DAY 4:  FROM VILLAHERMOSA TO PALENQUE

After three long days and more than 1,200 miles of driving, we’d made it from Laredo, on the border with Texas, all the way to Villahermosa, in the Mexican State of Tabasco. We stayed the night there, but we didn’t stick around long enough to check out the town. Palenque, our first official destination, was just two hours away, and we were anxious to get on the road! We hopped onto MX 186, the toll road, and drove east/southeast toward Catazaja and the intersection with MX 199, a distance of just 75 miles. From there, it was another 15 miles south to one of the most spectacular ancient cities in the Americas. Ancient ruins are my passion. This was my first trip to the land of the Maya, so I was looking forward to this day the way a kid looks forward to Christmas.

We had smooth sailing the whole way, until just before we reached the road junction. That was where all the traffic came to a halt, a line of buses, trucks, and private cars that stretched out further than I could see. The truckers had all shut off their engines. Many of them had bedded down in the shade underneath their vehicles, and were taking an early morning siesta; some sat together in small groups, playing cards. Vendors were walking up and down the line selling sodas and other refreshments to the stalled drivers, and from the look of things, everyone was settling in for a long wait.

I asked one of the truckers what was going on, and he explained that this was a Bloqueo, a protest mounted by the Zapatistas, a group of indigenous political activists, and they were stopping all traffic on every road leading into the State of Chiapas. They apparently did this sort of thing on a regular basis. This time, they were protesting the proposed construction of a “Super Carretera,” a modern highway that would run from Palenque to San Cristobal de Las Casas. The existing road was dangerous, and notoriously slow. A new toll road would cut the travel time in half, enhancing commerce, improving safety, and attracting more tourists to the region.

The Zapatistas felt that a road like that would only benefit outside interests, to the detriment of local residents, and that it would degrade the natural environment. To call attention to their position, they parked several 18 wheelers sideways across the highway by one of the toll plazas, and refused to move them, bringing all traffic to a halt in both directions. The Federales showed up first, followed by a squad of soldiers. The opposing factions faced off against each other, the Zapatista commanders exhorting the crowd with bullhorns, and before long the news media arrived, undoubtedly hoping to document a lively head bashing and mass arrests.

That was about the time that Michael and I got there. We walked up closer to the head of the line, to see what we could see: soldiers and police with rifles, campesinos waving signs, and at least one television news crew. I asked someone how long it was likely to last, and was told that it would probably end at sundown. “But it could stretch out for two or three days,” they said.  “You never know with these guys.”

I wasn’t about to spend even one whole day sitting in a traffic jam, no matter how much sympathy I might have for their cause, so that left us with two choices: Option 1: we could make a U-Turn and head back to Villahermosa, then take the coast road north into the Yucatan, saving Palenque for another day, or: Option 2: see if we could find a back road to Palenque that bypassed the Zapatista Road Block.

I had a spiral bound copy of the Guia Roji, a Mexican road atlas that’s a bit like Rand McNally. I turned to the page with a map of the area around Palenque, located the highway intersection where they’d put up the road block, and then traced backwards along MX 186, looking for an alternate route–and I actually found something! There was a State Highway, #243, that intersected MX 186 about 25 miles back toward Villahermosa.

Route 243 crossed the line into Chiapas just before reaching a town called Salto de Agua (Waterfall), about five miles from the main highway. From there, it continued southeast through the countryside, and connected with MX 199 forty miles south of Palenque. It was marked as a secondary road, so it was probably paved, and since we’d already decided not to wait where we were, I figured we had little to lose. “It’ll be an adventure,” I said to Michael. As it turned out, truer words were never spoken!

Route 243 to Palenque, in the Guia Roji, and on Google Maps. Also: the shortcut we discovered, using smaller roads that don’t appear in the road atlas

One nice thing about Google Maps is the way it lets you zoom in to view an area in greater detail. When I zoomed on the little town of Salto de Agua, I spotted yet another road, this one even smaller, that seemed to be a shortcut, connecting Route 243 with MX 199 in half the distance, and requiring less than half the time. This road didn’t appear at all in the Guia Roji atlas. I’d been burned by Google Maps enough times to to be cautious: the mystery shortcut might be nothing more than a cart track, or a footpath, in which case I’d have to stick with Route 243. Either way, the first step was to drive to Salto de Agua. Once we got there, the locals would know the best way to go.

MX 186 was a major regional highway that carried a ton of traffic; the line of vehicles backed up behind us had grown by almost half a mile, just in the time we’d been stopped. Many drivers were turning around and going back the other way, so I made a U-turn, and joined the pack. I assumed that there would be plenty of other drivers with the same idea as me, but when we got to the junction with Route 243, ours was the only vehicle that slowed and made the turn. It was a smaller road than what I expected, so small we almost missed it. Calling this road paved was a serious stretch: half the asphalt was missing altogether, and the rest had potholes big enough to cause damage. We bumped and bounced our way past a sign that read, “Welcome to Chiapas.” That was encouraging! Nobody was trying to stop the traffic on this road–it wouldn’t be worth their time.

We reached Salto de Agua, and almost immediately came to an unmarked fork in the road. This was the point where we were going to need some guidance, so I looked around, and spotted a policeman, standing on the corner. He was staring at us, obviously curious, so I turned around, and drove over beside him.

“Good morning,” I said cheerfully. “Can you tell me which of these roads is the best way to Palenque?”

“Palenque?” he said, looking a bit perplexed. “You should go back to the main road. That’s the way to Palenque.”

“The main road is closed today,” I informed him. “Nobody is moving past the crossroads.”

“Ah. The Bloqueo. But even so, that’s the only way to Palenque. You’ll have to go back the way you came.”

“My map says that this road goes on to Palenque.” I opened up the atlas and showed it to him, explaining about the long way around on Route 243, versus the shortcut I’d found on Google Maps. “I’m wondering if it would be possible to get through on the small road. It’s not on my map, but it would be right alongside the river, just north of it.”

The policeman studied the lines on the map, tracing them with his finger, looking even more perplexed “Yes,” he admitted with a shrug. “It is possible, but you really don’t want to go that way. It’s a terrible road!” He said something else after that, but I didn’t quite catch it, and besides, he had me at “terrible road”. I drive a Jeep, after all, and I love a challenge!

The guy wasn’t kidding about the road. The first couple of miles were paved, because we were still in the town, but after that, it went to the dogs, with wheel ruts so deep, it was like driving across a plowed field. According to Google Maps, the road followed a river. We hadn’t actually seen it yet, but we were supposed to be crossing it on a bridge at any moment. We rounded a curve, and sure enough, there it was, but there was a gang of guys with machetes who seemed to be waiting for us, and they had a chain stretched across the road, blocking the way.

“More Zapatistas?” Mike asked.

“If we’re lucky,” I replied. “If it’s anybody else, we’re in serious trouble.” I drove slowly up to the roadblock, and lowered my window.

“Good morning,” I said. “We’re driving to Palenque. Will you allow us to pass?”

The leader of the group, a young Mayan lad, walked up beside my Jeep, and fixed me with a menacing glare. “The road is closed,” he said,  keeping his hand on the hilt of his machete. “By order of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional!”

“Is it closed to everyone?” I asked innocently. “How about if we pay a toll? How much would the toll be?”

He gave me an even more menacing glare. “That will cost you everything you’ve got,” he said gruffly, brandishing his machete, while his companions did the same.

I didn’t like the sound of that. Not at all, so I gave him a blank look and said, “No entiendo.” (I don’t understand).

“No entiende?” he repeated back to me. He wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.

“How about you take ten Pesos,” I said in English, pressing a large, gold-colored coin into his hand. He stared at the coin, worth about 60 cents. It was such a ridiculous offer, he couldn’t decide if he should laugh in my face, or chop off my thumbs. The other guys took his uncertainty for acceptance and dropped the chain, so we sped away across the bridge, before they had a chance to reconsider.

Scene along a rural road in northern Chiapas

At this road block, they had a long board with nails driven through it from the bottom side, and they’d laid it across the width of the road. We slowed down as we approached, and watched as they pulled their board back to allow a small local shuttle van to pass. Those little vans were the only transportation available to local residents, and they were apparently allowing them through the blockade. I saw that as an opportunity: while the van scooted past the stop point headed west, I shot around them headed east, just barely making it past as they attempted to jam their board full of nails under my tires, loudly yelling at me to stop. Needless to say, I kept going!

We made it to Palenque about half an hour later, found ourselves a room, and headed for the famous Mayan ruins on the outskirts of the town. With all the roads to the outside world sealed off by the Bloqueo–even the smallest roads, as we’d discovered–the only visitors to the archeaological park that day were people who were already there in Palenque before the roadblocks went up, a small fraction of the usual number of visitors. When we pulled into the parking area by the ruins, we attracted a curious crowd, and one of the men asked how we’d gotten through.

“We took a back road,” I told him.

“You found a road with no bloqueo?”

“There was a small bloqueo,” I replied. “But they let me pass when I paid the toll.”

He laughed, but then he quizzed me about that, wanting to know how much I’d paid, and on which road, and I realized that he might be some sort of Zapatista organizer, trying to figure out which of their people had failed at his job. I really didn’t want to get the guy at the road block into trouble, so I was deliberately evasive, claiming that I was lost out there, and didn’t even know which road I was on. He didn’t much like that answer, but he didn’t press me any further. Running those roadblocks provided one heck of an adrenaline rush, but, in hindsight, it was more than a little foolish. We were extremely lucky that it didn’t end with punctured tires, if not punctured torsos. The Zapatistas are a serious organization with serious concerns. We were in Chiapas, which is their turf, so I really should have shown more respect. The wise move, under these circumstances, would have been to simply leave the area, and find somewhere else to go until the protest ran it’s course, and the road opened once again.

THE ZAPATISTAS!

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (ELZN)  is a militant political organization that has controlled most of the Mexican State of Chiapas for most of the last thirty years. They’re named after Emiliano Zapata, the commander of the Liberation Army of the South during the Mexican Revolution, and a great hero to the country’s poor. Their primary focus is on the rights and well being of the region’s downtrodden indigenous people, many of whom are of Mayan descent.

They’ve been at war with the Mexican government since 1994, using civil disobedience as their primary tactic. They’ve been described as Marxists, Socialists, and Anarchists, though in truth they can’t be so simplistically classified. For decades, they watched in silence as wealthy landowners treated them like serfs, and sold off their minerals and the valuable hardwood trees in their forests to careless profiteers who caused great harm to the environment. The Zapatistas quite simply want to regain control of their land and its resources, land that has rightfully belonged to their people for more than 2,000 years! The group’s most active period was in their early days, back in the 1990’s when they took over several towns in Chiapas, including San Cristobal de Las Casas. In subsequent years, many of their most prominent leaders were hunted down and jailed, but more recently, the government’s stance has softened. These days they’re tolerated, if not accepted as a legitimate voice for a large segment of the population in the southernmost part of Mexico.

Misol-Ha, a waterfall in Chiapas

It was barely past noon when we finished exploring Misol-Ha. When I studied my map, I saw that San Cristobal de Las Casas, a place I definitely wanted to see, was only 100 miles away. A hundred miles? Heck, even on a slow mountain road, that should only take three hours at the most!  Or so I thought. That stretch of highway is heavily used by trucks and buses that are often dangerously overloaded. The road consists of one steep curve after another; those heavy trucks are doing quite well if they hit 10 mph on the upgrades, and 15 mph rolling downhill in compound low. There are no passing lanes, nor is there much point in even trying to get ahead of the pack, since every vehicle on the road is equally slow. A hundred miles on THAT kind of road takes closer to six hours, and it’s exhausting!

The highway went through the middle of every small town along the way, which meant slowing down even more for speed bump after speed bump, all the while dodging potholes and free ranging chickens and goats. In one tiny community, we slowed for a group of children trying to sell us some sort of fruit, portioned out in plastic bags. We noticed that a young girl standing just ahead of the others was holding a string that she’d tied to a tree on the far side of the road. When she saw us approaching, she pulled her string taut, and raised her other hand, which was holding a bag of fruit, and shouted for us to stop.

Her string obviously wouldn’t have stopped us if we’d elected to keep going, but I didn’t want to spoil their game, so I told Mike to stop just short of it, and I rolled down my window.

“Buenas tardes,” I said. “Can I help you?”

“You must buy these guavas,” said the girl.

“I don’t want them,” I replied. “I don’t like guavas.”

“If you don’t buy, you must pay the toll,” she said, her face very serious.

“How much is the toll?”

“One Hundred Pesos.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I replied. “I won’t pay it.”

She stepped closer, peering through the passenger-side window, taking stock of the cameras and other expensive equipment cluttering the front seat. “Five Pesos, and those gafas.” Mike was wearing a pair of Ray Bans worth at least a hundred bucks. Clearly, the young lady had taste!

I handed her a ten Peso coin, the same amount I’d paid the young Zapatistas the day before. She scowled, but she dropped her string, and we drove on toward Ocosingo, a town near the halfway point between Palenque and San Cristobal. I was beginning to wonder if we would EVER get where we were going, but right about then, all the traffic on the highway came to a halt, stopped dead, all the way through the town. 

I pulled over to the side of the road, and one of the truck drivers walked over and greeted us. This was another Zapatista Bloqueo, he explained, and this time, they were stopping all traffic headed to San Cristobal de Las Casas! The trucker chatted with us for quite awhile, and he was definitely passionate about his grievances.

It would seem that support for the Zapatistas and their road blocks is far from universal. When the movement first began, back in the ’90’s, most of the people were in favor of what they were doing, but after so many years with no real change, sentiments have been shifting. A lot of people in the region make their living, in one way or another, from the transportation of goods. Not just the truckers, but the farmers, the shop keepers, ordinary people who have nothing to do with the Zapatistas and their politics. Many other people are dependent on the tourists, and when the roads are blocked to keep them out, everyone loses badly needed income. There’s also a lot of mistrust, a widely held belief that the Zapatista leadership is cutting back room deals with the government, and lining their own pockets, at the expense of everyone else. These are complex issues, and they are ongoing: the events in this post took place in 2015, more than eight years ago, and according to current reports on the news media, as well as social media, very little seems to have changed.

We bade goodbye to our trucker friend, then we turned around and drove back to Palenque, where we spent a second night with the toucans at the Comfort Inn.

The idea of blocking the roads to stop traffic has become a part of the culture in the hills of Chiapas, and anyone driving through the area stands a good chance of encountering one of these bloqueos. When it’s the Zapatistas, you’ll be obliged to stop, because nobody gets through until the protest has ended. When it’s children, or villagers blocking your way with a string, a rope, or a chain, the easiest course of action is haggle them down to a reasonable fee, and pay them.

Next up: Mexican Road Trip: Days 4-5: Mayan Ruins and Waterfalls in the Lacandon Jungle

(Unless otherwise noted, all of these images are my original work, and are protected by copyright. They may not be duplicated for commercial purposes.)

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