The horses wind up through the muddy forest path, leaving the waving children of the shanty town outside of San Cristobal de las Casas behind. My horse seems to have either a death wish, or a thwarted desire to be a tightrope walker. He spends most of the journey with no more than a half hoof on the road, the other half hanging over the edge. The rain comes and goes, playing hide and seek with the lush mountains. Villagers wash their clothes in streams by their wood-and-corrugated-iron huts, occasionally glancing up at us.

“Como su llama?” I ask the young guide, pointing to the restless animal.

He grins: “Rebel.”

Right.

San Cristobal sits high in the mountains of Chiapas. The elevation lifts it out of the heat of the lowland jungles, bringing cool relief and plenty of rain. Of the 4.2 million indigenous people in Mexico, 1.25 million live in Chiapas.

On New Year’s Day 1994, Subcomandante Marcos’s Zapatista movement emerged from the hills and occupied San Cristobal for a number of days as part of an on-going campaign to improve the lives of the indigenous people. The Zapatistas were soon chased out by the army, but the balaclava-wearing, pipe-smoking, Che Guevara-imitating Marcos earned a permanent place in the romantic imagination of Chiapas – and a prominent place in their postcard industry.
The horses climb to the remote indigenous village of San Juan Chamula. I’ve heard some mighty strange rumours about the goings-on at the church in Chamula.

Once, when I was a boy, I was sat upon the back of a horse to have my picture taken. Today, that qualifies me as an expert equestrian. This is Mexico: there is no health and safety lecture, no helmet and no English. You hop on your horse and hope for the best. I flick through my internal YouTube of Lone Ranger clips, trying to remember how to steer the beast. Our guide gallops past and Rebel thinks that looks like fun and we’re tearing through rocky fields, visions of Christopher Reeve tormenting me, and I realize that I can steer however I want: Rebel is making his own way.

After a couple of hours, we arrive at the edge of Chamula, leaving the horses with the guide. The market square is busy. Juicy tomatoes pile up next to ripe bananas, and chickens and children run through the stalls. Little girls hawk friendships bracelets and colourful belts to the tourists.

The church sits at the back of the square.

It looks like a perfectly ordinary church. Tall, white-washed walls topped by a bell tower. Crosses. Men in fine, black-feather coats walk in and out. A nearby graveyard gives up the secrets of the dead: black crosses for the old, white for the young and blue for everyone else.

Inside, the air is thick with incense. The pews have long disappeared and the stone floor is covered in pine needles, hundreds of precariously balanced thin white candles, cans of Coca-Cola and kneeling worshippers. Burping is a way of expelling dangerous spirits, and an integral part of worship.

The statues of tormented saints along the side are piled deep with flowers. Dozens of indigenous people sit on the floor in bright clothes, chanting, eyes closed, rocking. At the front of the church, a pale Christ has been deposed by dominant John the Baptist.

An old, heavily wrinkled woman lifts up a luckless chicken, turning it over the candles, mumbling an incantation. Eyes closed, she rocks back and forth. With a sharp twist, she breaks its neck.

Still chanting, she holds the chicken to the floor as it passes through violent throes into death.

The chanting intensifies. More candles are lit. Another chicken is brought to the flame.