The Road Through San Judas by Robert Fraga

Author:Robert Fraga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

NOT THE CAVALRY BUT STILL SOMETHING

His was like the second coming. The people alongside his route saw not just a Zapatista leader. They saw Jesus on a motorbike. They saw the Messiah on a two-wheeled donkey. Subcomandante Marcos was driving across Mexico, across the Chihuahua desert into Ciudad Juárez.

He spoke everywhere to the people who lined his path. He spoke in parables and riddles that no one could make sense of but which everyone understood. At least they understood what he meant them to understood.

The initials EZLN for the Zapatista movement were painted in red across the handlebars of Sup Marcos’s motorbike. He had named the motorbike Sombraluz (Shadow Light). The Zapatistas’ penguin/genetically modified chicken rode behind Sup Marcos. The animal—whatever it was—squawked disconsolately and twisted its neck to gaze into the dust storm generated by the passage of the motorbike.

The Sup’s odyssey across Mexico began in San Cristóbal twelve years to the day after the ragtag Zapatistas had seized that city in the 1994 uprising. Fifteen thousand supporters greeted his appearance ecstatically. “A new stage of the political struggle of the EZLN has arrived,” proclaimed one of Marcos’s comrades. “Delegate Zero (the Sup) will blaze the trail and open new doors.”

“I have been chosen to go out across the country to test the road,” said the Sup when his turn to speak came. The Zapatista movement was abandoning the armed struggle to try something different, “to reorganize the nation from below and to the left.” The head of the country’s Catholic Church approved. “It’s a good thing,” he said.

“We don’t fear to die struggling,” Marcos said. “The good word has already been planted in fertile soil, in the hearts of all of you, and it is there that Zapatista dignity will flourish.”

Sombraluz hiccupped its way across Ciudad Juárez. Past the boarded-up shops of the center. Past the iron-grilled windows and bolted doors of houses. Past the burned-out street lights that lined the streets. Up to the border where street vendors were selling tamales and elotes and tacos to the men and women and flavored ice popsicles and licorice to the kids.

Marcos brought his bike to a halt. He dismounted in a haze of diesel fumes. The masked man wore a fraying army cap with a star emblazoned above the visor. He walked halfway across the Stanton Street Bridge. Troopers had blocked the bridge at both ends, solely for this occasion. Marcos looked out over the hump in the roadway down into El Paso’s Segundo Barrio. This was the neighborhood that Bill Sanders and his partners had sought to gentrify. It was now packed solid with fervent Zapatista supporters. They were standing shoulder to shoulder. Some were waving the EZLN flag. The midday heat was suffocating. Sweat streamed down the faces of the people and dripped into their eyes.

Sup Marcos addressed the masses, just as the Son of Man had once spoken to the multitudes from some unidentified mountain top in Palestine two millennia before. But Marcos was speaking not

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