Sergio Pitol - The Art of Flight

8 JANUARY

The fighting continues, and there were some terrorist acts in different parts of the country. No significant damage. Instead, they seemed intent on showing that danger lurks everywhere all the time. The television reports produced by the government, as usual, are very clumsy; they’re attempting to deny the main problem: the extreme poverty and contempt to which the indigenous population has been subjected. How did the government not know that something on this scale was going on? Army shelling continues near San Cristóbal in areas largely populated by Indians. There are constant marches for peace and for cessation of the shelling in Mexico City. I ask myself again: Did the army not notice anything during the year that, according to the Interior Secretariat, the preparations were underway? Or the secret service of the various police forces? Or the much-trumpeted military intelligence? Was the information intercepted, or was it received and then dismissed because of the leadership’s eagerness to reach the inflationary target? I stood in a long line at a newsstand today to buy La Jornada and El Financiero . I wasn’t able to work this weekend.

11 JANUARY

So far this month my life has been a bundle of nerves. A friend from Mexico City just called me. She was hysterical, bordering on delirious. There was something truly irrational about her excitement. The revolution was beginning to save the country from its sins and would deliver it from the many evils that afflict it! She spoke as if the guerrillas had already taken the National Palace. When I hung up the phone, I felt compelled to examine my conscience. I continue to be encouraged by the revolutionary uprising in Chiapas because it lays bare the official lie that had been nagging at me and many others. But that feeling of encouragement goes away as I think about the victims who will die: Indians and Indian children, whose constant presence on television has begun to haunt me, as well as the fear that the country is going to hell, terrorized by a group that could well prove to be (we know nothing about its leader or its members) a variation of the Shining Path. A unilateral ceasefire was declared yesterday. I was relieved to hear that Camacho Solís had agreed to attempt to broker a peace settlement. If he is successful, he will become a giant. A giant in a world of midgets who govern our country. My hate, my contempt for the whole lot of arrogant scum who have constantly boasted of their so-called macroeconomic successes, has grown more intense and more radical. What an immense waste of money and effort on that solemn buffoonery that was Solidarity, for example! Today we saw a new image of Salinas on television. He no longer looks like the President of the Century but a tiny man with shifty eyes and a look of defeat: the man who for five years has misled the nation and deluded himself into believing that he was Caesar is forced — by grace of a group of Indians whose miserable existence he denied — to look into a mirror that reflects his true dimensions. I’m reminded of Tosca’s words as she stands over Scarpia’s corpse: “ E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma !” All Rome trembled before him! The only thing we can hope for is that these ten ultra-enigmatic days we have lived not be forgotten, that they serve as a lesson, that they initiate a period of national reflection, that our leaders wake up to reality, that they realize how far we are, because of them, from the First World in which they believed they were already living.

13 JANUARY

Today in La Jornada there appeared an open letter explaining the Jesuits’ position on the Chiapas conflict. I find it surprising. Among other things, it says:

Violence that causes loss of human life goes against the will of the God in whom we believe. However, violence in Chiapas did not begin with the armed uprising on the first day of last January. A secular history of plunder, abuses, marginalization, and murders has made victims of the poor inhabitants of that state, particularly the indigenous. This is, perhaps, the origin of the indigenous groups’ desperation that manifests itself now in armed counter-violence. So our rejection of violence, if it is to be just, must tend to its roots. The first and fundamental violence to be condemned is the structural-social-economic-political-cultural violence of which the ethnic groups and popular sectors of Chiapas and much of the national territory have been victims. Not to acknowledge this would be to avoid the state of things that have led to the current confrontation.

And later:

We believe that the events in Chiapas are a wakeup call for the entire national consciousness and an invitation to reflect on the risks of continuing a modernizing policy that benefits the ruling elite while marginalizing the country’s popular majorities. They are also a call for the government to take seriously the path to democracy.

Let us therefore acknowledge that the problem is essentially social and political, although it has now been expressed through violence due to the absence of legal channels. For this reason, a military solution would leave untouched the root causes and not lay the foundations for progress toward an enduring harmony and peace in that state. Paths of dialogue and of real agreement on acceptable terms for the parties involved must be opened.

And it concluded:

Consistent with the above, we demand that:

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE REPUBLIC, in accordance with the political measures recently taken, establish an immediate ceasefire and lift the de facto state of siege that it has imposed on some two thousand indigenous communities of Chiapas.

We believe that at this time a political will is urgently needed to initiate means by which to place the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) in the hands of the civil society.

THE ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION take a clear and flexible position in favor of a dialogue of reconciliation with the aim of achieving the necessary changes that led it to the decision to take up arms.

ALL BELIEVERS, as part of the Church in Mexico, undertake the self-examination necessary to be more attentive to the suffering of our people, to be companions to them and find, with them, effective paths to achieve the justice they deserve as children of God.

ALL MEXICANS open their consciousness to overcoming the racism within us and accept the indigenous as brothers, children of the same Father, and as members of the national community, with equal dignity and rights.

SIGNED: José Morales Orozco, S. J. Provincial

This is perhaps the most surprising and most serious thing published during these hysteria-filled days: the violence was not committed by insurrectionary indigenous peoples, rather by those who have exploited them for five hundred years. Right, then, is on the side of the indigenous groups, whom despair has compelled to manifest themselves in armed counter-violence. The letter serves as a brake on the unbridled racism that has begun to spread. Recently, one hears unbelievable things said against the Indians; sometimes the most violent are spoken by people whose faces are marked with indigenous features. They are relentless. They advocate for extermination. I suppose they believe at that moment their listeners are seeing them in a different light: blue eyes and Viking hair.

15 JANUARY

In Cuernavaca, at the home of an industrialist friend and former classmate at university. For a while we talked about nothing in particular until someone mentioned the name of the president. My host almost jumped out of his chair. He got up from the table and began to pace the room, violently cursing him. He spoke of the murder of his servant, the slaughter of his mares, of his obsession with power, of his arrogance, and the problems of misgovernment we owe to him… I was dumbfounded. So the hatred toward him and the current group in power has taken root in the different strata of society! In some cases, and this may be one of them, it’s probably a matter of interests…