Emiliano Zapata's Eyes

Flash Fiction

One hundred and two years after his death, Emiliano Zapata’s eyes stare out at me from a mural on a wall in Oaxaca de Juarez. Paint flakes away from paint, plaster separates from adobe, but Zapata’s eyes do not waver.

Zapata himself did not waver in his lifelong struggle to bring land and liberty to Mexico’s peasants. For his forty years of devotion to j…