Bueno. Cuento revolucionario.

The four previous books in this series were bleak and hopeless, writhing around in the misery of the laborers and the disgusting opportunism of those who steal their surplus value. The initial hundred or so pages of this book are even worse. The excesses of indignity, the violence, the stupidity and the preposterously unjust Porfiriato ruling class culminate and are no longer able to wring any further coin from the bodies of the indigenous people who slave under them in the mahogany plantations.

From the beginning of the book we can see this situation cannot continue. The expectation to produce two tons of mahogany which already exceeds the capacity of the people performing the labor doubles, and the punishments for not meeting the quota get more severe. The laborers receiving the punishments numb to them, and then they fight back.

"There's no need to be a great prophet to be able to say that everything's on the verge of bursting. If the old President's throne shakes and falls, the whole of this republic will go up in flames. And, as for long years nobody has learned to think, because thinking is forbidden, things will go on burning until we have all been consumed."

"If they had been reasoning men they would never have rebelled. Uprisings, mutinies, revolutions, are always irrational in themselves because they come to disturb the agreeable somnolence that goes by the names of peace and order."

There seems to be some confusion as to whether the author believes the essentialized traits of the natives that he describes throughout the course of this series. Traven describes the manner in which the natives are seen by the Porfiriato, and the manner in which they come to see themselves as colonized and helpless people. They buck this essentialized nature first and foremost with their rebellion. And any Spaniard who attempts to rely on this passivity, stupidity, and humbleness to regain control of their subjects literally get their heads smashed in for believing the lies they tell themselves. ( )

Book #5 in the six-volume Jungle series of the oh-so-mysterious German author B. Traven, The Rebellion of the Hanged is my second least-favorite book of the series thus far: only The Carreta (book #2; "The Ox-Cart") was worse. (I've yet to read the 6th and final book, The General From the Jungle.)

The premise of the Jungle series is that the real roots of the Mexican Revolution originated from the maltreatment -- essentially legalized debt slavery by another name -- of the various Indian tribes by the Mexicans and the various foreigners who came to Mexico under the reign of Porfirio Díaz to grab their unfair share of the pie. Books #1 through #4 (Government, The Carreta, March to the Montería ["montería" means "mahogany plantation"] and Trozas) take place roughly in the first decade of the 20th century; The Rebellion of the Hanged's last half occurs in 1910, when open rebellion against Díaz's regime has finally broken out in the north.

Traven is very good at giving the reader a sense of the terrible human cost that extracting most kinds of wealth from the land has: forget "sweat equity;" when thinking about many of the world's natural resources, one needs to add the prefix "blood" to them (as in "blood diamonds"), whether one is thinking about gold (as in Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) or mahogany (in Spanish "caoba"), as in the Jungle series. Reading the Jungle series will -- or should -- make you think twice before plunking for mahogany furniture.

Reading Rebellion, I can understand more fully what doubtless set the John Birchers at Henry Luce's Time-Life empire (which published The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the early 1960s) a'quivering in righteous indignation: Rebellion is polemic, doctrinaire, and not as denunciatory of the Soviet regime as some of the other books in the series. Despite the publishing info about Traven's books that I've spotted on the Net, I strongly suspect that The Carreta and Rebellion were written earlier than the other books, unless his brains were pickled by the prodigious quantities of alcohol which he supposedly quaffed on a daily basis. (Even while living in Chiapas -- ugh!) These are far and away the two most simplistic and naïve books in the series thus far; they're also the least humorous and satirical.

The revolution -- the rebellion of the title -- doesn't arrive until the last third of the book, and when it does, almost all forward movement in the narrative grinds to a halt as the revolution's leader-cum-prophet expounds at length, blithely excuses his followers' massacres, and is acclaimed the wisest man in all of Mexico by his rapturous and selfless disciples. Traven's strong suit was never individual characterization, but I found this to be much too much, and I didn't get the sense that Traven's normally finely honed sense of irony and cynicism tipped to the fact that the revolutionaries were every bit as murderous as the regime of blood-sucking parasites they were rebelling against: the fact that the Indians were illiterate and never knew of an Indian who had had a successful dialogue with a "white man" or a mestizo doesn't (or shouldn't...) provide them with a carte blanche to murder all in their path. The fact that the caoba workers are egged on by an academic who tells them to burn any and all scraps of paper with any sort of writing whatever on them makes the rebels' actions especially fraught.

All in all, the Jungle series is worth reading; but be prepared for a heavily sentimentalized treatment of the Indians as "noble savages" (in The Carreta) and for a rubber stamp endorsement of anything and everything so long as it is in the name of La Revolución! (in The Rebellion of the Hanged). If you can make it past these languors, Traven has many interesting things to say about government, economics and consumerism. ( )