They watched us from behind black hoods. I chewed gum patiently, trying not to appear nervous.
A woman with a yellow bandana over her face sat in between four hooded men. Their stares were disarming.
These were "the bats." They travel at night, invisible in the misty forests of Mexico's southern highlands. For 14 years, they've been fighting a violent and nonviolent war against a government that has expropriated their land and left them impoverished.
"You're going where?" my brother-in-law demanded when he heard my wife and I would be traveling to the state of Chiapas in Mexico. "That's one of the most dangerous places in Mexico."
In 1994, indigenous rebels emerged from the jungle and marched into five major cities. Called Zapatistas, after a peasant movement led 100 years earlier by famed Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, they challenged not only the government, but global capitalism.
A teacher at my Spanish language school in San Cristobal de las Casas remembers the day as more exciting than scary. "There was some shooting, but the next day they were gone."
The indigenous people of Chiapas, like First Nation people everywhere, suffer the worst indignities. At the time of the uprising, 70 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, Chiapas had the lowest literacy rate in Mexico and most households had no access to electricity, clean water, and adequate drainage.
Sound familiar?
Traveling through Chiapas I am reminded of rural Alaska--dirt roads, dilapidated homes, and the exotic aroma of wild food. Like Alaska Natives, Mexico's rural people try to live the words of Zapata: "La tierra es de quien la trabaja" (the land is for those who work it).
Four of us from the Spanish language school loaded into an old Volkswagon van that took us to a village on the outskirts of San Cristobal. About 90 percent of the indigenous residents speak only their native language, Tzotzile.
Then we made a quick decision to squeeze into a taxi that would take us deeper into indigenous territory. We arrived at the Zapatista stronghold of Oventic in a downpour. A man in a black cotton ski mask greeted us at a waist-high gate of wood and chicken wire. He asked for our passports then left.
In an initial interview, a hooded man wrote our names, occupations and home countries in a damp notebook.
During our second interview, another hooded man explained that the indigenous communities are a "good" government protecting themselves from "bad" government. He said the good government agreed only days earlier to a temporary truce.
Oventic saw intense conflict in prior years with the incursion of militia groups who considered Zapatistas "terrorists." In 1997, in the village of Acteal, a paramilitary group killed 45 residents, mostly women and children.
The indigenous communities are developing self-governing "caracols," represented by the image of a snail and anti-authoritarian in nature. The snail is an appropriate metaphor, the guard explained, because the process of self-governance is a slow one.
Caracols reminded me of the many Alaska communities that have taken decisions into their own hands, places like Tununak and Arctic Village. In Kasigluk, a village leader once called for the eventual end of a money economy.
On walls, colorful murals were painted -- a giant portrait of Zapata on the entrance to a clinic, a hooded woman holding a gun on the front of a women's cooperative, and slogans like "justice, democracy, liberty" on the side of school.
The Zapatistas are part of a growing shift, across Latin America, to economic systems with a more fair and equitable distribution of resources. It is a movement that transcends the disastrous effects of global "free" trade economic policies that have drowned nations in debt for the sake of corporate profits.
Despite the frail gate, the questions, and the cotton ski masks, I felt safer in the Zapatista community than in downtown Anchorage. I realized they weren't trying to scare me. They were simply trying to protect themselves from retribution, for daring to challenge powerful and dangerous interests, and for working to improve their lives.
Soren Wuerth teaches in the Anchorage School District and lives in Girdwood.
SOREN WUERTH
COMMUNITY VOICES