Saying Hi to the Zapatistas

This story isn’t particularly exciting per se because it’s just a brief moment in time. But it’s worth mentioning anyway. I’ve been in Mexico all month. It’s great, though the thing about Latin America is that anything–good or bad–can happen at any time. Mostly I’ve been in Mexico City, but had a few days in Oaxaca. I’ve spent lots of time in both of these places before. But I had never been to Chiapas. So a friend decided to come down to check it out for a week. Mostly went pretty well. Went to San Cristobal de las Casas–pretty great, though too much on the backpacker scene with the same cheap bars and crappy tourist things that you see from Bangkok to Cuzco. Then we headed to the Mayan ruins, first at Tonina and then at Palenque. The latter are legendary and rightfully so and the former are also wonderful, in part because they get far fewer visitors. We saw some cool birds–including a brief view of a toucan and a couple of trogons–a few mammals such as a family of agoutis, and overall had a good time. The food of Chiapas is perhaps the worst in Mexico and the music definitely is–it’s moved out of the awesome Mexican music of most of the country and into the marimba/xylophone pling pling of Central America. But whatever.

Here’s the thing though. The road from San Cristobal to Palenque is straight through the heart of Zapatista country. In the past, there have been some hold ups, some road closures, some brief stoppages to demand a little money from tourists, etc. Well, I wasn’t worried about the latter, though the former was worrying. But we asked around and everyone said it was pretty tranquillo these days. And on the way through, it was. So we took the same road back, slow and filled with endless speed bumps (topes!) as it may be. But about 2/3 of the way there, we run smack dab into some Zapatista political violence. Basically, they had expropriated some trucks from drivers, sprayed graffiti on them about the terrorist actions of the Mexican government, and set them on fire. We knew something weird might be going on when we saw like 30 trucks filled with Mexican police–going the other way. Our assumption is that perhaps this was a sort of performative thing–the Zapatistas occasionally set something on fire and engage in blockades, the police do a perfunctory search, and then go home because actually cracking down would raise tensions by a lot.

The thing about a situation like this–and I had been in this kind of thing before, while in South Korea during the gigantic 1997 strikes–is that as an outsider, you really don’t want to be there. While I doubt that they would have done anything to us, why find out? What possible good could come of hanging around and taking pictures? The answer is none. When confronted with something like this in real life–not in romanticized political rhetoric–the correct action is to respect everyone involved and step out of the situation as rapidly as possible. That’s exactly what we did, driving all the way back to Palenque (about 50 miles as the crow files, but a solid 3 hours in real time!) and changing the last days of our trip entirely.

Now, I obviously hold nothing against the Zapatistas for doing what they feel need to be done. The Mexican government has been horrible to the indigenous people of Chiapas for a very long time and their fight for self-determination is worthy. Plus, it may possibly be that there are things more important than the itineraries of tremendously privileged tourists! But let’s just say that seeing something like that in real life is……a hell of a thing.