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19 Fletcher F. World Aff. 71 (1995)
Chiapas: The First Post-Modern Revolution

handle is hein.journals/forwa19 and id is 77 raw text is: CHIAPAS: THE FIRST
POST-MODERN REVOLUTION
ANA CARRIGAN
When we came down from the mountain carrying our rucksacks, our
dead and our history we came to the city looking for our country.
The country that had forgotten about us in the last corner of the land;
the most solitary, the poorest, the dirtiest, the worst. We came to ask
this country, our country: Why did you abandon us there for so
many, many years? Why did you leave us there with so many of our
dead?
Subcomandante Marcos in the Cathedral of
San Cristobal de las Casas, 22 February 1994.
The dirt road leads out of the valley, away from the fertile ranch lands that
surround the provincial capital of Ocosingo. It follows the path of a narrow
ravine through the foothills, climbing between forests of pine trees, headed
eastward for the Lacandon Rainforest, into the area known simply as La Selva
- The Jungle. This is the road down which two regiments of the Zapatista Army
traveled on the afternoon of 31 December 1993 on their way to attack San
Cristobal de las Casas and Ocosingo. In every village they passed as they came
down from the mountains, carrying their weapons and their handmade uni-
forms concealed in backpacks and coffee sacks, their numbers swelled.
Today, some thirty kilometers outside Ocosingo, a row of boulders blocking
the road marks the frontier of Zapatista-held territory. Beyond, deep within the
valleys and ravines of the rainforest, sheltered by mountain ranges that loom as
impenetrable as a wall, lies the Maya world. Last January, the international
press, among them many veterans of the Central American conflicts of the 1980s,
came to these Indian territories looking for the past - and found the future.
When the twelve-day shooting war between the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN) and the Mexican National Army abruptly ended, the rebel
spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, began a dialogue with the Mexican people
through the pages of the national press that circumvented the government's best
efforts to contain the Zapatistas in their jungle habitat. It became quickly
Ana Carrigan is a Colombian-Irish journalist, writer, and filmmaker. She is the author of Palace
of Justice: A Colombian Tragedy, and Salvador Witness; her films include Roses in
December.

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