I arrive in Mexico City before Christmas, and the one room travel agency at the bus station is selling package vacations to Acapulco.  Two or three hundred dollars for 4 nights on the coast, meals and bus fare included.  It’s a vacation for shopkeepers and taxi-cab drivers, the ragged lower-middle class that praises God every Sunday for their prosperity and keeps one wary eye on the next step down the economic ladder.  It’s an economic class that’s likely to become a lot more familiar in our own country.

 

I reach Taxco at nightfall and the city is an apron of pink and yellow lights covering the mountain that it’s built on.  Taxco is built on silver, first the mine that made the town rich in the 1700’s, and then, since the 1930’s, from the silver jewelry industry that exports all over the world.  Silver stores and wholesalers line the streets with all their attendant support businesses, and the town looks like a movie Mexico: prosperous, colorful, where the only poverty evident is the few old people begging at the steps of the magnificent church..  This is an older Mexico, far from the funky cosmopolitanism of Mexico City: the woman are tiny and dark and the men have greased-back hair and pot bellies.  At night everyone goes to the main square and takes the air, perhaps with a brass band playing in the gazebo.

 

Taxco is one of three islands of conservatism in the state of Guerrero (the other two are Zihuatenejo and Acapulco).  Outside of those islands, Guerrero is in a slow but constant struggle between it’s campesino (peasant) groups and right wing paramilitary bands who systematically repress them on behalf of the big landowners.  This pattern has gone on for centuries in Mexico, exploding into large scale violence associated with names like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.  Guerrero is also the birthplace and homeland of guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas, whose death 34 years ago is being commemorated the day that I arrive.

 

Cabañas was a schoolteacher when his sympathies for peasant movements brought him afoul of the system.  He was teaching in the town of Atoyac when the rector demanded that all students wear uniforms to school.  Cabañas argued that many parents were two poor to afford uniforms, and the escalating conflict led to a demonstration, which led to a massacre.  Cabañas took to the hills, ultimately forming the Army of the Poor and Peasant’s Brigade Against Injustice.  His group of 300 peasants financed their operations the old-fashioned way: with robbery and kidnappings.  That was 1967, before the drug-trafficking became the method of choice.  Cabañas was 28 years old.

 

After seven years in the mountains the Senator from Guerrero, Ruben Figueroa, arranged to meet Cabañas clandestinely to persuade him to give up his arms.  They talked for three days without results, and then Cabanas took Figueroa prisoner.  This was the final provocation.  The Mexican government sent 16,000 troops to the arid mountains of Guerrero to hunt down Cabañas and his 300 man army.

 

It’s not clear exactly how Cabañas died.  Some say he was killed in a shootout with the Army, other say that he was wounded and committed suicide rather than be tortured and executed by the military.  A third version has him captured by the police, then murdered later in jail.  The senator was rescued.

 

The Guerrero newspaper had a long article on the several gatherings that were held to remember Cabanas’ death.  In Ayotac, 400 campesinos marched.  In Tixtla, 1000 marched, with banners that said “We are all Lucio” and “Neither Forget nor Forgive”    His daughter gave a speech, and told the newpaper afterwards that little had changed since her father’s time.   She blamed her father’s turn toward violence on the government:

 

“Do you think that Lucio wanted to go to the Sierra and let so many people die?  They didn’t leave him any other way . . . He, too, marched and all that . . .  and they didn’t leave him any choice, until they killed him . . .   The government itself tells you where you have to walk.  If you go and ask an official, he doesn’t pay any attention to you.  If you make a demonstration and there’s only a few people, they say, ‘they’re only a few.’  Then, if a large number of people come . . .  then, yes, they have to pay attention, if there’s many.”

 

I read this story of Cabañas with a feeling of sadness.  Seeing his broad, youthful face beneath a floppy jungle hat, it’s easy to identify with him: a schoolteacher who took the part of the poor in an almost unwinnable struggle.  His tiny peasant “Army of the Poor” seems quaint in the our present-day world of heavily-armed narco-traffickers and mass casualty terrorism.  That’s the luxury of looking at things across thirty years. 

 

On the back page of the same newspaper, human rights groups have completed an investigation and recommended that 40 police officers be prosecuted for robbery and torture during a raid in a remote community.  Campesino groups complain that their communities are being destroyed by soldiers, paramilitaries and police.

 

And that gives way to another sort of sadness.  Cabañas spent a good part of his adult life in flight and stalemate in an attempt to change things.  Whatever great anguish and little glory he lived are gone now, or rather, translated into peasant marches and speeches, thirty-four years later.  In the central plaza of Taxco, a woman is selling tamales from a wicker basket, an old man shines shoes, a mason chips steadily away at stones in front of the cathedral.