EZLN
Introduction
How Do We Understand Suffering?
We humans can tolerate suffering: we cannot tolerate meaninglessness.
—Desmond Tutu, Believe: The Words and Inspiration of Desmond Tutu
Human rights are being violated on every continent…. Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.
—Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1986
Before I had my two children, I had a miscarriage. I was living in New York City at the time and medically it was not a major event. I required surgery, but I was admitted to the hospital very early in the morning and by that same evening I was released and at home. Of course, emotionally it was deeply, deeply painful. Earlier, I had been invited to go on a human rights fact-finding delegation to the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico that was scheduled for the week after my unexpected miscarriage. I had lived in Mexico for years and been to Chiapas many times before, and the political events that prompted the delegation felt very immediate to me. And, undoubtedly to escape the emotional pain I felt and to stop feeling sorry for myself, the very next week I did indeed go.
Chiapas is the state where the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, according to its Spanish acronym) had launched its revolt on the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect on January 1, 1994. The EZLN was protesting economic and political policies that left indigenous people systematically marginalized and impoverished. Its goals included achieving basic citizenship rights, indigenous control over resources (especially land), and demilitarization of indigenous areas.1 In December 1997, when I was there on this occasion, paramilitary violence was at its height in Chiapas. The Mexican government was exploiting religious and political fault lines in these impoverished indigenous communities and arming paramilitary groups with Orwellian names, such as “Peace and Justice,” in order to terrorize potential Zapatista sympathizers. On December 22, 1997, thirty-six women and children were killed in Chenalhó, a community in los Altos, the “mountainous region,” of Chiapas.2 In the weeks preceding the Acteal massacre, as it came to be called, an upswing in violence had already exacerbated the displacement of Zapatista-sympathizing communities.
It was in one of those communities of internally displaced persons that I encountered a woman who was hemorrhaging as a result of a miscarriage. She was just about at the same stage of pregnancy as I had been the week before. However, in her case the hemorrhage was a life-or-death situation. She was weak from the loss of blood and
