Preface. I am fascinated by war and conflict, and especially in this book which shows how societies and conflicts are similar across time and mountain ranges all over the world. These cultures may be inevitable due to the harsh environments. Those of you trying to decide where to be postcarbon will especially find this of interest. As well as my book review of Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia.
Here are some excerpts that give you an overview, and after that some kindle notes with details of areas I am interested in, such as parts of Mexico where I’ve spent many weeks birding and visiting ruins. I recommend the first section on Albania especially.
Overview & Summary
All upland communities share cruel weather and harsh earth that together defeat most forms of agriculture and instill a deep sense of apartness. Mountain topography not only yields common concerns, it breeds similar characteristics as well. There is ample evidence that the severe weather and physical barriers of mountain regions give rise to mental toughness, self-sufficiency, insularity, and a talent for improvisation, among other traits. From the Ozarks to the Pashtun tribal areas, “mountain people” acknowledge and often celebrate these commonalities. Mountain people have a spiritual connection with the sacred earth, and are tough, suspicious of outsiders, stubborn.
The earth’s elevated surfaces foster a distinctive lifestyle as well. From Tirol to Bolivia, herders make seasonal treks to upland communal pastures. Honor codes that disappeared from most of the world centuries ago still govern social relations in many mountainous regions
Separatist movements, too, find havens on high. Kosovo, Corsica, Basques, Aceh, southern Thailand, Kachin, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya: in each, ethnic minorities who live in the mountains have engaged in struggles against lowlanders.
Harsh conditions produce closed and defensive communities that balk at being ruled by others. Mountain people are often so passionately attached to the earth they live on that they invest it with sacred properties. Religion imposed by colonial outsiders fails to take firm root, or is incorporated into indigenous beliefs.
Why does nearly every modern clan killing on the planet occur in a mountain society? Cultural anthropologists agree that herding societies remain especially obsessed with honor codes outside organized legal systems. Such communities tend to be clan-organized and in mountains. Being patriarchal, overt displays of machismo are expected even over what we might consider a minor slight. Insult to pride justifies murder, it seems, when people are so socially isolated that the only reliable structure is the family. The rocky land is not productive, and possession of hoofed animals is a measure of a man’s worth. The only assistance people are likely to receive is from male relatives with the same vested interests: protecting the purity of their sisters, who are considered a form of property, and the sheep that provide stew, cheese, and wool. An offense to honor may include everything from reneging on a promise to removing the cover of a cooking pot on a hearth.
Coastal people are a different story entirely: their exposure to other cultures through maritime trade made them more innovative and cosmopolitan than those in remote inland districts. Few scholars today would quibble with her conclusion that the ocean, the original superhighway for goods and information, fosters openness to other cultures, as do rivers and plains. Quite unlike mountains, these other geographic features encourage mobility, invasion, immigration, and, as a consequence, diverse and often hybrid ways of life.
Many of the world’s most entrenched conflicts take place in mountains, and we neglect this fact at our peril. Far from being irrelevant, these remote, often archaic, and seemingly exotic exceptional communities are enormously important to the future safety and stability of the world at large. The mountain is friend to those who want to elude or destroy authority—the revolutionary, the poppy grower, and the jihadi, to name only a few. Mountains are the last place where roads are built and the first place people go to hide.
Most of the cocaine and heroin that Americans consume is grown and smuggled by violent drug syndicates operating in the highlands of Latin America. The cartels’ extending reach is feeding addiction and gangsterism in the American heartland. Ever since the Clinton administration, our country has funneled $10 billion into trying to stop a war in the Colombian Andes that has been sustained by mountainous terrain for half a century. Afghanistan’s peaks and divided clans provide similar sanctuaries for the Taliban fighters.
Mountains not only harbor terrorists and other outlaws: they are where most of the world’s water supply originates. Rivers rise in the hills, and wars have been threatened over control of high-altitude reservoirs. Rhetoric will only escalate as water grows ever scarcer in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the American West.
Conclusion. The world will see more mountain conflicts where terrorists and outlaws flee when the government tries to suppress them. Most conflicts don’t make the news due to not having strategic importance or too far away.
But we have a moral imperative to pay attention. We ignore them at our peril. Danger, like water, flows downhill.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Book lists Podcasts: Financial Sense, WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Matloff J (2017) No Friends but the Mountains Dispatches from the World’s Violent Highlands. Basic books.
Lassalle heads the World Mountain People Association (WMPA) a network of proud highlanders from 70 countries who meet on scenic ascents every year to discuss their commonalities and their grievances. The association was born out of a global forum organized by UNESCO in June 2000. Some 900 mountain dwellers from around the planet gathered in the French Alpine town of Chambéry with a common mission: to pursue “equitable and sustainable development and the continuity of mountain identity.” The association survives on financing from French and Swiss authorities, organizations of native mountain groups, foundations, and private partners. Larger fears underlie the highlanders’ stated concerns—fears about identity, and survival.
Turbaned Tuaregs and Bolivian coca growers in sandals sit alongside Sherpas from Nepal, all eagerly chatting away. Much of the conversation, facilitated by teams of translators, focuses on shared concerns: How to gain control over the metals and water embedded in their traditional burial grounds? How, also, to prevent tourists from spoiling ancient pastures?
Sitting in this peaceful place, witness to the brotherly love flowing between the world’s mountain peoples, and mellowed by the ethereal yet earthy pipe music, it was easy to forget why I was there: to report on the prevalence of violence in mountainous regions. Mountains cover 25% of the earth’s surface and account for only 10% of its population. Yet they host a strikingly disproportionate share of its clashes. A 1999 United Nations report revealed that 23 of the 27 major armed conflicts in the world were being fought in mountain areas, and that ratio remains roughly true today.
The WMPA, for its part, focuses not on violence but on addressing the many challenges of life in the highlands.
ALBANIA
Before the Communist era, men seeking to evade killers sought shelter in defensive stone towers called kulla until reconciliation could be reached. Men could remain in these loaf-shaped sanctuaries for decades, sleeping on a thin mattress of goat skin, listening to the rush of the river outside, with nothing to do but look out of the narrow slats at the majestic mountains and hope someone would bring a bucket of milk and news of a truce.
An estimated 6,000 Albanian males, including 650 children, were stuck at home. Boys are ordered to remain indoors and upon reaching puberty are sometimes handed rifles in case their turn comes to exact revenge. A confined family is shunned until the blood debt is paid. Friends don’t visit, and the men can’t go out to work. Because the Kanun decrees that only males can shoulder the blood curse, the women often end up supporting the family by working in factories or laundries.
For housebound husbands who nominally retain their role as head of the family, the inability to work and lack of social contact have a bitter, emasculating effect, and such men frequently turn to excessive drinking and wife beating. As for the younger generation, while the state provides teachers who pay house calls on isolated students, home schooling doesn’t resolve the loneliness of teens who can’t date or play soccer. Instead, they indulge in endless television watching and video games, or stare at grimy walls and torment siblings. The children grow lethargic or pace within their narrow boundaries like zoo animals. Some families have built walled courtyards where boys can kick balls around. The few who can afford cell phones can potentially communicate with former schoolmates, but often kids living under the blood curse are shunned on social media, too. In any event, they quickly run out of new things to say.
Some avengers starve the victims’ families economically and socially. This is one reason people postpone the killings for many years, to torture them. Other families postpone because they don’t want to do it.
Like so many blood feuds in northern Albania, it started at a drunken wedding, this one near Brise, a community of a few hundred people where calling a man the wrong name is grounds for murder. At the party, Marrash’s father quarreled with another villager, who attacked Marrash’s father with a broken jar and scratched his forehead. A tiny drop of red trickled down. The Kanun, the ancient code of Albania’s northern mountains, holds that a facial wound is one of the worst offenses to honor. A man must seek revenge, no matter how little blood was drawn. The villager knew the rules: he told Marrash’s father, “One of you has to kill me.” Within a year, Marrash’s uncle shot the man dead at a village meeting. From that day on, Marrash and his two brothers knew that, in turn, one of them would be killed. Then the other family would wait for one of their men to be murdered, and so it would continue, back and forth for the foreseeable future. People here have been settling scores in this way for centuries. The vendettas killed an estimated 10,470 Albanians in the two decades between 1991 and 2012.
The only way to stop the gjakmarrje is if one party offers a besa, or truce, which then must be accepted by everyone in both clans. Often, consensus can’t be reached in big extended families. The clan that executed Marrash had behaved decently, all things considered. Not wanting to slay a man with young children, they put off the inevitable for years. When they eventually decided to kill Marrash rather than his brother, they did so because Marrash’s children were older than his brother’s and better able to support themselves.
After the feud started, they’d fled with their families to a town six hours south, where it would be more difficult to hunt them down. Still, their families, children included, rarely left their new houses, which they surrounded by walls tall as trees in an attempt to block snipers. Because an avenger cannot execute a victim in his home, it becomes his only sanctuary; many marked Albanian men never go outside. Marrash had dug a tunnel near his house for safe passage to his field. Eventually, though, he tired of the confinement and ventured outside. And there he died, doomed to the same fate Albanian highlanders have suffered for ages.
Mountains cover three-fourths of Albania. The northernmost range where Marrash was killed is practically impenetrable, a limestone massif that has held back a series of would-be invaders for 2,000 years, and continues to vex modern road builders. The people who cling to the slopes get around on goat paths, and the dirt tracks that substitute for roads often wash away in the frequent torrential rains. Ice creates massive blockades in the winter, cutting off entire hamlets for months on end. And then, when the frost finally melts, boulders crash down to create fresh obstacles; those few who own vehicles know to pack dynamite in order to clear the way. Communication is a constant challenge. In the old days, villagers got in touch by shouting across gorges. The digital revolution hasn’t made much of a difference today. There is practically no cell reception. There are few doctors.
The violence in these areas is indistinguishable from the clan fighting that prevailed in the flatlands before the rise of city-states. That primordial vendetta-fueled system of justice existed from biblical times through the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the sixth century to the Scottish highlanders of the seventeenth century, who then transported vendetta culture to the Appalachian mountains.
A man’s duty to ancestors is to uphold honor, and he will bring shame upon the clan if he does not accept retribution or exact revenge. His daughters will encounter trouble finding husbands. Ancestors will chastise him in the afterlife.” Bardhoshi went on to explain that the political-economic elite has traditionally resided in the southern plains and referred to the highlanders of the north as malok, or hillbillies.
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My first brush with mountain warfare occurred before I ever climbed anything taller than a hill. A fifth-grade history book offered a mesmerizing illustration of Hannibal’s quixotic crossing of the Alps. That gambit, in 218 BC, is often portrayed as a tour de force of strategy but all I could focus on were the elephants. The drawing showed the mighty, wretched beasts struggling against an alien habitat of deep snow, and tumbling off precipices like plastic toys. My ten-year-old mind was boggled by the hubris of herding hot-weather creatures across narrow icy paths as hostile tribes hurled boulders from above. The troops had it bad, too. Half of the 46,000 soldiers perished, many from the cold or falls. The 25,000 survivors emerged from the mountains exhausted and spent. This, to me, was nuts. I’ve maintained this view during a journalism career that has taken me to many of the world’s most intractable conflicts. Reporting from five continents and 39 countries, whenever I was sent to cover violence, I invariably found myself in rugged mountains, writing about all manner of hostilities, massacres, insurgencies, blood feuds, and putsches.
What often distinguishes mountains is that, in Lassalle’s words, they “constitute a natural frontier between countries and continents”—and the state on each side usually doesn’t take the local populace into account. Residing at borders, says Lassalle, means that highlanders often find themselves at the “crossroads” of global conflicts. Moreover, mountain areas “constitute the refuge of the revolutionary or the hunted rebel” who go there to hide and to marshal their forces. Mountains are the planet’s most intransigent feature, a natural wall that will always stand.
Besieged highlands—isolated from roads, the Internet, and sea-level capitals—harbor many of the world’s most neglected people. Invisible to the dominant culture of the plains, as well as to the government, these unassimilated communities harbor deep grudges. It’s little wonder that they resist being controlled more often and more tenaciously than flatlanders, who are generally more integrated into broader society.
MEXICO
One of the single most astonishing days in Mexico’s recent history was January 1, 1994. That morning, when most Mexicans were nursing hangovers from New Year’s Eve, some 3,000 Mayan Indians wearing black ski masks occupied several towns in Chiapas. They freed prisoners from a jail in San Cristóbal and set fire to police stations and a military installation in the region. Their demand: equal treatment and self-governance for indigenous Mexicans. For some reason no one in the government had seen this coming, in part because the EZLN, or Zapatista Army of National Liberation, had been training for a decade in terrain so impenetrable that it escaped the notice of Mexican intelligence. Embarrassed, the authoritarian state deployed 12,000 heavily armed troops to crush the insurgents. At least 145 people were killed over 12 days before the rebels did what mountain warriors generally do when under pressure: retreat to the highlands.
Souvenir ladies working the open-air markets sell felt dolls of guerrillas on horseback. Minibuses even make runs to the nearest Zapatista command center so that radical foreigners can glimpse the revolution across the well-fortified gates. Local church figures mediated a truce, and in 1996 the two sides signed the San Andrés Accords, meant to grant greater autonomy and rights to the rebels and the people they fought for. To one’s surprise, the state never implemented this ambitious plan, and instead set up army camps outside Zapatista enclaves. It looked away when political bosses affiliated with the ruling PRI party harassed Zapatistas with abductions, arson, and worse. The party’s modus operandi was to patrol the roads with high-caliber weapons and storm meetings of sympathizers
One of the worst incidents occurred on December 22, 1997, when paramilitary operatives going by the sinister name Mascara Roja, or Red Mask, slaughtered 45 indigenous pacifists attending a prayer meeting in the pueblo of Acteal. Feeling betrayed, in August 2003 the Zapatistas decided to go it alone, sloughing off the slogan, “Never again a Mexico without us.” They consolidated a patchwork of territory across 750,000 acres where they established their own schools, justice system, governance, clinics, and collectives. Over the years, Mexico has seen hundreds of uprisings, but the Zapatistas’ was remarkable. The country’s 12.7 million indigenous people, or 13% of its population, are among its most destitute and disenfranchised. How did a tiny group manage to dislodge from the mainstream and get away with it? Without question, the mountains played a determining role.
Conejo noted that the Zapatistas differed from guerrillas in other Latin American countries—Colombia, Nicaragua, Peru, and El Salvador among them. The Zapatistas did not seek national political power, nor were they influenced by modern ideologies. They were struggling to preserve unique customs, and the territory where their ancestors were buried.
The Zapatista rebellion was the world’s first by Internet. The EZLN’s public face, a pipe-smoking former professor who went by the nom de guerre Subcomandante Marcos, deftly captivated international attention with a website regularly updated with communiqués. An urban intellectual who had joined the movement while it was forming in the jungles in the 1980s, Marcos understood the power of sound bites and photo ops, uttering enigmatic phrases through his balaclava as he sat atop his horse. He was witty, even poetic. “We are sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution” was one of his many sardonic wisecracks.
Land ownership and identity lay at the heart of the struggle. The movement took its name from Emiliano Zapata, the folk hero of the 1910 Mexican Revolution whose rallying call was “Tierra y Libertad”—Land and Freedom. These words motivated this particular struggle, too, as they had many others before. The Zapatistas believed they were waging a just fight for survival and ancient property.
Records of rebellion in Chiapas date back to 1523, when the first wave of conquistadores confronted the mountain-worshipping Tzotzils. The Spanish soldier of fortune, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, wrote a vivid, probably embellished, firsthand account of the terrifying defenders. Taking advantage of ravines and mist, the Tzotzils tormented the Europeans with bows and arrows, rocks, slingshots, spears, and boiling water. They added a petrifying din of screeching pipes, drums, and trumpets made from large conch shells. “They said we were all to be killed, for this had been promised by their gods,” a shaken Díaz del Castillo recalled. Eventually this lot was subdued, but natives, from the Chiapa group, chose suicide over conquest. They leapt 3,333 feet into the deep waters of the Sumidero canyon, today a favored kayaking spot near San Cristóbal.
Highlanders rose up again in 1712, and yet again in a rebellion known as the Caste War that lasted from 1867 to 1870. Each time they were put down, but their anger was passed down through oral traditions. At the root of their discontent was a toxic caste system imposed by the Spanish Crown across Mexico that placed Europeans and an increasing number of mixed-race mestizos at the top and the natives firmly at the bottom, where they remain today. The political elite took little interest in the country’s original people; the state has generally only asserted itself in these mountainous areas via military actions to repress leftist movements, exploit the locals, or support mining companies that signed lucrative contracts on Indian land and then didn’t share profits.
Perversely, being left largely alone had an upside. Mountain peoples could frequently elect village authorities according to local traditions. For the most part, the most remote populations remained aloof from national party politics. They also did not assimilate. The mountain Indians continued to speak their languages, wear their tunics, carry babies on their backs, farm communally, and dispense justice through councils of elders.
Having harnessed the media so astutely in the 1990s, the Zapatistas now rejected most requests from journalists, lumping them in the same category as multinational corporations and Mexican politicians: outsiders not to be trusted. The Zapatista commanders let few outsiders into their enclaves and tightly controlled what went on inside. The only hints about living conditions came from leftist sympathizers, either NGOs that provided medical supplies and documented human rights abuses, or the carefully vetted leftist activists invited to take part in stage-managed visits. What they described was a tightly disciplined community where alcohol was not tolerated, members had to seek permission to leave the community even for short trips, and all internal disputes were settled by governing councils.
Víctor and his small staff made regular forays into the caracoles to investigate the trucks mounted with machine guns that patrol the communes. While having “liberated” large tracts of land, the Zapatistas didn’t have complete command of it, because hostile government supporters surrounded their settlements. Frayba collected data on paramilitaries allegedly in pay of local political bosses linked to the government. The men ambushed militants near the entrances of their settlements in order to intimidate or murder them. Then there were government soldiers that dismantled Zapatista communities by force, often with fatal consequences. Sometimes loggers and ranchers tried to chase the Zapatistas away in order to cut down and carry off the valuable timber or simply seize their land.
Having witnessed the movement’s evolution over the years, Víctor was well positioned to offer an expert perspective, albeit through a sympathetic lens. He believed that, while the EZLN were controlling about their public image and discipline, they had more respect for human rights than the average bribe-grabbing government official. They also, he felt, exhibited an unusual political maturity. Their abandonment of military offensives after the San Andrés Accords showed that they could readily admit to mistakes and move on, a rarity among political movements of any cast. Víctor said some of his staff at the human rights center had sought medical attention at the Zapatista clinics. They reported that health care, while rudimentary and lacking many vital drugs, was more accessible and effective than in other rural parts of Mexico, where procedures as commonplace as childbirth could turn fatal. As for education, each community now had a schoolhouse that delivered lessons in indigenous languages, which was virtually unheard of in Mexico. The curriculum presented the Zapatista view of history, with a heavy emphasis on colonial exploitation, and also covered farming techniques.
Another unusual feature was the emphasis on educating girls, a novelty in a rural society that normally assigned women a social position not far above animals. Female Zapatistas were encouraged to assume positions of leadership and command, from the armed forces to civilian councils.
Ironically, the biggest threat to the Zapatistas’ existence was not paramilitary harassment or land grabbers, but their own young people, who were abandoning the closed society to seek economic fortune elsewhere. Young people sought jobs and a less regimented lifestyle. Migration eroded social cohesion by exposing those who left to new political views, and the Zapatistas essentially excommunicated anyone who migrated too far afield or spent too much time away. If you left, you couldn’t return, or even communicate with family. They also expelled those caught possessing alcohol and accepting public funds. While the threat of exile could serve as a brake against petty crimes, the harsh punishment fractured families and entire communities, exacerbating the effects of immigration
The feasting at some rest spots on our way to the caracoles seemed more pagan than Catholic. Revelers wearing jaguar costumes and bull masks danced in the road to the beat of drums. From giant vats, women ladled servings of pox, pronounced posh, a potent homebrew of cane alcohol. Several men passed out on the ground from excess, having never made it to church. Those who were still standing seemed unlikely to be upright for evening Mass.
The Virgin of Guadalupe is particularly loved in indigenous areas that have embraced conversion. As we approached Oventik, the number of partygoers thinned, no doubt owing to the Zapatistas’ famed ban against drink. Festivities halted completely when we reached the billboards at the edge of the enclave. Black and red lettering painted on a road sign broadcast a revolutionary message: You are in Zapatista Rebel Territory
The people rule & the government obeys. Just beyond the sign lay a cluster of crude wooden buildings, which looked like a movie set for a Western, except for the murals covering the facades: a rainbow of snails in bandanas, masked women whose faces formed the kernels of corn husks, and portraits of Zapata. Each caracol has a “junta of good governance” whose membership rotates regularly in order to minimize corruption and give everyone a chance at leadership. Women are especially encouraged to join.
We were free to wander the camp and visit the “Che Guevara” gift shop. The Zapatistas don’t have many opportunities to earn income, and revolutionary-themed souvenirs are money-spinners. A visit to the handicrafts collectives is de rigueur for Zapa-turistas, the girl at the gate said. “How much are you going to spend?” she asked, pen aloft to record the amount. The store was piled floor to ceiling with refrigerator magnets, mugs, pens, T-shirts, ash trays, shot glasses, sugar bowls, all bearing a portrait of Marcos and the symbol of the revolution, a red star. We walked to the cafeteria, which was stacked high with crates of Coca-Cola, a seemingly odd choice for a movement in revolt against global capitalism. Then we checked out the pharmacy, which was mainly stocked with diarrhea remedies.
Our next destination was Caracol Four, which Víctor said was less of a Potemkin Village than Oventik. Being five hours deeper into the rural highlands, it couldn’t rely on tourists taking a day trip from San Cristóbal to shop for souvenirs. I suspected that the poetic Marcos had chosen the caracol’s full name: “Heart of the Rainbow of Hope, Whirlwind of Our Words.” Most people called it Morelia, after the nearest town. Once a major center of military operations, the caracol had fallen on tough times due to migration and exposure to what the Zapatistas called “bad views.” Further, residents had been subjected to organized intimidation that no doubt weakened the revolutionary resolve. Coffee growers aligned with the ruling PRI party had recently trespassed on their property, hauling rebels away and beating them. The settlement looked like a more weathered version of Oventik. There were the usual revolutionary murals, masked women holding guns, snails in bandanas. One depicted a gray city of tumbling skyscrapers, presumably a vision of collapsing capitalism.
We sat on a hard wooden bench outside the assembly hall, under a portrait of Zapata holding a big gun. Then it was time for us to go in for three separate interrogations, each by a foursome sitting behind a heavy wooden desk. Each group asked the same three questions. “Who are you?” “Why are you here?” “What do you want to see?” Finally, a silent, barefoot woman ushered us into a meeting room of eighteen people: the Junta of Good Governance that ran affairs in this wary community. They were dressed like everyone else in the community; the men wore jeans and frayed sweaters, and the women traditional flouncy skirts and huipil embroidered tops. Their faces were uncovered, yet they declined to state their names or be photographed. They were cordial but unsmiling.
“We can’t trust anyone,” explained a bearded man. “Bad ideas are not welcome here.” “We don’t need others,” asserted the serious fellow next to him. I wondered why the women remained silent. The bearded man seemed to read my thoughts. “I am talking because the women in this room don’t manage Spanish well. “We seek work, food, schools, health, freedom, liberty, justice, dignity, land. A caracol goes very slowly but protected. The government has a different life. We seek what we need ourselves. It is not easy to trick us again. We don’t want outside ideas. Exploitation and discrimination are our enemies.
The modern world couldn’t make room for these people, and still, it was always encroaching. They drank foreign soda and sold souvenirs to white tourists, participating in a global market that they couldn’t completely ignore.
In a country laid low by narcos and criminal impunity, these people were actually trying to keep the peace. They had chosen to cut themselves off, perhaps not fully aware, at first, of the deprivations this would entail. They had managed to rise above the exploitation and corruption. On some level, a very deep one, they were blessed: they had the mountains to protect them. Maybe that was as good as it could get.
A more sustained movement arose in the state of Guerrero, in La Montaña. Guerrero is best known internationally for the resort of Acapulco, that playground of celebrities and high-octane nightclubs on the Pacific white sands. Yet the mountains 150 miles from the yachts are home to Mexico’s most destitute hamlets: scattered adobe settlements of Me’phaa, Nahua, and Mixtec Indians. The landscape along the pitted road that climbs from the sparkling coast into the Sierra Madre del Sur—a different chain from that in Chiapas, though it has the same name—has changed little over the centuries. Ancient cornfields rise into pine forests with trees reaching sixty feet high. The tropical air grows fresher and the foliage denser as you ascend. Its tallest mountain pushes 12,149 feet into the sky. La Montaña comprises some of the country’s roughest terrain, a land of hurricanes and landslides, where cattle can’t graze and settlements are cut off for months during the rainy season. The forested slopes and gullies make agriculture difficult beyond communal subsistence plots of maize and beans. And heroin. The vicious narcotics cartels found the climate and isolation ideal for growing poppies. Harassing anyone who tried to stand in their way, they cultivated fields and secured a trafficking corridor from the mountains to the coast.
As in Albania, the simple harsh life in La Montaña suggests an entirely different world and era. Similar to Alpine communities, the community takes precedence over the individual. Certain customs are largely unchanged from pre-Hispanic times, namely collective farming and village councils that impart justice. Far from government eyes, village leaders assigned communal labor, based on the ancient tequio a la faena that obliged adult males to collectively work the fields, build homes, and guard settlements.
In late 2013 I went to La Montaña to see the dog biting its tail once again. The growing heroin addiction in the United States had encouraged more activity and violence by the narcos. Disgruntled indigenous villagers were organizing what they called “community police,” or in less generous terms vigilante squads, to round up and kick out the drug cartels and corrupt police who were harassing and extorting ordinary villagers. I spent a couple weeks following the self-defense units and their leaders, the middle-aged brothers Bruno and Cirino Plácido Valerio. The siblings with thatched hair and sandaled feet were farmers from the Mixtec ethnic group, and their impassioned oratory inspired other farmers to take justice into their own hands. These self-appointed guardians rode shotgun in pickup trucks and patrolled the hills in pursuit of malos, or bad guys.
The cartels were just the latest of a wide array of exploiters that had historically preyed on the Indians here. The list of malos was long: crooked police, rapists, extortionists, cattle rustlers, political bosses, land grabbers, robbers, drunks, mining companies, bribe takers, and narcotics smugglers. Mexico’s dysfunctional law enforcement and the remoteness of the Indian communities made them ideal victims for profiteers. Some of the worst offenders were the very people assigned to maintain the peace: soldiers and police officers. A typical ruse was to stop an indio coming in from the fields with firewood or crops, and claim there was an arrest warrant for him. Then the extortionists would impose a “fine” of $200 to erase it from the computer. It was an exorbitant sum for someone who lives off the land, but the alternative was jail without trial.
My first stop was to get a historical perspective from anthropologist Abel Barrera, who grew up in La Montaña during the 1960s, when authorities dictated that Indians had to cross the road if they saw a white man coming toward them. Abusive security forces molested the women. Doctors treated them with scorn, calling them “pigs” for not bathing frequently. Barrera was so upset by the bigotry and exploitation that he became an activist and founded a human rights center, Tlachinollan. His efforts to document rapes, arbitrary arrests, torture, and forced disappearances have won him a garland of international accolades from the likes of Amnesty International and the MacArthur Foundation.
For the first years of its existence, the community police force did rounds throughout the territory, turning over suspected robbers to regional authorities. To their frustration, many detainees bought their freedom, a common practice across Mexico. That’s when the community police set up their own justice system, called CRAC (Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities). Those found guilty of crimes by community assemblies were sentenced to physical labor, which usually meant building roads or working the fields. As CRAC grew, splinter groups broke off. Ego eroded unity against their main opponent, the Mexican state. Lacking the rigid discipline of the Zapatistas, rivals accused each other of patronage and abuse.
Attention shifted to Cirino’s younger brother, Bruno. He gained some international notoriety in 2013 for moving to the Costa Chica, three thousand feet down the mountain, where he joined with mestizos and businessmen to run narcos out of town. Implementing the community police model, Bruno drove from village to village in his white pickup truck, organizing self-defense squads. They favored a sinister look: wrestling masks or sacks with eyeholes crudely cut out. The units commandeered high-caliber weapons and SUVs with tinted windows seized from malos. These car chases frequently ended with a bad guy getting hauled away without due process of law. Prisoners would be locked in a room at the back of a house until a kangaroo court pronounced them guilty or innocent. If found guilty, detainees were handed over to government authorities, or ordered to leave town. Like Marcos on horseback in 1994, this was candy for international journalists, who breathlessly documented the daring new movement. Time magazine ran dramatic and menacing portraits of the masked community police.
In mounting one of the strongest challenges ever to the otherwise untouchable narcos, these scrappy farmers achieved what the incompetent military could not. Copycat citizen militias proliferated all over the country. At one point, observers counted them in half of Mexico’s thirty-one states, from near the border with the United States all the way down the Pacific coast.
The collective nature of mountain culture, he said, provided a perfect vehicle to organize a struggle. “Mestizos in other parts of Mexico are more individualistic. We in La Montaña think collectively with an ‘us,’ not a ‘me.’ We believe in consensus and the pueblo por el pueblo.” People by and for the people.
Someone was playing a corrido, a genre of narrative ballads set to a polka beat. Since most of the villagers were illiterate, music and storytelling served to pass down grievances about authority. First introduced in the 1850s, the corridos often have an insubordinate subtext, paying homage to outlaws. The narco-corridos glorifying drug bandits are a popular strand, even among Mexicans who abhor cartel violence. Guerrero had developed its own style, with lyrics featuring the words for bullets, police, fights, gunmen, shooting, and killings. This particular song was by a local band, Los Donnys de Guerrero, about a schoolteacher-turned-guerrilla leader, Lucio Cabañas.
Suddenly the group turned to me, shouting out complaints. Wrinkled hands touched mine, grasping in greeting and hope. Cirino tried to explain that I was a reporter, an abstract notion for peasants who don’t read newspapers. They thought I could convey their grievances to the authorities. They flashed identity cards so that I could note their names and demands. We need an ambulance. We need sewage pipes. We need money. We want dignity. We need, we want. No one had cows. They needed milk for the children. Sewage ran into the creek. They needed potable water. It went on and on. Everyone had a turn.
During our drive back to Acapulco, two tropical storms met up in one of nature’s freak convergences. We only found out later that much of La Montaña had been cut off as a result of flooding for the next two months. Houses were washed away and the whole region was hip-deep in mud. The government sent military cargo planes to rescue tourists from Acapulco’s high-rise hotels. But for weeks, no one reached out to the remotest parts of La Montaña.
COLOMBIA
The FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, roamed in an elevated territory of jungle and deep gorges, measuring some 115,000 square miles. There are no roads, and the fog and vegetation are so dense that visibility is often just a few yards. You couldn’t find a better guerrilla haven. As a result, the conflict still holds Colombia in its grip. In the words of a former national director of planning, “It is as broken a country as they come.
The latest round of peace talks between the FARC’s commanders and the government was just beginning, under foreign mediation in Havana and Oslo. At that point we didn’t know that a peace accord would be agreed upon four years later, in 2016, but the prospects were promising. The rebels were on the ropes, thanks to an $8 billion infusion by the United States government over the previous dozen years. This money was meant to stifle the drug trafficking that funded the FARC’s struggle and supplied 80 percent of the cocaine that went up American noses. With this American cash, the Colombian military had improved intelligence gathering and purchased helicopter gunships that could quickly deploy and resupply at high elevations. The army grew more precise in its aerial bombardments of jungle camps, inflicting psychological as well as physical damage. All the legendary FARC commanders were dead: the founder, Tirofijo, which means Sureshot, who was born Manuel Marulanda Vélez, and his three henchmen, Raul Reyes, “Mono Jojoy,” and Alfonso Cano. Demoralized, eight thousand guerrillas had turned themselves in over the past decade, sometimes walking hundreds of miles to police stations. That was half the entire insurgent force.
FARC fighters had so little contact with the outside world that both their Marxist ideology and their fashion sense were frozen in the early sixties, when the iconic Che Guevara photograph that now adorns T-shirts and posters first spread across the world. Scrappy hair poked out from their caps. They still echoed his rhetoric about a peasant utopia. “We were in our own world,” confessed Julio. Geographic isolation from leftist social movements in the cities calcified their myopic worldview. Unlike other Latin American guerrilla movements, such as those in El Salvador or Mexico, the FARC lacked opportunities to exchange ideas with human rights activists or foreigners, other than the ones they took hostage.
As every military strategist has argued, mountains are the hardest places to conquer. No conventional force in history has defeated quick-moving, high-altitude rebels with intimate knowledge of the terrain and the support of its inhabitants. Mountain geography is all to the guerrillas’ advantage. An outside force is automatically handicapped because it is less mobile and savvy about the landscape. The golden rule of infantry doctrine suggests a three-to-one ratio of numerical superiority over defending forces. The proportion must be even higher in the mountains. Soldiers must be trained to react to not only three lateral flanks but also to threats from below and above. A heavily loaded patrol will lose every time against a light, fast enemy that knows how to exploit the terrain. Speed, more than armor, represents security. Mountains are simply too burly to secure against mobile bands. The French could not pursue the Islamist rebels of Mali when they retreated to the Tegharghar mountains beyond Timbuktu in 2013. Osama bin Laden could not be tracked down in the caves of Tora Bora after 9/11. For quite some time, the Kurds have been harassing the Turkish government from their elevated havens. The list of undefeated highland warriors goes on and on: the Vietcong; the GAM, or Free Aceh Movement, which fought for an independent Islamic state in Sumatra; the Karen fighters of Burma; the Kurds; and plenty of others. Peace, when it came, came with diplomacy and talks, not outright military defeat.
Since World War II, the average guerrilla insurgency has lasted ten years. That’s forty years less than the FARC’s. Military strategists continually try to dissect the group’s startling longevity. In 2003, Stanford University political scientists James Fearon and David Laitin came up with a useful formula. Examining 145 civil wars from 1945 to 1999, they isolated common factors that, surprisingly, were not religious or ethnic grievances. Instead, the conditions most likely to favor prolonged guerrilla activity were a weak or autocratic central state; mountainous terrain; a sympathetic population that sheltered small bands of rebels; and revenues from contraband, like diamonds or cocaine, to fund the fight.
The war would never have lasted so long if the state had managed to establish a presence over its entire territory, a quarter of which rises over 10,000 feet above sea level. From the time of Spanish colonization in 1525, Colombia’s rural landholding has involved large and dispersed agricultural estates. That feudal system basically remains in place: a fraction of the population owns most of the fertile land, which is worked by tenant farmers. The remainder lives off tiny subsistence plots. A government presence in the mountainous hinterland would require a major feat of development and marketing: building roads and bridges at high elevations, and then convincing doctors and teachers to move there.
Today the indigenous compose at best 3.4 percent of the country’s total inhabitants, and most hug the Caribbean coast, the Amazon jungle, or the high slopes of the Andes. As a general rule, the indios who dwell in the mountains try to remain aloof of the political violence, and they harbor little fondness for either side. (The FARC’s rhetorical championing of the poor has not prevented it from demanding food from the native population.) Around the world, it’s common for national governments to ignore the needs of isolated, unassimilated mountain communities, and for flatland elites to misunderstand their traditional ways of life. I saw this dynamic in Albania and Mexico. But here, the problems go well beyond customs, laws, and land rights. There are essentially no government services for the country’s poor highlanders, indigenous or mestizo.
The insurgency has roots in a vicious rivalry between Liberals and Conservatives that has shaped the lives of Colombians, from those who live in the capital to the inhabitants of nearly every far-flung village. Grievances over land ownership, the harsh treatment by plantation owners, and the 1948 assassination of the Liberal candidate for president, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, politicized the peasantry and unleashed a decade of strife that left three hundred thousand people dead. Colombians refer to this carnage as la Violencia.
A power-sharing agreement in 1958 failed to defuse the distrust, and Communist and Liberal peasants formed self-defense units to arm themselves against Conservative-sponsored paramilitaries. Peasants forcibly displaced from their lands and treated harshly by plantation owners went on long marches to largely uninhabited and neglected rural areas of the country, declaring five “independent republics.
Despite his intimacy with the rough land, the peaceful experiment with autonomy was short-lived. With the Cold War in full swing, the notion of another left-wing bastion in Latin America prompted anxiety in Washington. The United States feared in Marquetalia a replay of Fidel Castro’s retreat into the Sierra Maestra mountains of Cuba, from where he organized his revolution. In May 1964, with the backing of Washington, crack troops from the Colombian army attacked Marquetalia with air support. Marulanda and the forty-seven other armed inhabitants camped at the site fought back but, out-gunned and out-numbered, were forced to flee higher up the peaks. From there, Tirofijo later declared all-out insurgency.
Most historians agree that the conflict would probably not have escalated if the United States had not exerted pressure on Bogotá to attack. If the colony had been left alone, it might have withered away or remained a localized irritation. Instead, over the next few decades the guerrillas built up a fighting machine of thousands that fanned out across the entire country, with tenacious strongholds especially in the south.
Successive right-leaning governments were unreceptive to the FARC’s demands for comprehensive land reforms that would redistribute the oligarchic elite’s property. Over time, the insurgents lost sight of their lofty goals. In the 1980s, ideology took backstage as the FARC mutated into a criminal organization, labeled “terrorist” in Washington, a moniker ideologically motivated but true with respect to the rebels’ abuses of human rights. The FARC extorted the very peasants and Indians that it claimed to liberate and gang-pressed many of their sons into its military wing, threatening to kill the parents otherwise. The FARC kidnapped more-affluent civilians, such as politicians and businessmen, for ransom. Ensuring the survival of la lucha (the struggle), the mountains served as fertile grounds to grow and transport coca leaves, which were converted into the cocaine that has provided much of FARC’s funding since the 1980s. The ever-entrepreneurial revolutionaries brought in even more money by diversifying into mining gold and other precious metals in their lands.
Confusing matters, two smaller guerrilla groups with similar Marxist-influenced ideology emerged: the ELN (National Liberation Army) and the more urban-oriented M19, or 19th of April Movement. Competing drug cartels and right-wing paramilitaries collaborating with the army joined the mix. Each group committed atrocities; in total, approximately a quarter of a million people were killed, and six million displaced—a number surpassed only by Syria today.
By the time of my visit, in 2012, most of the paramilitaries and the M19 had demobilized, the cartels of drug barons like Pablo Escobar had been replaced by smaller smuggling groups, and the ELN was largely irrelevant in its stronghold by the Venezuelan border. The FARC had become expert at warding off government incursions. They used tree canopies as shields from rain and detection. The thick forests and clouds blanketed inclines, preventing army surveillance aircraft from spotting movement in the vegetation below. The fighters’ primary tactic was the night raid, a hit-and-run surprise attack by small bands swift enough to improvise on the spot without needing to radio a command center for instructions. They knew the mud paths so well that they could prowl without night-vision goggles or flashlights. They stationed plain-clothed spies in the sparely scattered homesteads, who warned the guerrillas if government soldiers approached. Then the rebels packed up their hammocks and dispersed further in the thicket. Unlike the army, they didn’t need maps. They knew each river and trail, often using rock formations as compasses.
Marquetalia sits on a shelf 8,500 feet above sea level, patrolled by eighty soldiers who flew in and out on helicopters because there was no secure ground path to the site. The booby-trapped forest surrounding the locale was rife with potential ambushes and explosives buried under leaves.
Colonel Moreno was unexpectedly candid about the challenges of consolidating the territory they had recaptured from the FARC. The area had over 100 scattered villages, all of which had had a major FARC presence during the government’s 50-year absence. Most of these localities housed people whose sons and brothers had joined the movement, either from sympathy or because they were given no choice. They were reluctant to provide intelligence to the government, fearing for the lives of FARC relatives or their own. When the army “retook” Marquetalia, in 2006, the victory proved hollow. The soldiers found only two inhabited houses, while the guerrillas lurked in the surrounding hills, following Mao’s mantra: “The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.” FARC’s low-tech tactics could be continually adapted to changing circumstances.
FARC had substituted large-scale offensives with the defensive planting of land mines. They would ring a site with explosives and wait for approaching troops. This method was actually killing more soldiers and police than bullets did at the height of the conflict. The insurgents packed the explosives into tuna fish tins, and sometimes included feces as well, so that bacteria would kill survivors of the initial blast. The previous year the army had deactivated 916 land mines in the area but the rebels simply planted more.
No magic formula to subdue mountain militias exists, although many strategists have prescribed “winning hearts and minds,” a phrase coined by the British general Gerald Templer during the attempt to rid the jungle highlands of Malaysia of anticolonial insurgents in the 1950s. Simply put, it means hoping that kindnesses like building schools will prevail where brute force does not. General David Petraeus, whose 2006 manual for counterinsurgency described winning the higher moral ground by protecting civilians and living among them, is one of the more current examples of the idea. However, his strategy in Afghanistan could not overcome the fact that much of the rural population in remote
Colonel Leguizamon, who had studied at a combat training school for Latin American soldiers in Fort Benning, Georgia, wanted to test Petraeus’s method in southern Tolima, but so far he had seen lesser results than the American general had. His number two, Colonel Moreno, admitted that the military had lost potential allies when, upon arrival in Planadas, they occupied the elementary school as their barracks. They later built an alternative school, but many minds, and hearts, had been closed. Fearing that the FARC had infiltrators, the troops were not allowed to socialize with the locals, and remained on base for meals. They couldn’t go for a beer or play cards in town. Townspeople could not join the soldiers’ Sunday barbecues or games of soccer on the town’s only pitch. Only the colonels were allowed to eat out, and then only at one carefully vetted place, the most expensive restaurant in the area, which happened to be on the edge of the landing strip. There they could drink alcohol served in red plastic cups, even though drinking in public, in occupied areas, was not allowed. Harry or another sniper would stand guard five feet away, which made supper a tense experience for ordinary diners.
But neither was the FARC winning hearts and minds. The revolutionary reign in Planadas had sowed terror, not prosperity. At their height, the FARC patrolled in small groups, barging into shops to declare bans on the sales of Coca-Cola, the demon drink of gringo capitalism. They demanded that the deejays at the discotheques play their preferred cumbia tunes, and shot dancers whom they suspected of spying. The club still bore bullet holes on the wall. They harassed workers at the barber’s and ice cream parlor. The FARC lifted medicine from the pharmacies, helped themselves to chickens at the market, and slapped a “tax” on beer, rendering the popular drink unaffordable for anyone else. The tax is known as the vacuna, the vaccination, and it was also demanded in the form of cattle and crops. Planadas’s official population of twenty-nine thousand had shrunk to ten thousand due to killings and displacement.
Municipal officials like Carlos didn’t venture past the town limits because of the threat of assassination or abduction. If they wanted contact with outlying campesinos, they had to lure them to town. The FARC’s enduring demand was for fair distribution of land. So far, the country’s lingering patterns of feudal landowning complicated the government’s attempts at resolution. Most of Colombia’s roads run through the flatlands, where the large landowners hold more than 50 percent of the country’s most fertile properties. Aside from not owning their own land, the mountain people felt abandoned because they had no roads over which to move their goods to market.
The municipality invited a select group of farmers from veredas within a four-hour radius to sell products at a pilot market in Planadas. About two hundred farmers donned their best button-down shirts and straw hats and rode on mules or jeeps to sell sugar cane or thick bunches of bananas.
The average round-trip cost of travel was six dollars, and few had made back that amount in sales. By lunchtime, annoyed families were trussing up hens and filling sacks with other unsold wares. I chatted with a few of the vendors as they waited for the jeeps that serve as taxis. All had been forced to hand over crops or their sons to the FARC, but they didn’t trust the newly returned government either. They were trying to get by without being killed, and were confused about who stood for what when it came to the FARC and the government—a justifiable confusion seeing that the antagonists had probably lost sight of why they were fighting anymore.
Aside from growing enough to eat, farming families were vexed by lack of health care & education.
NOT COVERED – READ THE BOOK!
- The Himalayas are the highest and youngest mountain range in the world, providing almost half the world’s population with water. Nepal is one of the least developed countries in the world, with 80% dependent on subsistence agriculture. It’s wedged between the world’s two most populous nations – China and India.
- The Caucasus region where mountains range from 5559 to 18,000 feet (especially interesting since there’s a lot about conflicts with Russia)
- Kashmir between India & Pakistan
- The Hindu Kush (Afghanistan area)
- The Lyngen Alps 6014 feet (Norway, Finland, Sweden)
- The Pyrenees 3500-11168 feet & Swiss Alps 4249-15203 feet Switzerland’s main exports during the 16th and 17th centuries were mercenaries