Cancun Dispatch: 9/9

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The students have organized into three blocs, according to risk level. The white bloc is the safe block, which will try to avoid all confrontation with police. The violet bloc will focus on the carnival, and the orange bloc will be for defence, to put themselves between the police and give others a chance to escape. There is also a small Maoist group, which likes to provoke police, who are the wild cards in the equation.

The Infernal Noise Brigade marching band forms and begins to play. They look impressive in their black and orange and silver costumes, marching in slow step while playing drums and trumpets, pipes and trombones, and they consciously use the energy they create to help move a crowd and influence the tone of the action.

The Pagan Cluster joins the ofrenda group, helping to carry bags of earth and sacks of corn and beans and seeds. We are up toward the front of the march, with a beautiful painted mural of people in resistance on a banner in front of us and the band behind.

We move out into the streets. The police have blocked traffic and the street is empty. They have a very minimal presence - much less than what many of us have grown used to. The spirit is beautiful, but the heat is grueling. The sun blazes down, a burning, searing force. Medics and volunteers circulate through the crowd with water and aloe vera. But just walking at a slow pace, even standing still, is a major effort. I'm drinking and drinking and sweating and sweating, and occasionally wondering if I'm going to pass out.

But I'm happy. We are finally moving, marching together, Mexicans, students, internationals, all together, singing and chanting, drumming and carrying our flags and banners.

We reach the intersection by the entrance to the hotel zone. The police have built a big fence across the road, of moveable barriers, with wide buttresses behind to make them hard to tip over. The police are barricaded behind the barriers, and the space in front is open. We circle up and begin the ceremony. Gloria asks for silence, and we have it for a moment or two. The shamans move in and call the elements. "With the permission of the earth, the air, the fire, the water, with the permission of the ancestors, the elders, the youth . . ."

For a moment, the energy is focused and powerful. We are enacting the drama of this time, the energies of life and color and music, of earth and seed and sacred water, laid out in a mandala pattern in front of the barricades and the massed police and the power of force. I'm feeling the energy very strongly and feeling the other shamans stirring and working it in their own way, and as I place the water the kaleidoscope shifts, revealing a pattern of beauty and change.

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