"Facing the mountains we speak to our dead so that their words will guide us along the path that we must walk. The drums sound and in the voices of the land we hear our pain and our history."
- Second Zapatista Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, June 1994
The turning point in Mary Robinson's visit to Mexico last week came when a group of men, women and children interrupted a meeting between the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and representatives of local non-governmental organisations in Chiapas, in south-east Mexico. The Tzotzil women swarmed around the surprised commissioner, speaking in the hushed tones of their indigenous language, wearing the colourful huipil (embroidered shirt) of the Chiapan Highlands, which identifies one village from another.
The name of their organisation, "Las Abejas" (the bees), suddenly made sense. The women proceeded to dress Robinson in a blaze of colour, combining their huipil with a heavy black woollen skirt and satchel, as observers smiled.
"These are the same traditional clothes that 21 women were wearing when their blood spilled on our soil," said Antonio Gutierrez, a community leader. "We want you to take it back to Geneva, so you will always remember what happened to us."
The visitors came from Acteal village, where 45 unarmed men, women and children were massacred by gunmen in December, 1997, as they prayed in the village church. "You can be sure that I will take your reality with me," said Robinson, visibly moved.
Zenaida, aged nine, stepped forward, shyly turning her head away from the commissioner. She had been blinded by an assassin's bullet which went through her brain but miraculously failed to kill her. Another survivor took off his shirt, then his trousers, revealing huge scars from high-velocity bullets. "Don't be ashamed to look, our sorrow is great," he said.
The atmosphere was charged with memory, as if the spirits of the 45 innocent dead had quietly lined up behind the survivors, anxious to show off their fatal wounds, too.
The people of Chenalho municipality, which includes Acteal village, signed their death warrant in 1996, when they announced their decision to form a rebel autonomous council, turning their back on the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and declaring themselves Zapatista supporters. In January 1994 the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) had launched an armed rebellion in Chiapas, demanding land, justice and democracy. After two years of on-off negotiations, rebel and government delegates signed the San Andres Peace Accord in February 1996, granting limited autonomy to indigenous villages.
This accord was subsequently rejected by the Mexican government, which refused to ratify it before parliament until significant changes were made. The EZLN responded by implementing the accord itself, setting up civil courts, village commissions and decision-making assemblies in line with indigenous law, taking over government functions in areas under its influence.
Non-governmental organisations provided funds for health clinics, schools and community centres, while foreigners set up peace camps in Zapatista villages, to observe the increasing army presence. The Mexican army now has over 50,000 troops in rebel territory - this amounts to one soldier for every nine inhabitants in an area which has one doctor for every 18,000 inhabitants, according to the government's own statistics.
The government has poured billions of dollars into the conflict zone, selectively dispensing aid to wean rebel villages away from the Zapatista movement. In Chenalho district the displaced authorities planned their revenge, buying weapons and threatening families living in the autonomous villages. The Acteal villagers were targeted not only because they pledged support to the Zapatista movement but also because they organised themselves into a successful coffee co-op, exporting half a million dollars worth of organic brew directly to Europe, cutting out local "coyotes" or intermediaries, who pay farmers less than a dollar per kilo of coffee grown.
In December 1997, days before the Acteal massacre, this reporter visited Chimix, a PRI stronghold close to the autonomous council. The homes of Zapatista sympathisers had been burned down, the occupants forced to flee, their crops stolen and sold off. A red cross was painted on the homes that remained intact, symbolising PRI affiliation.
It was 10.30 a.m. on the morning of December 22nd, 1997, when the killers arrived, wearing black uniforms and wielding AK-47 rifles. The shooting lasted six hours, leaving 21 women, 14 children and nine men dead while dozens more lay in agony, suffering serious injuries. At the entrance to the village, state police sat in their vehicles and listened to the deafening sound of gunfire, refusing to intervene, despite desperate and repeated pleas by the villagers.
In the hours that followed, local authorities cleaned up the blood and piled up the bodies in a bizarre attempt to conceal the crime.
The testimony of the massacre survivors provided Mary Robinson with further proof that the increasing militarisation of Chiapas state has destroyed social cohesion and damaged indigenous culture. The commissioner's half-hour meeting with the Minister of Defence, Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, was described by one UN official as "a dialogue of the deaf" - Aguirre gave "an army-uniformed analysis as opposed to a ministerial political analysis", dismissing any suggestion that the army is part of the problem in Chiapas.
There were hints that Robinson's movements had been restricted by the government, particularly the anticipated visit to Acteal where 4,000 villagers awaited her arrival last week with marimba music and flowers. A leading Mexican cartoonist published a caricature on the visit in which the commissioner was strapped to a chair, bound and gagged, her glasses thrown to the ground - "Who is the new prisoner?" one security official asks another; "she isn't a prisoner", replies the other, "she's on an official visit."
The PRI has ruled Mexico for 70 years, combining populism with repression. It has proved remarkably skilful in reinventing itself to keep up with the changing times, but when its hegemony is threatened, the response is swift and ruthless.
The centre-left opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has suffered 644 assassinations in the past 10 years, while hundreds of indigenous people have been killed by state and paramilitary forces in Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca state. For every activist killed in a small rural district, dozens withdraw prudently from political life. In Mexico City, activists get a first warning - the music from the Sting (golpe in Spanish, a blow) is left on their answering machines.
The ability of the PRI government to maintain a semblance of a free press, dominate unions, co-opt intellectuals and maintain a positive international image led Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa to describe the regime as "the perfect dictatorship". In the 1988 Chiapas state elections, entire villages returned 100 per cent votes for the ruling PRI party, an extraordinary consensus which neither Papa Doc in Haiti nor Batista in Cuba could achieve under the cruellest of military regimes.
Amilcar Kanter, former PRI mayor of Altamirano, a district capital in the conflict zone, told me the secret of his success. "We took the ballot papers out of the boxes, crossed them all for the PRI then put them back in the booths," he explained. The Mexican government has since introduced a series of electoral reforms which have gradually prised open the system, allowing opposition candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas to win the mayoral elections for Mexico City in July, 1997.
Progress in rural areas has been slower, as the PRI refuses to put its huge vote machine at risk. Minutes before Mary Robinson met Acteal villagers and human rights groups in San Cristobal de las Casas, her security convoy was diverted to Na B'lom, an indigenous museum where a dozen officials awaited her for lunch. The commissioner sat down beside the guest of honour, Antonio Perez Diaz, mayor of Chenalho, where Acteal is located. Diaz is a close political ally of the previous mayor, Jacinto Perez, who was implicated in the Acteal massacre and removed from his post.
"That lunch wasn't supposed to happen," said Robinson, irritated by the diversion. "We were going to have a private lunch when we were surrounded by these people. I had no idea who they were. You saw that we got out of there very fast."
Later that day Robinson stood before the powerful Chiapan chamber of commerce, where business people and large landowners outlined their position on the conflict, criticising human rights workers for focusing on the indigenous "as if they were the only people living in the state". The contrast between the world of the indigenous poor and local business elite did not pass unnoticed by the commissioner: "they didn't have any appreciation of the pain and suffering of the people that I met earlier today," said Robinson, exhausted that evening, summoning up the energy for one final interview. "They see the conflict as a matter of security and order, so that everything is all right for doing business."
The 1994 Zapatista rebellion shook Mexico to the roots. It occurred on the very day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented, transforming Mexico into a business partner with the US and Canada, "We went to sleep in the First World and woke up in the Third World," commented Mexican writer Paco Taibo, as the country recognised that the illusion of prosperity, peddled by former president Carlos Salinas, masked a shocking reality of poverty and repression.
Salinas denounced the rebels as "unemployed leftovers from Central American wars" and anticipated a swift end to the movement. Six years later, Salinas is living in exile and three million Mexicans turned out to vote for Zapatista demands in a national referendum held last March. The Zapatistas surprised the Mexican government by establishing effective national and international support networks, while also enlisting support from public figures, including US movie director Oliver Stone, Nobel Literature prize-winner Jose Saramago and US rock band Rage Against the Machine.
The ruling party is engaged in its own permanent public relations campaign, mobilising experts to the four corners of the Earth, via local embassies, laden down with maps, charts and reports which portray Mexico as a haven of social, economic and political prosperity.
Looking back over her visit, Mary Robinson was overwhelmed by the response from Mexico's vibrant activist community. "Expectations were high," she explained, "and it's not easy to fulfil such expectations when the capacity to influence is essentially a moral one - but I have told it as I see it and I think I made the government think."
As the first anniversary of the Acteal massacre approached, in December 1998, the Las Abejas organisation sent a secret letter to the Zapatista leadership: "Come join us in prayer," it read. There was no reply from the rebels. The anniversary dawned cold and misty, just as it had a year before. The villagers gathered and prayed, reliving the trauma which remained so immediate to them.
Then, just before the anniversary hour struck, a long line of masked Zapatista rebels appeared on the road outside the community, 3,000 in all, heeding the call of the community. Once more the voices of the land listened to the pain of the people, showing the path ahead.