Zapatista village - San Cristobal

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The dreaded night bus was actually ok, and I arrived high up in the mountains at San Cristobal de las Casas at 9am yesterday. It was freezing. I piled on the layers, including my thick woollen poncho, and set out discovering the town. By 11am I was feeling sick with heat and sweat and had to go back to the hotel to take my shoes and socks off and change my jeans for shorts. Holy mother it gets hot here during the day. It's a very traditional town with most locals wearing traditional dress. There are lots of other traveller/backpackers wandering around, a large portion seem to be Scandinavians, so I'm getting my Scando-fix with so many marvevllous fringes and knitwear about. The cafes are great and do loads of lovely fruit and yoghurt combos for breakfast, and there is a coffee museum which I visited yesterday which has a very good cafe selling its wares.

This is now in the Chiapas region of Mexico, which is (or aims to be) autonomous in many ways, especially with workers unions etc getting together to sell regional goods as collectives. I went to the Mayan Medicine museum which was very interesting, but highly scary. It had a video showing a woman giving birth in the Mayan style (on her knees kneeling on the floor, hanging her arms round the husband's neck who is sitting on a chair facing her) with the midwife behind yanking away. Then just in case you didn't get the message there was a papier mache model re-enactment in a mock up hut. It has only heightened my phobia of childbirth and I didn't think that was possible.

Today I went to visit a Zapatista stronghold, high up in the mountains. The Zapatistas are identified by the Bush administration as a terrorist group. They are indigenous communities, originally from the Chiapas region but their support and allies are now worldwide, who are fighting the Mexican government for recognition of their lifestyles and customs. The govt arrest Zapatistas as they protested and took over several towns in this region (including San Cristobal) in 1994 because the govt was ignoring them and threatening their way of life. It sounds like the govt is trying to ignore and/or exclude the indigenous communities by not providing them with schools, amenities and sending out of date food supplies to them. I also know that by taking several towns in 1994 a war was fought for over two weeks and hundreds, maybe thousands, of people died in the conflict. The Zapatistas used weapons and will do so again. Therefore I wanted to find out more about this whilst I was here and in a relatively peaceful period.

We were met by village leaders wearing balaclavas who took our passports and were taken to a small room for a basic lecture on the movement. From this I could gather that after the 1994 uprising against poverty and exclusion of the indigenous people, a treaty was drawn up where the govt agreed to certain conditions, most of which it has since failed to honour, The Zapatistas now live completely separately from the rest of Mexico, running their own schools (bilingual with native language Tzotzil and spanish), clinics and communities. The govt gives them no support so they have to make everything themselves. They are keeping their languages and traditions alive but it seems they are struggling. I felt completely safe up there today and understand their cause absolutely, but I don't know enough to comment on the morality of this situation. As far as I could tell, they still have weapons just in case. They will use them again if the govt doesn't budge. The likelihood of them taking San Cristobal again in the future is very real.

So all in all it's a typical terrorist quandry. I wouldn't call them terrorists but they are a movement that uses force and kills. I'm going to have to do a lot more reading on this before I can say, write or think any more on the subject.

On the way back I went to a strange church which is Catholic mixed up with Mayan beliefs - a product of the scheming Catholic missionaries who noticed the local population coincidentally used crosses and other Catholic images in their traditional worshipping. So they introduced Roman Catholicism as a form of the local beliefs. It is totally bonkers now and has principles from all sorts of influences. The people worship St Christopher mainly and Christ is on the sidelines as less important. In the church there was healing going on with medicine men and women cleansing people with eggs, or chickens, if their illness was more severe. The strangest thing is that everyone drinks Coke in the church because burping releases the bad spirits, and plastered all over the villages in the area are Coca-Cola ads/signs. I also noticed in the town that many people had metal teeth - a side effect from drinking so much Coke??? I shudder to think. Whatever, I'm sure Coca-Cola are very happy about their dominance in the area.

This post sounds like an anti-establishment rant but I'm just reporting what I've seen today. Despite all this San Cristobal is a lovely place - possibly my favourite so far. Am heading to the complete opposite tomorrow AM - down to Palenque, a huge Mayan ruin in the middle of the jungle. I have been told to expect bugs, mosquitos, hideous heat and humidity, and howler monkeys who steal things. I'll be there for 2 nights so will be seeing new year in wrestling my beer from monkeys and trying not to get eaten alive by insects. Bravo!