Fences and Windows (23 page)

The Zapatistas staged an open insurrection, one that anyone could join, as long as they thought of themselves as outsiders, the shadow majority. By conservative estimates, there are now forty-five thousand Zapatista-related Web sites, based in twenty-six countries. Marcos’s communiqués are available in at least fourteen languages. And then there is the Zapatista cottage industry: black T-shirts with red five-pointed stars, white T-shirts with EZLN printed in black. There are baseball hats, black EZLN ski masks, Mayan-made dolls and trucks. There are posters, including one of Comandante Ramona, the much loved EZLN matriarch, as the
Mona Lisa
.

And the Zapatista effect goes far beyond traditional solidarity support. Many who attended the first
encuentros
went on to play key roles in the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and the World Bank and IMF in Washington, D.C., arriving with a new taste for direct action, for collective decision making and decentralized organizing. When the insurrection began, the Mexican military was convinced it would be able to squash the Zapatistas’ jungle uprising like a bug. It sent in heavy artillery, conducted air raids, mobilized thousands of soldiers. But instead of standing on a squashed bug, the government found itself surrounded by a swarm of international activists, buzzing around Chiapas. In the study commissioned by the U.S. military from the RAND Corporation, the EZLN is studied as “a new mode of conflict—’netwar’— in which the protagonists depend on using network forms
of organization, doctrine, strategy and technology.”

The ring around the rebels has not protected the Zapatistas entirely. In December 1997, there was the brutal massacre at Acteal in which forty-five Zapatista supporters praying at a church were killed, most of them women and children. And the situation in Chiapas is still desperate, with thousands displaced from their homes. But it is also true that the situation would probably have been much worse, potentially with far greater intervention from the U.S. military, had it not been for international pressure. The RAND Corporation study states that the global activist attention arrived “during a period when the United States may have been tacitly interested in seeing a forceful crackdown on the rebels.”

So it’s worth asking what are the ideas that proved so powerful that thousands have taken it on themselves to disseminate them around the world? They have to do with power—and new ways of imagining it. For instance, a few years ago, the idea of the rebels travelling to Mexico City to address the Congress would have been impossible to contemplate. Masked guerrillas entering a hall of political power signals one thing: revolution. But Zapatistas aren’t interested in overthrowing the state or naming their leader as president. If anything, they want less state power over their lives. And, besides, Marcos says that as soon as peace has been negotiated, he will take off his mask and disappear.
[When the Zapatistas finally did address the Congress, Marcos stayed outside.]

What does it mean to be a revolutionary who is not trying
to stage a revolution? This is one of the key Zapatista paradoxes. In one of his many communiqués, Marcos writes that “it is not necessary to conquer the world. It is sufficient to make it new.” He adds, “Us. Today.” What sets the Zapatistas apart from your average Marxist guerrilla insurgents is that their goal is not to win control but to seize and build autonomous spaces where “democracy, liberty and justice” can thrive.

Although the Zapatistas have articulated certain key goals of their resistance (control over land, direct political representation and the right to protect their language and culture), they insist they are not interested in “the Revolution,” but rather in “a revolution that makes revolution possible.”

Marcos believes that what he has learned in Chiapas about non-hierarchical decision making, decentralized organizing and deep community democracy holds answers for the non-indigenous world as well—if only it were willing to listen. This is a kind of organizing that doesn’t compartmentalize the community into workers, warriors, farmers and students but instead seeks to organize communities as a whole, across sectors and across generations, creating “social movements.” For the Zapatistas, these autonomous zones aren’t about isolationism or dropping out, sixties-style. Quite the opposite: Marcos is convinced that these free spaces, born of reclaimed land, communal agriculture, resistance to privatization, will eventually create counter-powers to the state simply by existing as alternatives.

This is the essence of Zapatismo, and explains much of its
appeal: a global call to revolution that tells you not to wait for the revolution, only to start where you stand, to fight with your own weapon. It could be a video camera, words, ideas, “hope”—all these, Marcos has written, “are also weapons.” It’s a revolution in miniature that says, “Yes, you can try this at home.” This organizing model has spread throughout Latin America and the world. You can see it in the
centri sociali
(social centres), the anarchist squats of Italy; in the Landless Peasants’ Movement of Brazil, which seizes tracts of unused farmland and uses them for sustainable agriculture, markets and schools under the slogan
Ocupar, Resistir, Producir
(Occupy, Resist, Produce). These same ideas about mobilizing the economically disappeared run through Argentina’s Piquetero movement, organizations of unemployed workers whose hunger has driven them to find new ways of winning concessions from the state. In a reversal of the traditional picket line (you can’t shut down factories that are already closed), the Piqueteros block roadways into the cities, often for weeks at a time, stopping traffic and the transportation of goods. Politicians are forced to come to the road pickets and negotiate, and the Piqueteros regularly win basic unemployment compensation for their members. Argentina’s Piqueteros (who often can be seen sporting EZLN T-shirts) believe that in a country with 30 percent of the population out of work, unions have to start organizing whole communities, not just workers. “The new factory is the neighbourhood,” says Piquetero leader Luis D’Elia. And the Zapatista ethos was forcefully expressed by the students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico during last
year’s long and militant occupation of their campus. Zapata once said the land belongs to those who work it; their banners blared, “WE SAY THAT THE UNIVERSITY BELONGS TO THOSE WHO STUDY IN IT.”

Zapatismo, according to Marcos, is not a doctrine but “an intuition.” And he is consciously trying to appeal to something that exists outside the intellect, something uncynical in us, that he found in himself in the mountains of Chiapas: wonder, a suspension of disbelief, plus myth and magic. So, instead of issuing manifestos, he tries to riff his way into this place, with long meditations, flights of fancy, dreaming out loud. This is, in a way, a kind of intellectual guerrilla warfare: Marcos won’t meet his opponents on their terms, he changes the topic of conversation.

Which is why, when I arrived in Mexico for March 11, I saw something different from the big history moment I had imagined when I first got that e-mail. When the Zapatistas entered the Zócalo, the piazza in front of the legislature, with 200,000 people cheering them on, history was certainly being made, but it was a smaller, lower-case, humbler kind of history than you see in those black-and-white newsreels. A history that says, “I can’t make your history for you. But I can tell you that history is yours to make.”

The Zapatistas’ most enthusiastic supporters that day seemed to be middle-aged women—the demographic that Americans like to call “soccer moms.” They greeted the revolutionaries with chants of “You are not alone!” Some were on break from their jobs at fast-food outlets, still dressed in matching striped uniforms.

From afar, the popularity of the Zapatistas—the forty varieties of T-shirts, posters, flags and dolls—may look like mass marketing, the radical chic “branding” of an ancient culture. Yet up close, it feels like something else: genuine, anachronistic folklore. The Zapatistas have got their message out not through advertising or sound bites but through stories and symbols, painted by hand on walls, passed through word of mouth. The Internet, which mimics these organic networks, simply took this folklore and spread it around the world.

As I listened to Marcos address the crowds in Mexico City, I was struck that he didn’t sound like a politician at a rally or a preacher at a pulpit, he sounded like a poet—at the world’s largest poetry reading. And it occurred to me then that Marcos actually isn’t Martin Luther King Jr.; he is King’s very modern progeny, born of a bittersweet marriage of vision and necessity. This masked man who calls himself Marcos is the descendant of King, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Emiliano Zapata and all the other heroes who preached from pulpits only to be shot down one by one, leaving bodies of followers wandering around blind and disoriented because they had lost their heads. And in their place, the world has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than he speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn’t show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas we have not one dream of a revolution but a dreaming revolution. “This is our dream,” writes Marcos, “the Zapatista paradox—one that takes away sleep. The only dream that is dreamed awake, sleepless. The history that is born and nurtured from below.”

June 2001

A woman with long brown hair and a cigarette-scratched voice has a question. “What does this place look like to you?” she asks, with the help of an interpreter. “An ugly ghetto or something maybe beautiful?”

It was a trick question. We were sitting in a ramshackle squat in one of the least picturesque suburbs of Rome. The walls of the stumpy building were covered in graffiti, the ground was muddy and all around us were bulky, menacing housing projects. If any of the twenty million tourists who flocked to Rome last year had taken a wrong turn and ended up here, they would have dived for their Fodor’s and fled in search of any edifice with vaulted ceilings, fountains and frescoes. But while the remains of one of the most powerful, centralized empires in history are impeccably preserved in downtown Rome, it is here, in the city’s poor outskirts, that you can catch a glimpse of a new, living politics.

The squat in question is called Corto Ciccuito, one of Italy’s many
centri sociali
. Social centres are abandoned buildings—warehouses, factories, military forts, schools— that have been occupied by squatters and transformed into cultural and political hubs, explicitly free from both the
market and state control. By some estimates, there are 150 social centres in Italy.

The largest and oldest—Leoncavallo in Milan—is practically a self-contained city, with several restaurants, gardens, a bookstore, a cinema, an indoor skateboard ramp and a club so large it was able to host Public Enemy when the rap group came to town. These are scarce bohemian spaces in a rapidly gentrifying world, a fact that prompted the French newspaper
Le Monde
to describe them as “the Italian cultural jewel.”

But the social centres are more than the best place to be on a Saturday night. They are also ground zero of a growing political militancy in Italy. In the centres, culture and politics mix easily together: a debate about direct action turns into a huge outdoor party, a rave takes place next door to a meeting about unionizing fast-food workers.

In Italy, this culture developed out of necessity. With politicians on both the left and right mired in corruption scandals, large numbers of Italian youths have understandably concluded that it is power itself that corrupts. The social centre network is a parallel political sphere that, rather than trying to gain state power, provides alternative state services—such as daycare and advocacy for refugees—at the same time as it confronts the state through direct action.

For instance, on the night I spent at Rome’s Corto Ciccuito, the communal dinner of lasagne and caprese salad received a particularly enthusiastic reception because it was prepared by a chef who had just been released from jail after his arrest at an anti-fascist rally. And at Milan’s Leoncavallo
centre the day before, I stumbled across several members of the Tute Bianche (white overalls) poring over digital maps of Genoa in preparation for the July 2001 G8 meeting: the direct-action group, named after the uniform its members wear to protests, had just issued a “declaration of war” on the meeting in Genoa.

But such declarations aren’t the most shocking things going on at the social centres. Far more surprising is the fact that these anti-authoritarian militants, defined by their rejection of party politics, have begun running for office—and winning. In Venice, Rome and Milan, prominent social centre activists, including Tute Bianche leaders, are now city councillors.

With Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing Forza Italia in office, they need to protect themselves from those who would shut down the centres. But Beppe Caccia, a Tute Bianche member and a Venetian city councillor, also says the move into municipal politics is a natural evolution of social centre theory. The nation-state is in crisis, he argues, weakened in the face of global powers and corrupt in the face of corporate ones. Meanwhile, in Italy, as in other industrialized countries, strong regional sentiments for greater decentralization have been seized by the right. In this climate, Caccia proposes a two-pronged strategy of confronting unaccountable, unrepresentative powers at the global level (for example, at the G8) while simultaneously rebuilding a more accountable and participatory politics locally (where the social centre meets the city council).

Which brings me back to the question posed in the
suburbs of Rome’s mummified empire. Though it may be hard to tell at first, the social centres aren’t ghettos, they are windows—not only into another way to live, disengaged from the state, but also into a new politics of engagement. And, yes, it’s something maybe beautiful.