[NYTr] Che's Legacy Alive and Well 40 Years Later in Mexico, as Elsewhere

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Oct 19, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross10182007.html

Che's Mexican Legacy

Forty Years After His Assassination, Che Guevara's 
"Guerra se Guerrilla" Survives in Mexico

By JOHN ROSS

The 40th anniversary of the assassination of Ernesto "Che" Guevara by
CIA surrogates in the Bolivian outback on October 8th, 1967, had deep
resonance from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego and beyond. Thunderous
tributes were offered in Caracas and Quito and a statue to El Che
unveiled in his native Buenos Aires. Bolivian president Evo Morales
officiated at a ceremony near the site of Guevara's murder to the
consternation of his own armed forces, which carried out the killing at
the behest of Washington. Hundreds of thousands of Che's devotees
poured into Santa Clara Cuba to mark the anniversary at the mausoleum,
which contains his recently recovered remains.

Mexico was no exception to Che mania. Fiestas and forums were
celebrated by the old and new left, poetry readings and rock concerts
organized. The iconic portrait of El Che taken by Alberto Korda
fluttered in the wind on 30-foot banners in the great Zocalo plaza, the
political heart of Mexico, and the Comandante's visage was de rigueur
on the chests of the celebrants. The inevitable Che t-shirt has been in
the vanguard of the commodification of this mythic revolutionary since
his death. Guevara's image now sells everything from vodka to bikinis
and baby clothes.

Mexico plays a particularly hallowed role in the liturgy of Saint Che.
Guevara arrived in Mexico penniless from Guatemala in 1955 after losing
his government job in the wake of the CIA overthrow of leftist general
Jacobo Arbenz. According to the prolific Mexico City author Paco
Ignacio Taibo II, one of Che's many biographers whose work sheds light
on the Comandante's shadowy Mexican stay, Guevara was so broke that he
was reduced to selling images of the saints outside public markets.

Mexico City in the mid-1950s was host to a lively Cuban colony.
Political refugees from the dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista
settled in the capital's old quarter where Perez Prado, the king of the
Mambo, held forth nightly at the Blanquita Theater. Cuban cafes such as
the Havana still survive in the neighborhood.

Guevara, an Argentinean by birth but an internationalist by conviction,
soon connected with Fidel Castro, the rebel son of an Oriente province
sugar grower. Fidel had been exiled from Cuba after leading a failed
assault on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago on July 26th 1953, a
date that became synonymous with the Cuban revolutionary movement.

Castro was gathering recruits for a fresh effort to overthrow Batista
and invited Che to join his revolution. The two trained by climbing the
old volcanoes that line the Valley of Mexico in preparation for setting
up guerrilla camps in Cuba's Sierra Maestra. Che's frequent asthma
attacks were said to have concerned Castro.

At a critical juncture in the plot, Che and Fidel were rounded up and
tortured by Mexican secret police but were unaccountably rescued by the
then-head of the brutal, corrupt Federal Security Direction Fernando
Gutierrez Barrios who subsequently helped the rebels to buy an ancient,
leaky yacht, the "Granma", in his native Veracruz.

On November 25th 1956, Che and Fidel and 80 recruits put out of the
tiny Veracruz port of Tuxpan aboard the Granma to launch the Cuban
revolution. Only a dozen of those who sailed out that night would
survive to make it into the Sierra Maestra where Guevara would
mastermind a successful three-year "Guerra de Guerrilla" (guerilla war)
to overthrow the dictator. "La Guerra de Guerrilla" later became the
title of El Che's how-to-do-it manual (1960) that has been required
reading for at least two generations of Latin American revolutionaries.

Che's "Guerra de Guerrilla" had instant impact in Mexico. On September
23rd, 1963, a fiery rural school teacher named Arturo Gamiz led a band
of would-be guerrillas in an attack on a Madera Chihuahua army barracks
- the bold assault was explicitly modeled on Fidel's attack at Moncada.
Although eight of the rebels, including Gamiz, were martyred, their
successors enshrined the date in the name of the September 23rd
Communist League, the most volatile urban guerrilla active in Mexico in
the late 1960s and early '70s, a period of intense government
repression known here as "the dirty war" in which Che and Fidel's
benefactor, Gutierrez Barrios, played a notorious role.

The 23rd of September Communist League operated out of the northern
industrial city of Monterrey, kidnapping tycoons, heisting bankrolls,
and engaging in deadly gun battles with the police. They were joined in
this "guerra de guerrilla" by a less Cuban-oriented formation, the
Forces of National Liberation (FLN) of which the contemporary Zapatista
Army of National Liberation (EZLN) is a lineal descendent.

15 "focos" or local guerrilla bands were active in Mexico in the years
following Guevara's assassination - the word "foco" was popularized by
Guevara's sometimes comrade in arms Regis Debrey who joined El Che
briefly during his fatal Bolivian adventure. The guerrilla focos
functioned in both urban and rural settings.

The most prominent of the rural practitioners of Guevara's guerra de
guerrilla was another rural school teacher turned revolutionary Lucio
Cabanas whose Party of the Poor went nose to nose with the Mexican
military and its U.S. advisors in the mountains of Guerrero state's
Costa Grande just north of Acapulco until he was cornered and killed by
the army in December 1974. Many years later, Cabanas's struggle gave
birth to Mexico's other contemporary guerrilla, the Popular
Revolutionary Army or EPR.

But long before Che Guevara penned his celebrated manual, "la guerra de
guerrilla" was a staple of Mexican history. Indigenous guerrillas
fought the European Conquistadores from the day Hernan Cortez dropped
anchor off Veracruz in 1519. Vicente Guerrero, a black muleteer, led a
guerrilla army against the Spanish Crown to win liberation in 1821. 40
years later, Benito Juarez, a Zapotec Indian, resorted to the guerra of
the guerrilla to drive French monarchists from the land.

During the 1910-1919 revolution, the first great uprising of landless
peasants in the Americas, both Francisco Villa in the north and
Emiliano Zapata in the south of Mexico, fielded standing armies but
their most potent weapons were small guerrilla bands that carried out
acts of sabotage, blew up troop trains, and attacked military barracks.

The Guerra de Guerrilla is a continuum in the nation's history. One
generation has passed the armed struggle down to the next. Lucio
Cabanas's grandfather was one of Zapata's generals. Another
contemporary guerrilla "foco" honors the name of Zapata's lieutenant
Ruben Jaramillo, who was gunned down by government agents in the 1960s.

Both Zapata and El Che are demi-gods in the Zapatista firmament. In the
autonomous villages in the highlands and jungle of Chiapas, Che's death
day October 8th is celebrated as the Day of the Heroic Guerrilla.
Zapata, who was ambushed by the revolutionary government he helped
install April 10th 1919, is similarly regarded as a reincarnation of
Votan, the guardian of the heart of the Mayan people.

But, although the EZLN is indelibly associated with General Zapata and
his Liberating Army of the South, the FLN's original blueprint for a
new Mexican revolution contemplated the Zapatistas rising in the south
and a Villista Army of National Liberation fighting a guerra de
guerrilla in the north, a scenario that never came to fruition.

Although the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Popular
Revolutionary Army represent Che's vision in contemporary Mexico, their
own vision of what kind of revolution they are fighting to achieve is
strikingly diverse.

* * *

Both of Mexico's principle guerrilla formations place El Che at the
very pinnacle of their revolutionary pantheons but veneration of the
sainted Guevara is one of the few subjects the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation and the Popular Revolutionary Arm have ever agreed
upon. At least until now.

The debut of the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) on the first
anniversary of the massacre of 17 farmers at Aguas Blancas Guerrero
June 28th 1996 did not please the Zapatistas. During a summer-long
rampage that took dozens of lives in assaults on police barracks and
military convoys, the EPR stole the spotlight from their Chiapas
counterparts who were then peacefully engaged in negotiating an Indian
rights treaty with the government of then-president Ernesto Zedillo.
Zedillo, startled by the violent EPR campaign, anointed the Zapatistas
as the "good" guerrilla, which infuriated the EZLN's charismatic
mouthpiece Subcomandante Marcos.

During a six-state shooting spree August 28th 1996, the Popular
Revolutionary Army boldly risked a turf war with the EZLN when its
guerrilleros penetrated the Zapatista zone of influence in the
highlands of Chiapas, hanging banners proclaiming their presence and
felling trees to block roads.

When the EPR added insult to injury by offering its solidarity in the
Zapatistas' ultimately doomed negotiations with the "mal gobierno" (bad
government), Marcos went ballistic. "We don't need or want your help,"
the Subcomandante snapped, accusing the EPR of only wanting state power
- the EZLN was then in the process of declaring itself autonomous of
the state.

In an exclusive Proceso magazine interview with EPR commander "Jose
Arturo", the Guerrero-based guerillero dissed Marcos's guerrilla
credentials, mocking the Sup because he was "trying to make a
revolution by poetry." His ever-present Sherlock Holmes pipe would
surely tip off the enemy during hot pursuit.

Although the Zapatista Army of National Revolution is generically
grouped as a guerrilla army, the truth is more diffuse. The EZLN's
origin was as a self-defense militia confronting the "white
guards" (private armies) of the ranchers in the jungle and highlands of
southeastern Chiapas. By 1994, the militias had involved into a
paramilitary force.

The Zapatistas' most celebrated act - the taking of San Cristobal de
las Casas and a nearby military base - in the first hours of 1994 just
as the North American Free Trade Agreement was kicking in, was as much
political theater as it was the "guerra de guerrilla" - although the
rebels' retreat back into the jungle, the terrain they knew best, was a
text book lesson lifted from Che's widely-read how-to-do-it manual "La
Guerra de Guerrilla."

Nonetheless, a guerrilla army is expected to engage in a shooting war
and the Zapatistas long ago eschewed the "all power comes from the
barrel of a gun" way of doing business. The EZLN says it has two
weapons - "El Fuego" (the gun) and "La Palabra" (the word) and the
words, mostly Marcos's, have dominated their arsenal for nearly a
decade. The last time the Zapatistas deployed their weapons was to
repel a government attack on the autonomous municipality of San Juan de
la Libertad June 10th, 1999.

By the fall of 1996, the Popular Revolutionary Army's guns had gone
silent. Purportedly cobbled together from 14 previously unheard-of
"focos" (a term coined by Guevara confederate Regis Debrey), the EPR
was subject to schism. The split seemed to drive a wedge between the
inheritors of Lucio Cabanas's Party of the Poor in Guerrero and a
Maoist faction long based in neighboring Oaxaca, the Clandestine Party
of Revolutionary Workers-Union of the People or PROCUP. Other schisms
have followed contributing to an alphabet soup of grouplets - the FARP,
the ERPI, the EPRI etc - mostly operating in the altiplano of Guerrero
and Puebla states with leadership cadre said to be based in the slum
cities surrounding Mexico City.

Oaxaca, where the PROCUP was founded by an ex-rector of the state
university, continues to be a stage for EPR activities - a shopping
center bombing on the eve of local elections in August was claimed by
the Popular Revolutionary Army. During 18 months of sometimes violent
uprising led by the Oaxaca Peoples' Popular Assembly or APPO to unseat
the tyrannical governor Ulises Ruiz, Ruiz repeatedly accused the APPO
of being a front for the EPR and the Popular Revolutionary Army's
initials were painted on a local hillside above the city at a
particularly conflictive moment in the struggle. Dozens of EPR
political prisoners have languished in Oaxaca jails for years.

This past May 23rd, two of the EPR's historic leaders, Eduardo Reyes
Amaya and Gabriel Cruz Sanchez, were "disappeared" from a hotel in the
Oaxaca city market. Witnesses saw them taken from the hotel by
unidentified police or military operatives. They appeared to have been
badly beaten. The two have not been heard from since and fingers point
towards Ulises Ruiz and/or the militarized federal police.

In response to the taking of the militants, the Popular Revolutionary
Army has launched what it terms "a national campaign of harassment" to
force the "presentation with life" of Reyes and Cruz Sanchez by whoever
is holding the men. In June and again in September, the EPR bombed
PEMEX oil and natural gas pipelines in Guanajuato, Queretero, and
Veracruz states, cutting off the energy flow to hundreds of factories
owned by transnational corporations and displaying an uncanny ability
to strike very near the heart of the Mexican economy. In addition, the
EPR claims responsibility for an armed attack on an unfinished prison
in Chapa de Corzo Chiapas - the Popular Revolutionary Army is thought
to have cadre in the Sierra Madre and the northern valleys of Mexico's
southern-most state.

The government of freshman president Felipe Calderon, whose 2006
election was severely questioned, has been reluctant to label the EPR
attacks as "terrorist" acts, a curious omission - these days, Che's
"guerra de guerrilla" is almost automatically synonymous with
"terrorism." Rather, Calderon has held back the army - 30,000 troops
are currently in the field fighting Washington's War on Drugs rather
than the EPR - and forcefully denies that his government is holding the
two old militants. The President even opened up the notorious Military
Camp #1 to inspection by the National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH)
to substantiate the claim. Similarly in Oaxaca, Ruiz has repeatedly
denied that he has Reyes and Cruz Sanchez.

During the "dirty war" against Lucio Cabanas's Party of the Poor in the
1970s, the military tortured hundreds of farmers suspected of being
supporters of the rebel leader and held them in a series of secret
prisons, eventually tossing their bodies from airplanes into the
Pacific Ocean near Acapulco. Are Reyes and Cruz Sanchez being held in a
secret prison?

Another theory making the rounds of Mexican political columns has Ruiz
or the military capturing the two men and then turning them over to
Oaxaca narco gangs in retaliation for the rumored kidnapping of an
important drug lord - the EPR has traditionally financed its operations
through high profile kidnappings.

While the Popular Revolutionary Army tries to find its disappeared
leaders, their cross-country rivals, the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation, is not enjoying the best of times. Tensions have been
ratcheted up in the rebels' autonomous zones where Indian farmers
affiliated with the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the
once-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have laid claim to
10,000 hectares of Zapatista land, mostly in the fertile lowlands of
the "Canadas" or canyons.

Soon after their historic January 1st 1994 uprising, the EZLN recouped
the "fincas"(ranches) where they had once toiled as sharecroppers and
slaves and declared them in collective possession but did not register
them with the "mal gobierno." Now the Agrarian Reform Secretariat is
awarding those lands to rival farmers in the form of "ejidos" or rural
communal production units. Skirmishes between the oddly named OPDDIC
("Organization for the Protection and Defense of Indian Farmers") and
Zapatista autonomous communities have been frequent since the spring.

Meanwhile in the highlands, the key Zapatista autonomous municipality
of San Andres Sakamch'en de los Pobres is under threat from a
previously unknown paramilitary formation, "Red OPDDIC", and PRD thugs
have attacked Zapatista farmers in neighboring Zinacantan.

The anti-Zapatista surge has forced the Comandantes of the EZLN under
Marcos's pen to suspend the second stage of the Other Campaign, the
Zapatista-inspired grassroots mobilization to build a new Mexican Left
from the bottom up. In 2006, the "Otra" focused its energies in the
center and north of the country and Year II is rooted in the south,
particularly the conflictive state of Oaxaca. But travel has grown
risky for the EZLN leadership. When a delegation sought to attend an
all-Indian anti-capitalist encounter in Yaqui territory in Chihuahua
this October, the comandantes were repeatedly harassed at military and
police checkpoints and returned to Chiapas because of threats to their
personal safety.

Perhaps because of the threats against the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation's hard won autonomy, Subcomandante Marcos startled longtime
Zapaphiles in September when he suddenly extended an olive branch to
his once bitter rivals in the Popular Revolutionary Army, backing up
the EPR's demands for the return of their historic leaders and the
guerrilleros' harassment campaign which has been largely directed at
PEMEX infrastructure. The gesture seems to establish a tacit
understanding for the first time and maybe even an eventual alliance
between the most prominent Mexican heirs to Che Guevara's "guerra de
guerrilla."


[Fans and enemies of John Ross are invited to attend "Eye On Mexico", a
celebration of the Mexican revolution and a benefit to buy the author a
fake eye. Friday November 16th at New College, 777 Valencia Street, in
San Francisco. 7:30 PM. Write johnross at igc.org if you have further
information. ]