Ocosingo is a dusty, hot little town about 100 kilometers northeast of San Cristóbal. It is situated in a valley just outside of the Chiapas highlands and is sometimes called the door to the jungle since it sits right at the edge of the Lacandón Rain Forest. In this part of the country banana trees and other more tropical and temperate zone vegetation begin to take over from the pine trees of the mountains.
There are no soft edges to Ocosingo. It's a jumble of severe one- and two-story cinderblock and stucco buildings. You can walk from one end of the town to the other in 15 minutes at most. Although the municipio of Ocosingo--an area similar to a county--is huge, it is mostly rural forest and pasture land. The town itself has a population of 20,000 and is one of the major cities of Chiapas. There are very few hotels and restaurants in the town.
Ocosingo is on the road that runs between San Cristóbal and the Mayan ruins at Palenque but it is definitely not a tourist haven. It is a hardscrabble patch of Mexico where cattle ranchers have ruled for decades. It is also an area where indigenous peasants have long struggled against nature and the ranchers to eke out a survival on tiny plots of land in remote and dirt poor little villages. There is no piped water in at least half of the homes in Ocosingo and five out of six homes have no septic system at all. 68 percent of the homes have no electricity. 75 percent of the houses in Ocosingo have dirt floors and almost 81 percent of the people live in overcrowded conditions.
On January 1 Ocosingo became a focal point of the peasant uprising led by the EZLN.
Shortly after we arrived in Ocosingo we met a young man who had witnessed the January uprising and wanted to get his story out to the world. "We all woke up and saw that the peasants had taken over. People were going to the market, and they weren't allowed to enter, because the Zapatistas were there, in divisions.
"About 9 in the morning, I went out to buy something from the pharmacy. But there was no pharmacy open. And there were a lot of Zapatistas at the four corners surrounding City Hall. We hadn't yet heard any shooting; the people from Public Security hadn't gotten together yet. I was with another person, and we tried to cross the street and the Zapatistas shouted at us, `Be careful! There might be shooting any minute now.' So we went a little faster, and at the next corner we saw the Zapatistas had grabbed their weapons and were down on the ground. And that's when the shooting began. The two sides fighting it out. Public Security was the ones in the blue uniforms.
"So I came back home. And when I got here, on the `periférico' (the road running around the city) there was a group of about 50 Zapatistas stopping the cars and checking them. They didn't do anything to the civilians. And so the whole day I was here with my family, and we listened to the shooting. And then that night, my brother came home about 9 p.m. and everything was all quiet. The Zapatistas had already gone into the City Hall. There were four dead of the Public Security, and they were just lying there in the central park."
Many of the people in Ocosingo were supportive of the uprising and from the very first day they came out to talk with the armed peasants who had taken over the city. Victor was one of those people and he described the scene he found to us. "The next day the Zapatistas went into the bank. It was just across the street from the park. And they took all the money about 9 in the morning. That was Sunday. They began to sack the ISSTE building (a state-run store). And people were telling them, `No, no. Don't go in there.' They said they were going to burn it, but then in the end, they said `No, if we're going to burn it, it would be better to take everything out for the people.' Then the Zapatistas gave the people permission to go in and take the goods. And people were going in and taking tape recorders and televisions, a whole lot of people. They just trashed the place. And the people were saying, `¡Que viva Zapata!' ('Long live Zapata!'). They were happy, taking things out.
"About 12 o'clock on the 3rd, people were all hanging out with them--waiting for them to break open another store. And even people from town were going up to them and taking their hand and pointing them, `That store!' People were talking to them, listening and talking. And the rebels were saying that they didn't have anything against the civilian population, only against the government. And about a half hour later, they broke into another store, a clothing store, "La Suriana," and sacked it totally.
"They burned the Palacio Municipal (City Hall). There was a confrontation between the Zapatistas and Public Security. The Public Security surrendered. So the Zapatistas went into the City Hall and burned it and they smashed everything. There was a policeman up on top and he burned too. Here they burned practically everything, all the files.
"Later I went back to see how things were going, and I found a friend. And we were there talking about the situation, and then we saw that inside the store there were four prisoners, cattle ranchers. They weren't tied up or anything. They were just there as prisoners. There was a lot of people in the market.
"I went back up towards the park. About ten minutes later, I saw the people begin to run. I asked, `What's going on?' And people said, `The Federal Police (the Judiciales--RW) are coming.' I saw two trucks with Zapatistas going up the road, totally full of people. I ran. There were no more people in the street. I heard a lot of bullets and many people running. When I got to the corner, I saw all these `federales.' So I went into a house, and I waited for it to be over. Because the `federales' don't respect anybody. If they found anyone on the streets, they were grabbing them by the hair and taking them off as suspects.
"Where they keep the horses--that's where the military was. About five or ten minutes later, there was another shootout. You would hear grenades and bombs, and the smell of gas--all night and part of the next morning. And no one from the civilian population could leave, because at night the military cut off people's electricity. Some say they wanted to be able to take away the cadavers. There were a lot of people dead, not just military people. And many people saw that. They saw the military trucks and then they took them away at night so that nobody would see.
"I wanted to tell you how they took away the dead. There is a soccer field, and about 17 military helicopters landed there. I have a camera that doesn't work, and I could see them through the lens. There were about ten civilians there. There were children. They were lined up, as if they were waiting for something. And then after a while, two trucks came and a helicopter drew close to them. They called over the civilians. These were the civilians that the military had found in the streets. And the military wanted them to pick up the cadavers, because the military didn't want to do it themselves. And these civilians picked up the sacks from the trucks and put them in the helicopters. Four helicopters remained behind. There were a lot more dead that the military had taken away earlier.
"We were locked inside for four days--with whatever food we had for the whole family. We couldn't go to get food, because of the military. Any person they would see running or walking really fast--they would shoot at you. And so we lived closed in here.
"Monday night, about 8 p.m., we heard machine gun fire. We saw 17 Zapatistas coming down that street. They were fleeing. Only one of them had a rifle, that was all. They went right through here. And two military guys with machine guns went after them.
"We went out with white flags to buy things, but we were kind of afraid when we began to hear the helicopters. We didn't even know where the bullets were coming from. The helicopters were shooting in the foothills.
"Some wounded rebels stayed in houses; there were a lot of people here that took care of the wounded Zapatistas. But they decided to go when the helicopters came through. The army fired the machine guns in the foothills where they also bombed. We couldn't tell where the bullets were coming from because the Zapatistas were fleeing in all directions. We were here, and there was fighting in the streets close by. When the helicopter would go by, the Zapatistas would shoot up at it. It would make a noise, `Ping! ping!'<|>"
I had seen the market when we first arrived in the city. The walls were scarred with hundreds of bullet holes. The corrugated metal roof had dozens of jagged-edge holes from mortars and large-caliber weapons. I mentioned this to Victor and he talked about what happened down at the market when the Mexican army came in to put down the uprising. "About six or seven days later, the people left their houses because we needed food. You could go to the market. But there was a massacre there. There were a lot of dead people, and their heads had been blown off because of the grenades.
There were five Zapatistas dead in a stall in the market. From what we could see, they had been tied. I think they had been tied up live, and then shot later. They had bullet holes in their forehead. The ropes had been cut already, but you could see that they had been tied. That's what was in the market. Some of them didn't have their shirts. Maybe they had tried to change clothes and put on civilian clothes. And the saddest part was--I saw this--that many weapons weren't real firearms, they were just wooden rifles painted black to impress. And that's what they came to fight with. Some of them had knives that were tied on to the end of these rifles, and those were their weapons.
"As far as I know, some four youths here from this town offered to go join the rebels, and they were shot in the market by the army. Of the civilians who left their houses, many of them were killed. Some of them simply because they made a wrong move--because they went to look out the window to see what was happening, things like that. The army was shooting at anything that moved. So many civilians died."
Although the official death toll has been reported to be 145, an International Jurists Commission that investigated the uprising and the government's repression reported that it is possible that 200 or even 300 people were actually killed. It is known that there were mass graves in Ocosingo and that many people in the area simply disappeared in the days after the uprising. Victor had firsthand knowledge of one case and although he was a little nervous he told me the story.
Victor had a friend who had gone out to celebrate on New Year's Eve. He got a little drunk and fell down and injured himself on the way home. The people he had been partying with decided to take him to the local hospital. He was in the hospital when the Mexican army came in to seize control of Ocosingo from the rebels. The army raided the hospital and forced all of the injured to line up outside. The army claimed that anyone injured and hospitalized in the course of the uprising was a Zapatista and was subject to arrest. Nothing more was heard from or about the people removed from the hospital. They simply disappeared.
Victor explained that his friend's mother refused to accept her son's unexplained disappearance. When a mass grave was uncovered in Ocosingo the mother went to view the bodies. It was there, in an unmarked mass grave, that she found her son. She identified him through a ring she had given him when he was younger. From what the woman could find out, her son had been dragged out of the hospital, executed and thrown into a mass grave as part of the Mexican army's restoration of law and order in Ocosingo.
When we arrived in Ocosingo it was an armed camp. It was clear the Mexican army was running the city. Heavily armed soldiers manned roadblocks on the main highway at both ends of the town. Military vehicles were parked outside one of the main bus terminals. A local shop had been taken over and turned into a kitchen for the army. Huge military encampments were set up on the edges of the city that faced out towards the Lacandón Forest and the mountains. Army troops with M-16s patrolled the streets in jeeps and trucks. Machine gun nests sat on the rooftops of many of the buildings in the city--as one young resident of the town put it, "watching the people and waiting." The air was so thick with tension that it was almost difficult to breathe.
Down at the center of town, at the zócalo, the scene was even more intense. At one end of the zócalo stood the ruins of the City Hall--a monument to the anger and struggle of the indigenous peasants. Uniformed police armed with automatic rifles stood guard around the ruins, eyeing everyone who walked by. Federal judicial police wearing "Operation Chiapas" T-shirts had taken over the main hotel in the city and were guarding what remained of the official buildings. These federales--the same units that make up the death squads and are behind the disappearance of so many people following the uprising--were armed with AK47s and Uzis as they kept watch over the zócalo.
Still, all of this military repression revealed the fundamental weakness and fears of the Mexican rulers and their imperialist backers. What happened in January scared the hell out of them. In Ocosingo the people, especially the indigenous peasants, showed much enthusiasm for the rebellion and the authorities were keenly aware that their repressive measures had not wiped out this enthusiasm.
This was vividly illustrated by something that happened at sunset one night in early spring. It had rained earlier in the day and evening was pleasant and cool. Scores of people were out strolling around the zócalo. Older people sat on benches watching the show and talking among themselves. Families and young couples walked around the outer edges of the park. Teenage men and women gathered up in clumps and showed off for one another. Many indigenous laborers stopped by the zócalo to enjoy the evening before heading home.
As darkness began to fall over the town the electricity suddenly failed all over the city. There were no lights anywhere. People in the zócalo laughed and joked. Some began to yell out that the Zapatistas were coming back. Such comments--followed by a laugh--seemed to be aimed at shaking up the military forces around the zócalo.
The moment the lights went out, the military jumped into action around the zócalo. Jeeps with machine guns mounted on them and troop trucks were brought up to the edge of the zócalo. The federales took over the balcony of the main hotel in the city and trained their AKs and Uzis on the zócalo. They held this position for almost an hour and all during that time they worriedly talked about how they had been informed that the Zapatistas had cut the electricity and were preparing to launch an assault against the town.
Eventually the electricity was restored and no Zapatista assault materialized. Still, the federales and the other military forces in the city remained on edge and on alert throughout the night. And although there was never any official report published on this incident, the military did review the situation and instituted some changes.
When we returned to Ocosingo some weeks later, the government had chopped down many of the biggest and most beautiful trees in the zócalo in order to give them a clearer view of--and better shot at--any and all potential enemies.
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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