The latest work by the Mexican reporter, with which he won the Anagrama/Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation Award, has as its central theme the EZLN’s voyage
The journey that the reader will take starts with a trip organized by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) across the Atlantic Ocean in the midst of the pandemic.
The invitation to board a boat to document a new feat of the indigenous Maya peoples who took up arms in 1994 triggered a series of questions about the dark and clear reality that I have had to report on in Mexico.
Hence, the port of departure for this book is covered in shadows, among which I try to look at the way in which the national political class took advantage of a supposed war against drugs, driven by the neoliberal logic that was established from the Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada, to obtain power by enveloping in death a country bloodier than any Latin American dictatorship of the last century.
We, the generation that was marked by the hope radiated by the Zapatista insurrection of the nineties, are thus trapped in a fog that we have not yet been able to dispel.
On the second stop of the trip I try to immerse myself in the history of the armed uprising and in some of the experiences of organization and resistance launched later by the Zapatista communities, through interviews with Subcommanders Galeano and Moisés, spokesmen and military chiefs of the indigenous army.
So the trip thus leads to a choral account by the civilian delegates of Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Chol and Tojolabal origin designated by their rebel peoples to sail towards Slumil K’ajxemk’op, which is intertwined in a spiral with other voices of sailors and stowaways to search for collective lights of a struggle in constant metamorphosis, committed to defending life in the mountains of Chiapas and in seas of the world that are unknown to them.
Welcome aboard.
1. PORT OF DEPARTURE: SHADOWS
Asleep in the ship’s hold, the books wake up with the swaying of the rising waves. Protected by wet steel, next to notebooks that record the voices of this strange odyssey, they offer an indecipherable spectacle as the ship crosses increasingly murky waters.
Suddenly they rebel against gravity. They open their pages until they reach the posture of a bat ready to fly over the dawn, ready to recover their former mysterious condition, eager to spread a vibrant literatosis, the only possible escape from the experiment on board.
The sailing boat is transformed into a minimalist and secret library, where there are no cats or booksellers or silence or desert, but rather a vertigo of memory that calms the anxiety and restlessness of the sea. As I write this, a new wave, larger than the previous one, hits the starboard and sets off the alarm outside, among the guard who watches the course of things. (I don’t hear the alarm, but I can imagine it, since that’s what I do, too.)
Crammed into the bunk, my spine vibrates to the rhythm of the sails aft. I miss the calm of the earth. It seems like chaos, but it’s not chaos.
This is what happens when a mountain decides to cross the sea. The books don’t understand it yet and fall into the hold; among cans with provisions of Chinese rice, beanballs and chili piquín, they come and go, they learn to play in the midst of the havoc, they let themselves be carried away by circumstances, they give up being what they are to live in vain inertia.
I don’t know how to react. I hesitate between going to save them and put them in the same space where they were, or put them in the backpack where the notebooks are, in case a bigger wave comes.
Time passes. My watch stopped a long time ago. I should rest before the new tasks, but I feel that I must leave the hold now to go and support the others, at least with my presence, in this adventure in which these rebellious books travel, sensing that their swaying contains the only meaning of any journey: exploring limits.
NORTH
You land. Although you pretend to be calm, your pulse is racing. There is a real chance of meeting Ismael Zambada, the oldest mafia boss in Mexico, who continues to operate underground somewhere in the north of the country under the nickname Mayo, alluding to a second name, Mario, by which no one knows him.
You receive the invitation while investigating the unstoppable violence that has led Mexican democracy in the 21st century to record more acts of torture, disappearances and executions than any Latin American dictatorship in the 20th century.
After several months of conversations, the time has come to travel to meet a drug lord with some kind of special power, which allows him to have been in the illegal drug business for more than fifty years without ever having set foot in jail.
Something you are interested in understanding is the keys to the barbarity unleashed in the midst of the social and political crisis of 2006, when the newly installed president, Felipe Calderón, declared a supposed war against drugs that filled dozens of towns and cities with blood and pain, turning them into graveyard.
You are worried about the logistics of the trip, but it is clear that, once the invitation is confirmed, you will go to the appointment: as other times, intuition prevails, a certain duty to seek out important silences in the midst of noise. You invoke Julio Scherer García, a benchmark of Mexican journalism, who, at eighty-four years old and despite official harassment, managed to meet clandestinely in 2010 with Mayo.
Eleven years later, in the pandemic spring of 2021, although you are agnostic, you want to believe that Saint Julio Scherer accompanies you on the uncertain path ahead.
SOUTH
The story of the navigating mountain also began in the pandemic spring of 2021, when I received a phone message from a member of the liaison team of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), the guerrilla group made up of thousands of indigenous people of Maya descent, who took up arms on January 1st, 1994 in Chiapas and altered the consciousness of the reality of a Mexico that was preparing to celebrate that day the arrival of the American dream, with the entry into force of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Canada and the United States.
Months before receiving that SMS, I had expressed to the EZLN command my interest in documenting how, almost thirty years after their uprising, they continued to expand their presence in the mountains of the south of the country despite the military siege against them, the widespread violence and the withdrawal of support from many former urban sympathizers, who now gave it to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a nationalist leader who had managed to win the presidency of the Republic in his third attempt.
With an iron will and creative resistance, the Zapatistas had managed to maintain a government outside the official and de facto powers that governed the rest of the country. In 2018 they had gone from having five to twelve Caracoles, the name given to the regional headquarters of their autonomous system of government.
The Zapatista expansion of their spaces for collective organization had gone unnoticed by the major media outlets and social networks, focused on the electoral frenzy and the rise to power of López Obrador.
Then, the pandemic made its appearance and, faced with the global confusion – and my personal disorientation – I longed even more to go to the Zapatista communities to report on their active process of land recovery and understand the way they were facing the health emergency.
That day I received the text message, I thought the communication had something to do with those requests I had made months before. Minutes later another message arrived asking me to be available to receive a call in which I would be told something important.
We had planned to go out in the afternoon to spend the weekend with the family at a nearby beach. I said that we would have to wait a while, so my partner and children went out for a walk while I received the call from Chiapas.
The phone rang at the indicated time. On the other end was a Zapatista spokesperson who, after greeting me, asked point-blank what plans I had for the upcoming months of April, May and June. I replied that, among other tasks, I would be working on a documentary about a 1950s assassin in Monterrey who had inspired the creation of the famous villain Hannibal Lecter.
My interlocutor jokingly commented that I would have to change plans. He reported that an EZLN delegation would take a boat trip to begin a journey across the five continents over the next few years. His words surprised me. Through communiqués, the Zapatistas had announced that they would sail the seas of the world in search of other horizons, without specifying when or how they would carry out an action that, until the moment of the call, seemed to me to be more of a literary than literal announcement.
I listened to the logistical details until I got to what seemed to be the main point of the conversation: the rebel peoples had decided that, on board the seamount they were going to send, an external witness would travel who could leave a record of the historical event.
They thought that this “other” on board could be me. It took me seconds to process the invitation, stammering phonemes and onomatopoeias of gratitude, and then excitedly accepted, although I noticed that I was in poor physical condition and, to top it off, I didn’t know how to swim. My interlocutor responded that some of the Zapatista envoys had never even seen the sea.
It was explained to me that I would have total freedom to narrate what I experienced on the trip. I was only asked that, in the images I captured, I should only try to ensure that the Zapatista travelers appeared with their faces covered by the balaclavas that symbolized their struggle or the face masks now in vogue.
Not as a request, but as a specific, non-negotiable requirement, I was informed that each member of my family had to authorize the climb to the mountain through letters addressed to the organization, in which they had to give the corresponding permission.
When I finished the call, a strange happiness mixed with fear came and went inside me. My family returned from their wanderings, waiting for news from Chiapas. They estimated that the trip to the beach was at risk of being cancelled because I would have to unexpectedly leave to cover or film something.
I told them we could leave as soon as they were ready, and I would tell them the news later. I hardly spoke during the hour-long drive, which I spent listening to Juan Cirerol’s music with my gaze fixed on the volcanic gravel of the road. Images and emotions ran through my head, ranging from storms, dizziness and giant waves to nerves, joy and anguish. I wanted to sort out this intimate soliloquy a bit before telling them what had just happened.
Once on the beach, after settling in, we went out for a walk. The sea was rough the afternoon I told them about the Zapatista invitation to cross the Atlantic on a mountain.
I told them that we could leave as soon as they were ready, and I would tell them the news later. I hardly spoke during the hour we traveled, which I spent listening to Juan Cirerol’s music with my gaze fixed on the volcanic gravel of the beach.
(********)
NORTH
After landing, you wait for instructions. Discretion prevails. They move you from one point to another, and then from that other point to another until you reach a place where you wait longer, while you deal with the uncertainty in that place that feels as lonely as the sea.
Night falls and you are moved to an open space to wait for what seems to be the final signal. Two hours pass in this way, in intense stillness, with the vehicle’s engine always on, until they return to one of the points they had visited before. The signal sent indicates to wait. As Lenin said, trust is good, but control is better: that night they will not leave for the final meeting place.
Another night without sleep.
While awake, you believe that at any moment in the morning the signal may arrive and they will leave immediately from there to who knows where. That is why you go to bed with your boots on. You don’t sleep because you think about stupid things like whether or not you should wear a mask during the meeting, and you check again which topics are worth prioritizing in the half hour that, you have been warned, the meeting will last.
You don’t know why, but Wim Wenders’ ‘’Wings of Desire’’ comes to mind. You are comforted that it has broken into your agitated stream of consciousness. Specifically, you remember the scene in which the angel Homer wanders with a soliloquy: “My heroes are no longer warriors and kings, but the things of peace… But no one has yet managed to sing an epic of peace. What is wrong with peace, that its inspiration does not last? What is wrong with it, that its story is barely told?”
The next morning, you remain alert, but also waiting. You spend it trying to read an essay by Houellebecq on Lovecraft without achieving the necessary concentration. It’s obvious that life has no meaning, but neither does death: it’s the only phrase you remember.
In the afternoon you receive a new signal to be alert. Minutes later a convoy arrives for you and takes you at full speed, changing vehicles on several occasions until arriving at some completely unknown place in the middle of the mountain, in the middle of nowhere.
Reality is also something you feel. Your complex of a journalist who wanted to be a poet tends to surface at extreme moments. Although you are not sure that you are getting close to the truth, there is an intense sensation that runs through your body and makes you feel that what you are experiencing is something REAL.
Original article by Diego Enrique Osorno, El País, November 9th, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.