Basta!: Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas.

By John Ross BASTA!: Food First. 178 pp. $12.95, 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 venomous, archly pro-government news director," the "sneering anchorman"--are set off against the virtuous Subcomandante Marcos, "with his bandaleros zigzagged across his powerful chest, his weapon ever ready to blast the forces of the evil government."

Ross has written for decades in the alternative press, and he does not disguise his hatred for the official Mexican media, pawns of the ruling party/government machine. How can Mexico have fair elections, he asks, when 90 percent of campaign coverage went to the PRI, and the little coverage the opposition received was slanted against them? He also shows how the fraudulent campaign of 1994 began with the fraudulent election of President Salinas de Gotari in 1988.

Ross depicts corruption as Mexico's equivalent of Dante's layers of hell. But beyond la mordida (the bribe), Ross paints the infinite strata of oppression that made Mayan Indians become Zapatistas. Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista press agent and military strategist, insists: "worse than being dead is being part of the living dead." We learn from Ross about "el Sup's" political origins and his past connections with movements that touched on the social activities of the "red bishop," Don Samuel Ruiz.

Ross reprints Marcos's self description that begins: "I lived in the bus terminal in Monterrey and I sold used clothing. In the afternoon, it would rain and I went and watched pornographic movies.... I was a taxi driver in Santa Barbara. I worked in a restaurant in San Francisco until I got fired for being gay. Then I worked in a sex shop. I gave demonstrations to the clients on plastic blow-up dolls.... I was a security guard at a massage parlor. I was a runner for the stock market on Wall Street. I came here by accident in 1983. I was drunk."

This political poet's prescience lies in his ability to turn not only a phrase but a rebellion in remote Chiapas into a world event. Marcos wanted to teach the sensitive world that "what is at play in Chiapas not just Chiapas but the TLC [NAFTA] and Salinas's whole neoliberal project."

The free-market design, or until devaluation in December 1994, the Mexican Miracle, "was built on huge dollops of foreign investment," Ross notes, much of which went into the stock market, "not exactly the most stable subsoil upon which to found a new economic order."

President Clinton and members of Congress might have saved themselves considerable embarrassment had they listened to Ross, who actually predicted the financial disaster months before it happened. He saw the overvalued peso and the "booming trade deficit" as proof that Mexico's "social peace is built on sand."

The disintegration of the current Mexican system dates back to 1982, the year of the Brady Plan, in which foreign capital bails Mexico out of its debt crisis. From that point on, the international lenders, not the leaders of the PRI, determined how much room the Mexican system had to exercise its inclusionary program in order to bring the various classes and sectors into the tent.

From 1982 there was no longer sufficient elasticity in the budget to pay off each group adequately enough to maintain social peace. In 1995, bankers no longer need U.S. marines to occupy the customs' sheds of banana republics to collect interest on their loans. Checks from Mexican oil sales are now deposited directly in a New York bank.

For more than a decade, foreign bankers limited the PRI's budget flexibility, thus impeding its ability to maintain its political coherence. As a result, a civil society began to develop outside the political system. Citizens inured to an electoral farce every six years for six decades expressed irritation. When the computer crashed" during the 1988 campaign after leftist opposition candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas appeared to be ahead, Mexico's political consensus grew fragile.

With outside economic forces dictating the design of Mexico's budget, the unique Mexican political structure began to crumble. The 1940s import-substitution model gave way to the 1980s neoliberal formula, which meant that Mexico's labor and resources became parts of world capital's gestalt.

But the old guards did not simply accept the loss of their perks and privileges. Ross presents the figure of Jorge Constantino Kanter, a John Wayne-type cattleman, who illustrates how the PRI no longer can satisfy the demands of large owners and middle-sized peasants, workers and employers, political bosses, and civil society. Kanter and his followers counted on the government to maintain in perpetuity its land-owning status. The failure of Salinas and now Zedillo to eradicate the Zapatistas has caused deep bitterness toward those who "betrayed" them in Mexico City, as well as toward the "red bishop," who somehow "whipped up the happy natives" into an unreasonable frenzy. One Chiapas businessman insisted that Don Samuel was the evil force behind Marcos.

But Ross shows how the Zapatista uprising had deep roots in Mexico's past. Rebellion from the Roots is like a political guidebook to modern Mexico, flashing back to Zapata's assassination and other key events and mixing them with the daily headlines to probe the fragile foundation of Mexico's socio-economic system. Ross takes readers on a fast-paced journey through the events of 1994, complete with intrigues of the leading figures of the PRI, like "ninety-four-year-old Fidel Velazquez, the boss of Mexican labor for more than half a century."

As the world of global business aproaches each Third World continent, it will confront the equivalent of Zapatistas and peasants who have seized lands, and simultaneously encounter members of the clergy, like Bishop Ruiz and the priests, nuns, and catechists who work out of his diocese. The Liberation Church remains one of the last lines of defense of indigenous populations.

Like Bishop Ruiz, the anthropologist George Collier understands the Zapatista uprising historically and culturally. In Basta!, he shows how the fate of Chiapas Indians was determined by actions elsewhere, which led to land policies and development models that moved the India peasant from one area to another. He and his family were gradually stripped from the roots of Mayan culture: the land and farming.

Both books look at the Zapatista movement as a force that can help reframe not just the Mexican situation, but the "development" debate itself and force the "developmentalists" to ask if there can be a moral and reasonable path to the 21st Century that includes the elimination of the Chiapas Indians--and all they represent.

The Collier team's scholarly approach to this subject makes a fine companion volume to Ross's breezier book. Collier finds the roots of the Zapatista rebellion not only in the decades of injustice that PRI rule administered, but in the fundamentals of contemporary development and in the world economy as it came to Mexico; in the changing patterns of land owning and marketing; in the place Mexico was granted inside the strategies of world capital. Collier concludes that "the conflict in Chiapas arises directly from a quarter century of Mexican development and modernization, and that solutions must take this into account."

Basta! doesn't offer simplistic solutions to Mexico's dire situation. "The time has passed for considering the `peasant question' simply in terms of price guarantees for corn or redistribution of land for labor-intensive household-based production," Collier writes.

The events in Chiapas reach beyond the story about a struggle for democracy and social justice in Mexico--beyond even the current course of NAFTA and GATT. As the reduction of life to market and commercial principles defines the daily course of existence, the Indian peasants become the most obvious victims, the ones least able to defend their small ejido, their tiny village, their unwritten language and ancient customs. Their very existence is placed at immediate risk as the agribusiness giants sweep into towns and villages with corn sold cheaper than any poor Indian can afford to market it. (Quite apart from the questions of justice, the loss of indigenous cultures would leave a large hole in the rich fabric of human history.)

Basta! documents and analyzes the results of decades of changing land patterns, the ransacking of the Lacondon jungle, and the government's desperate programs to maintain its political hold. But, Collier asks, is it possible for "Mexico to liberalize its economy without modernizing its political system"? His question extends to the very design of the global village. Can modern economies "afford societies in which so many people are losing their economic power as purchasers and consumers"?

The Zapatista uprising put the spotlight on all aspects of Mexican life. The army's clumsy and brutal response to the insurrection brought national and international condemnation upon the government. The PRI, undisturbed government of Mexico for seventy years, was forced to hold talks with an obstreperous gaggle of Indian farmers.

When the miniature army seized eight Chiapas municipalities on New Year's Day, 1994, it destabilized Mexico. It also sparked new hope among revolutionaries. But unlike most revolutionaries of our time, the Zapatistas do not propose to wage war for national independence or state power. These Mayan Indians have a different revolutionary message--one that even some of their supporters have not yet assimilated.

The Zapatistas demand something for those that have nothing--land to farm for themselves, freedom to choose their own representatives, clinics, schools, simple things that the dispossessed indigenous people of Mexico are denied. These basic demands defy a bankrupt government whose political base is slipping faster than the value of its currency. And they point to the shape and form of revolution south of the Rio Grande in the 21st Century.