Anticipating, here in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the start of the Zapatista Caravan tomorrow from the Lacandon jungle and the highlands of Chiapas to San Cristóbal, first day stopover of their two-week+two-day trip to Mexico City.

Standing across the street from the northeast corner of the municipal palace, I looked south a few streets to the end of Hidalgo, where it runs smack up to the Carmen church and its enclave. In July 96 we Zapaturistas, we tourists to the rebellion, as my slightly mocking campañera dubbed the likes of us, stood entranced across the street while inside the guarded enclave, a Zapatista delegation and representatives of the government and civil society were then meeting in the Carmen library. Those were tense times. San Cristóbal was awash with military. Vehicles occasionally drove through town, packed with soldiers, many if not most of them with the same indigenous faces as the Zedillo government’s supposed enemies, each with his heavy-duty firearm. But now, four and a half years later, the evening of Feb 22 was an unmarred tourist mecca where I stood. When we first came here in July 96 Roberto Rivas Bastidas, director of the El Puente language school on nearby Real de Guadalupe where we studied Spanish and Nancy taught English, took us for a little tour of the city in his spiffy car, and he chose to drive us on this same street where I now stood gazing, advancing into the postcard image with Carmen at the focus. But the times they are a-changing, once again. Since about seven or eight months ago, a young man told me, cars are barred from this pedestrian way. The polished-looking paving stones almost glowed in the yellow-orange illumination cast by primarily-sodium-vapor street lamps. The look, deliberately, is an enticement to tourists with hard currencies, a successful enticement, as the many prospering shops attest. Of course this happened gradually. It was Zedillo’s notion of how Chiapas should “be developed”, by investments that would build the usual accumulations of capitalist wealth. And it is what Fox also believes in. And, in a perverted way, it works. It works by keeping the class structure in place. Eighteen-year-old Blanca Flor, who served my breakfast this morning, saw me sitting at my laptop. She was surprised to learn that tomorrow Zapatista commandantes will travel from the Lacandon jungle to San Cristóbal, the first day of their caravan to Mexico city. She hadn’t even known there was to be a caravan to Mexico City. Blanca Flor (I didn’t get her family name) says she is single, lives with her parents and six siblings in San Cristóbal, and is poor. I asked her about her ethnicity, thinking she was probably indigenous. No, she’s mestizo, as are the majority of all Mexicans. She likes Fox, and she has hopes that things will improve. The Army, she wants it to stay here because it means security for her and her family. So in that sense, capitalist development works. It keeps many people poor, and surely promotes their hopes, and, most crucially, their ignorance of the realities that govern their lives. And it’s class, not ethnicity that’s key. Yesterday afternoon I stopped in at El Puente to say hello to Roberto Rivas, who is still director of that language school. He wasn’t there. He now works five days a week in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas, as director of communications for Chiapas of the PAN (the National Action Party). I’m uncertain whether that’s purely a party or also an unofficial government position, but surely Roberto, unlike Blanca, knows that tomorrow the Zapatista top commandantes and the sup will be coming to town. At El Puente they told me Roberto is at the school for sure every Saturday, and some Sundays. He played a role in reversing San Cristóbal’s initial loss of tourists allegedly caused by the conflict. He worked to get businesses to invest in advertising directed at tourists, with apparent success. There are many signs of wealth here that one didn’t see in the summer of 1996. Parked on Guadelupe next to the side of the main cathedrad sat a TV-Azteca van topped with its small digital-technology antenna. Inside two men worked in front of an array of electronic controls, watching a small monitor on which films they had taken earlier in the day were running. The familiar masked head of el sup was almost hidden behind an array of microphones. So TV-Azteca had made the arduous two-way trip to the press conference in La Realidad. The corporate networks need to know what’s going on so that they can put their slant on it, if they decide not to ignore it, but we need to rely on our own independent media. Nearby, on the plaza in front of the grand cathedral a sizable group stood, intently watching a video produced by indigenous people in Los Altos (the highlands) of Chiapas. It was about education in an autonomous community in rebellion. Education, as always, is propaganda. This was pro-Zapatista propaganda, the same kind I tried to teach at the University of Massachusetts in Boston until I retired. The grassroots communications network here in San Cristóbal is probably a model. It has functioned in tandem with the Zapatista’s own network, to keep the communities informed and to get honest information out to the rest of the world. As the woman of the projection group explained to me after the showing, they know that most people don’t have access to the internet. Today, she told me, the group at the newest Indymedia Center site, http://chiapas.indymedia.org will be distributing flyers with information about the upcoming caravan. They were being printed as we spoke in a nearby printing shop. Adelante!

http://omega.cc.umb.edu/~salzman