 Chestnut St., Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.