Zapatistas & revolutionary romance

I’ve been uploading a large selection of the images I took at the Zapatista encounter in Chiapas in 1996 to my Facebook this week in parallel with posting the articles and talks I wrote on the Zapatista’s from 2004 to 2006 to my archive on this site. It’s been a pretty intense trip down memory lane, some of which I share here.

From late 1994 on there was a small but very active ‘Irish Mexico Group’ in Dublin which kept up some level of activity until the end of the decade and which for a period of 2-3 years ran a dedicated peace camp in the Zapatista community of Diez de Abril, established on a ranch occupied in the aftermath of the rebellion. Probably something in the region of 100 people travelled to Chiapas with the IMG over those years, some for a matter of days, others have never really left. I made two trips over, the first for the ‘First encounter for humanity and against neoliberalism‘ in the late summer of 1996, the second around the same time the following year when we brought a delegation to Diez as part of the process of writing a report on Zapatista decision making. Recently I created a PDF pamphlet of this report and an update I prepared in the Autumn of 2005 after the 6th declaration had been released.

It’s interesting looking through the earliest writings and talks I did on the Zapatistas in the spring of 2004 as really they are not that bad considering my very limited access to information at that time. A big help though was the interviews published soon after the rebellion that had been conducted by Amor y Rabia, the Mexican sister group of the US organisation Love & Rage. On my return in 1997, as well as writing that report, I used the findings to publish articles in a number of anarchist publications, including Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, arguing the case for more of an engagement with the Zapatistas.

In 1997 the IMG handled a good chunk of the English language organisation of the ‘Second encounter for Humanity & Against Neo-liberalism’ which took place in the Spanish state. Somewhat earlier I had done a talk for the WSM on the ‘Zapatista contribution to the new oppositon‘ which in a minor way foreshadows the Seattle wave. Indeed at the successful Prague summit protest that closed down the IMF/World bank conference in 2000 I ran into several people I had last seen in the jungles of Chiapas or in the cities of the Spanish state.

The Zapatista rebellion continues even if it has been sucessfully contained for now by the Mexican government. The last articles I wrote on it reflected on where it stood after 11 years or resistance and on the new direction it took in that year. I have to confess I’ve lost track of developments of late, I think like many because I took the 1994 slogan of ‘Be a Zapatista where ever you are’ seriously. I do feel that given a little time I should return once more to write on the events of the last four years.

As to the romance? Well the events I describe catch up many of the most romantic moments of my life so far. The romance inevitably associated in the mind of a western leftist with guerrilla warfare and peasant land occupations. The decision to go to Chiapas in 1996 was one narrowly made, one of a number of points in my life where two roads diverged with possibly very different lives lying down each fork. I remember at the end of the first enounter a three hour trip standing packed in the back of a truck over treacherous mud roads switching back and forth through mountain jungle. I remember hiding behind a roadside shack, listening to the engines of vehicles climbing the hill beyond so we could hail the local chicken bus without being spotted by passing army or migration police patrols. After seeing Land & Freedom I regret not taking back a small sample of the free soil of Diez de Abril.

But also that other meaning of romance, a life of activism has meant that as often as not my lovers have been my comrades. The romance of the first encounters of a new love on a long, long overnight train journey from the north east of the Spanish state to the distant south. An encounter that was to built in a hotel in Madrid across the road from Atocha and Picasso’s Guernica, and rekindled in San Christobal posada as the fireworks went off for independence day. And then for one last time on a trip to Belfast & Derry during the period of fear after Billy Wright was assassinated by the INLA in the Maze prison. I remember an argument about republican murals in a sitting room off the Falls that night, sitting on the floor in order to be below the bullet line of a random drive by. And a much more dangerous encounter the following morning during a foolish trip to the gates between the Falls and Shankill. As has happened since that love fizzled out, defeated by vast distances, but I kept the memories and lessons learned.

Life plays some strange tricks on you as what seems certain fades and evaporates away. In the last year I have been to a very dark place, dark enough that in the countless hours spent travelling between unknown cities on Greyhound the option of simply vanishing crossed my mind more than once. It is inevitable that a darkness so deep causes you to think about your life to date, to wonder about every path not taken and if perhaps the wrong choice was made. At times like that I remember a line from Ridly Scott’s Bladerunner and I know I am not the only revolutionary to fall back on this scene. As he dies the replicant Roy Batty says to Deckard that "I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." Overly dramatic for sure but while the road not travelled may have proved easier I think there is much that I have seen and done that I would not trade, even if such a trade were possible.

WORDS Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter )

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