One must drive past Guadalupe Tepeyac, site of the first Zapatista Aguascalientes, the forum that hosted the peace talks and which the army destroyed last summer. The local hospital remains empty, a monument to Mexico's bureaucracy and the country's inability to deal with the needs of indigenous communities. The main road is unpaved. The huts are made of wood planks, without doors or windows. A separate room serves each family as kitchen, wood for the cooking pit neatly stacked around the walls.
Palms are their roofs and dirt is their floor.
A shack might house two or three families, all members of the same extended clan. While men work in the fields of corn and coffee, women stay at home grinding the maize to make tortillas, washing the family's clothes in the river, or chopping wood for cooking. Hard work and lack of nutrition quickly age their small, hunched bodies. The description is not exactly one of the garden of Eden. Yet, no other revolutionary movement today attracts so many people to its cradle.