Inside the Paramilitary Offensive: An Eyewitness View

by Liam Frost*

For the first week of March, the small Zapatista town of Emiliano Zapata had planned a full week of collective work in the milpa (cornfield) to make up for the consumption of a cow they had eaten a few days previous. They had killed it as a small reward for the number of river snails they had gathered so arduously the week before, and they were now preparing to clean fields ready to plant next season’s maize.

But like many other communities across the municipality of San Manuel at the beginning of March, and indeed across Chiapas, work in the milpa had been suspended. Instead, the men of Emiliano Zapata were gathered outside the home of the person in charge of the community, listening intently to loud, muffled voices emanating from his two-way radio. Though the voices streamed constant information, the gist was that paramilitaries were mobilizing.

By Tuesday morning the information from the muffled voices had become clearer and, indeed, visible. At around eight o’clock a caravan of at least seven cargo trucks rode through on the dirt road that bisects this small town, and reports were filtering through of a large demonstration in the market town of Ocosingo three hours away.

The demonstration had been organized by the Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Campesino Rights (OPDDIC, its initials in Spanish), an organization long characterized as having close paramilitary links. Over the last few years, the OPDDIC has grown rapidly in Chiapas, directly challenging the authority of the Zapatistas. By the end of the day the result of the demonstration was that twenty-six of the demonstrators were in jail for beating up two Zapatista cameramen who were documenting the protests and a much higher profile, although somewhat negative, for the OPDDIC.

It was the beginning of a strange time in the cañadas (canyons). Even the weather appeared to sense the sudden shift in mood, switching from dry, baking heat to foreboding storm clouds that only managed to threaten but never materialized into a rainstorm. The usual laid back pace of Emiliano Zapata had reclined to almost a complete halt, and all people could do was wait for developments and do what they could in their own homes.

During the night it was not unusual to hear the deep timbre of the conch shell, normally only reserved to call men for the planning of collective work but now used to alert them of new developments and plan shifts to guard the town. By the end of the first week of the “threat,