Article written by Tillie Scrunton
Tillie writes about her two weeks time as a human rights observer in a Las Abejas community, and recaps some of the history of their movement.
I recently returned from two weeks of human rights observation in a Las Abejas community out side of San Cristóbal. The Civil Observation Brigades are coordinated by the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center in hopes of preventing the military or paramilitary harassment that continues to be a threat to these communities.
While the red alert was in effect, FrayBa was not sending people into Zapatista communities, in accordance with what they interpreted to be the wishes of the Zapatista command, and because the caracoles are empty. However, FrayBa never stopped sending people to the non-Zapatista communities. So I went to a Las Abejas community near Acteal, with two Italians.
You’ve probably heard of Acteal. About the same time as the Zapatistas started percolating, a civil society group called "Las Abejas" (The Bees) came into being. They endorsed the Zapatista demands but opposed violence.
Members of Las Abejas, along with Zapatistas, were displaced as paramilitary activity surged. Las Abejas primarily went to three new communities, one of which is Acteal. Just before Christmas of 1997 paramilitaries from the group "Máscaras Rojas" – The Red Masks – massacred 45 people in Acteal, mostly women and children (49 people if you count the unborn). Since then, Frayba has maintained observers there.
The Mesa Directiva in Acteal sent us to a community in a town by the name of Pantelhó; the name of the particular community where we stayed is Fracción Guadalupe. It is composed of 13-16 displaced families from San Clemente.
The evening we arrived, the community called a meeting. We sat around outside under one incandescent bulb that is run on 'borrowed' power and they described their situation. The men sat apart from the women, and we sat on a bench. People spoke one by one in Tzotzil, and Manuel, the community’s 'responsable' and a young boy named Antonio interpreted. As I understand it, the history of their displacement runs roughly as follows.
Before 1994, there was a community of workers in San Clemente, all on a coffee farm, I believe, the owner of which fled in 1994 when the Zapatistas uprising began. As part of the flurry of agrarian reform that happened that year, the government purchased the farm from the owner and gave it to the community of workers. The land was deeded over to about 33 families.
Also beginning that year, the army began a counterinsurgency plan in Chiapas similar to those carried out in the rest of Latin America during the 80s. Paramilitaries were organized by the army and given a certain amount of protection while they carried out atrocities against other groups. In Chiapas many paramilitaries are linked with the PRI party.
In San Clemente, certain members of the community began to form a paramilitary group. The leader is a man named Juan Jiménez Gómez, and the group consists of him, his son and a couple of others. Although power relations in the community are a bit obscure to me, evidently Juan Jiménez Gómez began demanding 'cooperaciones' (ie: money) from each family in order to buy arms. Las Abejas is a pacifist group, and of course they were not in agreement with this. Once the fees escalated to a level of 830 pesos per family, people started having serious problems. They were told to pay or leave. Many felt threatened, so they abandoned their homes, leaving everything behind.
After leaving San Clemente, several people first thought they would go back, at least to harvest coffee. When they did go back to harvest, they were told that the men could not go to harvest, but the women would not be shot at. So the women harvested for a couple of days. On the third day when they arrived at their plots there were men with guns waiting. They ran, hearing shots behind them.
At some point two of the men were killed in Pantelhó. Warrants were issued for Juan Jiménez Gómez and others in relation to the murders. However, the authorities are not interested in pursuing justice in this case, perhaps because they are all members of the PRI.
The displaced community eventually renounced its claim to the land, hoping that this would end their problems with Juan Jiménez Gómez and his cohorts. However, he and others have continued to travel to Fracción Guadalupe to harass the people there, showing up at night, hooded and carrying guns. The last time this happened was around the first of July. Juan Jiménez Gómez's mother is sick, and he has stated that if she dies he'll come to Fracción Guadalupe to kill, because he believes they are causing her sickness.
The underlying motive in this case appears to be land and money. With the other families expelled, the paramilitary families have taken the land, and are now selling it.
While we were there, there was no paramilitary activity. I was sick for a week, with a fever that went to 102 every couple of days. So I lay inside our sweltering shack on a board most of the time, listening to the kids play just outside. When not feverish, I joined the two Italians, Serena and Stefano, hanging out with the kids who flocked to our house, to observe the daily goings-on. We walked into Pantelhó sometimes, buying food to replenish that which the women cooked for us each morning, noon and night (beans, beans, and tortillas, tortillas, for the most part).
It rained every afternoon, often with thunder and lightning. Each morning waking up, I was greeted by the sound of tortillas slap, slap, slapping as they were made by hand. Cooking is done over an open fire inside the house right on the dirt floor. Smoke pours out through the generous cracks and eaves. Lung problems are rampant.
The day after we arrived there was a party celebrating the end of the school year for the primary school. The children put on a program of dancing and singing and whatnot in the center of the community, where there is a communal house for cooking (completely black inside) and a large concrete pad in front of that (usually occupied by piglets and puppies).
I enjoyed my time in Fracción Guadalupe, although I could only converse with Manuel and Antonio because of the language barrier. But I found the reality of poverty to be predictably ugly. And stultifying. The kids found us so interesting in part because their other activities mostly involve sticks, mud and various forms of tag, house, and war. These are fun games but sometimes it might be nice to do things like read books or draw. By day four I had devoured all my own books and was reduced to waiting for Stefano to relinquish his Octavio Paz, since I was too sick to embark on some project like teaching English or learning Tzotzil. At least one of the kids was not well -- he was drastically undersized for his age, had a gut and cried all the time.
The men have been threatened and are consequently afraid to leave the community to work in Pantelhó which is just a few meters down the hill. They travel, three at a time to San Cristóbal for three-week stints at three shared jobs there. The women work for miserable wages cleaning in Pantelhó, and moreover have cook and haul the firewood every day. They don't have enough land to cultivate, so I think odds of this particular Tzotzil community preserving their language and culture are fairly slim, since indigenous tradition revolves around land and agriculture, mostly maize cultivation. Young Antonio asked me about work in the US. He's 15 but already married and has a one-year-old daughter. I never know what exactly to say to Antonio, no matter how many times he asks.
