Viva Zapata | by Carlos Fuentes | The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.

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Viva Zapata
Carlos Fuentes MARCH 13, 1969 ISSUE

Zapata and the Mexican Revolution

by John Womack Jr.
Knopf, 360 pp., $10.00

During the summer of 1962 I visited the villages and rice

fields in the State of Morelos. We were a small group of
Mexican writers and our purpose was to investigate and
denounce the murder of Rubén Jaramillo by the state
troops. Jaramillo had been the agrarian leader of
Tlaquiltenango. During his lifetime, he had defended the
integrity of the ejido, or communal lands, against the
voracious encroachments of real-estate dealers who
wanted to create a suburban tourist haven for nearby
Cuernavaca. The metropolitan investors insisted that the
region would profit from the influx of affluent vacationers
and that Jaramillo was standing in the way of progress. Emiliano Zapata; drawing by David Levine

The agrarista chief held his ground: let the capitalists have
the beautiful but barren lands to the west of Tlaquiltenango; the Communal lands were the
livelihood of his people and his people were not about to relinquish their rights and their roots
in order to become waiters, gardeners, or soda-pop vendors.

But the investors had gone too far: plans had been drawn, officials had been bribed,
urbanization works already had been started. So one morning the intransigent Jaramillo, along
with his pregnant wife and three stepsons, was hauled from his home by the state troops,
mounted on an army truck, and taken to the lonely plateau where the ancient pyramid of
Xochicalco stands. There, facing the misty blue hills and the deep grey gorges of the Sierra
Madre, Jaramillo and his family were shot to death. Their blood stained, once again, the
carved frieze of the plumed serpent that devours its own tail around the base of the Toltec
temple.

Jaramillo’s secretary received us in a simple brick hut. He was a bald, middle-aged man with
a big curly moustache and the face and hands of a smooth brown Buddha. He was
indistinguishable from the campesinos around him, except for two details that marked him as

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Viva Zapata | by Carlos Fuentes | The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/03/13/viva-zapata/

a literate man: he wore, in the hot, vibrant night, a black waistcoat, and a gold-plated ballpoint
pen conspicuously stuck out of his shirt pocket. He was gentle and proud, sad and firm in his
speech and manner. Yes, he had been warned by the state officials to lay off. He knew who
was responsible: a well-known and virtually untouchable Mexico City financier, in collusion
with the Governor of Morelos, who, by the way, had been involved in the killing of Emiliano
Zapata forty-three years before. We all knew that the only man finally responsible for the
actions of the Mexican army was the President of the Republic. Yes, he would probably have
to flee and go into hiding. The real-estate people would probably win this time.

We did not try to hide our outrage; he remained serene. He looked at us, at our city clothes, at
our dove-blue Renault parked near the tropical veranda full of hammocks and flower pots.
“No coman ansias,” he murmured with wry sympathy,…

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