The Ocosingo road in the heart of Zappatista country is the one place I wouldn’t drive back through. They were perfectly fine to me at the illegal toll and even made change for my 500 peso note. But later on 2 bicyclists were murdered on that road.
Other people had stories of refusing to pay at this road block and having their car damaged when they tried to go around (DUMB). Bicyclists are generally broke so it’s possible they pissed someone off by refusing to pay but tried to sneak through anyway or something. The odds they had something valuable enough to be worth robbing are very low.
After the first toll there was another informal voluntary toll, and then some very aggressive string across the road women. And then - the one that still terrifies me - some kids doing the string across the road. They were slow to pick up the string after the car in front of me so I STUPIDLY sped through it. I saw one of the girls stumbling a little trying to quickly pick up the string as I sped over it.
If that girl gets tangled in the string or somehow falls under my tire - I would be dead right now. They would drag me from my car and kill me. No chance to escape on one long mountain road and they can always communicate ahead to block the road. If I just injured her, maybe I survive. Worst decision of the entire trip.
Also there were endless nasty speed bumps that made driving not the most fun. Beautiful drive though. I’m glad I did it.
So yeah maybe anarchy is safer for locals and less safe for travelers - hence the caravanning.
Most states in Mexico that aren’t near the US border are pretty low on cartel activity - Michocan and Guererro are the exceptions.
If I’m so lucky as to become 65 years old I’m definitely going to set up booby traps around my house that will murder any first responders if I have a health problem or my own person if I have a lapse of memory. It just makes so much sense.
Maybe his family will stumble upon another trap when they’re going through his things. I found an enormous brick of marijuana hidden away when my uncle died, what if it had been a landmine booby trap instead? That’s something the whole family can laugh about around the dinner table, assuming I survive the ordeal.
I read all your stories and they were great. I don’t think you know who did the road block, but you know, anecdotes. I’d go by the statistics. I was comparing the homicide rate to the adjoining states. Chiapas is around 10 (I think it’s per 100000). Tabasco is around 20. Veracruz is 18. Oaxaca is 24. I wasn’t comparing it to states with a lot more cartel activity that go as high as 80.
The roadblock was the Zappatistas - they always have one along that road (it might move from town to town). There were 100s of people standing around. They had a loudspeaker. The money went into a little metal box where some people who were clearly in charge sat under in front of a folding table. All very official. No way that happens in the center of Zappatista country w/o them being in charge.
That’s the dude getting my change from the town officials.
I also saw a truck full of dudes with automatic weapons dressed in all black with black ski masks. Very revolutionary looking. At the beginning of the road block was a burned out Bimbo truck (Bimbo is the Wonder Bread/Hostess of Mexico). I guess he pissed someone off and they left the burned out shell there to send a message.
This was the second “voluntary” roadblock manned by Larry, Moe and Curly.
For the most part I don’t think this roadblock is nefarious. I’m sure it helps these little towns raise revenue. And they look at it as a toll to pass though their country - since they don’t recognize Mexico.
But it seems to spawn other “entrepreneurs” to create more roadblocks, and maybe that’s what causes all the problems.
A road block and a toll wouldn’t really surprise me from the Zapatistas much more than it would if it were run by the Mexican government, but I haven’t seen anything about Zapatistas with automatic weapons. Most of them, even during the battles with the Mexican government, didn’t even have guns. Here are some of them in 2018 with sticks.
I think I saw somewhere that 3 Mexican Federal soldiers were killed, but I’m not sure it was even that. The Zapatistas were almost entirely indigenous people without firearms fighting against death squads funded by landowners and against the Mexican Army. They sorta won because they marched en masse into Mexico City and the government realized it had to compromise because the Mexican people weren’t going to stand by while Indigenous people who weren’t going to back down continued to be slaughtered.
Yeah they are Mayan I believe. I’m fine with their cause. I just wouldn’t drive that road again - which bolsters my original point about the need for fortified caravans traveling through a feudal world.
The ground for revolt was well prepared. The worldwide economic depression starting in 1929 had devastated El Salvador’s agricultural economy, which was overwhelmingly dependent upon coffee. The harvest had been left to rot, and Sonsonate’s rural population found itself without a means to make a living. Since the late 1920s, militant communist organizers and labor leaders had been active in the area, especially among the Indian communities. When the bottom fell out of the economy, the agitators succeeded in convincing the Indians to rise up and attack ladino landholders and shopkeepers. Violence exploded in the Sonsonate area in January 1932. Over a period of 72 hours, several thousand Indians armed with machetes randomly looted the area; approximately 35 ladinos were killed.
The Salvadorean military quickly intervened and easily recaptured the territory. Then the reprisals began. According to several vivid eyewitness accounts, the troops began by rounding up those people directly involved in the conflict, and then went after all those who possessed Indian racial features and dressed in “Indian” clothes. Soldiers executed the captives and dumped their bodies into mass graves.
Although estimates on the number of people killed at this time differ (from about 15,000 to 50,000), the massacre was thorough - women and children were not spared. The consequences for the Indian population were devastating. The natural hatred - and fear - that the ladinos had toward Indians was given free expression; this enmity was combined with the dreaded stamp of communism to create the ideological image of “the communist Indian.” “The fight to defend the reigning order,” notes Marroquín, “was saturated with the anticommunist slogans that came to bear on the Indian problem: Indian and communism became the same thing.” The Indians of El Salvador went underground, for decades denying their existence to the outside world and hiding their identity. In 1975, Marroquín commented on the “profound distrust…even hostility” of the ladino toward the Indian:
At the present time, 43 years later, this closed political attitude is starting to disappear and already people speak with liberty about the Indian and his problems, although the indigenist tendency is principally toward archaeology.
I read about the apostrophe society giving up and was hoping they might troll everyone in their final press release like “the apostrophe society closes it’s doors”
Let’s not kid ourselves… that dude’s a fascist. Every single sticker on his truck means exactly that. That and the blue lives matter stickers which will be seen as wildly wildly offensive in 10-20 years.
People who lived in Germany under the nazi’s had swastikas emblazoned everywhere. These symbols mean approximately the same thing.
