Muertos
incómodos:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
The engagement of contemporary Latin American detective fiction with leftist politics has been a commonplace at least since the definitive emergence of the Latin American hard-boiled novel in the 1970s.(1) In the intervening decades, politically specific criticism of Latin American states and their police forces has been cited almost invariably as one of distinctive functions of the local variant of hard-boiled writing that has been termed neopoliciaco by the Mexican novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II. In an interview with Juan Domingo Argüelles more than 15 years ago, Taibo provided one of the most succinct and sound descriptions of the concerns of the Latin American neopoliciaco: “La obsesión por las ciudades; una incidencia recurrente temática de los problemas del Estado como generador del crimen, la corrupción, la arbitrariedad política.” (quoted in Balibrea Enríquez 50 n.5) In the introduction to her Crimes Against the State, Crimes Against Persons, one of the best and most current critical studies of the neopoliciaco in English, Persephone Braham has characterized its political vocation thus:
The neopoliciaco
is more overtly political and leftist than the
American hard-boiled novel […] Latin American writers have adopted the
genre in the years since [1968] precisely because it permits a critical
scrutiny of their social institutions in the light of modern liberal
principles
and their late-twentieth-century manifestations in the ideological
narratives
of neoliberalism and globalization. Contemporary Hispanic detective
fiction is
an explicitly ideological literature with international connections.
Its
leftist politics were honed in the international student movements of
1968,
Despite the intensity
of this
engagement, hard-boiled Latin American detective fiction has rarely
been
written in direct service of a specific political platform. The obvious
exception would be the case of
In light of this
history, Muertos incómodos is in some
respects an extraordinary contribution to the burgeoning corpus of
Latin
American detective fiction. First published in installments in the
Mexico City
newspaper La Jornada between December
5, 2004 and February 20, 2005, and then in book form in April of last
year, this
text invites attention not only as the revival, after an eleven year
hiatus, of
Mexico’s most prolific and successful detective series, but also as the
product of an unprecedented and intriguing collaboration. The novel was
coauthored by two celebrities of the Mexican left who have never met in
person:
the aforementioned Taibo, author of more than a dozen detective novels
and
primary international advocate of the Latin American neopoliciaco,
and Subcomandante Marcos, the masked revolutionary
leader of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional
in
Unmistakably divided in
both tone
and narrative discourse, the chapters contributed alternately by Taibo
and
Marcos offered not only an almost literally up-to-date commentary on
contemporary Mexican politics and the Zapatista situation, but also a
panorama of
the primary repressive abuses committed by the national governments of
the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional and, more recently, of the Partido
de
Acción Nacional, over a period of several decades.(3) As in prior novels, Taibo, who is also
a popular leftist historian, orients the investigation toward
historical issues
relating to the Mexican government’s systematic use of clandestine and
paramilitary forces to repress political opposition beginning in the
late
1960s. To this familiar project of the recuperation of repressed
historical
memory, Marcos adds his own urgent concerns with the military
containment and
paramilitary harassment of the Zapatista movement since its public
appearance
in January of 1994. Together, Taibo, the genre novelist and historian
of
revolution, and Marcos, the reflective revolutionary and master of
postmodern
propaganda, stretch the conventions of the detective novel genre in an
effort
to restore and inflect public memory of episodes long repressed and
denied by
official discourse. In the novel, these include, primarily, violent
attacks on
the 1968 student movement, the “dirty war” against Mexican
guerrillas in the 1970s, and the more recent massacre of pro-Zapatista
peasants
by paramilitary gangs in
It is difficult to
begin to analyze
this novel, written by two authors with sharply differing political
commitments
and literary habits, without treating it as two distinct texts sutured
together
in rough sequence. Here I will attend more closely to Marcos’s
contribution, since I find it the more disturbing of the two. Taibo’s
narrative in the even-numbered chapters is, by comparison, comfortably
familiar, since it revives the characters and scenario of
The serial presentation of Muertos incómodos in La Jornada occurred as part of a characteristically savvy campaign by Marcos to insinuate himself back into public consciousness following a four year period of near retirement from the media stage. While a trickle of communiqués and other writings had continued to flow from Marcos’s laptop and through the Internet and leftist media channels since the Marcha por la Dignidad Indígena and the passing of a limited indigenous rights law in 2001, Marcos’s withdrawal from public view gave rise to speculation that he was no longer present in Chiapas and that he had been marginalized within the mysterious command structure of the EZLN. In retrospect, it seems clear that Marcos’s turn to the detective novel was a creative tactic to counteract the desgaste, the erosion or wearing out of his rhetoric and persona over the seven years in which he communicated incessantly with national and international audiences as the voice of Zapatista resistance and as one of the most prominent Latin American critics of neoliberal globalization. Yet the primary problem with Muertos incómodos as a detective novel, in my reading, is the indomitable persistence of Marcos’s propagandistic rhetoric and voice, albeit filtered through a series of colorful intradiagetic narrators. (5)
Taibo and Marcos clearly agree on the necessity for combating the tendency toward desmemoria, or presentism and historical amnesia, in postmodern and neoliberal culture. Muertos incómodos is shot through with voices not only from the past, but also, as the title suggests, with voices from beyond the tomb. The most notable of these is the voice of Marcos’s detective, an indigenous Zapatista comisión de investigación or commissioned investigator named Elías Contreras, who tells us that he fought in the 1994 insurrection but is now dead (11). Although we are informed that he would be 61 years old had he not died, we are given no explanation of how it is that Contreras continues to function among the living, investigating, traveling, holding conversations, eating, digesting and defecating. Somehow, the only other characters who seem aware that he is dead are a nun named Chapis Lucrecia (152) and Marcos himself (60). Since no explanation for this is offered in the text, we can only speculate that this detail is included by Marcos not only to honor those Zapatista militants who fought in encounters with the Mexican army during the movement’s brief period of military activity in early 1994, but also to liken his own novel, somewhat cheaply, to the most indisputable of classics in the Mexican narrative canon, Pedro Páramo. (6)
Aside from the
collaborative
emphasis on the restoration of historical memory in Muertos
incómodos, another aspect of Marcos’s
literary rhetoric that I find particularly
noteworthy is the almost maniacal insistence on a carnivalesque
multicultural
diversity, inclusiveness and tolerance that we are given to understand
characterizes the Zapatista movement. One character who appears early
in the
Marcos chapters introduces himself as follows: “Soy filipino y me llamo
Julio@ y me apellido Isileko. Según
me dijeron, ‘Isileko’ quiere decir ‘secreto’ en
euskera. Trabajo de mecánico en un taller de autos en Barcelona
y mi
nombre lo escribo con arroba: Juli@. Lo hago así porque…
¿es necesario que diga que soy gay?” (40) Juli@ proceeds
to
inform us about his tattoos and multiple piercings and to explain how
he came
to reside in a pro-Zapatista peace camp in
Another figure born of
Marcos’s fantasy of inclusive, tolerant and mischievous resistance is
Natalia Reyes Colás, a 75-year old former bracera
said to reside in
Fragmentos
de la conversación entre el Sup y el que llaman
“Garganta Profunda” (según como fue interceptada por un
avión espía modelo EP-3, trasmitida a uno de los
satélites
SIGNIT de la Red Echelon, y retrasmitida al Centro de Operaciones de
Seguridad
Regional de Medina Annex, EUA, coordenadas 98o O, 29o
N,
del NAVSECGRU y la AIA, con el código “morai”) (87)
Whether or not the United Status was flying EP-3 spy planes over Chiapas to record Marcos’s conversations in late 2004, what is more interesting than the content of the intercepted conversation (essentially, the dishing of dirt on major Mexican politicians and anti-EZLN intellectuals by Garganta Profunda) is the appearance in the novel of a transcription of this conversation recorded and transmitted by U.S. spy satellites. A third reference to Echelon appears in Marcos’s final chapter.
Parte
de la transcripción de la llamada telefónica compartida
con puntos de origen en Washington, Roma, Madrid, Londres, Moscú
y
México, interceptada el día 10 de febrero del 2005 por el
sistema
satelital Echelon y borrada de los archivos por instrucciones de
Condoleezza
Rice, secretaria de estado estadounidense (218)
The transcription of these conversations, as well as the destructive hacking of the Echelon computers by the elderly Zapatista, seem intended as fantasies of empowerment through counterespionage, but the effect in the context of the novel seems almost contrary. Do we laugh when Marcos endeavors to exploit the comic potential of his movement’s vast technological and military deficit? And, moreover, behind the novel’s unexplained introduction of a surveillance transcription said to have been erased from U.S. State Department archives by orders of the Secretary of State, do we not detect the panoptical gesture of a narrative intelligence authorizing itself as it projects the (here admittedly frail) illusion of an infinite access to highly secret information? (7) The system of power relations operating in the text would suggest only one name for this coordinating intelligence: Subcomandante Marcos.
A final outstanding
example of Marcos’s
insistence on the inclusive and non-discriminatory character of the
Zapatista
movement, and also of his backfiring parodic fantasy of empowerment, is
his
deployment in Muertos incómodos of
a supposedly secret EZLN special operations team called NADIE. This
phantom
crack force, unknown to all but Marcos and the most senior members of
the EZLN
hierarchy (199), is said to consist of an intelligence specialist who
is a
ten-year old indigenous girl, an elderly nurse specializing in herbal
medicine,
a communications specialist who is a 15-year old indigenous girl, a
twenty-year
old punk mestizo explosives specialist, a black/mestizo driver and
mechanic,
and, as a last minute addition, a transvestite prostitute recruited in
Mexico
City by Elías Contreras, the dead investigator who also turns
out to be
the leader of NADIE. In Marcos’s half of the novel, this is the group
that traps and captures the arch-criminal Morales using a strategy
involving
laxative gum for the bodyguards and seduction by the irresistible
Zapatista
transvestite. For readers unacquainted with the novel, perhaps a short
quote
will suffice to demonstrate Marcos’s bizarre aesthetic, which
vacillates
between the cartoonish, the
sententious, the carnivalesque, the melodramatic and the
revolutionary-heroic.
After
Y entonces la Magdalena me preguntó que cómo
estuvo la
misión. Y entonces yo le dije que muy bien, que gracias a ella,
que sea
a él, habíamos agarrado al Malo. Y entonces él,
que sea
ella, me preguntó que si se veía bonita. Y entonces yo le
respondí que parecía una princesa. Y entonces ella, que
sea
él, se puso a chillar. Y entonces yo pensé que era por la
herida
y le dije que no chille, que ya pronto la íbamos a llevar a
curar. Y
entonces él, que sea ella, dijo que no chillaba por la herida
sino
porque nunca le habían dicho princesa. […] Y entonces ella, que
sea él, me preguntó si se va a morir. Y entonces yo le
dije que
no, que no se va a morir. Y entonces él, que sea ella, me dijo
que
quería que la llevaran a un hospital zapatista, que porque
quería
que de una vez la operaran para tener el cuerpo de por sí de lo
que era,
que sea de mujer. Y entonces yo le dije que de por sí. (209)
In this, the most dramatically intense scene of Marcos’s chapters, the ideologue strains at the limits of his creative capabilities, trying to infuse literary life into characters transparently fashioned as advertisements for his ideal of a boundlessly diverse yet unwaveringly socialist, indigenist and nationalist revolution. The anaphora evident in this quote also exemplifies one of Marcos’s most outstanding discursive tics in the novel: the repetition of a phrase such as “tal vez,” “que sea” or, most frequently, “y entonces” in nearly every sentence of a given section. In this, the most sustained and grating instance, “y entonces” occurs more than 150 times in eight pages of text.
Although the denunciation of homophobia and the homily on tolerance and inclusiveness in Muertos incómodos is not unwelcome, especially given Marcos’s personal contribution to the cult of the heroic male revolutionary guerrilla fighter, it would certainly be more welcome were it not so awkwardly posed. Indeed, the most troublesome aspect of the entire novel, for me, is its aggravation of one of the most lingering suspicions regarding Marcos’s role as the primary voice of the Zapatista movement. Whereas Marcos habitually identifies himself as a spokesman or secretary for the collective will of a democratically constituted indigenous command committee (the 20-member CCRI-CG or Comité Central Revolucionario Indígena-Comandancia General to which communiqués are often attributed), extensive reading of Zapatista publications tends to suggest the self-designated Subcomandante Marcos may actually continue to dictate at least a major portion of the rhetoric of EZLN policy and communications. (8) Since 1995, there has been, to my knowledge, no serious dispute with regard to the identification of Marcos as former university instructor in aesthetics Rafael Guillén, winner of a national medal for academic achievement at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1981 for his thesis on the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Given his extraordinary talent, it is not surprising that Marcos should assume primary responsibility for the communications of the EZLN, but what is problematic in the literary construction of Muertos incómodos, in the context of Marcos’s campaign of reemergence as the voice of the voiceless, is the suspicion of ventriloquism of the voiceless which haunts the reader. (9)
In
public accounts of their collaboration, Taibo has praised Marcos’s
literary gifts in the following terms: “tiene un estilo muy fluido,
correcto gramatical y ortográficamente, además, tiene
mucha
gracia, ya que tiene muy buen oído, porque esta especie de
castellano
tzotzilizado, que domina muy bien, es el idioma que maneja el
indígena
castellanizado que eligió como personaje y que tiene mucho
sabor” (quoted
in Montaño Garfias). As one of the novel’s two detective
protagonists,
Elías Contreras is the primary indigenous character and primary
narrator
of Marcos’s chapters. He also acts on Marcos’s orders in the novel
and sends him reports which Marcos keeps in a thick folder reserved for
Contreras’s cases (22). Contreras reflects repeatedly on the
idiosyncrasies of his own often non-standard Spanish and on the
differences
between his indigenous chiapaneco
speech and Marcos’s sometimes unintelligible erudite and urban
language.
The phrase used to characterize his linguistic difference is “hablar
muy
otro,” which might translate as “to speak very other.” Used
by various characters in different ways, this phrase seems to be
emphasized as
a charming example of the idiosyncratic grammar of the bilingual chiapanecos, but it is hard not to read
it in context as signifying something more like “to speak someone
else”, or perhaps “to speak a lot of Marcos”. Marcos appears
briefly as a narrator in the novel, and other narrators in his chapters
are
distinguished by their ostentatious diversity: the gay Filipino
mechanic Juli@
from
Marcos’s peculiar mocking of himself through fictional characters ultimately does nothing to dispel his authoritative presence in the text, not only as coordinator of the investigation, but also as the master of textual polyphony. The abundantly different Juli@, for example, appears in chapter III and narrates several pages before being informed that he’s not supposed to be in the novel (41). Subsequent comments by Juli@ make it clear who orders and structures this Zapatista text, and who has the power to include and exclude, accidentally or not. Juli@ is granted an Unamunian role in Muertos incómodos, speaking both as a reader of the unfolding novel and as a character aware of his own participation in it (“Ustedes se preguntarán qué hace un campamentista ‘extranjero’ en esta novela policiaca,” 40), but he narrates only three segments before being suppressed when his presence is deemed accidental by the supra-narrator, Marcos.
Bueno, me acaban de informar que yo no estoy en esta novela,
así
que todo debe tratarse de una lamentable equivocación que,
según
me avisan, resolverán en la mesa de redacción del
periódico
o en la editorial del libro. (41)
Tal vez el Sup nos metió en la novela por mula, porque
ya ven que
los zapatistas sostienen
que el mundo no es sólo uno, sino muchos, y por eso le
están
aventando a la novela un mecánico homosexual y filipino, una
alemana
repartidora de pizzas en moto y lesbiana, una maestra francesa amante
del jazz
y un cocinero italiano que cree en los extraterrestres. (44)
Yo le pregunté al Sup, el otro día que lo
topé en
el arroyo, si íbamos a ser su compañía de
Elías en
la novela. Me respondió que no, que sólo íbamos a
aparecer
en un capítulo. (60)
In a preliminary summary of chapter IX, Marcos refers to the authors of the quoted passages which make up a significant part of the chapter as “invitados involuntarios a esta novela” (143). This designation might serve just as well for all his characters, beginning with the lifeless Contreras, given that their dazzling superficial diversity seems to disguise a fundamental obedience to the revolutionary will of their creator, as well as a modulated but unmistakable echoing of his political rhetoric.
When the plucky non-conformist Juli@, for example, expounds on his idea that the Contreras’s investigation is part of a larger struggle, the language he uses is loaded. “EL asesino es el sistema. El sistema sí. Cuando hay un crimen hay que buscar el culpable arriba, no abajo. El Mal es el sistema y los Malos son quienes están al servcio del sistema.” (53) Here Juli@ seems most obviously to be mouthing a variation on Marcos’s central motif in the novel, that of “El Mal y El Malo,” a phrase drawn from Neruda’s Canto General (164). Through Juli@’s commentary, however, the author Marcos is also delivering an intertextual homage to the first Belascoarán Shayne novel, Días de combate, thereby authorizing, through subtle reference, his own intervention in the neopoliciaco genre. In Días de combate, the neophyte detective pursued a serial strangler and confronted him in a climactic conclusion in which killer and detective agreed that the eleven serial murders were inconsequential in contrast to the crimes perpetrated by the Mexican state during the same period. It is to this exchange that Marcos, through Juli@, alludes.
—Bien, he asesinado once veces y he causado heridas menores.
En
ese mismo intervalo de tiempo, el Estado ha masacrado a cientos de
campesinos,
han muerto en accidentes decenas de mexicanos, han muerto en reyertas
cientos
de ellos, han muerto de hambre o frío decenas más, de
enfermedades
curables otros centenares, incluso se han suicidado algunas docenas…
¿Dónde está el estrangulador?
—El Gran Estrangulador es el sistema.” (Taibo 222)
As Ilan Stavans and other critics have noted, Marcos the novelist does not want for literary references, and Muertos incómodos is characterized generally by somewhat dense intertextual and metanarrative play. Although Marcos’s primary narrator Contreras speaks as if orally addressing an unspecified group of interlocutors in Chiapas (pausing more than once, for example, to consult his vocabulary notebook) he also makes reference as early as the third page of the novel to his situation within it: “Uno de esos ‘casos’ fue el que ahora le da título a este capítulo de esta novela que, ahí lo van a mirar, es muy otra.” (11). Juli@ also makes repeated reference to his status as character and narrator in the novel, as I have indicated. Another example of this play involves the origin of Muertos incómodos. In the text, Marcos states that the investigation of Morales arose from a series of contacts between Marcos, Spanish novelist Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Vázquez Montalbán’s fictional detective Pepe Carvalho. Here Marcos pays homage to his originally intended collaborator in this project, (10) but he also invokes the codes of the neopoliciaco by making explicit reference to the works and characters of other genre authors and by endowing the characters themselves with an awareness of neopoliciaco codes. Taibo’s protagonist, Belascoarán Shayne, is known to the character Marcos for his previous literary adventures, and he is also identified by Taibo in his chapter X as a reader of a historical novel on Benito Juárez (“Había leído una novela donde se contaba la historia de la república itinerante,” 187) which many of Taibo’s readers will recognize as his own La lejanía del tesoro (1992). In addition to this literary interplay, the novel is also replete with references to La Jornada, the pro-Zapatista newspaper in which Muertos incómodos appeared, as well as to other publications.
This intertextual play and mixing of fictional and non-fictional references offers obvious parallels with the distinctive discourse of Marcos’s communiqués, which inspired Manuel Vázquez Montalbán to praise the Subcomandante as “un maestro en el juego literario posmoderno de la utilización del collage y la intertextualidad” (295). However, it also authorizes Marcos by demonstrating, again, his compliance with the codes of the neopoliciaco genre. Frequent acknowledgements of the alterity or artificiality of the imported, hard-boiled detective paradigm are a constant source of irony and humor most especially in Taibo’s detective novels, beginning with the very origins of Belascoarán’s detective vocation. (In Días de combate, the former engineer explained how was inspired to assume the role of the private investigator by a particular convergence of foreign and local cultural stimuli: after emerging from a screening of the George C. Scott detective spoof They Might Be Giants, and under the emotional influence of a weepy bolero, he read news of a murder reported in the nota roja section of a Mexican newspaper and decided to reinvent himself as a detective, initially by imitating the mannerisms of Humphrey Bogart.) Generally, the parodic self-referentiality of the Latin American neopoliciaco may be said to counteract the totalizing and panoptical realism of the classical detective novel, but here again, Marcos’s polyphonic, intertextual and self-referential literary play never manages to approximate spontaneous or free aesthetic signification.
Another prominent textual component inviting critical attention in the Marcos chapters is the legal documentation associated with Contreras’s cases. Marcos produces a selection of Zapatista legal formulas whose authorship he attributes to authorities of the Zapatista autonomous municipalities: “Acta de levantamiento” (45), “Declaración preparatoria pública” (48, 212, 213, 216), “Acta de averiguación” (210), and “Dictamen de sentencia” (217). In the context, again, of the neopoliciaco, this is an unusual feature, for although the hard-boiled detective generally disdains the official legal processes of states considered incompetent or criminally corrupt, the alternative justice administered almost never posits an alternative legal-procedural regime. Taibo’s Bealascoarán finally imposes conventional hard-boiled justice on one Morales by pushing him down the stairs of the Torre Latinoamericana, with the justification that the Mexican legal system will not prosecute agents of the state’s own violence. In this sense, with respect to the narrative imposition of justice on a second Morales, Marcos’s contribution to Muertos incómodos falls less within the realm of the hard-boiled than the police procedural, albeit one in which police procedural power has been appropriated by Zapatista authorities. Thus, the logic of Marcos’s investigation is as neat as the dichotomy stated time and again by Marcos’s characters: on one hand, the illegitimate “mal gobierno” of the Mexican state (first mentioned by Contreras on the fifth page of the novel, 13), and, on the other, the just and legitimate authority of the “Juntas de Buen Gobierno” of the Zapatista autonomous municipalities.
It is the proliferation of this dichotomous opposition of good governments and bad governments, in conjunction with the constant invocation of Neruda’s “el Mal y el Malo” that most clearly exemplifies the saturation of Marcos’s narrative polyphony by a revolutionary cant tending toward absolutism. Thus, in its narrative language, Muertos incómodos dramatizes one of the most permanent contradictions in Marcos’s ideological discourse: on one hand, the advocacy of egalitarian tolerance, multi-cultural solidarity and democracy from below, and on the other, the demand that the entire Mexican political class be locked in jail along with the rich. (11) This is another manifestation of the two contrasting aspects of Marcos’s persona described by Maite and De la Grange in their critical study almost a decade ago: “Marcos es, en efecto, una paradoja con máscara, una dicotomía permanente […] ofrece una cara irreverente, humilde, a veces lúdica y hasta casi libertaria, a la que se contrapone otra cuadriculada, intransigente y egocéntrica” (363). In the news pages of La Jornada (although less so in other Mexican newspapers), Subcomandante Marcos continues to speak frequently for the EZLN and the estimated 250,000 indigenous peasants residing in Zapatista-controlled zones of Chiapas, and in their name he programmatically advocates abandonment of the existing electoral system and peaceful overthrow of the Mexican government by a popular coalition of civil organizations as the only option for the salvation of Mexico. By allotting expression of his familiar critique and political program to a series of narrators in Muertos incómodos, Marcos surely intended to present these ideas as the expression of a collective consensus. So recognizable is the face behind the textual mask, however, that when Contreras comments on the last page of Marcos’s last chapter that he will have to sign off himself since “el Sup no está,” (220), he only calls attention to the force of Marcos’s ill-concealed presence in much of what has gone before.
Especially in Marcos’s chapters, but also in Taibo’s, Muertos incómodos represents Mexican history as an unresolved struggle of a mercilessly oppressed people against a series of inherently vicious, exploitative and treacherous ruling elites. The truth of history is to be located, as Marcos is fond of asserting both here and in his communiqués, “abajo a la izquierda”. (This is the title of the first communiqué he published following the serialization of Muertos incómodos.) In the novel, this rhetoric is delivered by characters such as that of the activist nun, Chapis Lucrecia, who has this to say: “El Mal está arriba a la derecha, con los ricos, con los que mal gobiernan, con los que oprimen al pueblo.” (153) Such comments by Marcos’s narrators are seamlessly continuous with the discourse of his communiqués: “allá arriba reinan la indecencia, la desfachatez, el cinismo, la desvergüenza.” (“La (imposible) ¿geometría? del Poder en México,” June 2005). To the right and above, Marcos locates the Mexican state, all the major parties of Mexican electoral politics, and the economic and cultural elites whom he accuses of selling off the Mexican fatherland, la Patria, to the highest transnational bidder. Another of Marcos’s narrators, a pro-Zapatista Trotskyist nicknamed El Chino, denounces globalization as an organized manifestation of Evil (“la Internacional del Mal,” 159) and Vicente Fox’s Partido de Acción Nacional as part of an international fascist conspiracy. This Manichean and metaphysical rhetoric persists, remarkably enough, despite Marcos’s reproduction in Muertos incómodos of a January, 2005 La Jornada article by Pedro Miguel criticizing precisely the theological rhetoric in which President Bush has couched his own campaign against the so-called Axis of Evil (150-1).
In the final pages of
the novel,
Taibo’s seems to chide Marcos gently over this rhetorical tendency,
when
Belascoarán wonders in
If some readers will
dismiss the
foregoing comments as ungenerous in view of the gravity and validity of
the
political concerns raised by Muertos
incómodos and of its charitable ends, others will surely
question
the wisdom of devoting any critical attention whatsoever to such a
slapdash and
unapologetically doctrinaire text. The historical engagement of the neopoliciaco with leftist politics seems
to me, however, to provide some justification for the critical
consideration of
this unusual limit case. Like many other cultivators of the neopoliciaco,
Taibo, no less than
Marcos, would surely refute the possibility of separating the aesthetic
value
of a text from consideration of its political impact. (At the Semana
Negra in
Notes
(1). For an overview of the trajectory of the Latin American novela negra, see my recent article “The Detective is Dead. Long Live the Novela Negra!”
(2). According at least to one international wire service article on initial reactions to the novel, it was none too well received even in Mexican literary circles. “Las figuras literarias de México, que normalmente simpatizan con los zapatistas, no están muy impresionados por los ‘Muertos Incómodos.’ ‘Es muy regular, no me convence todavía,’ dijo Carlos Monsiváis, el intelectual de izquierda más importante de México. ‘El estilo recuerda los comunicados de Marcos que han aparecido en La Jornada, los que dejaron de ser tomados en serio, pues oscilaban entre líricos, políticos y verborreicos,’ sostuvo por su parte el escritor Homero Aridjis.” (“Líder zapatista”) In one of the few reviews published in mainstream U.S. media while the serialization was still in progress, a Rolling Stone editor named Alex Mar, writing in Salon, contrasted the novelty of the initiative with the poverty of the results: “according to [editor] Hernández, La Jornada quickly garnered a 25 percent rise in its Sunday readership with the inception of Muertos incómodos. The New York Times and the Guardian reported on the literary project as international news. But while packed with venomous references to neoliberalismo, globalization, and those who ‘disappeared’ during the anti-leftist ‘dirty war’ of the ‘70s, the wrench in the book is literary: It's dismal. Its chapter-by-chapter production leaves the story without clear structure and intent, and it’s as uneven as the talents of its authors, with Taibo’s installments miles ahead. Despite his painfully clear aspirations, Marcos […] is no fiction writer.”
(3).
At the
official Mexican presentation of Muertos
incómodos in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl in April of 2005,
Taibo
described the scope of the novel as follows: “nació una doble
investigación en la que se revelan 30 años de horrores,
30
años de tranzas, de negocios turbios, de asesinatos, de guardias
blancas, de paramilitares, de negocios hechos a la sombra del poder […]
es un descenso a los infiernos mexicanos de los que todos ustedes
tienen
razón, conocimiento y referencia. (quoted in
García
Hernández “Una sociedad aburrida”)
(4). In one account of his reaction to the surprising proposal by Marcos, Taibo recognized the recklessness of writing without a plan: “¿Cómo sin ponernos de acuerdo? Una novela no es enchílame otra, hay que articularla, tramarla, darle peso a la historia, construir la trama central.” Despite these reservations, he didn’t hesitate long before accepting the challenge, and the first chapter of the novel went to press within a week of his acceptance. “Debe haber sido lunes o martes. Yo escribí a toda velocidad una nota diciéndole que el título no me gustaba y proponiéndole algunas reglas y subreglas. Esa misma noche me puse de acuerdo con La Jornada para iniciar la publicación al domingo siguiente.” (quoted in García Hernández “Muertos incómodos”)
(5). A particularly scathing
attack on Marcos’s
current discourse, as exemplified by speeches delivered in the course
of La Otra Campaña, appeared in
February of this year in Letras Libres,
one of the publications denounced by both Marcos and Taibo in the
course of Muertos incómodos. There Letras Libres editor Julio
Patán wrote as follows: “Este
desinterés generalizado [del público mexicano ante la
anticompaña] sirve para explicar el mal humor de Marcos, su
violencia
verbal nada contenida y libre de amaneramientos estilísticos. No se trata solo de su generosidad con los
insultos, un tic discursivo que, a fin de cuentas, también puede
explicarse por la arraigadísima idea, permeada de clasismo,
caciquismo y
condescendencia clasemediera, de que así es como hay que
comunicarse con
el vulgo (al naco hay que hablarle en naco). Se trata, sobre todo, de
su
regreso a la jerga revolucionaria, leninista, foquista-guevarista,
patéticamente setentera, pues.”
(6). Ilan Stavans, author of the
first published monograph
on the Mexican detective novel, also recognized Marcos’s evident debt
to
Rulfo in his highly unfavorable review of Muertos
incómodos in The New Republic
Online: “El Sup isn’t a storyteller
as much as a propagandist. His doctrinaire segments have no artistic
verge.
They are tedious disquisitions on inequality and fraud. He is
unquestionably
well read, particularly in Latin American literature. His ideological
education, he once said, owes as much to the theoretician Antonio
Gramsci as it
does to Gabriel García Márquez. His portions in Muertos
incómodos read like an amateurish tribute to the work of
Juan Rulfo,
author of the classic novel Pedro Páramo and the stories
included
in The Burning Bush. Contreras’s first-person speech is that of
an
uncultured peasant, just as in Rulfo’s oeuvre. Except that El Sup
doesn’t have the talent to sustain such weltanshaung.”
(7). Here I have in mind D.A. Miller’s Foucauldian reading of the nineteenth-century realist novel, and especially the detective novel, in The Novel and the Police. There Miller writes: “I have been implying […] that discipline provides the novel with its essential ‘content’ […] the novel’s own repudiation of policing power can be seen not to depart from, but to extend the pattern of this discreet Aufhebung. Whenever the novel censures policing power, it has already invented it, in the very practice of novelistic representation” (18, 20). An example: “Balzac’s omniscient narration assumes a fully panoptic view of the world it places under surveillance. Nothing worth knowing escapes its notation, and its complete knowledge includes the knowledge that it is always right. This infallible super-vision is frequently dramatized in Balzac’s descriptions as an irresistible process of detection. […] There is no other perspective on the world than its own, because the world entirely coincides with that perspective. […] the faceless gaze becomes an ideal of the power of regulation.” (23-4). One final observation by Miller is perhaps particularly relevant to Marcos’s practice in the cited passages: “One thinks […] of the typologies to which novelists like Balzac or Zola subject their characters, or of the more general normalizing function which automatically divides characters into good and bad, normal and deviant. The panopticism of the novel thus coincides with what Mikhail Bakhtin has called its ‘monologism’: the working of an implied master-voice whose accents have already unified the world in a single interpretative center. […] The master-voice of monologism never simply soliloquizes. It continually needs to confirm its authority by qualifying, canceling, endorsing, subsuming all the other voices it lets speak. No doubt the need stands behind the great prominence the nineteenth-century novel gives to style indirect libre, in which, respeaking a character’s thoughts or speeches, the narration simultaneously subverts their authority and secures its own.” (25)
(8). This is the essence of the criticism directed at Marcos by a Zapatista defector named Antonio, quoted by Bertrand de la Grange y Maite Rico in their critical 1998 study, Marcos, la genial impostura: “Nunca hubo un comandante indígena. Marcos es el que decide” (197). By Antonio’s account, the 20-member CCRI-CG, supposedly the supreme governing body of the EZLN, was a fiction invented shortly before the January, 1994 uprising to lend a (masked) indigenous face to a movement organized by transplanted urban ideologues. Journalists De la Grange and Rico allege that while the indigenous comandantes were never simply puppets, only two or three wielded effective political influence outside their own communities (54). At the very end of his substantial book on Marcos, Vázquez Montalbán refuted this perception as follows: “como aparentemente se trataba de un grupo de indígenas enmascarados mandados por un blanco pseudo poeta, el racismo cultural decretó que los pobres indígenas, una vez más, estaban siendo instrumentalizados por profetas postmarxistas locales o por indoeuropeos nostálgicos de la KGB. La verdad era muy otra. Los líderes indígenas curtidos en luchas sindicales agrarias y de defensa de sus raíces, abiertos a la modernidad y no cerrados a ella, absorbieron el residual guerrillismo universitario de corte castroguevarista y lo sumaron a una inteligentísima operación de presión ética sobre la sociedad mexicana e internacional.” (378) The staging of Marcos’s public reemergence in August of 2005, following a four year and four month absence, seems to suggest a continuing preoccupation with the perception of his relationship to the indigenous comandantes. A La Jornada report described the scene last year as follows: “Con su uniforme militar, su pistola al cinto, escoltado por siete guerrilleros armados y colocado detrás de la dirigencia política -siete hombres y nueve mujeres encapuchados que junto con él participan en la organización de los trabajos de la Comisión Sexta que se encargará de la parte política nacional para impulsar la creación de una fuerza política de izquierda y la otra campaña-, Marcos escuchó con respeto y tolerancia todas las opiniones.” (Henríquez)
(9). Having lived in close contact
with indigenous
communities for more than twenty years in the mountains of Chiapas,
Marcos
confidently enunciates the indigenous “we” in his written
communications and in his public appearances. On March 6 of this year
in San
Pablo Toliman, Querétaro, he spoke as follows: “Nosotros somos
indígenas de
(10). The first published reference that I have found by Marcos to Muertos incómodos appears in a letter dated November, 2004 and written to be read at a session in honor of the deceased Vázquez Montalbán at the Guadalajara book fair. This is how Marcos announced the project: “En alguna misiva le propuse a Don Manuel Vázquez Montalbán escribir una novela policíaca ‘a la limón’, con unas partes escritas en las montañas del sureste mexicano y otras en las Ramblas catalanas. Él aceptó, aunque, lo confesó alguna vez, no tenía la menor idea de cómo eso sería posible. Yo tampoco, pero esto ya no lo supo. Próximamente el Sistema Zapatista de Televisión Intergaláctica, ‘la única televisión que se lee’, trasmitirá el primer capítulo de una serie policial que, como todo lo zapatista, tiene un futuro incierto.” (“A Manuel Vázquez Montalbán”)
(11). This contradiction persists
in statements made by
Marcos in the context of his most recent political venture, La
Otra Campaña, the tour
scheduled to take him through the 32 states of the Mexican republic
between
January and June of 2006. In
an interview with Hermann Bellinghausen at the Mexico City offices of La Jornada in May, Marcos described the
campaign as follows: “La Otra Campaña va a lograr la
unión de [las] resistencias y rebeldías, que van a
obligar a
todas las organizaciones políticas de izquierda a unirse, como
ya ha
ocurrido en la Karavana. Se va a crear un movimiento cultural,
político,
científico y humanista sin precedente en este país, abajo
y a la
izquierda.” He stated the ultimate objectives as follows: “Vamos a
derrocar al gobierno por vías civiles y pacíficas; se van
a ir
los ricos y los políticos a la cárcel.” (Marcos
“A este paso”). Later
in the same interview, he declared: “si no hacemos la otra
campaña
lo que podría pasar es una guerra civil. La otra
campaña es
la única alternativa para que este país sobreviva.”
(Marcos
“La clase política”)
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