The scene is simple, but significant and powerful. Three men and two women appear in the frame of the camera located in the Ocosingo forest, in the State of Chiapas. The five wear balaclavas to hide their faces and form themselves in a military line, with their arms down, almost close to their bodies, and with their gaze fixed forward. They remain still and static for a few seconds. They are Benito, Elisa, Mario, Felicia and Luis Miguel, all former members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), who participated in the indigenous uprising of January 1, 1994. 30 years after the insurrection in Chiapas, they break the silence for for the first time and, without a balaclava, they narrate their motivations, experiences and wounds from that war.
After the weaponsin competition at the Guadalajara Film Festival, is a documentary by director Héctor Laso and producer and journalist Denise Maerker, which explores the risks and sacrifices that these ex-combatants faced, seeking to change a reality marked by misery, oppression and oblivion, while they reflect on the transformations left by the armed struggle and whether the inheritance of this learning has managed to permeate their present and future generations.
Laso says that the investigation began at the end of 2022. The film and research work materialized in up to seven trips to Chiapas. However, being able to find the voices and the meaning of what they sought to tell was complicated due to the secrecy on the part of the Zapatista movement. For that reason they decided to look outside, for the ex-militia members.
“I joined the armed struggle of the EZLN because I was tired of living in poverty, in misery, in oblivion, due to the mistreatment of the landowners, of the caciques. All of us, men and women, were motivated and united by the same cause. We were forgotten, because there was no good education,” says in a fragment who at the time was known as Captain Benito, who lost an eye on January 2, 1994, in what he describes as “the bloodiest battle in Ocosingo.” ”.
Laso says that, as they lived in hiding for decades, they were instructed not to speak, that the one who spoke for them was Subcomandante Marcos himself. So, he continues, it was telling them, ‘we are not going to talk about the movement, we are going to tell its story.’ The director continues: “I didn’t want to make a political-social film, but rather I had to make an intimate portrait of his life after the weapons. I decided to dig into the past and their motivations so they would stop calling them ‘murderers.’
Maerker complements Laso and says that the documentary does not intend to make a judgment about Zapatismo, which he remembers at the time as “an important turning point” in public, political and country life, but rather to tell what had happened to the lives of those people who made that transcendent decision 30 years later. “They still admire the Zapatista movement, they are not fighting and they feel great respect for their former colleagues who still remain within the ranks,” the producer clarifies.
Luis Miguel and Felicia, in their home, in front of a projection of the images of the time – which were recovered from the Televisa archive and which represented a review of around eight months – can still be seen convinced of their decisions, as a result of lack of education and tired of living in poverty. “When it was time to vote for war, we all raised our cards,” remembers Luis Miguel, while Benito, in another scene, as a complement, states the following: “If we kill it is because there was no other alternative, no other path.”
Maerker says that what they found in the testimonies was a change in mentality and life for them. “For the Zapatista leaders, Marcos and others, perhaps it is very little, not what they expected. They wanted a revolution, to change the State. It seems very valuable to us to imagine all those indigenous women with that new awareness of their role, their power, their word, and creating women and generations thinking in a different way,” the journalist says.
Told in Spanish and Tzeltal—one of the indigenous languages spoken in the Chiapas Highlands—, after the weapons It accounts for the brutality of armed confrontations, and shows the strength of indigenous women who, 30 years ago, refused to accept “their reality” full of machismo and submission.
The role of women is another of the columns of the documentary. Lieutenant Felicia and Captain Elisa, as well as their male counterparts, realize that the fight against machismo began within insurgent and guerrilla life, with “even work.” “If I had not joined the EZLN, life would be much worse. I wouldn’t have that courage, as a woman that I have now, how to speak, how to protect yourself, or have the courage to work. Now I am a stronger woman because I learned many things within the EZLN,” says Felicia in another segment.
The documentary also narrates, from the voice of the five, what those 12 days of combat against the Mexican army were like, in terms of preparation, the feeling of that moment from the ranks of the militiamen and the expectations they had regarding the armed conflict. However, they had never been portrayed by the media and public opinion of the time. That also shares after the weaponsprojections between walls of what was once another life that now seems distant.
“They had never seen the images. And you see them. Something intense in their gaze when they are watching and the emotions that those images awaken in them. It is tremendous when one of them says that they are sending them straight against the military barracks, which is sending them to have bullets fall on them like corn into a bucket, as one of the women said. They went as if in a kind of frontal battle where they were in the vanguard and that word, which appears several times, seems harsh to me. They sent them like that, to the forefront,” says Maerker.
“These splinters that I carry are worth it because in my mind it is always because of the two daughters I have. Well, it is the memory of those 12 days of combat,” Felicia recalls in another cut of the documentary, about a movement that was characterized by an enigmatic image given by the use of balaclavas, portrayed and narrated from the most human side of its participants, face to face with the viewer. From his family stories, his training in the jungle, his combat wounds, his personal relationships and his learning in the guerrilla: that is after the weapons.
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