From On the plain of snakes (Paul Theroux, 2019) pp406-10
A few days before his speech, Marcos had given an interview to the French paper Le Monde, “This is not Marcos’s march nor the EZLN’s,” he said, ‘It is the march of the poor, the march of all the Indian peoples. It’s intended to show that the days of fear are over.” It was an ethnic rebellion, he said, “Of all the people in Mexico, the Indians are the most forgotten.”
Marcos became a familiar voice, if not a familiar face. His favorite authors, he said, were Cervantes, Lewis Carroll, Garcia Marquez, Brecht, Borges, Garcia Lorca, and Shakespeare. Hamlet and Macbeth, he added, were essential studies in power. He was not interested in maintaining control as an army, explaining, “The military man is an absurdity, because he must always rely on a weapon to be able to convince others that his ideas are the ones that should be followed.” He went on, “Our movement has no future if it is military. If the EZLN perpetuates itself as a military organization it is bound to fail.”
As for his mask: “It’s about being anonymous, not because we fear for ourselves but rather so they cannot corrupt us.” He also said, “We are the Zapatistas, the smallest of the small, those who cover their faces to be seen, the dead that die to live.”
NAFTA, he said, was a tool of the sort of globalization that he characterized as a sinister power grab by international corporations to subvert governments all over the world. “The world’s new masters have no need to govern directly. National governments take on the role of running things on their behalf. This is what the new order means—unification of the world into one single market. States are simply enterprises with managers in the guise of governments, and the new regional alliances bear more of a resemblance to shopping malls than to political federations. The unification produced by neoliberalism is economic: in the giant planetary hypermarket it is only commodities that circulate freely, not people.”
Corporate interests connive with third-world tyrants to supply goods and services and raw materials. The United States and Europe and China everywhere: “the globalization of exploitation.”
It was what I had seen on the border, the clusters of foreign-owned factories, exploiting their workers in distressed communities to save money and increase profits. In a prescient essay, Marcos wrote in 1997, “As a world system, neoliberalism is a new war for the conquest of territory. The ending of the Third World War meaning the Cold War—in no sense means that the world has gone beyond the bi-polar and found stability under the domination of a new victor. Because while there was certainly a defeat (of the socialist camp), it is hard to say who won… The defeat of the ‘evil empire’ has opened up new markets, and the struggle over them is leading to a New World War, the Fourth.”
As Apple Corporation was expanding in China, and Microsoft in India, and textile and appliance companies were setting up factories in Mexico, South Korea, and Thailand, Marcos was writing, “Vast territories, wealth, and above all, a huge and available workforce lie waiting for the world’s new master but, while there is only one position as master available, there are many aspiring candidates.”
In his determination to be independent, and no one’s case or client, Marcos has also railed against the paternalism of many charities and NGOs. In the “Thirteenth Estela,” of the Zapatista Calendar of Resistance, in 2003, he denounced the sort of aid in the form of charity and handouts advocated by celebrities and church groups, and “a more sophisticated handout the practice of some NGOs and international organizations [that] decide what the communities need . . . without even consulting them.” How they “impose not only certain projects but also the times and ways of implementing them. Imagine the exasperation of a community that needs drinking water, and what they get is a library, one that needs a school for children, and gets a course on herbal medicine.”
This clear thinking resonated with me. All my adult life, beginning with my teaching in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, I have tried to understand how to reconcile the nature of poverty, the role of charity, the intervention of aid organizations, and the maneuverings of governments, especially those in the third world. After repeated visits to Africa over fifty years, I concluded that foreign aid as it is conventionally practiced is essentially a failure, futile in relieving poverty, and often harmful, relieving the ills of a few at the expense of the many. Most charities are diabolically self-interested, proselytizing evangelists, tax-avoidance scammers with schemes to buff up the image of the founder—often someone in disgrace or mired in scandal or obscenely rich. Claiming to be apolitical, such charities allow authoritarian governments and kleptocracies to go on existing, because the charities do the governments’ work, and in doing so, prevent oppressed people from understanding how they are being exploited.
The best example I have seen close up is the presence of China in Africa, offering rogue aid to despots in return for valuable commodities. The United States once did this in small and subtle ways; China now does it conspicuously and with impunity. When I took my Africa trips for Dark Star Safari and The Last Train to Zona Verde I saw how with backhanders or huge loans China bought dictatorships in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Sudan, and Angola, in order to obtain ivory, gold, bauxite, oil, and much else, leaving the countries in deep and sometimes unpayable debt—indeed debt slavery. But the United States still does the same in many countries, taking advantage of a government’s indifference to human rights abuses.
This is the reason Apple (dodging taxes, exploiting Chinese workers, pretending to care) is a trillion-dollar company, one of China’s best friends. When someone like Bill Gates or Tim Cook makes noises about helping the poor, while conniving with China to use cheap labor and turning a blind eye to China’s human rights brutalities (a million Uighurs imprisoned to be brainwashed in Xinjiang, the persecution of gay men and women, the suppression of news, and other abuses), you just want to laugh. In the years Bill Clinton sold the American people on NAFTA, he did not say how it would remove manufacturing from communities in the United States (the many instances I recounted in Deep South), nor did he seem to know or care how it would destroy the lives of farmers in Mexico with genetically modified crops, as I heard from Francisco Toledo’s organization in Oaxaca.
It took me years to see that charities and NGOs are profitable businesses, many of them subversive ones. The average Peace Corps volunteer gains greatly in experience by living for two years in, say, an African dictatorship, but the result is demoralizing rather than uplifting for the citizens of the host country: in my experience the Peace Corps volunteers’ students, instead of becoming teachers themselves, immigrate to Europe or the US. Subcomandante Marcos’s term for this seemingly well-intentioned but ultimately self-serving effort is neoliberalism, which in the United States is as rampant among Democrats as Republicans.
Another humane aspect of the Zapatista struggle that has annoyed many other rebel groups is their refusal to engage in the killing of ordinary citizens. Bombings by the Irish Republican Army—cheered and often financed by some Irish Americans-——were condemned by the Zapatistas as savage and inhumane, and of course the targeting of civilians is a grave
breach of the Geneva Conventions, punishable as a war crime. (I recalled that whenever a bomb went off in a market square in Ulster, killing bystanders, either the IRA or the Ulster Defence Association took credit for it and crowed, or said nothing and let the innocent bleed to death.) And the same goes for the brutalities of ISIS and Al Qaeda.
As for Basque separatists and their bombing campaigns in Spain, Marcos wrote in 2002, “We consider the struggle of the Basque people for sovereignty just and legitimate, but neither this noble cause, nor any other, can justify the sacrifice of civilian lives. Not only does it not lead to any political gain, even if it did, the human cost is unpayable. We condemn military actions that hurt civilians. And we condemn them equally, whether they come from ETA [Basque nationalists] or from the Spanish state, from Al Qaeda or George W. Bush, from Israelis or Palestinians, or anyone who under different names or initials, claiming state, ideological or religious reasons, makes victims of children, women, old people and men who have nothing to do with the matter.”
This is the clearest possible statement of the dignity of rebellion and the limits of resistance, a rational way of looking at the world, and a means to go about fixing it: “to build a world in which many worlds fit.” In what has been described as the world’s first postmodern revolution, Marcos’s temperament—and actions — were those of a pacifist. I admired him for valuing the lives of civilians, I identified with him in his passion for writing, I was enlightened by his parables—the rabbit, the fox, Durito the beetle. I was in awe of his stamina in existing in one of the most inhospitable jungles on earth, and I was happy to be invited to the Zapatista event.
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