Searching for Zapatistas

Catedral de San Cristobal

I arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas after a 12-hour bus ride through some of the windiest roads I have ever traveled. It was about midday but the cold mountain air of the southern Mexican town easily pierced my layers of clothing as I made my way towards a big trashcan. The road and stale bus air had been turning my stomach for hours and its contents now wanted out. I stood over the trashcan for a few minutes -- eyes tearing in anticipation -- before convincing the previous night's meal to complete its digestion.

Feeling better, I gathered my backpack and left the station. Outside, my traveling companions were waiting: my sister, two brothers, and a friend now living in Oaxaca. They mocked me a little but were glad I wasn't sick. We hovered in the station plaza a few minutes until deciding to walk the streets and find a suitable (cheap and clean) hostel.

Four or five blocks later we walked by an electronics store where a dozen children crowded the narrow sidewalk, hypnotized by the television sets turned on to attract customers. It was the kind of surreal scene from 1950s America when people gathered around television stores to watch breaking news on the Soviet threat; in our modern era it was a reminder of the cultural gulf that exists between many peoples of the world.

Two blocks farther down the street was the town's main square, a patchwork of geometric green shapes crisscrossed by pathways and anchored by a large, central stage. Below the arcades of the colonial buildings enclosing the square, Mayan women sold their wares, their faces resembling reliefs and frescoes on Mayan temples, as they offered to slash their prices. It was impossible not to buy anything from these women as they cradled their newborns in the cold.

Subcomandante Marcos

I bought a doll of Subcomandante Marcos, the pipe-smoking Zapatista leader who enjoys a Che-like status here. It was difficult to believe that the merchants, musicians and tourists now stood where a decade earlier masked insurgents roamed.

On January 1, 1994, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (known as the EZLN or, simply, Zapatistas) chose this town to make a stand against the Mexican government's Indian policies and brought international attention to the plight of the country's large indigenous communities. I still remember the images from 1994 when the Zapatistas took over the town, and the square not 20 feet away was crowded with masked men and women holding rifles and machetes.

Now I possessed the leader of those men and women in my hand, made of colorful fabric and holding a crude wooden gun (but no pipe). Before I could put the doll away a young girl offered me another doll, this one of Marcos and a woman on a horse. It was hard to say no because I spend twice as much on a beer at a cheap bar, but Mexico has a way of making you ignore poverty and I walked away from the girl.

Crunchy Tourists

After sticking our heads into various hostels to inquire about prices, we picked one a few blocks from the square which was very clean, as hostels go. Our neighbors on one side were a group of young Swedes, and on the other a family with young kids (Canadians, I think). Downstairs was a Belgian who, I was told, had spent the last 20 years traveling and living throughout the world.

The great Peter Forsberg

That night, I returned to the hostel after spending most of the day trying to get lost in the town. The Swedes were having a blast, their empty bottle of tequila displayed proudly on the table as if it were a trophy. We quickly began talking and after indoctrinating me on the greatness of hockey player -- and fellow Swede -- Peter Forsberg, they told me of their school project as Peace Watchers.

Four of them were in Chiapas as part of a school program to study Mexican indigenous culture, which included acting as Peace Watchers between the indigenous groups and the Mexican military; the other two had quit their jobs and planned to stay in Mexico as long as their money allowed them. Magnus Torsne, one of the students, described his job in the villages as "human shields, but not that dangerous." The theory was that as long as foreigners were living in a village the military and police wouldn't cause trouble. And as long as these Swedes were in them they didn't.