Wages of Rebellion by Chris Hedges Read Free Book Online

that come to exploit them. And in this the Zapatistas allow us to see the future—a future where we have a chance of surviving.

    “This figure was created, and now its creators, the Zapatistas, are destroying it,” Subcomandante Marcos said to roughly 1,000 people who turned out late in the evening of May 24, 2014, in the village of La Realidad for a memorial for a Zapatista teacher, José Luis Solís López, who had been murdered by Mexican paramilitary members. “And we saw that now, the full-size puppet, the character, the hologram, was no longer necessary. Time and time again we planned this, and time andtime again we waited for the right moment—the right calendar and geography to show what we really are to those who truly are.” 12
    The murder of the teacher—known by his nom de guerre as “Galeano”—three weeks earlier, on May 2, appears to have been part of a drive by a government-allied paramilitary group, CIOAC-H, to assassinate rural Zapatista leaders and destroy the self-governing Zapatista enclaves. The Fray Bartolome Human Rights Center said that fifteen unarmed Zapatista civilians were wounded on May 2. In other attacks that day, a Zapatista clinic was destroyed and a school and three vehicles were damaged. 13
    The address was the first public appearance by Marcos since 2009. In a downpour, he spoke to the crowd into the early hours of May 25. He has been the public face of the Zapatistas since the group emerged as an insurrectionary force on January 1, 1994, in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. Marcos, who is mestizo rather than Mayan, spoke about his rise as a media figure following the uprising and how the movement had catered to the demands for an identifiable leader by a press that distorts reality to fit into its familiar narratives.
    Just a few days later [after the uprising], with the blood of our fallen soldiers still fresh in the city streets, we realized that those from outside did not see us.
    Accustomed to looking at the indigenous from above, they did not raise their eyes to look at us.
    Accustomed to seeing us humiliated, their heart did not understand our dignified rebellion.
    Their eyes were fixed on the only mestizo they saw with a balaclava, that is to say, one they did not look at.
    Our bosses told us:
    “They only see their own smallness, let’s make someone as small as them, so they may see him and through him they may see us.”
    A complex maneuver of distraction began then, a terrible and marvelous magic trick, a malicious play of the indigenous heart that we are, the indigenous knowledge challenging modernity in one of its bastions: the media.
    The character called “Marcos” started then to be built.
    The clandestine movement began, like all rebellions, with a handful of idealists. 14
    “When the first group arrived in 1983, 1984, we were in the densest part of the jungle,” Marcos said in
Remembering Ten Years of Zapatismo
, a documentary produced by the Chiapas Independent Media Center and Free Speech Radio News. “We are talking about a group of four or five, six people that repeated to themselves every day ‘this is the right thing to do,’ ‘the right thing to do.’ There was nothing in the world telling us this was the right thing to do. We were dreaming that someday all of this would be worth something.” 15
    Early on January 1, 1994, armed rebels took over five major towns in Chiapas. It was the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect. The EZLN announced that it no longer recognized the legitimacy of the Mexican government. In denouncing NAFTA as a new vehicle to widen the inequality between the global poor and the rich, the EZLN showed an understanding of free trade agreements that many in the United States lacked. It said it had resorted to violence because peaceful means of protest had failed. The Mexican government, alarmed and surprised, sent several thousand members of the military and police to Chiapas to crush