March 31, 1911—Emiliano Zapata and the 100th anniversary of his revolution for land and liberty

Late on the night of March 31, 1911—100 years ago this spring—the great Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata led a group of armed men in commandeering a police station in Villa de Ayala, a small town in southern Mexico. The group disarmed the police and held an emergency meeting in the town square where they gathered more support for their cause, enlisting about 100 more residents in their revolt against the corrupt and cruel government—bent on procuring their historic family farms and ranches and killing them to erase the evidence of ownership.
   The next morning, the men were on horseback, racing along the Cuaulta River Valley, gaining more support from farmers and villagers as they thrust forward in their assault against the greed of sociopaths in public offices across the country all the way to the capitol in Mexico City. These many paid-off politicians and military generals were intently focused on taking the land and livelihood away from the peasants all across Mexico for personal gain and to crush resistance at the grassroots level—often the most dangerous starting point for revolution.
   By the end of the second day of the regional revolt, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people were at Zapata’s command. At age 31, he was president of the village council at Anenecuilco and more importantly for his society, one of the best horsemen in the state of Morelos. His friends and enemies alike could not escape his penetrating, dark eyes, and an intense, watchful visage that insinuated an air of stubborn persistence.
   In previous years Zapata and his brother, Eufemio, had frequently challenged Mexican authority over the issue of confiscation of lands that belonged to people in his village. But on that day, 100 years ago, Zapata became an authority of his own people, leading a rapidly growing force of small farmers and sharecroppers in openly declaring themselves against the government. Their efforts made the issue of “land and liberty” for small peasant farmers one of the most important causes of the Mexican Revolution.
   Zapata was capitalizing on a movement that began months earlier when Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Pascual Orozco attacked government troops in northern Mexico. And Francisco Madero, formerly in political exile in the U.S., returned to his country in Feb. 1911 to lead the movement against the government of Mexico. By the time of Zapata’s initial raids, young Mexicans like Lazaro Cardenas, a 15 year old, were breaking into jails to free prisoners, seized weapons, then galloped into the hills joining the fight amid cries of “Que viva la revolucion.”
   This was the first of the great revolutions of the 20th Century, and even today, Zapata has many followers, guided by his spirit in fighting basically the same issues of land and liberty that were defended 10 decades ago. And on New Year’s Day in 1994, a small band of men and women led by a man calling himself Subcommandante Marcos, raided a small village in the state of Chiapas just as Zapata and his brother and others had done, and the Marcos group declared themselves revolutionaries fighting the same greed and corruption that had plagued the poor farmers and villagers in Mexico during Zapata’s brief lifetime.
   This time, in 1994, the raid took place on the day of the formal initiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which would open the floodgates to exploitation of Mexico’s indigenous people and the land that was at the center of their lives. And the fighting drew a swift and relentless military response from the Mexican government.
   Following the 1994 raids in Chiapas, national attention was focused on the small town of San Cristobal de las Casas, in that southern state. In the months and years that have passed since then, the Zapatistas began to lead a wider movement—to protect and preserve the rights of indigenous peoples worldwide—a vanishing populace being steamrolled by the iron wheels of progress.
   Marcos, like Zapata, led the people in their cause at a dangerous time, and his efforts were successful for years. The shrouded mystique of Marcos captivated people all across the globe. With integrity, intensity, courage and shrewd military thinking, he carried Zapata’s spirit out of the jungles of Mexico and onto the pages of . Still, to this day wherever he is now, Marcos remains an enigma, as little is known about him. Over the past 17 years he’s surfaced at irregular intervals, while managing to elude capture or death by a Mexican military that has long wanted him crucified publicly or privately—dead or alive.
   The irony is that most Mexicans, including many of the soldiers under orders to find and arrest him and the people who support him, consider Zapata a national hero, a man who shaped Mexico in the 20th Century. Now, of course, the cartels are the big influence. As negative for the average people as Zapata was positive. No wonder so many Mexicans want to escape into their neighboring country to the north. To get away from a terrible economic situation, and the drug cartels who kill whenever and wherever they feel like—by the thousands. That is the war in Mexico today.
   Zapata, and Marcos, were truly great leaders because of their commitment to the cause of land and liberty, and because their goals have had nothing to do with greed or privilege, or personal power. Similar in some ways to President Abe Lincoln, Zapata’s aim was the enlargement of opportunity for an oppressed people, the abolition of slavery imposed by the powerful Haciendados—the wealthy landowners and corrupt politicians who wanted more land even if it meant wiping out the common people and taking their farms and ranches by force. The need for vigilance has not diminished, but increased, since 1994.
   A great cause will seek its leader, and a great leader attests to the wisdom and power that may lie within the most unlikely of us, according to writings by the late Arthur Schlesinger, who served as special advisor to JFK. Such a leader does more than advance a cause, they exhibit new possibilities, empowering followers. No matter how just the cause, leaders and countries are somewhat limited by the times they exist in—economics, and especially the influence of our modern corporate media and the forces of a powerful few who control and dispatch the camera and the pen.
   But a timeless leader knows that it’s not his or her job to find the truth. Just too earnestly seek it. We don’t see that in leaders today, especially in America—where obscuring or convoluting the truth is the order of the day.

March 31, 1911—Emiliano Zapata and the 100th anniversary of his revolution for land and liberty

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