I'm tommorrow heading to what foreigners call Mexico City and what Mexicans call simply Mexico, or D.F., Distrito Federal. I'm all set to meet several Indymedia Mexico people there, and I've also been asked to speak at a gallery there called H4tch about Detritus.net and related things, at 7pm on Wednesday the 8th. That will be fun. Apparently on the next evening there will be the first in a long time meeting of a bunch of Mexico City Indymedia folks, which I can hopefully attend.

I finally met Jacob from San Diego IMC when he showed up here in San Cristobal again yesterday. Last night we hung out with Luz and Timo from Chiapas Indymedia and had lots of good chats about indymedia and various projects, here, in Guatemala, in Tijuana, and elsewhere...

It was funny that at one point I got frustrated with my ineptitude at speaking espa

If you don't know what's been going in Bolivia, and/or you don't know why, if you haven't been following it, or even if you have but you don't really understand the recent historical reasons for recent events, you have to read Jim Schultz's latest blog entry. Everything he posts is excellent, but this one in particular is great because he goes back and explains the foreign pressures that have really been the cause of the uprisings going on now. And its an excellent summary case study of how the neoliberal, nondemocratic institutions which rule our world operate. They apply invisible fists to get their way, and when the people rise up and say they don't like it, others from outside who don't know about the invisible fists look and see a violent mob disrupting peaceful life. But who created the conditions that made that 'mob' get so desparate and pissed off? The IMF. The World Bank. Etcetera.

I'm tired of sitting at this computer and its an absolutely beautiful day outside, but I figure I should post something, since its been a little while.

(Speaking of tired what does it mean that the spanish word for tired, cansado, is so similar to the work for married, casado? hmmm....)

Anyway. This week I've been going to a spanish school here in San Cristobal called El Puente (the bridge). It's really good. My teacher Cecila is very competent and nice and I'm learning a lot. A lot of what we've been doing is going over and 'cementing' stuff I learned some of before but haven't practiced enough. From her I'm also getting more used to how fast Mexicans talk and how they pronounce stuff (there's more of that 'j' for 'y' thing here) compared to Guatemalans. Its also really interesting how teachers vary, in their styles and accents but also in what they consider proper. The biggest difference was Efrain in Oventic, with his Zapatista philosophies of how to communicate, but there are smaller examples that I've been noticing.

I'm staying with a family headed by a mother who has been working with the school for about 10 years and has hosted over 400 students in that time. wow. Her house is really nice, clean, and beautiful, and she prepares wonderul meals and is super friendly. There's a courtyard in the middle of the house, as is the norm here, with a really beautiful garden with lime and peach trees and flowers and lizards. The bedroom is the nicest place i've slept for 2 months.

Anyway, I've only got a few days left in San Cristobal. I have a few gifts to purchase and some preparations to make and then I head far to the north to Mexico City. I'm looking forward to my first visit to the second largest city in the world. Actually according to some, I've already been there, to Sao Paulo, and Mexico City is only 8th. But I thought it was Tokyo, then Mexico City, then Sao Paulo. Actually according to that same site the 3 largest urban areas, rather than cities, are New York, then Mexico City, then L.A. Then Mumbai, Calcutta, etc... hmm. Its all how you count it, I guess...

News that is much more local to me: I heard the following from someone I met at Junax, the hostel for volunteers where I was staying: She went to Roberto Barrios, which is one of the 5 Caracoles, the seats of Zapatista Good Government. This community, unlike Oventic where I was, is mixed Zapatista and non-Zapatista (usually this means supporters of the PRI, the political party that ruled Mexico for 71 years till Fox took office). In many Zapatista areas they need foreign activists to be there as observers so that the Army or the paramilitaries don't commit human rights abuses. These volunteers are called 'Campamentistas.'

Anyway, usually it is muy tranquillo at these campamentos. The volunteers sit all day and watch the road and count how many army or police vehicles and personnel go by. If the authorities try to talk to them, they are supposed to act like the're just dumb tourists. Then they come back to San Cristobal and report what they saw. Usually it's boring, but comes with a good feeling, I'm told, that you're helping prevent further violence against Zapatista communities.

Usually. I was told, however, that last wednesday in Roberto Barrios a foreign campamentista was on her way to the bathrooms when some non-zapatista villager pointed a gun at her and told her they weren't wanted there. Later during the night a mob of villagers were throwing rocks at the house where the dozen or so volunteers were trying to sleep, and shouting threats.

Obviously the PRIstas don't want the campamentistas around, because they're stopping the paramilitaries and army from doing nasty stuff to the Zapatista people there. I think this is a new kind of thing going on in Chiapas. I haven't heard of peace campers being threatened before. My friend arrived a couple days after this happened. She and the other volunteers were told by Zapatista security that they should never go anywhere alone. Even when going to the bathrooms they should go in big groups. After a day or so she and several other volunteers there decided to leave.

A few others stayed. I hope they are alright.

While travelling its often hard to keep updated on world events, especially the admitedly somewhat obscure (for the U.S.) subjects that I try to keep track of when I'm home. But lately Bolivia has been erupting into action again, again mostly about the hydrocarbon policies - really really serious stuff going on there, and being in Latin America you get more news of Latin America. I've been following things as best I can for the last few days online, and today La Journada, the leading left-leaning national paper in Mexico, has a front page above the fold story about Bolivia. The situation is getting steadily more intense. Blockades are up in La Paz and now Cochabamaba. Military officers are getting fired by the army for saying in public on televison that the president should resign... I don't know if anyone has much of an idea what will happen, but big changes are afoot soon, I would say. So keep looking at Bolivia Indymedia (if you know spanish), or Jim Schultz's Democracy Center Blog, or Narco News, where mi amigo Luis Gomez is reporting from La Paz pretty regularly.

On the Chiapas Indymedia site is an english translation of the latest from El Sup, Subcommandante Marcos, responding to the football (soccer) team from Milan, Italy, which has accepted his challenge of a game with the Zapatista team. At the bottom of the page is the letter from Italy.

I've been reading almost nothing but Marcos' writing for the last week and this latest is in perfect form with his style of the last 11 years. He uses the letter as an excuse to make biting criticisms of Mexico's government, the U.S. base in Cuba, and even Governor Arnold in California. And he mentions his constant beetle companion, Durito, who wants the team's players arranged in single file instead of 3 ranks. Hilarious.

I hope this tournament really happens.

So I am back from Oventic as of 6pm last night, and back in San Cristobal. Here I will write about my week out in the country at one of the Caracoles, the seats of the Zapatista autonomous 'Buen Gobiernos'. My alter-travellerego-doppelganger Jacob has already written a lot more than I think I will about his experiences in the same place, about a month before me. He had a slightly different take, of course, but he described a lot and took lots of photos (as did I, but he has put more online than I want to take the time to do now), so if you haven't read his blog entries about it already you should now to get a more complete idea of the place...

(brief interrupt: In this cybercafe a table away is a REALLY dorky looking gringo with a straw porkpie hat, flipflops and Docker shorts drinking a can of Dos Equis as he surfs the web. One of the employees is whistling along with 'Dark Side of the Moon' playing on the stereo. outside the strains of a live mariachi band filter in from the street. Ah, its good to be back in San Cristobal.)

So, a brief primer on the Zapatistas: After their 12-day armed insurection in January 1994 and the ensuing armed counterattack by the Mexican military as it chased them through the jungle for months, destroying indigenous villages just for being in the way, things sort of settled down into a tense and long series of peace talks that started and stopped and finally in 1996 resulted in the San Andreas Accords, an agreement which the government never actually followed through on. President Zedillo actually never even submitted the treaty to Congress, much less made the legal changes neccesary to realize the accords.
Eventually new President Fox did submit them to the legislature but still things have not exactly moved forward too fast.

The Zapatistas didn't wait around for what they call the Bad Government to do what they demand, what the Accords demand. They went ahead with their part. Even before the accords were signed, they had set up what they called the Aguascalientes, which was a center of Zapatista effort and where talks and meetings with civil society would happen. The army destroyed it and the villagers there became refugees in their own country. Later the Zapatistas in response built 5 more Aguascalientes (they're named after the town in central mexico where the revolutionary forces met after the Mexican Revolution to finally get together and cooperate to bring order back to the country). Oventic was the first. Each Aguascalientes corresponds roughly to one region and one indigenous group. Oventic for example is Tzotzil. In La Realidad, another Aquascalientes, in 1997 ( i think) they had the first Encuentro, a massive meeting of people from all over the world to talk about how to fight neoliberalism and get the 3 things the Zapatistas are always demanding: democracy, liberty, and justice.

In 2003, the Zapatistas made news again by changing the Aguascalientes into 'Caracoles.' 'Caracol' means 'Snail,' and the community is modelled on the snail, in a way that I dont fully grok. (see the photo above, and 2 others I uploaded to my flickr page. just click on the photo) Its important to them and the Mayan worldview though, that a society is comparable to a snail. Each of the 5 Caracoles would be the seat of a Junta de Buen Gobierno. Each Junta has elected representatives from the municipalities that are clustered around that Caracol. Each municipality, really itself a cluster of villages and towns, has its own local government with 50 elected officials, presided over by a Consejo. They're elected by a huge general assembly ever 3 years or 1 1/2 years where people vote by voice.

Back in the Caracol, the representatives that form the Junta follow the will of the people to get things done in the community. There's a great saying they have, you see it on signs a lot, that translates to 'Here, the people order and the government obeys.' Whenever theres something that has to be decided, people go to the Junta house. Someone goes out and gets a quorum of Junta members and they go to the house and put on the Zapatista ski masks (no, people dont just wear them all the time in Zapatista land) and then let whoever needs them come in.

For example, when I got to Oventic, an hour ride in a collectivo (like a taxi but you share it with others and it only goes to predefined places, so its cheaper) away from San Cristobal, I had to wait 2 hours. Finally I was let into a building with 2 masked Zapatistas. They were from the government of the immediate municipality where Oventic is located. They asked me some questions and looked at the letter from the Mexican Solidarity Network and then let me move on to the next house, the house of the Junta. There were 6 masked people there. They asked me more questions and then gave me a stamped form and told me where the school was. So then I hauled my pack down the hill to the school, and met Efrain.

Efrain is the head teacher of the Oventic Language Academy. He's an amazing man, not only a language teacher but a philosopher poet mystic wiseman. He's also friends of a filmmaker friend of mine, Alex. When I first got there Efrain look at the form the junta had given me and got confused. It said 'Esteban', because the Junta seemed confused when I told them my name, like many spanish speakers seem at my name. So often I tell them Esteban. The Junta all nodded and said, 'ah, Esteban es mejor' (Esteban is better (than Steev)). But Efrain had 'Steev' written in his list of incoming students. Well, we got that straightened out and I found a place to sleep in the little dorm room full of other students (mostly from North Carolina), and then I and the other new students watched a little video about how the Zapatistas built the Oventic Aquascalientes (now Caracol). The video shows tons of army tanks and troops driving past the village and the people shouting angrily at them.

The point is that the Mexican government wanted the Zapatistas to sit around and wait for them to do nothing until the problem just went away. But the Zapatistas went ahead without waiting for handouts or some profound change in Mexican society or politics. They went ahead and started building the kind of society that they wanted, in their territories that the peace accords had ceded to them. And the Caracoles are where most of that is happening. The Caracoles are the space set aside for Civil Society (Civil Society? what's that, you ask, maybe, since even in the 'first world' the idea of civil society has mostly atrophied. Isnt there just the Executive, Judicial, and Legistlative, and then the mob of people that vote every 4-6 years, and that's it? no). Civil Society is the national and international group of people which the Zapatistas appealed to from the start in their uprising. If it wasn't for Civil Society, the Zapatistas surely would have been crushed by the Mexican Army's overwhelming armed force. But the people of Mexico and the world spoke up and said, no, we want you to stop fighting and settle this matter peacefully.

So Civil Society has this space in the center of the snail, so to speak. that is where foreigners can come, meet with Junta, and in the case of Oventic, go to school. Also in the Caracol are the headquarters of various productive cooperatives, like a coffee growers cooperative, a weaving one, one that makes really nice Zapatista leather boots, etcetera.

At the school foreigners who pass through the accreditation process run by the Mexico Solidarity Network may study Spanish or Tzotzil. Last week I was there with 7 other students. One was studying Tzotzil and the rest were learning spanish. I was the third most advanced of the spanish students, after Andreas, a guy from Switzerland who is a really cool computer/video geek and who was also spending the week fixing all the Caracol's computers, and Coqui, a young punky activist woman from Asheville, NC. The others were all basically still beginning students who didnt know any of the language at all when they got there. Which kind of surprises me.

The main thing to understand about the school in Oventic is that it's not really a language school. I mean, you learn some Spanish or Tzotzil, but its mostly about something else: learning about the Zapatistas, about the indigenous culture, and the Zapatista/indigenous way of looking at reality. And, its a yet another way to support the Zapatistas - the money you pay helps support the secondary school that the Zapatista kids go to right there in the same complex of buildings.

But if you want to go there just to learn Spanish you'll be frustrated and disappointed. I had learned this earlier, so I knew what to expect, but I was still frustrated sometimes, by this and other related matters. I kept comparing the experience to my experience at the Escuela de la Montana in Guatemala. I wanted to go out and see how these people lived. I wanted to eat in their homes and hike around the area. None of these things are possible. The Caracol is where internationals can be, not in the communities. And you can't just wander around the country, because its dangerous. In a sense the Zapatista people are still in a state of war. The army and the police and the paramilitary groups that they support are still out there doing horrible things from time to time, and foreigners who are suspected of being involved with the Zapatistas can be deported - this doesnt happen much anymore but it is possible, and often the advice you get is to act like you dont know spanish and youre just a stupid tourist if the police or army question you.

So, at the school you're basically confined to a small little area about the size of 2 football fields. One street where the Junta and other buildings are, and the school grounds at the end of the street. So when you're not in class (and class is only 2 hours a day), you just sit around and read, or talk (and the attitude of most of the other students was not very studious, so no one really practiced speaking spanish amoungst themselves outside of class).

I got a lot of reading done, and I listened to a lot of cynical complaining about Asheville, North Carolina, and participated in various conversations comparing Portland's activist scene to Asheville's. And I walked around taking photos of the huge numbers of murals in town. Every day there was 2 hours of class and one hour or more of some activity - watching a documentary, learning and singing Zapatistas songs, and taking a tour of the medical clinic there, and one day we went to San Andreas, the town where the peace accords were signed, and met with the Zapatista government there.

The 2 hours of class were great, especially because I had Efrain for a teacher. I shared the class with 2 other students, so that was another difference from teh school in Guatemala that was sort of frustrating. When you're used to one on one, undivided attention of the teacher for 5 hours and then you get a shared class for 2 hours, its pretty different. Especially when the other students are quite a bit lower level. I'm sure I helped them a lot with vocabulary, at least.

But again, as I accepted quickly, its not about learnign Spanish. In fact, to avoid further surprised and disappointed students in the future, the should stop even calling it a Language School. It should just be called the Intergalactic Zapatista Political Philosophy Academy for Internationals. I'm not being cynical, I assure you. Like I said, I accepted the situation, and I still got a lot out of it. I was happy to be supporting the Zapatistas, and to be learning more about them. and the classes with Efrain really were great, not for the grammar but for the philosphy, because Efrain really is a very profound, smart, wise man who is very passionate about the ideals of the Zapatistas and teaching others about them in a very mystical way, full of riddles and enigmatic discussion.

The fact that I was able to have these conversations reasonably efficiently is some evidence of my progress at Spanish, I suppose. And certainly linguistic concepts were a wonderful springboard into very deep other subjects. For instance, we learned that the Zapatistas always stress using the active voice rather than passive voice in their communications. Zapatistas would never say, 'The village was destroyed.' They would say 'The army destroyed the village.' the passive voice hides the responsible party, the active agent of the action being performed.

We also had an amazingly deep and mindboggling conversation about the subjunctive mode, and why english doesn't make as much use of it as spanish. What does that mean, culturally, socially? We all admit by now that language has alot to do with the culture that speaks it. But is it the chicken or the egg? Is English the language of capitalism by accident, or did England and then the U.S. become 'masters of the universe' partially because of their language, so precise and streamlined and easy to describe cold hard facts and numbers and monetary amounts? Contrarily, As a mexican woman in Livingston told me, Spanish is like dancing. And the mayan languages are even more different. Efrain told us that in Tzotzil there are no direct objects, only subjects. And there's only one pronoun, or something like that.

The point is that we were delving deep into the fabric of reality there. It was great stuff. If I had signed up for that, it would have been that much greater. But I had signed up for Spanish. Again, I AM NOT COMPLAINING. I'm just saying, right now in my life my priority is learning Spanish. Knowing mayan philosophy is not going to help me conduct better interviews with the mothers of dead mexican girls. Spanish will. So, for that reason, I decided one week in Oventic is enough. This coming week I'm going to enroll in for a week at a school here in San Cristobal, where I can get one on one instruction, lots of it, and stay with a mexican family i can practice talking with.

Then my plan is to get a bus to Mexico City, meet some Indymedia 'kids' there (I'll blog more soon about what I call 'the kids phenomenon') and hang out there for a few days. Then head to the coast just to get a couple days of beach time at Mazatlan, and then north to Juarez, by June 15 or so.

Wow, its amazing how the list of blogs on Indyblogs has ballooned in the last few months, I think as a result of the Indyconference in February. When the story about the conference appeared on the global site, about a month later, with links to indyblogs and my blog and other bloggers that were there, a bunch more imcistas were like, hey, i have a blog too!

Anyway, that was an aside before even starting. Uh... anyway, pues si... oh yeah, i was going to talk about my plans. I think maybe ive been reading too much stuff by Subcommandante Marcos, his style of tangents and postscripts and riddles is perhaps rubbing off...

So, I feel a lot better today. Its quite amazing. The cough is still with me, of course, like an old friend. But the other stuff is mostly disappeared. So, I'm going ahead with my original plan and going off to the village of Oventic tommorrow morning.

Oventic is one of the seats of the Juntos de Buen Gobierno, 5 places of governance which the Zapatistas set up in 2003. It was also the 2nd Aguacaliente, a gathering place where they invited people from the rest of mexico and the world for a conference, i think in 1995 or 1996. I'm still a little hazy on exactly what happened when in the 20 year history of the Zapatistas (yes, 21. they started organizing in secret in 1984, 10 years before they hit the spotlight on january 1, 1994). But I've now, just this week, seen 3 documentaries and am reading a new book called Ya Basta! which is the collected communiques of Marcos, I think everything he wrote for the public since 1994 that was not fiction (he also wrote some collections of stories, and also some children's books). He's an amazing writer, with a really playful but intellectual style.

Anyway, pues si, I am going to Oventic and the conditions will be rustic, as they say, so i may not be online again for a week. My original plan was to be there 2 weeks. But I have heard even more than I heard before that the school there is good for learning about the Zapatistas but not the greatest for spanish. So I might come back after a week and go to a school here in San Cristobal. Or I might stay in Oventic. And even if so, I will probably come into town on the weekend anyway. its only 40 minutes away, i hear.

I'll be sleeping in a hammock and i hear its really great and muy tranquilo. Jacob from SD indymedia wrote about it in his blog, he was there about a month ago. (livejournal doesnt seem to have permalinks to individual blog entries, stupidly enough, so i cant link you straight to the oventic entries he wrote. just scroll down till you find them, if youre interested. he wrote a lot.)

oh, other news: I met Paco from Chiapas Media Project and showed him and a few people from Chiapas Indymedia the rough cut of my Juarez documentary. They had lots of really great comments and advice about it. The mexicans brought up some stuff that was totally right on, that I hadnt thought of before and was embarrassed about, but I had never thought what a Mexican audience would think of it. I was always thinking of the audience as being all gringos. and still i think the majority will be. but it would be nice if the film didnt totally offend and alienate mexicans, no? claro.

Yesterday I went over to the office of Chiapas Indymedia to let Paco make a copy of my Bolivia DVD. He said it would be very interesting to the indigenous people here that he works with. I'm glad I could bring it here to yet another interested audience. Then we went over to Timo's house (Timo is part of Chiapas Indymedia) to watch the first cut of a video that he and Nancy are workign on about International Financial Institutions like the World Bank and IMF. Its going to be good. They have a lot of work still to do but its a good project.

So, yeah, just so ya know, i'm fine, and not seeing a blog entry for a week doesnt mean ive died of dysentary (neccesarily), it just means i'm out in the campo. (country) Hasta luego!

So, as you know, Ive been sick. During this whole trip Ive been sick at some level and type. Lately Ive been dealing with this respitory thing that I get every winter (this time it came a little later in the season). But Ive found I could hold it off and be somewhat comfortable by just taking a lot of drugs - cough syrup, pseudephedrine (sudafed), and acetomeniphen (tylenol).

But its always annoying looking for this stuff at farmacias. All the names are different, brand names of course but even chemical names are sometimes difficult to decipher. I go into a farmacia and ask for somethign for a cough and they bring all this stuff out that I have no idea what it is. Then I just say, tienes dextromethorphan? and they go oh, si, claro, and go back and bring something else out. Also you just cant get pure pseudephrine, in Guate or Mexico. Its always got some other shit in it, either a pain reliever or i dont know what else. But, it works at least.

However, speaking of pain relievers, I cant find acetomeniphen here. It just doesnt exist. I found it in Guatemala, both generic and in Tylenol. But here in Mexico even when you ask for Tylenol they bring you Tylenol that has Parecetemol in it instead. What the fuck? Is it just not sold in all of Mexico? is it illegal, banned? In my experience Paracetemol doesnt work too well. I guess I'll get some ibuprofen, but that doesnt help with a fever. Fucking annoying.

To top it all off yesterday I started getting stomach problems. Just typical travellers digestive ailment, probably, but more serious than before so far on this trip, and I was already sick. Isnt there some rule that you cant have 2 illnesses at the same time? hah. right.

During the past night I was feeling bad enough that if I still feel that bad on monday I dont think I'll go to Oventic like I was planning, whcih would suck. I might have to just hang around San Cristobal a few more days, because Oventic is out in the country and having all these medical problems there would not be good. Maybe I'll study spanish here instead.

It just sucks being sick, especially when youre travelling. especially for 2 months.

Well, yesterday I had another amazing thing happen. I was walking around town again, on my way to get my laundry, actually, and I was right about in the same place, by the bookstore, where my amazing coincidence the previous day had happened. And I hear this voice say my name. I looked around and couldnt see anyone that looked like they were talking to me. Then someone said it again and I was better at figuring out where it came from. A woman, a gringa, was standing there that I didnt recongize at first and she said 'your name is steev, right? we met in Buenos Aires last year.' It was Jen, from Virginia Indymedia, who I had indeed met in Buenos Aires. Wow. I was almost speechless from surprise.

I told her about the Chiapas Indymedia office and she decided to walk along with me there. We caught up on stuff as we walked. She'd been travelling in Mexico for 3 months and was in San Cristobal working at Chiapas Peace House. Wow. I think I'll go back to that same block again now and see what happens today. hah.

I have been on the computer for about 3 hours now so I need to make this quick and wrap this up. I have actually been doing some remote programming work, believe it or not. Just a little, for a friend. He said he would pay me, and would be proud to say these cgi scripts will be 'hecho en Chiapas' (made in Chiapas). Also I just uploaded some photos again, just a few highlights. The one to the left is an example of the huge profusion of grafitti and stencils in San Cristobal, much of it political. Click through to my flickr pages and check out the latest 6 photos.