issue #02 pdf - Razorcake

THE WAR AGAINST OBLIVION:
THE ZAPATISTA CHRONICLES
John Ross, paperback, 350 pgs.
"This war is always a matter of the corn patch
vs the World Bank, the hoe against the stock
market, the poorly armed guerrilla band against
a military armed to the teeth by the Pentagon,
the village against the World Trade
Organization, the smallest of the small against
the Fortune 500, the local against the global, the
many against the few…"
-John Ross
Every now and then, I read a book, and I
enjoy it so much and feel it is so important that
I wish I could convince everyone to read it. I
felt that way with Emma Goldman's autobiography
of anarchy and resistance, Living My Life. I
felt that way about Philip Gourevitch's narrative
about the Rwanda Genocide, We Wish to Inform
You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our
Families. And, right in between those two,
sharing Goldman's spirit and fight and
Gourevitch's ability to balance the tragic and
absurd, is John Ross's chronicle of the situation
in Chiapas, Mexico, The War Against
Oblivion. First, a bit of history for the uninformed.
On January 1, 1994, the first day that
the North American Free Trade Agreement
was in effect, the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN) marched into
San Cristobal and five other municipal seats
in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas
and declared war on the Mexican government.
The military presence in San
Cristobal was minimal. Most of the soldiers
had been given leave for the
86
holidays. The rebels quickly took control
of the town and issued the First
Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, a
document explaining the rebels' position.
Essentially, the EZLN were fighting
for indigenous rights in Mexico.
Specifically, they took issue with the
Mexican government's re-writing of
Article 27. Article 27 was one of the
most important results of the Mexican
revolution, pushed by Emiliano Zapata
to give communal lands to the Indians in
Mexico. Carlos Salinas, then-president
of Mexico, essentially took away those
communal lands and offered them up to
big businesses "to buy, rent, or enter into
association" with. The re-writing of
Article 27 was one of the conditions of
NAFTA.
Delivering the First Declaration of
the Lacandon Jungle was
Subcommandante Marcos, an eloquent,
ski-masked mestizo (a person of mixed
blood, not indigenous to Chiapas). The
press immediately latched on to Marcos
as the commander of the EZLN. But no,
Marcos assured everyone, he was not in
charge. He simply spoke for the Indians
from whom NAFTA had stolen land.
Rebels in the five other cities didn't
fare quite so well. The Mexican Army
rallied pretty quickly, and for the next
twelve days, a shooting war broke out.
On January 12, 1994, Carlos Salinas
declared a cease fire. What followed
has been six years of low intensity warfare:
a series of negotiations between the
EZLN and the Mexican government; the formation
of paramilitary groups (otherwise known as
Mexican and US armed death squads); the formation
of guerrilla armies; the massacres and
rapes of random civilians and farmers; sporadic
battles for land; increased military presence;
agreements made and broken; and basically the
Mexican government following the example
that the US government set in the Indian
Wars last century. This is the subject
of The War Against Oblivion.
Prior to reading The War Against
Oblivion, I didn't know too much about
the situation in Chiapas. I knew that there
had been a short shooting war. I knew
that people were starving. I knew that
different educational groups had been
soliciting money for schools in Chiapas.
I noticed a lot of references to Chiapas in
reports of protests of the WTO in Seattle and the
World Bank/IMF in DC. I'd read a handful of
articles in both mainstream and leftist magazines,
and most of the articles I read had that
Sally Struthers, these-children-are-starving,won't-you-please-help
kind of tone. Or else they
had the one-dimensional, hysterically politically
correct tone. I'd meant to inform myself
more on the subject, but I'm probably like most
people in the sense that I can only take so much
of that. I guess I have a finite amount of empathy
and articles that take dramatic or horrific
events and just hit you over the head with them
overwhelm me.
That said, John Ross does a fantastic job of
transmitting a dazzling amount of information
on the Zapatistas and the general political climate
of Mexico. He lets the drama stand for
itself and covers the low intensity warfare with
a subtle but stinging wit. John Ross basically
sounds like your favorite political science professor
after he's had a few beers and decided not
to hold his tongue.
Of course, The War Against Oblivion is not
an objective book at all. Ross is an unapologetic
supporter of the Zapatistas as well as a
vicious critic of the Mexican government, the
PRI (the ruling political party in Mexico), Bill
Clinton, NAFTA, the World Trade
Organization, the World Bank/ International
Monetary Fund, and big business in general.
Ross's subjectivity doesn't bother me at all,
though, because nothing is objective. The
mainstream American press wasn't objective
when it chose to ignore guerilla warfare in
Mexico prior to the signing of NAFTA (a choice
which, incidentally may have lead to the passing
of NAFTA). The mainstream American
press isn't objective when it chooses to ignore
the fact that our neighbors to the south have
been actively engaged in a revolution for the
past seven and a half years. And the mainstream
American press certainly isn't being
objective when it chooses to ignore the fact that
most of the Indians being shot in Chiapas
are standing on US oil and are being
shot with US bullets coming out of US
guns by soldiers led by US trainedcommanders
who drive US trucks
to their US helicopters. Ross, on
the other hand, wears his point
of view like a press pass, yet
rather than choosing to