Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas.

AuthorLandau, Saul

By John Ross Common Courage Press. 424 pp. $14.95, paper.

In December 1994, almost a year after Mexico's generals assured their government that they had contained Zapatista rebels inside the Lacondon jungle, new uprisings occurred in towns located hour away from the "controlled" area. These new rebellions catalyzed Mexico's already precarious economic situation. The government tried to stall the capital flight, but stripped of its facade of authority by the spreading insurrection, it could not quell the dwindling reserve supply or cover up the shocking trade deficit. When newly installed President Ernesto Zedillo finally ordered drastic devaluation of the peso shock waves surfaced throughout the world's investment community. Mexico's economic "miracle" was unmasked.

The "dinosaurs" of Zedillo's ruling party, panicky investors on Wall Street and at the Mexico stock exchange, and some national-security relics in Washington sought to blame subversives for this disastrous series of events. After all, politicians and speculators alike had reaped enormous profits from Mexican investments until a bunch of upstart, ski-masked Mayans challenged the authority of the government.

Though the Indian peasant rebellion in Chiapas did not cause the Mexican peso crash, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation has made Chiapas ungovernable. The challenge, however, goes beyond Chiapas, to the very core of Mexico's political system.

Who are these Zapatistas who undermined one of the world's longest ruling cliques? Two new books, Rebellion from the Roots and Basta!, tell their story and offer insight into the nature of the ongoing uprising.

John Ross's irreverent, fast-moving, yet informative narrative allows him to expound beyond the events surrounding the uprising and offer his profound knowledge of Mexico. He imitates Raymond Chandler's similes: "The sentiment pulsated like a newly-sewn scar." And he evokes John Reed's gushiness: "Assembling 6,000 Mexican leftists and seeking to achieve agreement on anything beyond the death of the PRI, is, in itself, a kind of supreme craziness but then transporting those 6,000 delegates, invitees, observers, and national and 'international' journalists deep into the jungle ... was a locura that only the poet guerrilla Marcos, with his 'Fitzcarraldic' vision, good humor, and immense powers of convocation, could have pulled off." Ross also inserts dashes of Hedda Hopper: "Don Samuel [Bishop Ruiz of Chiapas] was in hot water with Rome."

There's no "balanced objectivity" in Ross's acid, tongue-in-cheek prose. The bad guys--like the "detestable" Jacobo Zabludovsky, "the...

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