G
Guest
Guest
US towns gather in their wounded
Returnees shunned by national media win warm local welcome
Gary Younge in Greenfield, Missouri
Saturday December 27, 2003
The Guardian
As the honorary grand marshall of Greenfield's Christmas parade, Derick Hurt waved with his right hand as he led the other vehicles in a lap of the main square on Saturday.
His left hand is still not functional since he bailed out of his Humvee in Mosul, Iraq, and landed on it, breaking his wrist. Every now and then he would stop saluting locals holding "Welcome Home Derick" posters and tap the spot where his lower leg used to be, to ease the throbbing.
Behind him, local dignitaries, church groups, and the kings and queens of the high school threw sweets to children from the boats and floats on which they were towed. Ahead of him was a lifetime of disability as an amputee, with a body flecked with shrapnel.
"It's a big thing for me," said Mr Hurt, 26, of the reception he has received in the week since he arrived home. In a town of around 1,500 nestled in the rural midwest, an area of big skies and small creeks, his injury and homecoming have been a big event. Local people raised thousands of dollars to help his family travel to see him at the Walter Reed military hospital in Virginia. Cameras from the local networks met him when he arrived at the airport in Springfield. When he got to Greenfield, the town was waiting in the square.
Around 2,657 soldiers have been injured in Iraq, according to the Pentagon. But while the death toll influences political debate and prompts public discomfort, the swelling legions of the wounded - around 10 a day - have failed to make any impact on a national level.
With the exception of Jessica Lynch, whose capture, rescue and return has already produced two books, one film and a national myth, little has been heard until recently about those who came back to start a new life in wheelchairs and on crutches.
And little that has been heard has been good. There were the wounded who had to wait for weeks for medical treatment in Fort Stewart Georgia, where they complained of filthy conditions. There was Shoshana Johnson, a black woman who was shot in both legs and held prisoner for 22 days, who says racism is the only explanation for why she receives $700 (£500) less each month than Ms Lynch. Then came was the scandal of wounded soldiers being forced to pay $8.10 a day for their hospital meals, until the rule was repealed by Congress.
When Mr Hurt was at Walter Reed hospital, a cast of stars visited to boost morale, including Bruce Willis, Shania Twain and Cher.
After Cher's visit, in late October, she called a television phone-in program to ask: "Why aren't Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president - why aren't they taking pictures with these guys? I don't understand why these guys are so hidden, why there are no pictures of them."
To some, this is more evidence that George Bush - who has yet to attend the funeral of any soldier killed in the war and refers to the casualties only in general terms - is trying to distance himself.
But last week, Mr Bush was to be seen on television visiting the Walter Reed hospital.
"We put a lot of fine troops in harm's way to make this country more secure and the world more free and the world more peaceful," he said.
"We ask them to face great dangers to meet a national need."
When Mr Hurt joined the army in 2000, he had little sense of great danger. "It was peaceful at the time," he said. "I never imagined I would fight."
Then came September 11. Mr Hurt was sent to Jordan. It was his first time abroad.
The second was when he went to Kuwait in February, in preparation for the invasion of Iraq. On September 13, he drove a Humvee through the city's empty streets. The night before, he had written to his father saying all was quiet in town.
Suddenly there was a flash, and then another one. "I was in shock," he said. "The engine had died and I knew I had to get out of the car. I used my bodyweight to lever myself out of the window, which is probably when I broke my wrist."
He lay face-down on the kerb amid the smoke and the gunfire. "I thought, this is it. I'm going to die right here, just like a vegetable on the ground."
Then he heard one of his fellow soldiers shout his name as his comrades came to his aid. He screamed in pain as one tied a tourniquet around one of his injured legs.
"One of them was just hanging on by a thread and the other one was all battered up," he said.
His father received a phone call at 1.30 the next morning. "I knew it was the military, and I knew that since they called me he must still be alive, because they come around in person if they're dead," he said. "So I thought, 'So long as he's still alive I can deal with the rest.'"
Mr Hurt was in hospital in Germany for five days before he was flown to Walter Reed, where he stayed for three months. "I was thinking, 'This is it. It's not going to get any better. What kind of job can I get now?'"
Still, he does not regret joining the army - "These things happen for a reason," he says.
Mr Hurt cannot fault the veterans' administration, which is advising him on benefits. He misses sport, but is driving already, and living with his father until he returns to Walter Reed for treatment next month. After that, he is thinking of going back to his former job as a machinist, where the workshops are wheelchair friendly.
"I've been very impressed," said his father. "It took me six months to get a job when I got back from Vietnam, and they gave me nothing."
Resistance takes the offensive
Luke Harding in Basra
Saturday December 27, 2003
The Guardian
Resistance forces in Iraq have begun their biggest offensive since Saddam Hussein's capture two weeks ago, killing at least four US soldiers by mortar and bomb attacks.
A roadside bomb killed one soldier and injured another early yesterday in a convoy near Baquba, about 40 miles north of Baghdad. A second soldier was killed trying to defuse a bomb outside the town.
Two other US soldiers died in a Christmas Day mortar attack on a camp near Baquba.
Two Polish soldiers were injured during a guerrilla ambush in southern Iraq yesterday.
The attacks followed a three-day attempt by US troops in Baghdad to wipe out resistance in the city.
The army said yesterday that it had arrested 66 people in its latest night-time operation, including a major-general connected to Saddam and 20 other "significant figures".
But the raids seem to have galvanised the insurgents, who fired several rockets early yesterday into the green zone, Saddam's riverside palace where the coalition has its HQ.
They attacked numerous other western targets in Baghdad, including the heavily fortified Sheraton hotel, which is used by journalists and contractors, the Turkish and Iranian embassies, and a block of flats next to the German embassy.
Residents spent most of Christmas listening to the nightly battles involving heavy mortar and gunfire between US forces swooping over the city in Apache attack helicopters and the insurgents.
The coalition's HQ resounded with wailing sirens after coming under mortar fire late on Thursday night.
A spokesman confirmed that there had been "impacts", but refused to elaborate on the damage.
Mortar shells were fired at the Sheraton on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, one piercing the wall on an upper floor, but no one was hurt.
Two Iraqis were killed by a roadside bomb.
There seems little doubt that the capture of Saddam in a hole near Tikrit a fortnight ago has not demoralised the Iraqis actively resisting US rule. Attacks are becoming almost too frequent to count in Baghdad and the Sunni triangle.
In Mosul three US soldiers were injured yesterday in an ambush on their patrol, which returned fire, killing a taxi driver.
Israel plans revenge for Christmas attacks
Conal Urquhart in Jerusalem
Saturday December 27, 2003
The Guardian
Israel closed the West Bank and Gaza Strip yesterday and was planning further retaliation for the Christmas Day suicide bombing that killed four people.
The first suicide bombing for almost three months happened minutes after an Israeli helicopter fired two missiles at a car in Gaza, killing three members of Islamic Jihad and two bystanders.
Said Hanani, 18, from the village of Beit Furik, east of the West Bank city of Nablus, blew himself up in the middle of a group of soldiers at busy bus stop just after 6pm.
He killed Angelina Shekhirov, 19, and Rotem Weinberger, 19, from Kfar Saba, and Noam Leibowitz, 21, from Elkana. The name of the fourth victim, a 17-year-old girl, has not been released. All four were buried yesterday.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a secular Marxist group, claimed responsibility and said it was the first in a series of retaliations for the killing of two of its members in Nablus last week.
Just before the explosion Israeli Apache helicopters fired two missiles at the car carrying Makled Hamid, the leader of Islamic Jihad's military wing, and two associates.
A field worker for the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said the explosion scattered thousands of tiny ball bearings around the area, killing the two bystanders and wounding several others.
Israeli army spokesmen said that Hamid had been responsible for scores of attacks on Israelis in Gaza, and was killed because he was about to carry out an unspecified "mega-terror attack".
Islamic Jihad said it was an Israeli attempt to prevent a Palestinian ceasefire, calling it a "dirty message" to the Egyptian and other Arab mediators trying to bring it about.
The Israelis have decided to retaliate against the PFLP and Islamic Jihad but not Hamas, which they accept has suspended attacks in Israel.
General Moshe Yaalon, the army chief of staff, told the daily paper Yediot Ahronot: "It is no coincidence that a group like Hamas decides to stop attacks within Israel, it comes from the realisation that their organisation is in danger."
He said that despite the bombing he believed a ceasefire with the Palestinians could be just weeks away.
"The Palestinian-Israeli conflict will be with us for many years to come, but I believe we have now passed the peak of the violent struggle," he said.
In the short term the upsurge in violence has led to the postponement of negotiations. Israeli and Palestinian officials have been trying to arrange a meeting between the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers, Ariel Sharon, and Ahmed Qureia, to reinvigorate the road map peace plan.
A preparatory meeting was cancelled earlier in the week after an Israeli raid in southern Gaza killed nine Palestinians.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian cabinet minister in charge of negotiations said: "We condemn the targeting and killing of Palestinian and Israeli civilians and we call on Israeli government to resume a meaningful dialogue to a peace process."
One Israeli newspaper commentator warned that Israel's military action was in danger of nourishing the circle of violence, to the extent it would become impossible to see who was retaliating for what.
He wrote: "Afterwards, go figure what came first, the assassination or the revenge terror attack, the infrastructure that was dismantled or the one that arose due to its predecessor's dismantling, and so on and so forth."
Zapatistas go back to the grassroots to start again
Ten years after their uprising, the Chiapas rebels are feeling the chill of neglect
Jo Tuckman in Morelia
Saturday December 27, 2003
The Guardian
Through a door under a painted rainbow Zapatistas sit in an office with a computer, a couple of manual typewriters, a satellite phone and not much else.
"We are satisfied and proud to be working against the system," says José Luis Hernández, spokesman for the "junta of good government" recently established in his village of Mayan peasants. "We are creating a new culture."
A decade after its brief but bloody uprising the largely indigenous Zapatista Army of National Liberation, led by the mestizo (mixed race) Subcomandante Marcos, is still talking big.
The difference is that far fewer people are listening.
The rebellion began on New Year's Day 1994, shaking Mexico to its core and catapulting Marcos and his ragtag army on to the world stage.
Their rhetoric against centuries of racism and neglect, the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which was launched he same day, and the party that had governed Mexico since 1929 struck many chords.
The fighting lasted 12 days, killed a few hundred and turned the Zapatistas into an international symbol of indigenous struggle and the fledgling anti-globalisation movement. It made Marcos the most romanticised Latin American revolutionary since Ché Guevara.
Ten years on the Zapatistas have been largely forgotten in a world caught up in more pressing battles, and even in Mexico Marcos's communiques barely make the newspapers.
President Vicente Fox, whose election in July 2000 brought democratic government to Mexico, can largely ignore the conflict. The Zapatistas have little to show for the years of struggle.
After their initial success putting indigenous demands on Mexico's political agenda, they have failed to secure the legal reforms to answer them. Many indigenous villagers sympathetic to the Zapatistas still live in the abject poverty that prompted the rebellion, banned by the leadership from using the schools, clinics and other development projects lavished on Chiapas state after the uprising.
Free trade has continued marching forward, leaving Mexico's poor farmers floundering in its wake.
But the Zapatistas show no sign of giving up. Their challenge is to prove that they can not merely survive but make Mexicans and the world heed their message.
"The movement is tired. It has lasted for too long in difficult conditions," said Jan de Vos, the Belgian historian and anthropologist who has written extensively on the Zapatistas.
"Let's see if Marcos still has enough imagination to give it new energy."
Marcos, a former university lecturer who says he set off to make revolution with a copy of Don Quixote under his arm, has a much-lauded strategic eye. It was he who timed the uprising to coincide with the launch of Nafta, and who reinvented the Zapatistas as an indigenous movement after recognising that their original rhetoric of socialist revolution was falling flat.
Now he and other rebel leaders seek to rejuvenate the movement by forcing forward the vision of indigenous autonomy, with or without the acquiescence of the authorities.
The strategy was launched in August with the creation of five regional governments, called juntas, also designed to tighten the leadership's hold over far-flung Zapatista communities and rein in control of international donations.
At the junta in Morelia Mr Hernández explains how Zapatista jurisdiction works.
He says there is no need for jails because lawbreakers are "persuaded" to "understand" their crimes, and that there is no resentment at the lack of resources, since Zapatistas know their "dignity" is worth more than any government development project.
Seven masked comandantes sit silently by: there to provide guidance to the new civilian authorities.
The Zapatistas' peaceful image has been tainted by cases of non-conformist families being hounded out of rebel communities, but their war is still far less associated with violence than most other armed rebellions. So much so that the Chiapas conflict has always verged on the surreal.
Never more so than in early 2001 when Marcos and the rest of the high command mounted a rock star-style tour of Mexico, designed to rally support for the peace accord signed in 1996 by the previous government and then forgotten in favour of a huge military deployment, support for anti-rebel paramilitaries, and lavish spending in indigenous areas.
The collapse of the 71-year-old regime in 2000 raised hopes for a return to the peace process, but it was not to be. Parliament eventually passed a watered-down version of the reform, angering the Zapatistas, who pronounced Mr Fox no better than the regime he had replaced.
Neither side has set out to rekindle the violence, but neither is looking for peace.
Returnees shunned by national media win warm local welcome
Gary Younge in Greenfield, Missouri
Saturday December 27, 2003
The Guardian
As the honorary grand marshall of Greenfield's Christmas parade, Derick Hurt waved with his right hand as he led the other vehicles in a lap of the main square on Saturday.
His left hand is still not functional since he bailed out of his Humvee in Mosul, Iraq, and landed on it, breaking his wrist. Every now and then he would stop saluting locals holding "Welcome Home Derick" posters and tap the spot where his lower leg used to be, to ease the throbbing.
Behind him, local dignitaries, church groups, and the kings and queens of the high school threw sweets to children from the boats and floats on which they were towed. Ahead of him was a lifetime of disability as an amputee, with a body flecked with shrapnel.
"It's a big thing for me," said Mr Hurt, 26, of the reception he has received in the week since he arrived home. In a town of around 1,500 nestled in the rural midwest, an area of big skies and small creeks, his injury and homecoming have been a big event. Local people raised thousands of dollars to help his family travel to see him at the Walter Reed military hospital in Virginia. Cameras from the local networks met him when he arrived at the airport in Springfield. When he got to Greenfield, the town was waiting in the square.
Around 2,657 soldiers have been injured in Iraq, according to the Pentagon. But while the death toll influences political debate and prompts public discomfort, the swelling legions of the wounded - around 10 a day - have failed to make any impact on a national level.
With the exception of Jessica Lynch, whose capture, rescue and return has already produced two books, one film and a national myth, little has been heard until recently about those who came back to start a new life in wheelchairs and on crutches.
And little that has been heard has been good. There were the wounded who had to wait for weeks for medical treatment in Fort Stewart Georgia, where they complained of filthy conditions. There was Shoshana Johnson, a black woman who was shot in both legs and held prisoner for 22 days, who says racism is the only explanation for why she receives $700 (£500) less each month than Ms Lynch. Then came was the scandal of wounded soldiers being forced to pay $8.10 a day for their hospital meals, until the rule was repealed by Congress.
When Mr Hurt was at Walter Reed hospital, a cast of stars visited to boost morale, including Bruce Willis, Shania Twain and Cher.
After Cher's visit, in late October, she called a television phone-in program to ask: "Why aren't Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president - why aren't they taking pictures with these guys? I don't understand why these guys are so hidden, why there are no pictures of them."
To some, this is more evidence that George Bush - who has yet to attend the funeral of any soldier killed in the war and refers to the casualties only in general terms - is trying to distance himself.
But last week, Mr Bush was to be seen on television visiting the Walter Reed hospital.
"We put a lot of fine troops in harm's way to make this country more secure and the world more free and the world more peaceful," he said.
"We ask them to face great dangers to meet a national need."
When Mr Hurt joined the army in 2000, he had little sense of great danger. "It was peaceful at the time," he said. "I never imagined I would fight."
Then came September 11. Mr Hurt was sent to Jordan. It was his first time abroad.
The second was when he went to Kuwait in February, in preparation for the invasion of Iraq. On September 13, he drove a Humvee through the city's empty streets. The night before, he had written to his father saying all was quiet in town.
Suddenly there was a flash, and then another one. "I was in shock," he said. "The engine had died and I knew I had to get out of the car. I used my bodyweight to lever myself out of the window, which is probably when I broke my wrist."
He lay face-down on the kerb amid the smoke and the gunfire. "I thought, this is it. I'm going to die right here, just like a vegetable on the ground."
Then he heard one of his fellow soldiers shout his name as his comrades came to his aid. He screamed in pain as one tied a tourniquet around one of his injured legs.
"One of them was just hanging on by a thread and the other one was all battered up," he said.
His father received a phone call at 1.30 the next morning. "I knew it was the military, and I knew that since they called me he must still be alive, because they come around in person if they're dead," he said. "So I thought, 'So long as he's still alive I can deal with the rest.'"
Mr Hurt was in hospital in Germany for five days before he was flown to Walter Reed, where he stayed for three months. "I was thinking, 'This is it. It's not going to get any better. What kind of job can I get now?'"
Still, he does not regret joining the army - "These things happen for a reason," he says.
Mr Hurt cannot fault the veterans' administration, which is advising him on benefits. He misses sport, but is driving already, and living with his father until he returns to Walter Reed for treatment next month. After that, he is thinking of going back to his former job as a machinist, where the workshops are wheelchair friendly.
"I've been very impressed," said his father. "It took me six months to get a job when I got back from Vietnam, and they gave me nothing."
Resistance takes the offensive
Luke Harding in Basra
Saturday December 27, 2003
The Guardian
Resistance forces in Iraq have begun their biggest offensive since Saddam Hussein's capture two weeks ago, killing at least four US soldiers by mortar and bomb attacks.
A roadside bomb killed one soldier and injured another early yesterday in a convoy near Baquba, about 40 miles north of Baghdad. A second soldier was killed trying to defuse a bomb outside the town.
Two other US soldiers died in a Christmas Day mortar attack on a camp near Baquba.
Two Polish soldiers were injured during a guerrilla ambush in southern Iraq yesterday.
The attacks followed a three-day attempt by US troops in Baghdad to wipe out resistance in the city.
The army said yesterday that it had arrested 66 people in its latest night-time operation, including a major-general connected to Saddam and 20 other "significant figures".
But the raids seem to have galvanised the insurgents, who fired several rockets early yesterday into the green zone, Saddam's riverside palace where the coalition has its HQ.
They attacked numerous other western targets in Baghdad, including the heavily fortified Sheraton hotel, which is used by journalists and contractors, the Turkish and Iranian embassies, and a block of flats next to the German embassy.
Residents spent most of Christmas listening to the nightly battles involving heavy mortar and gunfire between US forces swooping over the city in Apache attack helicopters and the insurgents.
The coalition's HQ resounded with wailing sirens after coming under mortar fire late on Thursday night.
A spokesman confirmed that there had been "impacts", but refused to elaborate on the damage.
Mortar shells were fired at the Sheraton on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, one piercing the wall on an upper floor, but no one was hurt.
Two Iraqis were killed by a roadside bomb.
There seems little doubt that the capture of Saddam in a hole near Tikrit a fortnight ago has not demoralised the Iraqis actively resisting US rule. Attacks are becoming almost too frequent to count in Baghdad and the Sunni triangle.
In Mosul three US soldiers were injured yesterday in an ambush on their patrol, which returned fire, killing a taxi driver.
Israel plans revenge for Christmas attacks
Conal Urquhart in Jerusalem
Saturday December 27, 2003
The Guardian
Israel closed the West Bank and Gaza Strip yesterday and was planning further retaliation for the Christmas Day suicide bombing that killed four people.
The first suicide bombing for almost three months happened minutes after an Israeli helicopter fired two missiles at a car in Gaza, killing three members of Islamic Jihad and two bystanders.
Said Hanani, 18, from the village of Beit Furik, east of the West Bank city of Nablus, blew himself up in the middle of a group of soldiers at busy bus stop just after 6pm.
He killed Angelina Shekhirov, 19, and Rotem Weinberger, 19, from Kfar Saba, and Noam Leibowitz, 21, from Elkana. The name of the fourth victim, a 17-year-old girl, has not been released. All four were buried yesterday.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a secular Marxist group, claimed responsibility and said it was the first in a series of retaliations for the killing of two of its members in Nablus last week.
Just before the explosion Israeli Apache helicopters fired two missiles at the car carrying Makled Hamid, the leader of Islamic Jihad's military wing, and two associates.
A field worker for the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said the explosion scattered thousands of tiny ball bearings around the area, killing the two bystanders and wounding several others.
Israeli army spokesmen said that Hamid had been responsible for scores of attacks on Israelis in Gaza, and was killed because he was about to carry out an unspecified "mega-terror attack".
Islamic Jihad said it was an Israeli attempt to prevent a Palestinian ceasefire, calling it a "dirty message" to the Egyptian and other Arab mediators trying to bring it about.
The Israelis have decided to retaliate against the PFLP and Islamic Jihad but not Hamas, which they accept has suspended attacks in Israel.
General Moshe Yaalon, the army chief of staff, told the daily paper Yediot Ahronot: "It is no coincidence that a group like Hamas decides to stop attacks within Israel, it comes from the realisation that their organisation is in danger."
He said that despite the bombing he believed a ceasefire with the Palestinians could be just weeks away.
"The Palestinian-Israeli conflict will be with us for many years to come, but I believe we have now passed the peak of the violent struggle," he said.
In the short term the upsurge in violence has led to the postponement of negotiations. Israeli and Palestinian officials have been trying to arrange a meeting between the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers, Ariel Sharon, and Ahmed Qureia, to reinvigorate the road map peace plan.
A preparatory meeting was cancelled earlier in the week after an Israeli raid in southern Gaza killed nine Palestinians.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian cabinet minister in charge of negotiations said: "We condemn the targeting and killing of Palestinian and Israeli civilians and we call on Israeli government to resume a meaningful dialogue to a peace process."
One Israeli newspaper commentator warned that Israel's military action was in danger of nourishing the circle of violence, to the extent it would become impossible to see who was retaliating for what.
He wrote: "Afterwards, go figure what came first, the assassination or the revenge terror attack, the infrastructure that was dismantled or the one that arose due to its predecessor's dismantling, and so on and so forth."
Zapatistas go back to the grassroots to start again
Ten years after their uprising, the Chiapas rebels are feeling the chill of neglect
Jo Tuckman in Morelia
Saturday December 27, 2003
The Guardian
Through a door under a painted rainbow Zapatistas sit in an office with a computer, a couple of manual typewriters, a satellite phone and not much else.
"We are satisfied and proud to be working against the system," says José Luis Hernández, spokesman for the "junta of good government" recently established in his village of Mayan peasants. "We are creating a new culture."
A decade after its brief but bloody uprising the largely indigenous Zapatista Army of National Liberation, led by the mestizo (mixed race) Subcomandante Marcos, is still talking big.
The difference is that far fewer people are listening.
The rebellion began on New Year's Day 1994, shaking Mexico to its core and catapulting Marcos and his ragtag army on to the world stage.
Their rhetoric against centuries of racism and neglect, the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which was launched he same day, and the party that had governed Mexico since 1929 struck many chords.
The fighting lasted 12 days, killed a few hundred and turned the Zapatistas into an international symbol of indigenous struggle and the fledgling anti-globalisation movement. It made Marcos the most romanticised Latin American revolutionary since Ché Guevara.
Ten years on the Zapatistas have been largely forgotten in a world caught up in more pressing battles, and even in Mexico Marcos's communiques barely make the newspapers.
President Vicente Fox, whose election in July 2000 brought democratic government to Mexico, can largely ignore the conflict. The Zapatistas have little to show for the years of struggle.
After their initial success putting indigenous demands on Mexico's political agenda, they have failed to secure the legal reforms to answer them. Many indigenous villagers sympathetic to the Zapatistas still live in the abject poverty that prompted the rebellion, banned by the leadership from using the schools, clinics and other development projects lavished on Chiapas state after the uprising.
Free trade has continued marching forward, leaving Mexico's poor farmers floundering in its wake.
But the Zapatistas show no sign of giving up. Their challenge is to prove that they can not merely survive but make Mexicans and the world heed their message.
"The movement is tired. It has lasted for too long in difficult conditions," said Jan de Vos, the Belgian historian and anthropologist who has written extensively on the Zapatistas.
"Let's see if Marcos still has enough imagination to give it new energy."
Marcos, a former university lecturer who says he set off to make revolution with a copy of Don Quixote under his arm, has a much-lauded strategic eye. It was he who timed the uprising to coincide with the launch of Nafta, and who reinvented the Zapatistas as an indigenous movement after recognising that their original rhetoric of socialist revolution was falling flat.
Now he and other rebel leaders seek to rejuvenate the movement by forcing forward the vision of indigenous autonomy, with or without the acquiescence of the authorities.
The strategy was launched in August with the creation of five regional governments, called juntas, also designed to tighten the leadership's hold over far-flung Zapatista communities and rein in control of international donations.
At the junta in Morelia Mr Hernández explains how Zapatista jurisdiction works.
He says there is no need for jails because lawbreakers are "persuaded" to "understand" their crimes, and that there is no resentment at the lack of resources, since Zapatistas know their "dignity" is worth more than any government development project.
Seven masked comandantes sit silently by: there to provide guidance to the new civilian authorities.
The Zapatistas' peaceful image has been tainted by cases of non-conformist families being hounded out of rebel communities, but their war is still far less associated with violence than most other armed rebellions. So much so that the Chiapas conflict has always verged on the surreal.
Never more so than in early 2001 when Marcos and the rest of the high command mounted a rock star-style tour of Mexico, designed to rally support for the peace accord signed in 1996 by the previous government and then forgotten in favour of a huge military deployment, support for anti-rebel paramilitaries, and lavish spending in indigenous areas.
The collapse of the 71-year-old regime in 2000 raised hopes for a return to the peace process, but it was not to be. Parliament eventually passed a watered-down version of the reform, angering the Zapatistas, who pronounced Mr Fox no better than the regime he had replaced.
Neither side has set out to rekindle the violence, but neither is looking for peace.
