Continuing on his tour of Mexico's north, Zapatista Subcommander Marcos stopped in Sonoyta (the Sonora border town across from Lukeville, AZ), where his caravan drove into the desert and stopped at the fence demarcating the international border, where signs warned "Prohibited to cross the line." There, he got out of his minivan and purposefully hopped the fence, spending some two minutes on the northern side of the frontier.
The caravan then proceeded to the desert village of Magdalena de Kino, where Marcos met with the traditional authorities of the Tohono O'odham (Papago) indigenous people, whose territory is intersected by the international line. Tohono O'odham governor Jose Garcia Lewis presided at the event.
Eugenio Elorduy Walther, the conservative PAN governor of neighboring Baja California, publicly expressed releif that Marcos had left his state. But Marcos pledged that in 2007 the Zapatistas will establish a camp in Baja California near the US border to support the right of the local Cucapa indigenous people to fish in the delta of the Colorado River, which Baja state authorities now prohibit. (La Jornada, Oct. 22 via Chiapas95 [1])
See our last posts on Mexico [2], the Zapatista tour [3] and the struggle for the border [4]. See also our last post on the Tohono O'odham [5].