A friend who we’ve recently met tells me about his upbringing. He’s one of ten children from a ranch outside Ocosingo, a town not far from here scarcely known for its intellectual achievements. Ocosingoites are known as quesos (‘cheeses’) by the rest of Chiapas, because it is a town famed for its cheese-making.
It is also famous as the bloodiest site of the Zapatista uprising on New Year’s Day 1994. I ask him about how the Zapatistas affected his parents’ lives since they were still living there. Like many people, he says, his parents were woken in the middle of the night by men with masks who asked them to leave their ranch. His mother and father (who was 88 and lame) were forced to walk from their ranch to the town in the darkness.
He says that when the Zapatistas took Ocosingo, there was so much fighting in the streets that journalists were not allowed in for three days while the soldiers cleaned up the blood. While the international news concentrated on the siege in San Cristobal, nervous trigger-happy soldiers and armed Zapatistas waged war in Ocosingo’s streets.
His father, he says, died of a heart attack because he was no longer able to work the ranch he loved. I ask him what he thinks of the Zapatistas – whose campaigning for indigenous land rights often involves seizing land from mestizo families who have owned it for a long time, expecting a tirade of complaint.
However, he says it is complicated, and it is impossible to say who is right. However, he believes that the injustice of land taken by mestizos from the indigenous hundreds of years ago cannot be solved by forced land seizure. He says he teaches students who are young and who idolise Subcomandante Marcos, but that they don’t understand what is really going on.
His comments make the popularity of little toy Zapatistas and tourist “Zapatista cafes” seem even more bizarre. I wonder how much the young tourists who come here to hang out with Zapatistas know about what really happened?
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