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Emily Pederson
National Front for the Fight for Socialism
San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas

“Los que parecian mudos al terminar el ano 1993, amanecieron con palabras en sus bocas el dia primero de enero de 1994, no solo los indios sino los mestizos intelectuales. Ahora somos conocidos los mayas, zoques y otras etnias en todo el mundo. Si las palabras llegaran a surtir sus efectos en la realidad, tendriamos un Mexico nuevo, mucho mejor, y en nuestros pueblos indigenas poco a poco habria vivienda, bonanzas, nueva vida. Pero las plasticas se conduecen mal o las palabras se las lleva el viento, por no encontrar firmeza en la realidad. Si no se cumplieran, no unicamente regresariamos al sufrimiento de antes, si no al contrario, el sol perderia brillo ante nuestros ojos.”

Translation:

“Those who seemed mute at the end of the year 1993 woke up with words in their mouths on the first of January of 1994, not just the indigenous, but even the mestizo intellectuals. Right now, we, the Mayans, Zoques, and other ethnicities, are known all over the world. If the mending words go as far as to take effect in reality, we will have a new Mexico, a much better one, and in our indigenous towns little by little there will be housing, well being, new life. But the talks are conducted badly or the wind takes the words away, because they don’t find commitment in reality. If they are not fulfilled, not only will we go back to the suffering of before, if they are not the sun will lose its shine before our eyes.”

–Kuxul Waychiletik, “El Levantamiento Armado,” Suenos Despiertos (“The Armed Uprising,” Waking Dreams)

In 1994, thousands of indigenous soldiers died for the rights of their people. Thousands of people in the Mexican army died, too, because the Zapatistas’ war was on the Mexican government, so their guns were pointed at the government’s military. Many who weren’t on either side were caught in the crossfire. The whole world looked at Chiapas and the government promised to make things better for the indigenous, who had been treated like they had no rights to land, health, justice, decent pay for their labor, autonomy, or education since the time of the conquest.

17 years later, the racism that plagued Chiapas isn’t as bad as it was. The indigenous have a voice now, but the progress is little by little. In some ways things have stayed the same. Sometimes justice is still not done when crimes like murder, robbery or rape are committed against indigenous people.When I came back to San Cristobal de las Casas after being away in Yajalon, five Ch’ol families had set up a sit-in in the one of the main squares of the city. The wooden platform they were sleeping on was covered in signs about paramilitarism in Chiapas and being expelled from their lands. A few weeks earlier, near the end of June, a group of men with ski masks and guns led by one Marciano Gaspar Jimenez came to their homes at 2:00 in the morning and threatened to kill their littlest children if they didn’t leave their land. The families were robbed of everything they had and had to flee their homes that night. As of now the gunmen are still free.

The families belong to a campesino organization called the FNLS (Frente Nacional para el Lucha para el Socialism/National Front for the Fight for Socialism). It’s not uncommon for people who are part of this organization to get threatened and intimidated. When the people of Chiapas organize from below, trouble always comes from above. In protest of what happened to them, the families and some of their compañeros from the FNLS set up a sit-in in one of the main squares of San Cristobal, a city six hours from their town, and another in its State Council for Human Rights’ (SCHR’s) office. They handed out information about their situation to the passerby and asked for help or solidarity from human rights groups and the government for a month. They wanted the aggressors punished, reparations for the damages, and legal documents proving their ownership of the land. The government itself gave them the land after they were displaced two times before, years earlier, but hasn’t given them proof of ownership. An official was supposed to come arrange for the paperwork a week before the expulsion, but he never showed up.

The government gave the families no response other than public space officials coming to tell them that the space for sit-ins was on the other side of the plaza. The most respected human rights group in the city gave them the cold shoulder because its people only help their own, which means those who belong to the Other Campaign (the Zapatista political movement). The SCHR told them they were violating its property and bickered with them about being in the way, about the kids using the bathroom, about why they had so many children in the first place.

Eventually, the families decided to go back home even though the paramilitary was still roaming free in their town. Staying at the sit-ins in San Cristobal was unsustainable, the strategy wasn’t working, and they needed their land back. They convinced the SCHR to provide them with buses and help them get home safely, and on the 22nd of August they returned to their town, Las Conchitas. The night before they left I was taking pictures outside their campsite, one thing led to another and I ended up inside, and the next day went with them to photograph their trip home.

The SCHR sent a car of officials and international observers to head the caravan so that the chances of violence would be less. Along the way, we stopped in two towns to pick up compañeros from the FNLS to go with them in solidarity, most of them carrying their machetes, joking about what they would do if bullets started flying. By the time we got there we must have been more than 70 people. Pulling into the road that leads into the town was tense, but thankfully the paramilitary wasn’t lying in wait. As we marched through the woods to the families’ houses everyone chanted “Get out of las Conchitas paramilitary!” and “Zapata lives and lives and lives!”

The families have been home for a week now, and they are getting threatened again. When the men leave the house to go work in the field, the gunmen are waiting, and when they see them they fire bullets into the air.

Today I told Don Antonio, one of the tzeltales I´m working with in Yajalon, about what happened to these five families, and he said, “Asi pasa, porque somos indigenas (that’s what happens, because we’re indigenous.)“

Paramilitaries commit the atrocities that the Mexican army has to pretend it didn’t have anything to do with. “Ejercito y paramilitar es el mismo,” said Don Antonio. “El paramilitar no es el ejercito, pero es el ejercito que les da sus armas. El ejercito no puede matar a sangre frio, pero paramilitar? Si pueden…Nunca van a acabar con los paramilitares (The military and the paramilitaries are the same thing. They’re not part of the military, but it’s the military that gives them their guns. The military can’t kill in cold blood, but a paramilitary? They can…They´re never going to end the paramilitaries.)”

Emily Pederson
Yajalon, Chiapas, Mexico
Yashalum Santiago Apostol, A.C.

Since the beginning of July, I’ve been photographing at a community center called SYJAC in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. Recently Sabás, the director of the center, decided to send me to Yajalon, a hot sleepy small town a few hours away, to spend some time working with a campesino organization called Yashalum Santiago Apostol. Yashalum gives grants and dormitory rooms to students from the Tzeltal and Ch’ol communities around Yajalon so that they can study when their families can’t afford the costs. It was founded by an American priest, Father Loren Riebe, over 20 years ago. One of my colleagues from SYJAC and I spent two weeks there, getting to know the dear people that run it, recording interviews and visiting families to put together a documentary about the organization.The lowdown on Yajalon is this: The municipal capital has potable water, electricity, schools, and a hospital. But in the small and sometimes isolated indigenous communities around it, if there’s a medical clinic at all, it either has no doctors or no medicine. The lack of medical infrastructure causes a lot of tragedies in these villages. As for education, there’s usually only a primary school, less often a middle school. Students have to go to the municipal capital if they want to go to high school, but it’s a long walk away, anywhere from 40 minutes to five hours. If they live far, the only way is for their parents to rent them a room in the capital. Since Dad usually works in the field farming beans and corn and earning just enough to sustain the family, that’s not an option, and indigenous students are de facto shut out of the educational system. And so Yashalum was born, the baby of this problem and the philosophy of Don Samuel Ruiz, the much loved Bishop of San Cristobal who spent his life defending the rights of the indigenous of Chiapas, Guatemala and beyond. It was Don Samuel who taught Father Loren about the ecclesiastical life in Chiapas and sent him to work in Yajalon.

Yashalum started out small. People from the communities wanted to study, and Father Loren let them stay at the parish, first five, then ten. The demand kept growing, and it evolved into a grassroots organization directed by the locals it affects. Today the organization has two shelter houses for students from the communities, where they stay and get meals for free while studying. It also gives grants of 1000 pesos a month to support university students (about $100), and 300 pesos a month to middle and high school students (about $30). The funding comes from Father Loren convincing families in the United States who have extra money to sponsor a student. But the need is too big for the organization alone to cover, especially in recent years, since the number of sponsors has dropped since the US’ economic collapse. Out of the 110 students that applied for the university scholarships this year, Yashalum can take on 25.

Almost all of the students we met said if it weren’t for their scholarship from Yashalum, they would be working rather than studying. They are also usually the first generation in their family to study past middle school. In the past, racism and the economic order of Yajalon made it unheard of for there to be such a thing as an indigenous professional. The society has become less exploitative and divided in recent decades, but the federal government still fails to build infrastructure in the indigenous towns. Yashalum is having a serious impact on the right to education of these communities: this year 183 students, the majority in college, are being supported by the organization. The most beautiful thing is that education is a right than can lead to the fulfillment of other rights for these communities. Graduates from the program are doctors, human rights defenders, agronomists, engineers. The saddest thing is that a few of them don’t come back home.

When Father Loren first arrived in the 1970s, sixteen rich families controlled everything in Yajalon. Caciques (large landowners) had been treating the indigenous like little more than slaves for centuries. They were paid for their labor, but just barely. When a cacique sold his ranch, it literally came with all the indigenous that worked on it, as if they were property. So, naturally the project didn’t go over well with the powerful. Helping campesinos get the resources they needed to get an education was something subversive, socialist, to be done away with and fast. The tension boiled over after the Zapatista uprising in January 1994, when a rebel army of indigenous chiapanecos declared war on the federal government and demanded liberty, democracy and justice for their people. None of the major battles took place in Yajalon, but fear that the guerilla would spread hung over the place like a storm cloud; in Ocosingo, just an hour away, one of the ugliest clashes between the Zapatistas and the army had gone down in the central market. The powerful families of Yajalon began to wonder more and more about what on earth Father Loren was doing with all those indigenous people down there at the ranch. Organizing Zapatistas? Distributing guns? In 1995, the military surrounded Yashalum’s boys’ dormitory, and false charges claiming that Father Loren was a Zapatista leader got him expelled from the country, essentially kidnapped along with 6 other priests who were thrown out under different pretexts. Thousands of people marched in protest, but Father Loren would not win his case until 5 years later, when he was granted permission to return to Mexico as a tourist. He now lives in California, and comes back to Yajalon to visit the communities he had been working with for decades once or twice a year.

With or without him, Yashalum is still strong as ever. The reason for that may be that instead of trying to control the organization, he rightly trusted the people to know what they needed to do for themselves. It was about them, and so it should belong to them. That philosophy is especially needed in a place like Chiapas, where outsiders to Maya culture have historically denied the communities their autonomy and not given them a say in processes that affect them. The executive council of Yashalum is all Tzeltal and Ch’ol men who have to give up a day of work to meet once a week, but they feel strongly enough about what the organization is doing for their communities to give back. Down in the core of the concept of charity – at least in the way it’s practiced by many do-gooder organizations, and the way it’s viewed by many of the people who donate – lurks an ugly assumption: that you need our help, because you’re not capable of doing it on your own. In place of “giving charity” to the people of Yajalon, Father Loren believed in working in solidarity with them. Today his role is simply to help them get the money they need to do the work, and visit once in a while to give everyone a big hug, kid around about “gringolandia” and “these dangerous Indians,” and eat tamales.
—
Yashalum & the Mission Teaching Foundation
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