Observations From The Field - Chiapas, Mexico 2006

The following is a collection of emails written to my family in April 2006 whilst on location recording sound for the feature documentary A Massacre Foretold by Nick Higgins

The trailer, with part of the interview described below, can be seen here: http://docuseek2.com/if-mas

April 13th 2006

It´s Wednesday. I´m sat in a jeep parked outside the entrance to a Zapatista community high up on a mountain top about an hour from the nearest large town, San Cristobal.

It´s misty right now. Low cloud is making visibility practically impossible. What am I doing here? Nick, the director of this documentary, is somewhere inside the gates of this autonomous community attempting to negotiate an interview with Commandante David, head of the base. He´s been gone ages now. At least an hour and a half. I’ve seen countless people enter and leave the base through the gates manned by two guys wearing the symbolic and famous black balaclavas worn by the Zapatista movement. Chickens have wobbled past my window, as have young indigenous children and their mothers fresh from a day´s work in the fields. To my left a bunch of Westerners aged between 18 and 20 years old are busy banging away at some hut, frantically trying to put it together as they attempt to out pace this cold, white, thick mist that has swallowed us all.

A far cry from a few hours ago. In our attempt to find this base we had to drive through a small town called San Andres. Where in other towns and villages people have at least appeared to be friendly, there was nothing of the sort to be found in this place. A drunk man was lying by the side of the road as we made our approach through the town centre. Another two men were arguing outside a bar. The town square was filled with taxis, buses and people waiting around. We noticed one man wearing a Pri t-shirt. The Pri are a local political group. There are general elections this year and posters of different candidates are up on every street corner. The man who is running for governor of the region is also Pri. He was local governor when in December 1997 46 people were massacred in a church in the small autonomous community of Acteal-the reason for our filming here. Indian turning on indian...why?

As we drove through the town we could sense eyes gazing at us. After all we were two western men in a black Jeep with tinted windows! Indian men with weathered faces and sombreros watched cooly as we slowly drove past. Having driven through the centre we were still lost. A little further down the hill Nick stopped to ask a young man on a bike the right direction. The man didn´t even brake, he looked at us spitefully and said, ´don´t stop here, keep moving.´ Was that a threat I asked Nick? He didn´t really reply only commenting that the western people here out this far from the tourist route are normally people associated or doing volounteer work for the Zapatistas. As you can imagine from my earlier comment, the Pri don´t like the Zapatistas, nor do they like foreigners.

Quite a contrast to earlier in the day. We had driven up to one of the Ábeja´communities, a kind of spin off of the Zapatistas. They work in a similar fashion that is that they run their villages autonomously from the rest of Mexican society. No government run schools nor municipalities, only their own rules and lwas and they have been successfully doing this for years now.

The main problems began in 1994. The government spent the 80´s and 90´s opening up it´s resources to free trade. The local region of Chiapas is rich in resources even potentially oil and uranium. The only thing in the way of the government and this new found wealth have been the local indigenous population. Instead of working with them after 500 years of indian repression, they decided to try and displce these people driving them to the big cities to potentially beg and live life as third calss citizens.

Resistence formed and a group naming themselves the Zapatistas declared a rebellion in ´94. What followed was harrasment from the Mexican army, people disappearing, mass executions and other such attrocities. However, the Zapatistas and other groups fought back, sometimes with arms other times peacefully. The end result was a ceasefire in 1997.

However, the government had armed and financed local indian groups, including the Pri, as para militaries as part of their counter-insurgency operations and they were also fighting against the rebels. This all culminated in December 1997 with the now famous massacre in the village of Acteal of 46 mostly women, children and the elderly, who whilst fleeing the para militaries took refuge in a church. At this point the world took note.

As it is Easter week, the yearly week long procession of the Virgin Mary is taking place between various villages in the Abeja community. We arrived earlier that day in the village of Libertad. Nick and I had planned the filming of the procession meticously, down to the last detail. We were always to be one step ahead of the procession filming in three locations carefully chosen for their aesthetics. The jeep was parked further down the track waiting for us to jump in and drive to the next location. The first place was on the other side of the valley. From this vantage point we could see the procession approaching from afar and then film them as they came by. We saw the procession move from the village and we filmed them from our point. Then, we waited...We saw them approach further down the track clinging itself to the side of the mountain. We waited some more... Ears of corn hid the procession for a while, the last stretch before they were to become visible to us again. We waited...patiently. We waited some more...patiently. Then we heard an approaching van. That doesn´t look like the procession? We flagged down the van and asked the driver. 'Have you seen the procession?' 'Yeah,? he replied, 'they took a left...'

Nick and I looked at each other.... We legged it back to the car and drove as quickly down the road taking the turn that somehow we had totally missed in our precision pre-planning. Sure enough, we came across the procession as it slowly made it´s way to a nearby village. The van in front with it´s beautiful purple flowers covering the back pulled over to let us pass. Countless children inside with their teeth grinning widely pointed and laughed at us. The priest was driving the van. In front were countless local`people and missionaries holding flowers and the virgin Mary all dressed in their colourful striped clothes. We both sheepishly looked at the preist as he pulled over to let us pass, 'we waited on the wrong road,' said Nick. The priest raised his eyebrows seemingly to God. 'Pendejos' said Nick, 'we´re such pendejos!' - Pendejos being the local sleng for 'complete bloddy idiots.'

Still, the procession was full of colour and sound. The villagers greeted the procession with music, people sang, children laughed and ran about excitedly. The odd firework was let off in celebration and the village elders turned up to greet the oncoming crowd dressed in their traditional white robes and multi-coloured pointed hats. The children in the back of the pick up van smiled even wider and we had our shot. Even the chickens, unfazed by all the excitement, seemed to waddle around with an extra spring in their step...

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April 18th 2006

It´s early evening in the village of Acteal. The recently built concrete auditorium near the local council´s office built on top of a level below where the bodies of the 45 people killed in cold blood lie buried, is full of villagers watching the Passion Of Christ.

It´s Saturday. The village comprises of half a dozen wooden huts varying in size, that act as a communal kitchen or as a dining room, as various sleeping quarters for the two nuns that stay here and for Justin, the Australian aid worker. Further down this rocky narrow, cowboy Western-like avenue are two concrete single storey houses that act as Justin´s office and as a space for the local women. Beyond theses buildings stands the church. Please ignore any idea of what you believe a typical church to look like. For this is a large wooden hut. Once inside various Catholic icons stand proudly in glass cages like stuffed animals at the end of the church. A table acts as an alter. Below that, on the ground, the women have put together a large heart made of purple flowers.

Looking for the villagers, paramilitaries fired hundreds of rounds into this tiny, innocent looking church thinking that these people were inside. When eventually they found the petrified locals in a nearby crevice just below where the auditorium now stands, there fired mercilessly into those petrified eyes killing 45 of of them and wounding 26.

The church still has bullet holes in it´s woodwork. Below on the ground, little specks of light brighten up this windowless space. Above, the corrugated iron roof stands littered with violent bullet holes. The light pokes through like stars in a cloudless night.

Quite beautiful really.

We arrived here earlier this morning and we´re staying for 2 nights interviewing various local people affected by the massacre.

We´re about 1300 metres up, surrounded by beautiful, endlessly rolling lush green mountains with razor sharp ridges and often vertical, wall-like drops. Winding roads brought us here amid road blocks, pot holes, partially destroyed tarmac from previous floods, army bases, other villages and the sporadic dreaded suspension-crunching sleeping policemen. Children stop to stare as we drive past in our black jeep. When they peer in to see who is driving they find our appearances amusing and scutter off laughing shyly. Local buses whizz past, well, I say buses but they are really pick-up trucks with high sides that keep passengers in like cattle.

The endless winding roads. There´s no notion of how high up we are. Up and down past endless valleys and ridges we seem to travel. When we stop to take a shot of the breathtaking view, the sound of various birds and crickets massage my ears with joy. The gentle breeze picks up a little and the banana leaves and ears of corn in nearby fields perk up excitedly with a sweeping sound as if to say hello.

When we left San Cristobal at 6am these mountains were covered with a spectacular mist. Like an enchanted, mythical world, the tops of the ridges took on an almost soft like glow. Lower down, dark grey peaks poked through the mist like a child trying to attract our attention.Tree tops like ancient ghosts tremble quietly through this foggy haze.

It´s evening now. As the sound of darkness engulfs us all, the fireflies grace us briefly with their chemical glow. All around me they light up like a multitude of shooting stars.

In the distance the once mighty mountains disappear, fading into the blue grey haze of approaching night. The closest ridge now a silhouette resembling the peculiar profiled faces of ancient men lying down as if asleep for millions of years.

Earlier today I felt like crying. To be honest there were slight tears rolling down my cheeks throughout the interview. This morning we had a rare interview with Maria. She looks like she is in her 40s, a typically dressed indigenous woman with her hand-made striped multi-coloured blouse and dark blue dress that is the common, traditional uniform-like clothing worn by women and girls in this region.

We went to visit her in her home, two wooden shacks with corrugated iron roofing. A small courtyard of hardened clay links these huts together. One serves as sleeping quarters the other as a kitchen. Chickens run about outside as do small children noisily, in a fashion that still keeps lying, sleeping dogs unimpressed.

The mid-morning sun beats it´s stick at us mere mortals down below, unmercifully.

She tells us her story. Nine members of Maria´s family were killed in the massacre that day, the 22nd of December 1996. Initially she thought that two other family members had been killed, however, her two nieces turned up wounded in a hospital days later. Maria only discovered this after some time. she had been out of the village that terrible morning and as such, due to intense paramilitary, police and army operations in the area, she was unable to head back to her village to see for herself what had happened. For the authorities had cordoned off the entire area in an attempt to hide the fact that they had been involved in training and arming the paramilitaries that carried out the raid. Instead they attempted to fool the world´s media by informing them that this was an internal dispute amongst indigenous people thus promoting the idea that the army had to stay in this resource rich region to control the peace. With the free trade, neo-liberal government treaty´s ink still wet, one can see why this area is so sought after by government officials and businessmen alike.

Tears run ever more freely down Maria´s cheeks. Often she stops momentarily to weep. She speaks in her local language, her niece translating every so often her words into Spanish.

She sits on the ground knitting a pattern onto a new dark blue skirt. Her gaze is intensely traumatised. She mostly looks down at her hands but occasionally raises her glance to look at us. I simply don´t know how or where to look. Concentrate on your job I say to myself, my grip intensifying on my microphone.

She pauses for a moment, straightens herself a little, stands up proudly and walks off heavily with the weight of the overwhelming experience she is recounting to us.

Who could do this, I think in her absence? It emerges through the course of these interviews that the Mexican government waged a secret war on the indigenous people of Chiapas. They funded and trained paramilitary groups made up of disenchanted locals, mostly young men with no social status or jobs, giving them a form of power and prestige that they previously did not enjoy. Using typical counter-insurgency tactics written by the US army in a counter-insurgency manual, the government unleashed the militias as a way to combat the rising autonomous Zapatista movement that was increasing it´s break away from government control in a land rich in minerals and potentially oil. The Zapatistas also took up arms but also resisted through peaceful means.

However, the Abejas of Acteal ideology revokes violence as a form of resistance and in doing so were caught out as easy targets. The government´s objective in targeting Acteal was to draw the Zapatistas into armed conflict thereby maintaining the army in the region to aid their economic goals. The plan failed when the Zapatista did not fight back and the world´s media uncovered the story. Now there is a fragile peace. Fear still exists, persecution and torture still occurs. Autonomy is still under constant threat though right now you would not have thought it unless you knew a little bit more about the situation. The fear is still here and it is very, very real.

Maria returns. Her hard worked hands once again continue where she left off. Sowing nervously like a fidgeting chain-smoker. It´s so hot, I think to myself as yet another tear slyly snakes it´s way down from my eye. But it doesn't´t matter. She needs to tell her story. It kind of feels like her release of information and emotion throughout the interview is acting as a form of therapy for her. She smiles fragile like at the end. ´Tell the people out there that what I say is the truth.´

Five of her children were lost that day. Somehow she has kept on going. She now has two young children who run around us with what seems like innocent glee, much to my technical annoyance. Her bravery astounds me. As I look around at Nick and Carlos, the Mexican cameraman, we all seem to be in this frozen state of tranquillity, yet humbled. Simply humbled.

April 22nd 2006

Thursday.
I find myself back in Mexico City. Today is the first day I've had since I've been here to take a step back and let everything that I've experienced in the last 10 days sink through the system. Today, it has hit me hard. I miss home today, the ones I care for, my friends, my family.

Acteal seems like a million miles away from where I am except I still see it vividly on the faces of passers by and deep within my thoughts. Today I'm finding it hard to accept humanity. Where does that fine line exist between the final traces of reason and total emotional abandonment? That final line, is it painted with a thick brush or drawn with the faintest of strokes from a soft pencil?

Wednesday morning we filmed Antonio, the village leader of Acteal. In front of the little wooden church he sat explaining the philosophy of the Abejas, that much like a beehive, small communities of people working together for their own good can pull together to be a powerful force. To their credit they renounce violence. They favour peaceful ways to preserve their culture and their ways as much as is possible when faced with the ongoing bombardment of commercial advertising of that supposed better life. Simple traditions such as making their own tortillas are noisily being threatened by the horn of the daily tortilla delivery motorcycle.

The Abejas are spread out over many communities, some are totally separate from other villages others, as is the case in Acteal, live side by side with other people of different social beliefs. Here the Abejas share their village with the Zapatistas.

Persecution is still rife. Only the week before three members of an Abeja community in an other village were arrested and put into jail. Why? The reason being that they are candidates in the upcoming local and national elections and they are simply representing the wrong party. Faced with such intimidation, the representatives of each Abeja village travelled for miles in order to place pressure on their captors. Antonio explains that eventually the Abejas were released the other day though not before having been beaten and tortured. We fight for the freedom of our brothers and sisters, he says.

Their struggle is ongoing and I can't help but admire the man. It seems they are constantly being harassed in some way or other. Back in San Cristobal, one human rights activist we spoke to referred to it as a secret war. The tactic is to wear the people down through constant harrasment into eventual submission. However, Antonio does not look nor sound like a man who is going to simply give up. Far from it, he seems incredibly determined to maintain what they can of their indigenous way of life. At the top of the steps leading down to the village there is a big banner by the roadside that reads,'We will not sell-neither our land, nor our water, nor our biodiversity. The oil, the gas are ours.'

I ask myself, how long can these people keep fighting? The Zapatistas have and would again take up arms against any future aggression from the military, but the Abejas...? Blanca, the human rights expert, explained to us that Chiapas is the most militarized region in Mexico. She pointed to a map with coloured pins pin pointing precisely where each base is situated. She seems alarmed. She explains how in this election year the military has abandoned a cluster of its bases. She goes on to explain how military strategy does not concede it's positions for no reason. The fear is that they are regrouping waiting to pounce. Whether true or not this fear certainly reflects on the people that we meet in Acteal. The military may be quiet right now in their remaining bases, the police lazy when once they would have manned roadblocks and the paramilitaries back to leading their daily lives in their respective villages but all the elements are scarily there to reignite the situation at any given moment.

Maybe it's the sleepless nights I had recently that help fuel my current mood. Tiredness certainly doesn't help. We stayed two nights and four days in total in Acteal. The two nights were spent in a Red Cross funded large wooden hut sleeping on bunk beds. For such a large space there were only two sets of bunks. I slept on the top one. Not so bad one imagines except that there were no handles on either side to prevent me from falling in the middle of the night! From the lofty heights of my narrow bed I lay as still as possible, wrapped like a caterpillar inside my sleeping bag, awaking with every turn I made throughout the night to dreams of falling off cliffs and walls.

I'm still tired from the previous days' interviews, both physically and emotionally. Apart from Maria we also filmed Vicente. One of the elders, aged around 55 and part of the village council he lost his wife and daughter in the massacre.

Vicente takes us to his corn field, a small plot of land located on the side of a mountain by a small dusty road about ten minutes by car from Acteal. He wears the traditional short lengthened white robe and straw hat. Momentarily he looks on bemused at the beginning of the interview as Nick, our director, looks down at his trousers much to his shock, to discover that he has been standing on a red ants nest and that they have made their way mercilessly up his trouser legs in order to repel their giant supposed attacker.

As Vicente nimbly works his way up and down his corn field like a sprightly mountain goat, Carlos and I find the terrain slightly tougher to negotiate. Huge leaves batter us and our equipment as we attempt to keep up with him, our movement slow and cumbersome as we run up and down 45 degree slopes. Often falling over we almost lose ourselves in this labyrinth of green.

Our cat-and-mouse game with Vicente eventually ends when we eventually catch up with him though we are out of breath and exhausted. We settle as he explains how many of the paramilitaries involved in the massacre are known to him and the villagers. Some have been arrested but many roam freely. One was even captured by the Zapatistas and instead of being turned over to the authorities was held for re-education. He simply cannot understand their actions. But he too has moved on and has also, like Maria, remarried. Such suffering yet these people have carried on with their lives. In amongst all the trauma, humanity seems to still find a way of surviving.

The following day, Easter Sunday, the long awaited procession of the Virgin Mary was due to arrive. It's 7am and the oldest man in the village, Mariano, has the duty of leading the morning prayers at two locations in the village, the first in front of a cross by the council building, the other in front of a cross outside of the church. Other village elders also joined in as people watched.

Musicians played an array of traditional instruments-a small toy like violin, a similarly wooden small harp, a strange looking guitar, a drum and some shakers. Playing the same melody over and over again, almost monotonous but not quite, almost trance like but again, not quite. The tuning slightly out, the drum slightly too loud, almost rag tag yet sweetly, pleasantly enough, all the elements appeared to work together in some strange kind of cacophonous harmony.

We left the village soon after in search of the procession. Rumours told us that they were down at the next village of Polho, a Zapatista community. We raced down the road in one of the local pick-up truck buses to catch up with them. When we found them we were greeted by scores of children walking ahead of the procession, each one carrying a bunch of flowers, some looking at us curiously as to what we were doing, others laughing at us due to our peculiar appearances I supposed, as we endeavored to stay that one step ahead.

The oncoming Virgin Mary was held aloft by four bearers as different groups of musicians played different, contrasting types of music as if in battle with one another. Colourfully dressed people walked on by behind. They made their way up slowly past the snake like mountain road to Acteal where the local villagers had all come out to greet them. Different sets of multi-colours soon merged as the procession and the people of Acteal melted into one. The newly enlarged procession then made it's way down the village steps to rest inside the auditorium for Easter mass.

Maria looked on in tears surrounded by her playful children.
Today is a celebration of life over death, said the priest over the microphone amongst the colour and above the noise. I couldn't agree with him more.