Wednesday, October 29, 2008
A Visit with former Chiapas Bishop Samuel Ruiz
By Charles Hardy
September 25, 2003
QUERE’TARO, ME’XICO; SEPTEMBER 2003: I heard my friend say over the telephone, “Tatik, Charlie just arrived on the bus. When would be the best time for us to visit you?” A few hours later at 4 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, we rang the doorbell of his home and were greeted personally by Tatik.
Tatik (meaning “father” or “elder”) is an affectionate Tzotzil title for Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the retired bishop of Chiapas, Mexico who now lives in the city of Quere’taro.
Ruiz was appointed bishop of Chiapas in 1959 at the age of 35. Soon after arriving there, he became aware of the problem of the indigenous people and started defending them. In 1993, Rome asked that he resign from his position, but dropped the request when a few thousand indigenous marched in support of him. Having reached the mandatory age for retirement (75) and after serving in Chiapas for more than forty years, he resigned in March 2000.
The purpose of my visit was an interview. I was a bit hesitant because I had read a 1998 article by Sergio Munoz in the Los Angeles Times. Munoz wrote about the bishop: “He cannot be called easy-going: He favors impassioned monologues and hates to be interrupted.” Maybe the five years since that interview have mellowed him or possibly it had something to do with the interviewer, but during the two hours we spent drinking coffee and sharing cookies at his dining room table I was visiting with a man far different from the one described by Munoz.
At 79, Ruiz was not only friendly, but also intellectually sharp and willing to listen as well as to talk.
Since I live in Venezuela, the events of the past several years there have been the focus of my attention. They have also overshadowed for me what has happened outside of Venezuela, including that of the Zapatista movement in Mexico. What little I knew of them, I had gained from international press reports.
Following are two examples of that reporting cited in a recent Narco News report by Annalena Oeffner. On August 8, an Associated Press story claimed that “most Indian people even in the Zapatistas’ jungle heartland have declined to join the movement...” Another report in the Financial Times August 10 said that the absence of Subcomandante Marcos at the August 8-10 meeting in Oventic was seen as “a sign of his declining power within the Zapatista hierarchy.”
Based on this type of reporting, I was looking for the bishop’s response to two principal questions: 1) Was the support of the Zapatistas declining? and, 2) Was the leadership of Subcommandante Marcos being replaced? By the end of the interview I would discover that both of my questions were very poorly worded.
First, the bishop was quick to point out that the Zapatistas did not represent only people in Chiapas but were an expression of what was being felt throughout all of Mexico. He then painted the political scene that gave rise to the Zapatista movement.
Ruiz said that there had been a nationwide rejection of the political maneuvering leading up to the elections that took place in July 1994, keeping the PRI party in power at that time. When the Zapatistas appeared on the scene, the dialog that followed showed clearly that their problems were felt throughout the country.
According to Ruiz, the government tried to disparage the project in four steps. First they questioned why an indigenous group should feel that they represented the whole country. Nobody had elected the Zapatistas to represent them. Secondly, they said that they didn’t even represent the indigenous poor of the country. Thirdly, that they didn’t even represent the indigenous of Chiapas, not even the people in the municipalities where they came from. And finally, the government reached the extreme of denying them even the legitimacy that they had had with the previous government saying that the movement was just the result of some “guy” (Marcos) who infiltrated Chiapas and who wears a mask and smokes a pipe, thereby denying the indigenous any ownership of the movement.
Because of the government’s version, the bishop said, “It must be said clearly that it is a movement centered in Chiapas but that has national origins.” And yet, he added, the mass media continue to spread the idea that the problem of the Zapatistas is only the problem of Chiapas.
He also said that when President Fox assumed the “throne” of Mexico, he indicated that the problem of the Zapatistas was the problem of the previous government. But the Zapatistas replied, according to Bishop Ruiz, “No, no, no, Se~or. You have a problem with us and we have a problem with you because you are sitting in the same seat as previous governments. You can’t say that the foreign debt belongs to the previous government. Equally we have a problem with you and you have a problem with us. The difference is that we want to resolve the problem through dialog and not through force.”
He emphasized that the problem of the indigenous was not just a Mexican problem but was present throughout the continent. The indigenous person is still being colonized. With few exceptions, “from Alaska in the United States to the Patagonia [in Argentina], the indigenous is on the floor under the rest of society. This would indicate that it is not by their own will that this is so but that the system itself places them on the margin of society.” But, because of the attempt to celebrate the 500 years of the conquest of America, the indigenous have risen up and now say that they want to be the subjects of their own destiny. Besides, he added, 500 years is nothing in comparison with their history.
He also noted that what was happening in Cancu’n (the World Trade Organization was meeting the day I visited him) showed that even the rest of the world is recognizing that there are problems with the system. He said that “not only is a new world possible, but it is urgent and necessary.”
My first question, in some ways therefore, had little meaning for him since he refused to focus the question on the Zapatistas. What was happening with them was only a small part of the consciousness that was rising throughout the Americas and throughout the world.
Proceeding to my second question I said that I had read in Venezuela that Subcomandante Marcos was turning over his power to others. Once again, my question was off base. The bishop was quick to reply, “That’s a bad interpretation of the situation. He never was in power. The press has tried to say that he is the movement.”
He then pointed out that Marcos is not indigenous himself and is only a “subcomandante.” He has a definite role in the security of the people, but a technical dimension. He never participated in the dialogs although he was present at the first because he was invited the night before so that he could communicate with the press what happened. He spoke better Spanish than the rest who were present.
Referring to the absence of Marcos at the Oventic meeting in August, the bishop said that what is happening is something of a self-criticism to clarify to the world that Marcos is not the movement.
When I asked him to explain what the Zapatistas meant by the terminology “govern by obeying” (mandar obedeciendo), he replied: “There’s nothing to explain. Any authority should obey his people. He is not to order but to ask, ‘What is it that the community wants?’ He shouldn’t look out for his own interests but ask what are the interests that will serve the community.”
I then shared with him a story. I was told that in Venezuela there is a group of indigenous people where the leader (li’der is the word I used) is “he who listens.” The bishop took exception to the word lider saying that it was a word from North America. Recognizing that similar words exist in Spanish, he nevertheless preferred to talk in terms of “processes” in reference to Latin America. When there are leaders the problem is, he said, “take the leader away and the process comes to an end.”
I also asked him his opinion about “participative democracy” in distinction to “representative democracy.” The term is used often in the 1999 Constitution of Venezuela. This he also placed in a worldwide context, saying that the war in Iraq had clearly shown that there was a “divorce” between the people and their elected representatives in the United States, England, Spain and even in Mexico. They had been chosen by their political parties, received their power through elections but afterwards were seeking their own interests. There were no demonstrations anywhere in the world in favor of these leaders, he noted.
He said that it was now clear that it would not be the political parties that would guide the future of the world, but rather organizations not directly connected to the government.
Concluding the conversation about the Zapatistas, I had some questions for the bishop about the situation of the Catholic Church in the world today.
One was whether or not the Theology of Liberation still existed. He replied: “Is there a theology of slavery?” For Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the only theology worth its name is that which liberates.
Following the interview I wanted to get another perspective on the Zapatista movement. I am no expert on the subject and, although I have visited Mexico several times, I have never been in Chiapas.
A friend shared a book with me entitled, Marcos, La Genial Impostura (“Marcos, the Inspired Fraud”). The book was published in 1998 and written by two authors. One was a male French correspondent for Le Monde who arrived in Mexico in 1993, Bertrand de la Grange, and the other was a female correspondent for the Spanish newspaper El Pais since 1994, Maite Rico. The book presented a picture almost totally contrary to that which Bishop Ruiz had painted.
In its 472 pages I was told the following: 1) There was nothing particularly unusual about the elections in 1994; 2) There was little support for the Zapatistas in Chiapas or elsewhere in Mexico; 3) Marcos was the leader of their every action - the indigenous had a small role to play; 4) Bishop Ruiz was at times so aligned with the Zapatistas that the Mexican secret services thought, for a while, that he was Comandante Aleman; and, 5) The Zapatistas had accomplished little for the people they supposedly represented.
The book is full of interesting interviews and information. It is also a one-sided presentation that seems to represent the government position that Ruiz had described.
A few sentences on page 282, however, especially impressed me. The authors knew what Ruiz was feeling and thinking on October 26, 1993 when he received the request from the Apostolic Delegate, Girolamo Prigione, asking him to resign. “He took the blow, but he felt dizzy. He was convinced, and he was right, that it was a settling of political accounts. He knew that the contents of the letter which he had sent to the Pope three months before, during his visit to Mexico, had irritated the government.” (The letter spoke about the political situation in Mexico and the oppression of the indigenous).
I am always amazed at foreign reporters who are not only able to do interviews and gather information, but who are able to reach so far into the depths of any situation that they even know what people are thinking and feeling.
Reading the book, I felt I was reading about Venezuela and not about Mexico. We, too, have been plagued with foreign correspondents and local reporters who sometimes make a foray into the barrios and emerge with a better knowledge of what is happening in them than those who have lived there for decades.
Whose story about the Zapatistas is correct? That of Tatik? Or, that of the government and these reporters? I am in no position to say and in a few days I will return to Venezuela where I have lived for most of the past eighteen years.
But I do worry about something: is it possible that Bertrand de la Grange and Maite Rico are now in Venezuela meeting with opposition leaders and preparing another book? I can see the title already, possibly chosen before going there: Cha’vez, Otra Genial Impostura (“Cha’vez, Another Inspired Fraud”).
Charles Hardy, a native of Cheyenne, Wyoming, has resided in Venezuela for most of the past eighteen years. As a Catholic missionary priest, he lived in a pressed-cardboard and tin dwelling in a barrio of Caracas from 1985 to 1993. He is a professor of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism (first and second sessions of 2003). His editorial columns appear frequently in www.vheadline.com and can be found in English and Spanish at www.cowboyincaracas.com. Comments may be addressed to him at Charlie@cowboyincaracas.com
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