180 R A J PAT EL

Although it wasn’t being reported in the mainstream English-

language media,14 the Mexican press had been writing about the
horrific health conditions at Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of the
U.S.-based Smithfield meat-packing company, for some time.15 At
the company’s operation in La Gloria, in Veracruz, they kill nearly
one million pigs a year.16 It was here, on March 30, 2009,17 nearly a
month before the outbreak hit Mexico City, that health officials re-
corded the first swine flu case. The virus that is currently in Mexico
and the southern United States is a novel H1N1 virus, one that
jumped species from pigs to humans.
Smithfield insists that it repeatedly tested its pigs and found them
to be free of the virus, though The New York Times reports skepti-
cism among some veterinary experts about whether these tests were
meaningful. It’s still an empirical question as to whether Smithfield
factory played a role in the epidemic, and some federal officials have
said the disease emerged in Asia, not Mexico. Still, some sort of con-
fined animal operation remains a highly likely point of origin of the
disease.18
Meanwhile, anyone in public space in Mexico had to walk around
in blue masks. The most dangerous part of us was our mouths.19 My
destination, however, was not Mexico City but the country’s south-
ernmost state, Chiapas. There, I saw altogether different masks when
I met with the Zapatistas, the insurgent group that declared war on
the Mexican government in 1994. Here’s how their proclamation
formalized the state of affairs in their southernmost corner of Mex-
ico over the past five hundred years:

We are a product of 500 years of struggle: first against

slavery, then during the War of Independence against
Spain led by insurgents, then to avoid being absorbed by
North American imperialism, then to promulgate our
constitution and expel the French empire from our soil,
 TH E VA LU E O F NOTH ING 181

and later the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz denied us the

just application of the Reform laws and the people re-
belled and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor
men just like us. We have been denied the most elemen-
tal preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and
pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we
have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our
heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food nor edu-
cation. Nor are we able to freely and democratically elect
our political representatives, nor is there independence
from foreigners, nor is there peace or justice for ourselves
and our children.20

In the fifteen years since that declaration, they’ve won land—by

some estimates over half a million acres21—built primary health care
facilities and made schools for the tens of thousands of people in
their “liberated” territory. Their greatest victory, however, has been
to build what has been hailed as a highly successful experiment in
democracy and justice. I came to Chiapas to talk to the representa-
tives of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (the Good Government Coun-
cils, or Juntas for short). And when I met them, they were wearing
their signature accessory—ski masks.
Beyond the rather obvious reason that they don’t want to be hunted
by the Mexican government—a fate that seems increasingly likely
with the recent expansion of military forces in Chiapas—there’s an-
other explanation for the masks. The foundation of Zapatista de-
mocracy is the village, which is usually anywhere between fifteen
and one hundred families. They hold regular assembly meetings
that everyone is allowed to attend, and at which everyone is encour-
aged to speak. At the meeting, the village appoints two or sometimes
four responsables, men and women equally represented, who act both
as local authorities and as representatives to a regional municipality
182 R A J PAT EL

(of about fifteen to one hundred villages). Together these munici-

palities select a pool of members from all villages to be on their Junta
de Buen Gobierno—there are five in total, covering all Zapatista-
controlled territory. Once selected, the members leave their villages
to serve at the Junta’s headquarters for one week out of every six, for
a term of three years. After that, they’ll never serve again. With con-
stant rotation, faces change all the time, but the Junta’s function re-
mains the same.
The room of balaclavas is a sign that indigenous people are en-
gaging in democracy without its most infectious symptom—elections.
Rather than sitting in individual air-conditioned offices in front of
large portraits of themselves, these democratic officials serve their
communities anonymously, with their faces hidden by the masks of
the office they have assumed. The ski masks also serve another po-
litical purpose. They are a reminder that when you visit the Junta,
you aren’t there to see a par ticular person—you came to see the
people. The masks reveal that the most important face in the room is
yours. There’s still accountability, though—the Juntas sometimes
publish denuncias, open letters denouncing a human-rights violation,
as they did recently when the Mexican army, allegedly looking for
marijuana fields while conducting “the war on drugs,” destroyed the
main collective cornfield in the town of La Garrucha. In these cases,
the Junta members will sign their real names, but when they’re work-
ing, the mask is a mantle of office.
At the entrance to the Zapatista territories, there’s always a sign
that says “Está usted en territorio rebelde zapatista. Aquí manda el
pueblo y el gobierno obedece.” (You are in rebel Zapatista territory.
Here the people lead and the government obeys.) This is in marked
contrast to the famously corrupt Mexican ruling party, the PRI (Insti-
tutional Revolutionary Party, which, despite its name, is structurally
more aligned with the U.S. Republican Party, or the British Conser-
vatives). As one Junta member explained, “In Mexico, the federal
 TH E VA LU E O F NOTH ING 183

government tries to buy your vote, the PRI gives out soda to buy
your conscience. Here, we don’t get paid—we do it because we have
been chosen.” They were at pains to stress that they weren’t there by
choice. When they are at the Junta’s headquarters, they need to find
someone to take care of their fields or their children, and yet, with-
out exception, they said it was important to do.
Conducting an interview with a Junta is unusual. Names, ages,
occupations and personal opinions are off-limits, because they’re ir-
relevant (see above). I was asked to present a written list of questions,
they privately pondered their collective response and I was invited
back to hear every member of the Junta take a turn answering. This
takes time. Not for nothing is the name of the five Zapatista Junta
headquarters “Caracol,” snail. I asked one of the Juntas why. “Three
reasons—first, the snail walks slowly but surely; second, our ances-
tors blew through a conch shell to call a meeting together; third, the
shape of the shell shows how information goes in and out of the
Caracol, and that’s how we work: by listening and exchanging.”
Those familiar with the Slow Food movement will see some simi-
larity here. Slow Food’s philosophy rejects the acceleration that capi-
talism has brought to food, insisting that food should be produced in
consonance with the environment and with a respect for the labor
that produces it. Not fast food but Slow Food. If you’ve ever tried Slow
Food, you’ll know what a sublime and transformative experience it
can be. Although the Slow Food movement has the reputation of be-
ing a middle-class supper club, its DNA is radical, and has a resonance
with the Zapatistas—it shares the notion that everyone has the right to
participate in, and enjoy, the world around them, and that genuine
democracy takes time. The joke about the Zapatistas is this:

Q: How many Zapatistas does it take to change a light-

bulb?
A: Come back in two weeks.
184 R A J PAT EL

What Zapatistas are practicing is slow politics. Visitors and nongov-

ernmental organizations trying to work with the Zapatistas can get a
little impatient with the process of constant consultation, discussion
and deliberation. It doesn’t feel efficient, and NGOs get frustrated at
being made to wait, but that’s because they’re making a mistake in
valuing time. It’s not as if the Zapatista government isn’t capable of
swift responses. You wouldn’t want deliberative emergency service,
and the Zapatistas have two ambulances and a clinic that provide
prompt and universal coverage. But to decide justice and politics takes
time—you wouldn’t rush a criminal trial, or cut short the presentation
of evidence in order to reach a verdict more swiftly, and it’s the same
with politics. Urgency is quick. Insurgency takes much longer.
It’s a point I heard made rather clearly. “People know that we de-
clared war fifteen years ago,” one of the masked men offered. “But
what people also know is that the shooting war lasted only twelve
days. Much more important was the political war. It takes time to
build a  secondary school—first we had to build all the primary
schools. There’s nothing that happens overnight. It takes time to find
the form.”
And, again, the form isn’t obvious, or even found the first time.
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” said a woman whose eyes
suggested she might be thirty. “We didn’t know if a government run
like ours was even possible. But we’ve shown that it can be.” That
the process works better if people spend more time on it is a finding
only recently discovered by psychologists and behavioral economists.
In one paper, researchers quote Henry Ford’s autobiography, where
he states that “time waste differs from material waste in that there
can be no salvage.”22 What the economists demonstrate, and what
the Zapatistas know, is that with a correctly structured system, you
can build a great deal of trust between participants by taking time
together.
 TH E VA LU E O F NOTH ING 185

The Juntas have been so successful in their deliberative democ-

racy that ordinary non-Zapatista Mexicans seek their advice. The
Zapatistas will receive anyone. Such is their reputation for impartial
deliberation that their governing body is trusted by citizens and state
alike to resolve cases ranging from divorce to grand theft. Local
people prefer the Juntas’ deliberations to the federal court system,
where the case will be decided on the basis of which side was better
able to bribe the officers of the court.23 The justice that the Zapatis-
tas offer is transformative justice rather than punitive. There is a jail
that is mainly used for drunks, but incarceration is not the solution
for most problems. The kinds of punishments that the Junta recom-
mends are warnings, duties of care and community ser vice. In one
case involving the theft of over $40,000 from a truck carrying the
salaries of local government employees, the Junta first tracked
down the robbers, forced them to return the money to the govern-
ment and then deliberated over their sentences. It was decided that
sending them to jail would only hurt their families, who would have
to work in the fields without the robbers’ labor, so they were sen-
tenced to 365 days of community ser vice, with half the time allowed
to tend to family fields, and the rest spent on public work. This is, of
course, a million miles away from the prison industry in the United
States, which leads the world in incarceration in the name of “public
safety.”
The Juntas are also involved in commoning, figuring how to
share resources from land that they have reclaimed from large land-
holders. Balancing the economic needs of the community and the
ecosystem’s ability to sustain them is a delicate art. One Junta has
restrictions on chopping down healthy trees (and, if it needs to be
done, three are planted in each tree’s stead). Revenues are shared
between communities and the Junta.24 Another Junta noticed de-
clining yields on the land they’d been corralled onto by the Mexican