"It stands?"
"It shakes. I myself am shaking now. I admit it. But my duty calls, so I must steel myself and move swiftly to deal with this crisis."
"How bad?"
"Muy terrible. Popo smokes like a bad cigar now. I fear an epic eruption. I need your help, Colonel Primitivo."
"I do not know how to fight volcanos, but I and my men will do whatever is asked of us."
"Then go to Chiapas and exterminate the renegade Verapaz. "
"This order comes from El Presidente?"
"No, this comes from my lips to your ears. Not even God must hear these words."
"I understand."
"Within the hour, Verapaz has issued a communique. He is deserting the jungle and forests. His goal is nothing less than Mexico City-all Mexican cities ultimately."
"He is drunk with pulque and arrogance."
"He understands the central government has been plunged into a crisis from which it may never emerge. Victory may be his if steps are not undertaken. I am ordering you into Chiapas. Find and intercept this man. Kill him. Make it seem as if he perished in the earthquake. That way no embarrassment will attach itself to you or I or El Presidente. "
"I spit upon El Presidente. "
"That opportunity, too, may arise very soon," the general said dryly. "For all of Mexico is up for grabs, and it is incumbent upon the strong to crush the less strong with all of our might before we fall to the weak."
"I go to Chiapas. Subcomandante Verapaz has issued his last flowery communique. "
"Go with God, Colonel. Just do not allow Him to witness what you do."
"Understood, General."
That very hour a column of tanks and APCs left Montezuma Barracks in Oaxaca at full speed, heading south into Chiapas, where destiny awaited Colonel Mauricio Primitivo.
Destiny lay in ambush for Subcomandante Verapaz, as well. But it was a different destiny. A cold, wormy one.
Chapter 11
A funny thing happened to Alirio Antonio Arcila on the way to the revolution.
It was not so much funny as it was tragic. Yet it was also funny. There was no avoiding this. It was a great joke, a cosmic joke. The gods might have conceived such a joke, except Antonio did not believe in any gods, Mexican, Christian or otherwise.
His gods were Marx and Lenin and other dead white European males whose economic philosophy had seized the twentieth century by the throat.
Alirio Antonio Arcila was a Communist. He was a brother in spirit to Che and Fidel and Mao, and so ached to follow in their booted footsteps.
Then came Gorbachev. The Berlin Wall fell. It was a calamity. And the calamity was followed by other, more calamitous calamities. The Eastern Bloc disintegrated. The mighty USSR fragmented into the powerless CIS.
Just as Alirio Antonio Arcila was poised to reap the violent fruit of ten years spent planting the seeds of discontent in the Lacandon jungle, the international Communist movement was no more. There was no more communism, in fact. Democracy had gripped Moscow with its unshakable iron grip. Even the unbending gray mandarins in Beijing were embracing capitalism even as they clutched Mao's little red book.
And those who clung to the socialist path were overnight bereft of sponsors and funding. Havana became a basket case. Pyongyang an isolated embarrassment. Hanoi lurched into the capitalistic camp. And in Peru the Maoist Shining Path had been hurled reeling and broken, by an elected dictator into the mountains that gave them birth.
All was lost. All was for naught.
Except Alirio Antonio Arcila had been trained as a socialist revolutionary. He had no other talents, no marketable skills, no vocation. There was no other path to follow in life. He knew only revolution and its bloody talents.
So even though the cause was lost, there was no reason that he could think of not to throw a revolution anyway.
It was either that or take over his father's coffee plantation. Antonio would never do that. His father was an oppressor. Antonio would rather make futile revolution than become an oppressor like his evil father, who had amassed a fortune on the backs of illiterate peasants and sold his product to capitalists who in turn sold it to others at obscene profits in a cycle of exploitation without end.
For months after that last stipend had come, Antonio brooded in the jungle, thinking that all he needed was a cause. If only he had a cause.
But what cause?
Oh, he had convinced the Mayan peasants that their cause was liberation and economic justice. But those were only words. Antonio intended to liberate them only to deliver them into the hands of the new Communist rulers of Mexico, of whom one would be no less than Alirio Antonio Arcila.
Then had come NAFTA.
He did not perfectly understand the North American Free Trade Agreement. It involved free trade, obviously. That equaled capitalism. Therefore, it was bad. If not evil.
And so he'd addressed his Maya on this looming evil.
"I have heard this day of a plot called NAFTA," he had told them. "It is a scheme to oppress you as never before."
They regarded him with their sad, stony eyes. Those eyes were the eyes of Mexico, full of soul-deep contradictions and conflicting emotions.
"In this new NAFTA world, the farms of the capital-I mean the norteamericanos-will be placed on the same footing as your meager corn and bean fields. This is fundamentally unfair. For they farm with fierce machines while you have but your strong backs and rude hoes. This is betrayal. Worse, this is treason. We must fight this unfairness."
The Maya heard these words and they nodded in their mute way. They were not men for talk. Talk wasted the breath. They knew that their allotted breaths were fewer than those who breathed the machine-fouled air of the cities. This, too, was unfair. But it was undeniable.
Besides, over the years Antonio dwelled among them, they had come to see their light-skinned patron and advisor with the quetzal green eyes as Kukulcan incarnate. According to legend, Kukulcan, the Plumed Serpent, had been a white man come from across the sea to lift up the Maya many baktuns ago.
He had given them the gifts of writing, agriculture and other high knowledge only to depart, vowing to return in a future time of great need.
It was obvious to the simple indio peasants that their benefactor was Kukulcan incarnate, returned as he had promised.
Antonio did nothing to dissuade them from this belief. After all, it had worked for Cortez when he arrived in Yucatan in the Aztec year called One Reed. He was thought by the original Mexicans to be Quetzalcoatl, the very same Plumed Serpent god, white of skin and heralding a new era, whose return in the next One Reed year had been prophesied by Aztec prophets.
Cortez did bring gifts, in his way. He ushered in the era of the Spanish conquest. The Aztecs were cast down into slavery. The Maya empire had by then fallen into ruin, the survivors retreating into the jungles to eke out simple agrarian lives.
The Maya equivalent of Quetzalcoatl, whom they called Kukulcan, had not returned in Cortez. In Antonio, they had their Kukulcan. And as he was their god incarnate, the word of Alirio Antonio Arcila was law.
The word of Lord Kukulcan was to resist NAFTA by force.
They took up their Uzis and their AK-47s that had been cached all over the jungle, cleaned off the rust-resisting Cosmoline and began training in earnest.