Visiting Zapatista Chiapas

This article was published in the section Frugal Traveler at The New York Times:

In the Village of the Zapatistas

The entrance to Oventic, a village in the Chiapas highlands about an hour north of San Cristóbal de las Casas, is easy to miss. It’s a simple metal gate with nothing in particular to distinguish it. Cargo trucks and Nissan taxis roll by as they do anywhere else in the state, and in the cold fine mist of an October morning, Oventic seemed to vanish behind the gate into thick fog.

That was oddly appropriate, given that Oventic is an autonomous enclave run by the Zapatista National Liberation Army, the armed, largely indigenous rebel group that for many in the United States is synonymous with Chiapas. It was the Zapatista uprising on Jan. 1, 1994, that put Chiapas on the political map and drew attention to the group’s war against Mexico’s government over the poverty of peasants in Chiapas.

With the suave, pipe-smoking, balaclava-clad Subcomandante Marcos as their mysterious frontman, the Zapatistas captured towns (including San Cristóbal), issued communiqués and declarations from the Lacandón jungle (whose outer edge I visited last week) and managed to negotiate agreements with the government on land reform and autonomy for the region’s native people. Those agreements, however, were never fully enacted, the Mexican military occupied swaths of Chiapas, and paramilitary groups killed Zapatistas sympathizers (the most notorious being the 1997 massacre of 45 Tzotzil Indians in the village of Acteal). Rarely, if ever, were tourists affected by the conflict.

In the last several years, however, the conflict has calmed significantly (although not necessarily to the Zapatistas’ benefit) and receded from international view, leaving the movement of today a bit of a mystery. After reading “The Zapatista Reader,” an anthology of essays, magazine articles and documents, I wanted a firsthand view of life in a modern Zapatista community. As it happened, Oventic, which is apparently open to visitors, was just a 30-peso colectivo ride away from San Cristóbal.

First, however, I had to get through the gate.

“Your passport,” said the man standing guard, his voice muffled by a ski mask.

I handed over my passport, and he walked into a nearby shack, emerging a few minutes later to escort me in. Inside the shack, two men sat at a table, ledgers open, while three others stood around them. All wore ski masks as well, not — as I’d first thought — to ward off the chill but to hide their identities.

They, too, asked for my passport and began to fill out a form. Where did I come from? Why was I here? How long did I hope to stay? All were easy to answer — until they asked my profession.

The problem: As a New York Times travel writer, I’m not supposed to reveal my identity to the people I’m writing about. This is primarily to prevent hotels, restaurants and other businesses from giving me special treatment, but it’s also so that I experience places as an everyday tourist would. To tell the Zapatistas I’m a writer would alter their attitude toward me, and worse, I wouldn’t be able to find out if a regular tourist could visit.

Still, I hated lying — I couldn’t simply invent a profession. Fortunately, as a freelancer, I technically don’t have a job. Plus, my wife was about to have a baby, and we’d decided that I would stay home to take care of our child. Conveying this arrangement, however, was a challenge. A jobless American on vacation without his wife, but planning to watch the baby? Leaving the form blank was an impossibility — they may have been rebels, but they were also bureaucrats.

Finally, after several minutes of questioning, we settled on a profession: amo de casa, the male version of ama de casa, or housewife.

A guide brought me out of the shack, and I began to get a sense of Oventic. Structurally, the village was simple. A wide, straight concrete road led steeply down the hillside, with buildings on either side. Some had obvious functions — a hospital, a school — while others did not. Many were low, wooden buildings with corrugated tin roofs and brilliant murals mythologizing the struggle. Emiliano Zapata — a hero of the 1910 Mexican Revolution — stared out from the Snail Mu’ktal Tzob’onbail (in Tzotzil, the House of Grand Meetings), machete in one hand, an army behind him. A purple-faced woman, the red handkerchief around her face stamped EZLN (the movement’s Spanish abbreviation), looked out from another wall under the slogan “There is no weapon more effective than truth in thought.”

The guard led me to another shack, on whose door was a painting of an ear of corn, each kernel representing a masked Zapatista. The room was decorated with leftist paraphernalia from around the world: posters of Che Guevara and Hugo Chávez, the flag of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, a banner calling for Basque prisoners to be returned to Basque country, and even a big Mexican flag. The Zapatistas may be rebels, but they’re also patriots.

From behind a wide table, two middle-aged men in balaclavas — one portly and sleepy, the other thin and earnest — invited me to sit down on a bench and asked me for the same information (my passport, name, origin and profession) causing the same confusion along the way.

Formalities out of the way, the thin one — who identified himself as the Explanation Committee — began to tell me the Zapatistas’ story. Before 1994, he said, poor people in Chiapas couldn’t get clinics or schools built in their communities, or have electricity installed, or benefit from the gold, oil and other valuable commodities on the land.

Now, he said with some pride, they had their own towns that existed entirely apart from those governed by Mexico, with their own clinics and schools. Oventic — named for a local tree — was just one of the many Zapatista ejidos, or communes, throughout the state, with new inhabitants joining all the time. How many? “Muchos,” he said.

The Zapatistas’ separatism was not, however, without its drawbacks. The government may tolerate ejidos such as Oventic, but it still restrains the movement. When I asked about the military checkpoints along the Chiapas highways, the Explanation Committee got emotional. The military, he said, often denied his people passage, justifying the blockade by saying, “These roads and bridges are only for Mexicans, and since you’re in opposition to the government, you’re not Mexican.”

I then asked about Subcomandante Marcos, the charismatic and still-unidentified Zapatista frontman, who has written everything from elliptical political tracts to children’s books. The Mexican government has been saying for years that he was in fact Rafael Guillén, an economics professor from Mexico City. Who, I asked, was he?

“Es muchos,” said the Committee, seeming to smile under his ski mask. He is many.

Outside, the mist felt colder and thicker than before. I wandered — alone, unescorted — down to the bottom of Oventic’s main road, where it dissolved into a muddy field. It looked like the edge of the world.

Maybe it was the dreary, cold weather that day, but Oventic hardly felt like a place where “muchos” lived. The only people in the street were 16 unmasked men hoisting a new electrical transformer atop a pole, and I watched them work from the veranda of the only open business in Oventic, a general store, where I bought a cup of coffee (10 pesos) and a folk music CD, “Canta David del EZLN y su Guitarra Volume 2” (20 pesos). Perhaps the most surprising thing about Oventic was its normalcy. Apart from the masks and the murals, this could have been any sleepy ejido in Mexico.

At the same time, I knew there were things as an outsider I could never see, like the weapons the Explanation Committee said they still possessed. While the officials and citizens of Oventic calmly answered my questions, they were not exactly outgoing. (Perfectly understandable, given the history.) And while I was allowed to take pictures, I was twice told not to include people in any of them.

Then, with nothing more to do in Oventic, I left through a smaller side gate, hailed a pickup-truck colectivo and climbed into the back, where two boys were hanging onto the railings and enjoying the rollercoaster ride. We stopped once on the way down, to pick up an older couple and their plastic crate full of hot corn on the cob. The smell was wonderful, and as I inhaled deeply, the old man offered me one. I pulled off the husk, removed a small worm that had been steamed along with the kernels and, in the honest chill of the highlands, ate my last lunch in Chiapas.

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Moron Alert

If you read this blog on a regular basis, you know by now that I have not too much love for right-wing loonies.

There is some halfwit that writes for The Miami Herald by the name of Carlos Alberto Montaner who just penned an article called The Chavez- 'Banana Left' Alliance.

It is the classic drivel, but to tell you the truth, Chavez is not exactly my favorite cup of tea, so I did not really care for what Montaner had to say, that is until I read this paragraph:

• In Mexico, the colorful Subcomandante Marcos, noted for supporting ETA's Basque terrorists and denouncing the Spanish monarchy, has gone from being an icon of the left to becoming an embarrassing fellow traveler.

I can not believe that after two years the right wing Cubans at the orders of Madrid are still trying to pin that one on the Sup.

Just a couple of weeks ago I posted something about it here at Ingeleraz.

I also have posted at Gazteleraz the original letters in Spanish by the Subcomandante Marcos and in none of them he offers a hint of support for ETA. Quite the opposite, he demands from them to stop the violence and he even offers himself as a victim if only to give the Basques a chance to negotiate a way out of the conflict.

The Subcomandante Marcos and the EZLN have repeatedly voiced their support for the Basque people, but only an idiot or someone that wants to manipulate the perception of the Basque conflict would call that support for ETA, like Fehr from Mana did.

When I read notes like the one by this Montaner character I realize how much ignorance and misconception there is about the Basques, their struggle and their right to self determination.

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Keyword Analysis Answers

There is a couple of entries at the Keyword Analysis at Statcounter that called my attention, so I will now try to elaborate on them.

Item No.1: Fher Maná Subcomandante Marcos.

A couple of years ago, in virtue of the first Aguascalientes celebrated in Europe, more specifically in Madrid, the Subcomandante Marcos from the EZLN sent a letter to the organizers of the event.

In the body of that letter, the Sup Marcos sent a special greeting to the Basque women and men working in behalf of the self-determination of Euskal Herria.

As usual, the idiots like Savater and Garzón cried wolf and insisted that the Sup Marcos was endorsing ETA.

Nowhere in the letter one can read anything that may lead to think that the Sup Marcos was supporting ETA, but that is the way the Spaniards and their drones around the world address any show of support towards the Basque, let us remember the Idaho Memorial that was received with the same sort of borish reaction.

The Sup Marcos proceeded to demolish all the Anti-Basque idiots with a series of letters. In the process, he demonstrated to the world just how fake and cowardly Baltasar Garzón is. After Garzón refused to assist to a meeting he himself called, the whole thing came to an end.

Months later, out of the blue, Fher, the singer and front man of the Mexican rock group Maná, attacked the Sup Marcos for its support of ETA. Fher quoted that same letter. Fher went on to say that he regreted using a poem by the Sup Marcos in the group's last album.

The Sup Marcos did not even bother trying to talk things out with this poser by the name of Fher, he rather lirically said that he had no time for pendejadas.

Fher is one of those fakes that Muguruza talks about in one of his songs.

Item No. 2: What They Say About the Basque People Arrogant Direct Harsh.

Well, reading Dean's World, the Trasatlantic Intelligencer or the Barcepundit would give you a good idea of what some people think and/or say about the Basques. Sorry if I don't provide the links to those blogs, the first one features good posts time to time, but the other two are just the classic drivel by hateful people with nothing better to do but spill venom and lies.

At A Green Conservatism, Marcus calls them Anti-Basques. Justin Raimondo calls them Basque-phobes at his Anti War page.

Whenever it comes to self-determination, what they apply to Taiwan or Israel does not apply for the Basques. Suddenly the Basques are a bunch of lunatics that are hell bent on planting bombs out of some stupid and racist idea that they are superior to the rest of the Spaniards and that they should have independence, even after there "was never a Basque country in history", nevermind the Kingdom of Navarre.

They go to the extreme of saying that the Basque Country is a poor and undeveloped country, when in reality is the second most developed economy in the Iberian peninsula. They say that as an independent country it would be too small, as if Luxembourg, Andorra, Lichtenstein, Slovenia and the Netherlands were known for their vast territories.

Yes, when it comes to deriding the Basques, there are many arrogant bores around the world willing to be quite direct about their hate towards this European nation and quite harsh about what they say about a society that all what is asking for is to be allowed to do things their way, which is no better or worst than the way other people do things, it is just their way, the Basque way.

And there you have it, more on these Keyword Analysis answers coming your way.

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From the Selva Lacandona

Berria English:

Zapatistas reaffirm commitment to struggle

In the town of Oventic they have condemned the Government’s attitude and have called for the work to be continued

Editorial Staff

Yesterday and the day before yesterday the Zapatistas reaffirmed their commitment to carry on the struggle in favour of autonomy and indigenous rights during a number of jamborees held in the autonomous towns of Chiapas (“Caracoles” or Snails) to mark the 10th anniversary of the EZLN, the Zapatista National Liberation Army. “Only by rising up and hanging on to this can we build up our autonomy as an indigenous people,” declared Alvaro, member of the Oventic Good Government Committee.

The Zapatistas reviewed their work over the last ten years and called on the people present to carry on. “To be able to live freely we have to carry on our work and not give up or betray ourselves.” The Zapatista representative said in this respect that they were grateful for the international support they had received and asked the hundreds of people from all over the world who had come together in Chiapas to go on offering help: “We have been able to go our way thanks to the participation of the local people, but also thanks to the solidarity of the citizens of the whole world. Help us as much as you can.”

He explained that the Zapatistas’ struggle was against neo-liberalism and said in this respect that “the fight against the common adversary” had to be continued everywhere.

The Zapatista representative declared during his public appearance in Oventic that the uprising led by the EZLN, the Zapatista National Liberation Army, on 1 January 1994 in Chiapas was the most important period in the history of the indigenous peoples. “It was a revolt against 500 years of neglect, marginalisation and injustice that we local people had been suffering.” He recalled that the event had turned the Zapatista movement into the symbol of the struggle for self-determination of peoples all over the world; however, he denounced the situation that the indigenous peoples were still suffering. “We live under the military threat posed by the Mexican Government”. The Zapatistas denounced the Mexican Government for hampering the work of the Good Government Committees set up last summer in 30 autonomous villages of Chiapas. “They have been restricting our development, blocking off roads, cutting off water and electricity supplies, occupying our land, closing down schools…,” they pointed out.

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Smoke Screen

With no further intro I present to you this article by Naomi Klein:

A deadly franchise

The global war on terror is a smokescreen used by governments to wipe out opponents

Naomi Klein
Thursday August 28, 2003
The Guardian

The Marriott hotel in Jakarta was still burning when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia's security minister, explained the implications of the day's attack: "Those who criticise about human rights being breached must understand that all the bombing victims are more important than any human rights issue." In a sentence, we got the best summary yet of the philosophy underlying Bush's so-called War on Terror. Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.

Many have argued that the War on Terror is the US government's thinly veiled excuse for constructing a classic empire, in the model of Rome or Britain. Two years into the crusade, it's clear this is a mistake: the Bush gang doesn't have the stick-to-it-ness to successfully occupy one country, let alone a dozen. Bush and the gang do, however, have the hustle of good marketers, and they know how to contract out. What Bush has created in the WoT is less a "doctrine" for world domination than an easy-to-assemble toolkit for any mini-empire looking to get rid of the opposition and expand its power.

The War on Terror was never a war in the traditional sense. It is, instead, a kind of brand, an idea that can be easily franchised by any government in the market for an all-purpose opposition cleanser. We already know that the WoT works on domestic groups that use terrorist tactics such as Hamas or the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (Farc). But that's only its most basic application. WoT can be used on any liberation or opposition movement. It can also be applied liberally on unwanted immigrants, pesky human rights activists and even on hard-to-get-out investigative journalists.

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was the first to adopt Bush's franchise, parroting the White House's pledges to "pull up these wild plants by the root, smash their infrastructure" as he sent bulldozers into the occupied territories to uproot olive trees and tanks to raze civilian homes. It soon included human rights observers who were bearing witness to the attacks, as well as aid workers and journalists.

Another franchise soon opened in Spain with the prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, extending his WoT from the Basque guerrilla group Eta to the Basque separatist movement as a whole, the vast majority of which is entirely peaceful. Aznar has resisted calls to negotiate with the Basque autonomous government and banned the political party Batasuna (even though, as the New York Times noted in June, "no direct link has been established between Batasuna and terrorist acts"). He has also shut down Basque human rights groups, magazines and the only entirely Basque-language newspaper. Last February, the Spanish police raided the Association of Basque Middle Schools, accusing it of having terrorist ties.

This appears to be the true message of Bush's war franchise: why negotiate with your political opponents when you can annihilate them? In the era of WoT, concerns such as war crimes and human rights just don't register.

Among those who have taken careful note of the new rules is Georgia's president, Eduard Shevardnadze. Last October, while extraditing five Chechens to Russia (without due process) for its WoT, he stated that "international human rights commitments might become pale in comparison with the importance of the anti-terrorist campaign".

Indonesia's president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, got the same memo. She came to power pledging to clean up Indonesia's notoriously corrupt and brutal military and bring peace to the fractious country. Instead she has called off talks with the Free Aceh Movement, and in May invaded the oil-rich province in the country's largest military offensive since the 1975 invasion of East Timor.

Why did the Indonesian government think it could get away with the invasion after the international outrage that forced it out of East Timor? Easy: post-September 11, the government cast Aceh's movement for national liberation as "terrorist" - which means human rights concerns no longer apply. Rizal Mallarangeng, a senior adviser to Megawati, called it the "blessing of September 11".

The Philippines president, Gloria Arroyo, appears to feel similarlyblessed. Quick to cast her battle against Islamic separatists in the southern Moro region as part of the WoT, Arroyo - like Sharon, Aznar and Megawati - abandoned peace negotiations and waged brutal civil war instead, displacing 90,000 people last year.

But she didn't stop there. Last August, speaking to soldiers at a military academy, Arroyo extended the war beyond terrorists and armed separatists to include "those who terrorise factories that provide jobs" - clear code for trade unions. Labour groups in Philippine free trade zones report that union organisers are facing increased threats, and strikes are being broken up with extreme police violence.

In Colombia, the government's war against leftist guerrillas has long been used as cover to murder anyone with leftist ties, whether union activists or indigenous farmers. But things have got worse since President Alvaro Uribe took office in August 2002 on a WoT platform. Last year, 150 union activists were murdered. Like Sharon, Uribe quickly moved to get rid of the witnesses, expelling foreign observers and playing down the importance of human rights. Only after "terrorist networks are dismantled will we see full compliance with human rights," Uribe said in March.

Sometimes WoT is not an excuse to wage war, but to keep one going. The Mexican president, Vincente Fox, came to power in 2000 pledging to settle the Zapatista conflict "in 15 minutes" and to tackle rampant human rights abuses committed by the military and police. Now, post-September 11, Fox has abandoned both projects. The government has made no moves to reinitiate the Zapatista peace process and last week Fox closed down the office of the under-secretary for human rights.

This is the era ushered in by September 11: war and repression unleashed, not by a single empire, but by a global franchise. In Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Colombia, the Philippines and China, governments have latched on to Bush's deadly WoT and are using it to erase their opponents and tighten their grip on power.

Last week, another war was in the news. In Argentina, the senate voted to repeal two laws that granted immunity to the sadistic criminals of the 1976-1983 dictatorship. At the time, the generals called their campaign of extermination a "war on terror," using a series of kidnappings and violent attacks by leftist groups as an excuse to seize power. But the vast majority of the 30,000 people who were "disappeared" weren't terrorists; they were union leaders, artists, teachers, psychiatrists. As with all wars on terror, terrorism wasn't the target; it was the excuse to wage the real war: on people who dared to dissent.

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EZLN, Garzon and Fox

Here you have this unique article by John Ross regarding the battle taking place in Mexico, a battle that pits the EZLN and the Mexican leftist movement against the fascist governments of Spain and Mexico.

There is one paragraph completely out of place, but other than that, the article captures what's going on, here you have it:

While Zapatistas Shout: "Gora Euskadi!" Fox Government Rounds Up Mexican Basques and Ships Them to Aznar's Torture Chambers

By JOHN ROSS

August 19, 2003

A traveler motoring through southeastern Chiapas these days is apt to encounter neatly-lettered road signs advising that one is now entering "Autonomous Zapatista Rebel Territory". Several such notices are posted along the two-lane black-top that winds through the highlands up to Oventic, the site of one of five recently inaugurated "caracoles" (literally "spirals") from which the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) is building regional autonomy.

But as one nears Oventic, other road signs pop up in the nearby cornfields. "EUSKAL PRESOAK! EUSKAL HERRIRA!" reads one announcement, against which a Tzotzil-speaking Zapatista militia man leans, casually puffing on a cigarette. The sign, however, is not written in Tzotzil but in an equally esoteric lingo, Euskara, or the language of the Basques, and when translated demands "Let the Basque prisoners return to their homeland!" The road sign in Euskara is a forceful reminder of the odd bond between the largely Mayan EZLN and those who struggle for the independence of the Basque Country ("Pais Vasco" or "Euskadi.")

"Gora Euskadi!" (Long Live the Basque Homeland!) greeted a ski-masked Indian comandante, Zebedeo, at the recent Oventic inauguration festivities, "that this cry will never be extinguished even in the prisons and torture chambers of the Spanish government!" The comandante then explained that the EZLN supports "the political and cultural struggle" for Basque independence but not the terror tactics of the notorious ETA ("Euskara Ta Askatasuna" or Basque Homeland and Liberty.)

Indeed, a bitter epistolary conflict has erupted between the EZLN's quixotic spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos and that homicidal terrorist band--at one point in the angry colloquy, Marcos even feared that he could be ETA's next victim.

Last November, after 18 months of frozen silence, the Subcomandante broke his word fast with a rambling, cheeky comunique addressed to Zapatista supporters at a Madrid conclave. The screed lacerated Spanish king Juan Carlos ("a constipated old man") and right-wing prime minister Jose Maria Aznar (a "pipsqueak" and a "donkey") but reserved special vitriol for National Audience judge Baltazar Garzon for his persecution of supporters of Basque independence.

Garzon, often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, is best known for his flawed attempts to extradite ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain to answer charges of human rights atrocities during his tyrannical regime (1973-89.) The Judge has been more successful in obtaining the extradition of accused Argentinean torturer Ricardo Cavallo from Mexico--Cavallo is charged with the disappearance of at least 5000 Leftists during the "dirty war" (1976-83) in that southern cone nation.

Garzon, whose judicial position allows him ample investigative powers, first won public attention in Spain when he revealed that former Socialist prime minister Felipe Gonzalez had sponsored a counter-terrorism unit, the GAL, deemed responsible for the killings of 27 Basque independence fighters in Spain and France, a disclosure that helped bring down the Gonzalez government.

But Judge Garzon soon turned his legal guns upon the Basque independence movement itself. Hundreds were taken prisoner and tortured (as substantiated each year by Amnesty International), newspapers have been shuttered, and political parties proscribed--Batasuna, outlawed late last year as alleged "apologists for terrorism", won 11% of the Basque vote in the last elections and held seats in both the national and local parliaments.

In his stinging November note, Marcos labeled Garzon "a grotesque clown" who demonstrates "his true fascist avocation" by persecuting the Basques. The Judge, the dyed white streak in his ample head of hair bristling like a bantee rooster, immediately fired back. The rebel leader was "a ridiculous figure with his pipe", and "a miserable coward who insults" the nearly 900 victims of ETA terrorism by bad-mouthing Garzon's crusade. Baltazar Garzon also threw down the gauntlet, challenging the Subcomandante to a debate "without masks or disguises where and whenever you like."

Not to be daunted, the unflappable Zapatista mouthpiece immediately set a date and a place, April at Lanzarote in the Canary Islands near the home of Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago, a great fan of the rebels. Marcos also summoned ETA and Batasuna and the Aznar government to Lanzarote for a "Festival of the Word" and implored the ETArras to declare a 177-day truce until the talks could be entabled.

Suggesting that the Subcomandante was "mentally unbalanced" and suffering from delusions of grandeur, Spanish authorities turned the invite hands down. ETA was even less diplomatic, tagging the proposed talks "a pantomime" and expressing the suspicion that Marcos was just trying to get his picture back "on the front pages of the newspapers and the popular tee-shirts." Moreover, by asking for a truce, the Zapatistas were intervening in the internal dynamic of the Basque independence movement. The aspersions put a quick damper on "The Fiesta of the Word" and the fracaso soon faded from public visibility.

Then this past August 8th, as the EZLN was preparing to inaugurate the new "caracoles" with their regional autonomous authorities, who should show up in Chiapas but Judge Baltazar Garzon himself. He was on vacation, Hizzoner insisted to reporters at the airport in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state capitol, but did not miss the opportunity to diss the Zapatistas' "caracoles" as being "Illegal" because they do not conform to the Mexican Constitution. Marcos was a charlatan who was bamboozling the Indians the Judge insisted, and soon disappeared into the foliage "on vacation."

The unexplained absence of Subcomandante Marcos at the Oventic ceremonies August 8th-10th has led to wild speculation that the two adversaries had finally conducted their long-awaited debate--in private.

More probably, Garzon's mystery trip to Chiapas obeyed his obsession with ETA and not the EZLN--although he may well have had an eye ou the ties between the two groups. The Judge's touch-downs in Mexico City and Tuxtla came at a moment when President Vicente Fox--with whom Garzon met in July--has ordered a crack-down on suspected ETA terrorists and sympathizers living in Mexico. In most cases, detention and extradition orders have been crafted by Garzon's office.

Since 1996, when then-presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Felipe Gonzalez inked an extradition treaty that was finalized under Aznar (the agreement opened the door to Spanish support for a free trade pact with the European Union), 36 Basques have been detained and expelled from Mexico into the waiting arms of the Spanish police. One deportee died under suspicious circumstances during a 1997 round-up in which Spanish police officials directly participated in violation of Mexican law.

Now Fox is eager to demonstrate to Aznar and the diminutive prime minister's big boss, George Bush, that he too can be tough on terrorism.

Item: in late April, Lorenzo Llona, a naturalized citizen, was detained on his way to work in the central Mexican city of Zacatecas and held for extradition to Spain on allegations that he had participated in a triple murder in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa on June 24th, 1981 (Basques picked up in Mexico are increasingly charged with crimes dating back to the 1980s.) The only problem with this scenario is that Llona had already emigrated to Mexico when the murders were committed and had the paperwork to prove it. Nonetheless, Garzon pushes ahead with the extradition claim, a process that could take years while Llona remains behind bars.

Item--On July 4th, Miguel Ebxanda, a Basque who may have been in Mexico illegally, was nabbed by immigration agents, driven to the Mexico City airport, and deported to Madrid where Spanish police took immediate custody, before anyone even knew he was missing. Such summary deportations of Basques have become common practice here when the suspect's papers are adjudged to be not in order.

Item: On July 18th, in a muscular show of force with Judge Garzon in country, Federal Investigation Agency (AFI) robo-cops broke down doors in four Mexican cities and arrested sic Basques and three Mexicans for allegedly laundering ETA moneys (another Garzon investigation.)

All of the Basques arrested were prosperous middle-aged business men and women, some of them naturalized or married to Mexicans. At least one of the arrestees was so confident of his legal status in Spain that he had bought a ticket to move back to Pais Vasco. He and his wife were reportedly waiting for the moving van in front of their Monterrey home when he was collared by the AFI.

The morning after the July 18th raids, code-named "Operation Donasti", Aznar phoned Fox to congratulate the Mexican president for his tough stance in the War on Terror.

Basques first came to Mexico with the Conquest--Hernan Cortez carried eight Vascos in his crew. The Franciscan missionary Vasco de Quiroga evangelized western Mexico. Basques and their descendants have assembled immense fortunes here and are captains of industry and commerce (one example: the Azcarriaga family, principle owners of the Televisa conglomerate.) Basque names are ubiquitous--an Echeverria has been president and an Arizmendi a bishop.

Basque refugees from the Spanish civil war (1936-39) were welcomed to Mexico by a sympathetic president Lazaro Cardenas. They established businesses and social centers like the Centro Vasco in the old quarter of the capital, for decades a venue noted for conviviality and fine dining. But now the Centro Vasco has fallen on dark days. The AFI and Spanish police are thought to surveil its elegant quarters--the six accused money launderers often met there.

"Being Basque in Mexico these days is a lot like being an Arab in the U.S. right after 9/11" observes Javier Elorriaga, a Mexican of Basque descent and a civil Zapatista leader.

Why Garzon was dirt-digging in Chiapas has not yet emerged from the mud but there is little doubt that he kept tabs on the Zapatista celebrations up at Oventic. Despite its astringent relations with ETA, the EZLN is routinely attacked by his detractors for backing the terrorists. In a paroxysm of xenophobia, ex-president Zedillo once accused the rebels of harboring ETArras in peace camps established by the civil society in the jungles and mountains of Chiapas, and immigration agents in the region continue to zealously pursue possible Basque visitors.

But the coincidences between the Indians and Basque country has less to do with terrorist plots than it does with the essential nature of their struggles. Both are nations within nations--fourth world nations if you will--and both fight for meaningful autonomy from what they regard as the "mal gobierno: (bad government.)

John Ross was a resident of Pais Vasco during the late 1970s, the
most explosive years of the struggle for Basque independence.

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