Imbolc '95 Imbolc '95Suspended between a temporary ceasefire and war, the Mayan community of Morelia are celebrating their dead. There is the inauguration of the village's first library, followed by speeches and children's races. Later there is a mass presided over by two visiting Canadian bishops and a modest feast prepared for the visitors - religious, human rights delegates, the national and international press. And the day is rounded off with more speeches, poetry, music and the grand finale - a formal (Mexican) flag-lowering ceremony.
This small, tranquil village hidden among the remote tropical valleys at the edge of the Lacandon Rainforest is remembering and honouring the deaths of three villagers at the hands of the Mexican Federal Army.
A year ago today, seven days after the Zapatista uprising shook Mexico, the Mexican Army, in a series of reprisals against "guerrilla communities", invaded Morelia. The men were dragged from their houses and forced face-down on the basketball court for hours. While the men were being kicked and thumped, the women of the community were forced to prepare food for the rampaging soldiers. Three elderly villagers - Sabastian Santis Lopez and Hermelindo and Severiano Santis Dominguez - were hauled into the village church. For four hours their screams in the agonies of torture resonated through Morelia. Electric torture, water torture, unrelenting, as the rest of the village listened, powerless.
Three weeks later, their remains were found discarded in a ditch. Another thirty-two villagers were abducted to the local military barracks and incarcerated, stripped and tortured. In time, the army (in the face of public pressure) released them, without charge and without so much as an acknowledgement of the injustice done upon them.
"Here we are, those forever dead, dying once more, but this time in order to live."
With these words the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) swooped down from the mountains to seize several towns in Chiapas on New Year's Day 1994. A year later, things have gone well for the rebels. The plight of the dispossessed indigenous population has now been brought to the forefront of the country's political and social arena. Further, the Zapatistas, based among the oppressed and exploited Mayan communities of Chiapas, have awoken the popular forces of Mexico from a stupefying sleep during the 70-year-old dictatorship of the PRI government. All over the country, the cry with which the insurgents launched their insurrection, "Ya Basta!" ("more than enough!") is heard, and the unfinished business of the 1910 revolution is at the forefront of people's consciousness....
The prompt mobilisation of the popular forces against the Mexican Army's counter-insurgency war (half a million people were involved in the capital alone) halted the proliferation of Morelia-type atrocities. A brittle ceasefire has since been maintained between the Army and the Zapatistas, but peace talks have yet to produce a lasting agreement. The government pays lip service to change, but life and death continue as before for Chiapas' majority poor, and the Zapatistas are holding on to their guns until their demands are really met. Meanwhile, pressure mounts on the government as each day more and more people are organising across Mexico, creating the possibility of more Chiapas. Already the economy is in chaos, the peso devaluing by 56% in the first week of 1995.
Morelia is a rural village similar to thousands of others in Mexico. The 600 families live hard-working, poverty-stricken lives. The community-held land strains to sustain its people. Children die of preventable illness; 16,000 people die yearly of preventable diseases in Chiapas. The "People of Corn", so called because of their reliance on (and communing with) the single crop, live on their knees and have done so for the 502 years since the conquerors came and tried to destroy the Mayan world. And the latter day conquerors, the owners of large estates, ranchers, the multinational companies who extract the mineral wealth, and the bosses and clients of the government, continue the exploitation and oppression of the indigenous population.
"Better to die on your feet than live on your knees", Emiliano Zapata declared 80 years ago - a sentiment echoed by the Zapatistas today. "We want peace with justice, respect and dignity. No longer will we live on bended knees." (EZLN communiqué, January 1994).
"A year ago the light of truth left us", a Morelian village leader recalling the atrocity tells those assembled on the day of honouring the dead. "But we were reborn because, instead of accepting defeat, we realised our struggle was not false or imposed; it is our life, that which was taught to us by our parents and our parents' parents...."
The memory of the three dead is now cherished. The new library is called "The Three Martyrs of January 7th Library" and as the village children, silent, stand to attention with military discipline, their teacher told us that the dead are living within each child. "The living and the dead", she continues, still a teenager herself, "together, united, carrying a new world in their hearts...."
The next day, when the bishops and the press and the human rights delegates have left, the community returned to normality. The women rose at 4 am to prepare the tortillas. The men set out on the two-hour walk to their communal fields. All but the youngest children must work. Beyond the fields, the Army encirclement waits; the tanks, helicopters and jet fighters are in place. The community, in the spirit of the revolution that is burning bright within them, has begun to grow vegetables organically. A change has come; the people of corn are looking to the future.
"Our voice began its journey centuries ago", says a Zapatista communiqué, "and will never again be silenced."
Ramor Dagge is a development worker.
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