Post-cold War Rebellion

With twenty-odd years of reporting on popular struggles in Latin America, John Ross bears an insight largely absent from American discourse. His alliance with "deep Mexico" is commendable in this time of information spectacle in which we are seduced and submerged. "Rebellion From the Roots" is a strongly historical, narrative account of the present resistance movement in Chiapas.

Ross' clear and consistent reporting portrays a politically fragmented Mexico dominated by government terrorism. One-time political allies now compete against each other in the wake of the free market: landowning campesinos against displaced farm labor; underemployed industrial labor against the unemployed; pro-business indigenas against their poor cousins. But any public denouncement of the PRI government brings jail and torture and/or "disappearance."

Meanwhile, Ross shows how half the population lacks the means for basic subsistence while "Salinas' 24 new billionaires lap up the liberal luxury. . . the longest-ruling state party in the known universe, the 'perfect dictatorship,' as Vargas Llosa once labeled it, continues to usurp power and intends to do so long into the 21st century."

Within this context, the Zapatistas appear as a voice of humanity rather than extremist subversives. From Chiapas - where Ross reports the infant mortality rate is double the national average - the rebels call for "civil society" - for fair wages, land reform, education, medicine and participatory government. It is clear that this revolt has no resemblance to the militant uprisings in Algeria or Israel, where civilians are randomly attacked .

But Ross has no illusions about this first "post-cold war" popular rebellion. The Zapatistas are under fire not only by and U.S.-built aircraft and satellite surveillance. They are under fire from Mexico's poorest of the poor, who are afraid of what betraying government "business as usual" might mean. By the end of "Rebellion From the Roots," one is left to wonder whether any good - in terms of material conditions for the poor - will be achieved without total political and economic overhaul.

"First World, Ha Ha Ha!" is a collection of essays, stories, interviews and poetry from writers on both sides of the southern border. As a collage of the multiform responses to the Zapatista struggle, it presents the spectrum of voices seeking expression and freedom from the present government abuse. Interviews with the Zapatistas and indigenas are interspersed with commentary and analysis by Leslie Marmon Silko, Leonard Pelletier, Noam Chomsky and several others. The theme tying these contributions together is the common struggle to do away with government terrorism despite small-group political differences.

A Poem beckons:

"Come forward, O ballplayers warriors

you of the rubber and the marigold

I am the skeleton of chocolate 

inside the skin of the Red Mirror,

the enchanted head of the people

many times decapitated bouncing from milpa to street

with looted eyes extorted ears

thoughts defrauded by the Scorpion with more than sixty legs and a tail

packed with decades of poison."

These writings remind us that the free-market breeds its own rebellion - the rebellion of the abused and forgotten - against the beneficiaries of the market. As Chomsky observes, "the protest of Indian peasants in Chiapas gives only a bare glimpse of time bombs waiting to explode, not only in Mexico."

"First World, Ha Ha Ha!" and its partner, 'Rebellion From the Roots" serve as a strong antidote to the sterile and homogenous media coverage of this unfolding event.