Late afternoon on New Years Day, Patti and Bobby came back from Chedraui and told us that the Zapatistas were forming up for a march a few blocks from us. We got in the jeep and went down to take some pictures. We hung around for awhile but when it looked like they might move out we left, we didn't want to get stuck not being able to go home and they were clearly going to head down the main road into San Cris which would go right by us.

As it turned out, we didn't hear the loudspeakers start on the trucks until later in the evening, way after dark. We went out and sat on a wall in front of the hotel and watched the whole parade. There were thousands of people, marching and in trucks and the trucks all had loudspeakers that were leading chants by the people behind them. It was impressive.

I was struck by the number of people who appeared to be foreigners and by the huge red communist flags. I had heard that much of the movement had been co-opted by foreign communists, I don't know that this is true as a great majority of the marchers appeared to be indigenous but there is certainly a large foreign component.

Apparently this was the first day of a 6 month tour of Mexico that the Zapatistas are doing to influence the elections in June. I'm not at all clear on what they mean in their 6th Directive or how they are going to go about changing elections that they don't intend to participate in. From reading quotes of Sub Comandante Marcos's speech later in the centro, it sounds like he thinks he will be assasinated.

It was an impressive demonstration, we counted 150 people per minute passing us and it lasted for an hour. Later we heard that Marcos - who is now supposed to be called Delegate Zero - was in the white truck near the beginning. We missed him.