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Title: Beyond Resistance: Everything Author: El Kilombo IntergalĂĄctico Date: 2007 Language: en Topics: interview, Zapatistas Source: Retrieved on 2nd September 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/beyond-resistance-everything-interview-subcomandante-insurgente-marcos
This interview was created and conducted by El Kilombo IntergalĂĄctico.
We are a people of color collective made up of students, migrants, and
other community members in Durham, North Carolina. Our project is to
create a space to strengthen our collective political struggles while
simultaneously connecting these struggles with the larger global
anti-capitalist movement.
When we designed this interview in our community assembly, we wanted to
bring out several thematic layers. We wanted to talk about issues unique
to the US: a particular set of race relations and our own perspective on
the battle between capital and color; the historic and contemporary
predominance of migrant, displaced, and âin-flightâ populations and the
kind of communities created by a nation of ânationlessâ people; and the
reality of being simultaneously part of the global poor in a
capital-rich country and part of the great richness and resistance which
exists âbelowâ in the global movement for a different world. We wanted
to talk about issues that bridge the North American continent: the real
danger and simulated reality of the border, the migrant labor that now
supports two economies, and the communities all over the continent that
have never recognized nation-state boundaries as legitimate. And finally
we wanted to situate our discussion in issues now fully and undeniably
global: how to build effective anti-capitalist movements, construct new
social relations, and create real alternatives for the organization of
society in the context of a globalized capitalist economy.
We want to provide a brief explanation of the perspective and experience
that frames our conversation with the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN). El Kilombo came together after the historic anti-war
movement which preceded the US invasion of Iraq, and in the midst of a
floundering and disoriented US Left and a disenfran-chised population.
As students, migrants, and other members of the community we realized
that we shared common problemsâinsecure working conditions, the
expropriation of our land and resources, a paralyzing isolation in the
maze of attending to bills, health, housing, education, debt, and
documentationâas well as common enemies: a corporatized university
system complicit with powerful agents of capital and corrupt
politician-managers united in a shared goal of patent and profit control
over the wealth of knowledge, labor, and life we provide in common.
We started by opening a social center, a space for encounter, where
people could come together, not only to find things and services they
need, but to meet each other and to talk about creating things they
desire. We started English and Spanish language classes, Capoeira
classes, computer classes, and homework help for kids. We designed a
collectively-taught political seminar for ourselves and the community,
and began mapping the problems and resources of our city. The
participants in our programs, our neighbors, developed into a collective
decision-making body, an assembly, which in turn decided what else was
needed. Together we are all working on a health commission to set up
free medical consultations, an organic garden to provide free food
distribution, and a housing collective to lower costs and address
security concerns in our neighborhood.
We were created, as a collective, in the âtodo para todosâ of the
Zapatistas, in the âque se vayan todosâ of the piqueteros in Argentina,
in the dignity and self-respect of movements in the United States like
the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, and in the courage and
commitment of all of the quilombosâthe indigenous, African, multi- and
inter-racial peoples all over the world that built autonomous
communities to break the relations of domination.
When the Sixth Declaration of the LacandĂłn Jungle came out, we sent a
representative from our group to accompany the first journey of the
Other Campaign, the visit of the Zapatista Sixth Commission to every
state of the Mexican Republic. We did this in support of the Other
Campaign, but also to create a bridge between our movements and as a
learning experience for ourselves. As a member of our assembly said of
the Zapatista movement, âThey have nothing and they have given us
everything.â Solidarity is insufficient. The only thing worthy of our
dignity and of theirs is a movement here as fierce and formidable and
transformative as what the Zapatistas have created there.
The Introduction that follows here, âZapatismo: A Brief Manual on How to
Change the World Today,â is a synthesis of our experience of Zapatismo
over the last decade and what we believe to be its lessons and insights
for a world in the throes of destruction and on the edge of powerful
possibilities.
Our interview with Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos was held shortly
after his return to Chiapas following the first full journey of the
Other Campaign through Mexico. Finally, with the hopes of increasing
circulation of the Sixth Declaration of the LacandĂłn Jungle, we have
included it as an appendix, in its entirety.
From âEl Hoyo,â Durham NC, our hole in the ground, below and to the
left,
âEl Kilombo IntergalĂĄctico
November 2007
TODAY
By El Kilombo IntergalĂĄctico
The following lines are the product of intense collective discussions
that took place within what is today El Kilombo IntergalĂĄctico during
much of 2003 and 2004. These discussions occurred during the advent of
the Iraq War and our efforts (though ultimately ineffective) to stop it.
During those months it became very clear to us that the Left in the
United States was at a crossroads, and much of what we had participated
in under the banner of âactivismâ no longer provided an adequate
response to our current conditions.
In our efforts to forge a new path, we found that an old friendâthe
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National
Liberation, EZLN)âwas already taking enormous strides to move toward a
politics adequate to our time, and that it was thus necessary to attempt
an evaluation of Zapatismo that would in turn be adequate to the real
âeventâ of their appearance. That is, despite the fresh air that the
Zapatista uprising had blown into the US political scene since 1994, we
began to feel that even the inspiration of Zapatismo had been quickly
contained through its insertion into a well-worn and untenable
narrative: Zapatismo was another of many faceless and indifferent âthird
worldâ movements that demanded and deserved solidarity from leftists in
the âglobal north.â From our position as an organization composed in
large part by people of color in the United States, we viewed this focus
on âsolidarityâ as the foreign policy equivalent of âwhite guilt,â quite
distinct from any authentic impulse toward, or recognition of, the
necessity for radical social change. The notion of âsolidarityâ that
still pervades much of the Left in the U.S. has continually served an
intensely conservative political agenda that dresses itself in the
radical rhetoric of the latest rebellion in the âdarker nationsâ while
carefully maintaining political action at a distance from our own daily
lives, thus producing a political subject (the solidarity provider) that
more closely resembles a spectator or voyeur (to the suffering of
others) than a participant or active agent, while simultaneously working
to reduce the solidarity recipi-ent to a mere object (of our pity and
mismatched socks). At both ends of this relationship, the process of
solidarity ensures that subjects and political action never meet; in
this way it serves to make change an a priori impossibility. In other
words, this practice of solidarity urges us to participate in its
perverse logic by accepting the narrative that power tells us about
itself: that those who could make change donât need it and that those
who need change canât make it. To the extent that human solidarity has a
future, this logic and practice do not!
For us, Zapatismo was (and continues to be) unique exactly because it
has provided us with the elements to shatter this tired schema. It has
inspired in us the ability, and impressed upon us the necessity, of
always viewing ourselves as dignified political subjects with desires,
needs, and projects worthy of struggle. With the publication of The
Sixth Declaration of the LacandĂłn Jungle in June of 2005, the Zapatistas
have made it even clearer that we must move beyond appeals to this
stunted form of solidarity, and they present us with a far more
difficult challenge: that wherever in the world we may be located, we
must become âcompaner@sâ (neither followers nor leaders) in a truly
global struggle to change the world. As a direct response to this call,
this analysis is our attempt to read Zapatismo as providing us with the
rough draft of a manual for contemporary political action that
eventually must be written by us all.
On January 1^(st) of 1994, the very day that the North American Free
Trade Agreement was to go into effect, the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN), an army composed in its grand majority by members of
Chiapasâ six largest indigenous groups, declared war on the Mexican army
and its then commander-in-chief, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who,
according to the EZLN, was waging an undeclared genocidal war against
the peoples of Mexico. In response, the EZLN proposed that fellow
Mexicans join them in a struggle for land, housing, food, health,
education, work, independence, democracy, justice and peace.[1] During a
twelve day military offensive, Zapatista soldiers, many of them armed
only with old rifles and wooden sticks, occupied seven municipalities in
the state of Chiapas (Altamirano, Las Margaritas, San CristĂłbal,
Ocosingo, Chanal, Huixtan, and Oxchuc). Since these first days, there
have been hundreds of pages written claiming that the EZLN is a movement
for the rights of indigenous Mexicans, for the recuperation of rural
lands, for constitutional reform, and for the end of NAFTA. We would
like to insist that despite the fact that all of these claims are
absolutely true, none of them are sufficient to understand the
appearance and resonance of the EZLN. According to Subcomandante Marcos
(the delegated spokesperson of the EZLN),[2] the Zapatistas wanted
something far more naĂŻve and straightforward than the innumerable goals
that were attributed to them. In his own words, they wanted to âchange
the world.â[3] We believe that this must be our first and primary
premise if we are to understand Zapatismo: that the EZLN is a movement
to change the world, and that those who have been attracted to them,
including those who might read these pages, sympathize with the EZLN
because they too believe, like the Zapatistas, that, âanother worldâ is
both possible and necessary.[4]
In presenting this premise, the first and most obvious question that
arises is, what is wrong with the world today that the EZLN and others
might want to change it? According to the Zapatistas, our current global
condition is characterized by the fact that today humanity suffers the
consequences of the worldâs first truly TOTAL war, what the EZLN has
aptly named the Fourth World War.[5] The nature of this war is best
understood by contrasting those World Wars that have preceded it. Taking
for granted that the nature of the First and Second World Wars are well
known (i.e. Allied Powers vs. Central Powers and Allied Powers vs. Axis
Powers), we will turn to the immediately preceding world warâthough it
is rarely understood as suchâthe Third World War. The Third World War
(or the Cold War) was characterized by the fact that nation-states faced
down other nation-states (most typically the United States and its
allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics and its allies in the Warsaw Pact) for the control
of discrete territories around the globe (most specifically Central
Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America). At the height of this
conflict, the guerrilla style tactics adopted by each side made it
appear, as General Nguyen Van Giap noted, that âthe front today is
everywhere.â[6] And yet, most anyone would agree that like the previous
World Wars, the Third World War ended with the conquest of specific
territories and the ultimate defeat of an externally identifiable enemy
(the U.S.S.R.).
In contrast, what the EZLN has identified as the Fourth World War is a
war between what the EZLN has termed the âEmpire of Moneyâ[7] and
humanity. The main objectives of this war are: first, the capture of
territory and labor for the expansion and construction of new markets;
second, the extortion of profit; and third, the globalization of
exploitation. Significantly then, for the first time, we are in the
midst of a World War that is not fought between nations or even between
a nation and an externally identifiable enemy. It is instead a war for
the imposition of a logic and a practice, the logic and practice of
capital, and therefore everything that is human and opposes capital is
the enemy; we are all at all times potentially the enemy,[8] thus
requiring an omniscient and omnipotent social policing. As the EZLN
explains, this qualifies the Fourth World War as the first truly TOTAL
war because, unlike even the Third World War, this is not a war on all
fronts; it is the first world war with NO front.[9]
The war with no front has two faces. The first is destruction. Any
coherent logic and practice that allows for the organization of life
outside of capital, anything that allows us to identify ourselves as
existing independent of capital, must be destroyed or, what may be the
same thing, reduced to the quantifiable exchangeability of the world
market. Cultures, languages, histories, memories, ideas, and dreams all
must undergo this process. In this regard, struggles for control over
the production and subordination of racialized and gendered identities
becomes a central battlefield. All the colors of the people of the earth
face off with the insipid color of money. For the capitalist market, the
ultimate goal is to make the entire world a desert of indifference
populated only by equally indifferent and exchangeable consumers and
producers. As a direct consequence, the âEmpire of Moneyâ has turned
much of its attention to destroying the material basis for the existence
of the nation-state, as it was through this institution that for the
last century humanity was able to, even if only marginally, keep the
forces of money at bay.
The second face is reorganization. Once the âEmpire of Moneyâ has
sufficiently weakened the nation-state, it then reinvigorates this same
institution for its own ends through the introduction of schemes
intended to benefit the structure of the market itself, specifically the
advent of privatization as government policy. This allows for the
increasing intervention of the state with the end of minimizing its
redistributive or social capacity and using it as a mechanism for the
insistent imposition of the market. This imposition is so expansive that
literally everything becomes a business opportunity, a site for
speculation, or a marketable moment. What was previously a site for
community strength (i.e. a mural) is today simply a wall for corporate
advertisement; what was previously knowledge passed down to be shared
socially is today the site for the latest pharmaceutical patent; what
yesterday was free and abundant today is bottled and sold.
Without any social safety net and bombarded with images of an
ever-present enemy, the logic of policing extends to that figure
previously known as âthe citizenâ of the former nation-state. This
figure is today reconstituted as an atomistic self-policing subject, âa
competitorâ who enters (i.e. misses) all encounters believing that âthe
other,â that which is not me, exists only to defeat me, or be defeated
by me. A total war indeed. Today there is simply no quiet corner to rest
and catch oneâs breath.
In the eyes of the EZLN, the Fourth World War has had three major
society-wide consequences, each played out at varying sites.
First, States: the State in the Empire of Money, as mentioned above, is
reorganized. It is now the âdownsizedâ state where any semblance of
collective welfare is eliminated and replaced with the logic of
individual safety, with the most repressive apparatuses of the State,
the police and the Army, unleashed to enforce this logic. This state is
in no way smaller in the daily lives of its subjects; rather, it is
guaranteed that the power of this institution (collective spend-ing) is
directed purely toward new armaments and the increasing presence of the
police in daily life.
Second, Armies: the Army in previous eras was assumed to exist for the
protection of a national population from foreign invasion. Today, in the
structural absence of such a threat, the army is redirected to respond
with violence to manage (and yet never solve) a series of never-ending
local conflicts (Atenco, Oaxaca, New Orleans) that potentially threaten
the overall stability of international markets. In other words, as the
EZLN points out, these armies can no longer be considered ânationalâ in
any meaningful sense; they are instead various precinct divisions of a
global police force under the direction of the âEmpire of Money.â
Third, Politics: the politics of the politicians (i.e. the actions of
the legislative, executive, and judiciary branch-es) has been completely
eliminated as a site for public deliberation, or for the construction of
the previously existing nation-state. The politics of the politicians
has been redirected and its new function is that of the implementation
and administration of the local influence of transnational corporations.
What was previously national politics has been replaced with what the
EZLN refers to as âmegapoliticsââthe readjustment of local policy to
global financial interests. Thus the sites that once actually mediated
among local actors are now additionally charged with the mission of
creating the image that such mediation continues to take place. It is
best to be careful then and not believe that the politicians and their
parties (be they right wing or âprogressiveâ) are of no use; rather, it
is important to note that today their very purpose is the outright
simulation of social dialogue (that is, they are of no use TO US!).
If this global situation is in fact a warâand the high level of social
devastation as well as the number of dead and imprisoned seem to confirm
thisâthen the parameters of this new war detailed by the EZLN force us
to reassess the effectiveness of our customary strategies and tactics so
as to determine if they are in fact adequate to our current situation.
In this regard, the EZLNâs insights obligate us to reevaluate our
conceptions of both oppression and politics.
First, the current situation forces us to reconceptualize how inequality
functions. For much of the 20^(th) century, progressive social movements
had become accustomed to thinking of inequality as measured by
exclusions and inclusions. For example, many oppressed minorities spent
an immense amount of social energy struggling for their inclusion in
national projects, or, similarly, countries on the âperipheryâ of the
world economy oriented much of their energy toward inclusion in projects
for âinternational development.â But today, the âEmpire of Moneyâ has
made this play of insides and outsides increasingly irrelevant as a
social indicator of inequality. As if in some perverse fulfill-ment of
the desires of previous social movements, today we are all included in
the nightmare of the global market. Or, as Subcomandante Marcosâ
fictional sidekick Durito (a comical beetle) would have it, oppression
todayâand since at least 1989âis no longer maintained by the famous
vertical walls that were meant to keep the masses of citizens inside
safe from the innumerable enemies outside (or vice-versa).[10] That wall
was torn down forever and has today been rebuilt horizontally across the
entire face of the earth. This new wall cares little where in the
(geographical) world you might be; it is instead there to keep the
billions of exploited below the wall from the small handful of
exploiters who built it. In short, this new wall is there to separate
the âEmpire of Moneyâ from those who would threaten itâthat is, from all
of us. Given this situation, to demand âinclusionâ is to desire to stand
above the wall; to demand change is to desire a collective blow for this
wall to crumble.
Second, we must reassess the grounds for potential political change. If
we are to take the Zapatistas seriously and conclude that the politics
of the politicians is a sphere that functions through the simulation of
public opinionâthrough polls and the circulation of sound bites and
imagesâto administer the interests of transnational capital, it would be
near suicide to continue to do politics as a competition for influence
within that sphere. No matter how well-intentioned or âprogressiveâ a
given party or platform may be, the proximity of politicians to the
vertical structure and logic of the State today assures only their
complete functionality to the larger system of inequalities. In
addition, we must remind ourselves that these politicians are not there
to simulate for just any power; they are there to simulate social peace
for a global power that is today greater than the collective power of
any particular state. Thus, any opposition that limits itself to the
level of a single state, no matter how powerful, may be futile.
Yet, at the same time that these futilities surface, other strategies
and tactics simultaneously emerge within this new situation, strategies
that rise to the challenge of the contemporary impasse faced by our
previous social visions. Consider for example the tremendous inspiration
provided by the following lines written by Subcomandante Insurgente
Marcos; what appears at first as poetic license should be read more
carefully as the outline of a brilliant strategy for our times:
âThe social ship is adrift, and the problem is not that we lack a
captain. It so happens that the rudder itself has been stolen, and it is
not going to turn up anywhere. There are those who are devoted to
imagining that the rudder still exists and they fight for its
possession. There are those who are seeking the rudder, certain that it
must have been left somewhere. And there are those who make of an
island, not a refuge for self-satisfaction but a ship for finding
another island and another and anotherâŠâ[11]
The Fourth World War continues unabated and the result has been a near
total devastation of the earth and the misery of the grand majority of
its inhabitants. Given this situation and the sense of despair it
brings, it would be easy to lose a sense of purpose, to raise our hands
in defeat and utter those words that have been drilled into us for the
past thirty years: âthere is in fact no alternative.â Despite the new
contours of the Fourth World War and the sense of social dizziness that
it has created, it is important for us to realize that this war shares
one fundamental constant with all other wars in the modern era: it has
been foisted upon us in order to maintain a division (an inequality)
between those who rule and those who are ruled. Since the attempted
conquest of the âNew Worldâ and the consequent establishment of the
modern state-form, we have so internalized this division that it seems
nearly impossible to imagine, let alone act on, any social organization
without it. It is this very act of radical practice and imagination that
the Zapatistas believe is necessary to fight back in the era of total
war.
But how might this alternative take shape? In order to begin to address
this question, the Zapatistas implore us to relieve ourselves of the
positions of âobserversâ who insist on their own neutrality and
distance; this position may be adequate for the microscope-wielding
academic or the âprecision-guidedâ T.V. audience of the latest bombings
over Baghdad, but they are completely insufficient for those who are
seeking change. The Zapatistas insist we throw away our microscopes and
our televisions, and instead they demand that we equip our âshipsâ with
an âinverted periscope.â[12]
According to what the Zapatistas have stated, one can never ascertain a
belief in or vision of the future by looking at a situation from the
position of âneutralityâ provided for you by the existing relations of
power. These methods will only allow you to see what already is, what
the balance of the relations of forces are in your field of inquiry. In
other words, such methods allow you to see that field only from the
perspective of those who rule at any given moment. In contrast, if one
learns to harness the power of the periscope not by honing in on what is
happening âaboveâ in the halls of the self-important, but by placing it
deep below the earth, below even the very bottom of society, one finds
that there are struggles and memories of struggles that allow us to
identify not âwhat isâ but more importantly âwhat will be.â By
harnessing the transformative capacity of social movement, as well as
the memories of past struggles that drive it, the Zapatistas are able to
identify the future and act on it today. It is a paradoxical temporal
insight that was perhaps best summarized by âEl Clandestinoâ himself,
Manu Chao, when he proclaimed that, âthe future happened a long time
ago!â[13]
Given this insight afforded by adopting the methodology of the inverted
periscope, we are able to shatter the mirror of power,[14] to show that
power does not belong to those who rule. Instead, we see that there are
two completely different and opposed forms of power in any society: that
which emerges from above and is exercised over people (Power with a
capital âPâ), and that which is born below and is able to act with and
through people (power with a lower case âpâ). One is set on maintaining
that which is (Power), while the other is premised on transformation
(power). These are not only not the same thing; they are (literally)
worlds apart. According to the Zapatistas, once we have broken the
mirror of Power by identifying an alternative source of social
organization, we can then see it for what it isâa purely negative
capacity to isolate us and make us believe that we are powerless. But
once we have broken that mirror-spell, we can also see that power does
not come from above, from those âin Power,â and therefore that it is
possible to exercise power without taking itâthat is, without simply
changing places with those who rule. In this regard, it is important to
quote in its entirety the famous Zapatista motto that has been
circulated in abbreviated form among movements throughout the world:
âWhat we seek, what we need and want is for all those people without a
party or an organization to make agreements about what they donât want
and what they do want and organize themselves in order to achieve it
(preferably through civil and peaceful means), not to take power, but to
exercise it.â[15] Only now can we understand the full significance of
this statementâs challenge.[16]
It is important to note how this insight sets the Zapatistas apart from
much of the polemics that has dominated the Left, be it in âsocialistâ
or âanarchistâ camps, throughout the 20^(th) century. Although each of
these camps has within itself notable historical precedents that
strongly resemble the insights of Zapatismo (the original Soviets of the
Russian revolution and the anarchist collectives of the Spanish Civil
War come most immediately to mind), we must be clear that on the level
of theoretical frameworks and explicit aims, both of these traditions
remain (perhaps despite themselves) entangled in the mirror of Power.
That is, both are able to identify power only as that which comes from
above (as Power), and define their varying positions accordingly.
Socialists have thus most frequently defined their project as the
organization of a social force that seeks to âtake [P]ower.â[17]
Anarchism, accepting the very same presupposition, can see itself acting
in a purely negative fashion as that which searches to eliminate or
disrupt Powerâanarchist action as defenestration, throwing Power out the
window.[18] Thus, for each, Power is a given and the only
organizationally active agent. From this perspective, we can see that
despite the fact that Zapatismo contains within itself elements of both
of these traditions, it has been able to break with the mirror of Power.
It reveals that Power is but one particular arrangement of social force,
and that below that arrangement lies a secondâthat of power which is
never a given but which must always be the project of daily
construction.
In sum, according to the Zapatistas, through the construction of this
second form of power it is possible to overcome the notion (and the
practice which sustains it) that society is possible only through
conquest, the idea that social organization necessitates the division
between rulers and ruled. Through the empowerment of power, it is
possible to organize a society of âmandar obedeciendoâ (rule by
obeying),[19] a society that would delegate particular functions while
ensuring that those who are commissioned to enact them answer to the
direct voice of the social body, and not vice-versa. In other words, our
choices now exceed those previously present; we are not faced with the
choice of a rule from above (we would call this Sovereignty), or no rule
at all (the literal meaning of Anarchy). The Zapatistas force us to face
the imminent reality that all can ruleâdemocracy (as in âDemocracy,
Liberty, and Justiceâ).[20]
When democracy is wrenched from the clenched fist of idealism, and is
instead understood as the cultiva-tion of habits and institutions
necessary for a society to âmandar obedeciendo,â a whole new continent
of revolutionary praxis opens before us. That is, having been able to
identify the autonomous and antagonistic relation that âexercising
powerâ (a conduct of power) has to âtaking powerâ (a conduct of Power),
the Zapatistas have been unique in their capacity to move beyond the
street protest and rhetorical denunciation that have seemed to dominate
much of the rest of the anti-globalization movement in recent years. In
fact, it seems that in the same way that the Zapatistas were an
inspiration for the recovery of the spirit of resistance that has
characterized the movements of the past decade, their vision will
continue to be a key inspiration as these same movements struggle with
the necessity of moving âbeyond resistance.â[21]
Below, we would like to outline the most notable and consistent
practices that have allowed the Zapatistas to grow and become stronger
while many of the movements that were born alongside them in this recent
cycle of struggles have come and gone (while the pain and desires that
gave rise to many of them remain intact). In enumer-ating a series of
distinct Zapatista practices, we in no way intend to imply that any one
of these practices is primary over any other, or that any of them in
themselves is Zapatista democracy. To the contrary, as many others have
noted, democracy is best understood through what physicists and systems
theorists have called âreverse causality,â where cause and effect form a
closed and retroactively nutrient circuit, making the question of a
first or primary cause irrelevant. Instead, the practice of democracy in
Zapatista territory tends to place its emphasis on the distinctions and
discernments that allow for the composition or compilation of a number
of habits, institutions, and results. In other words, Zapatista
democracy is not any single habit, action, or institution (means), in
which case it might be described as a verb; nor is it the result of any
of these habits, actions, or institutions (ends), in which case it could
be considered a noun. Rather, it is an ecology for the coupling of
institutions, actions, and their results that allows for a continual
feedback loop repeatedly opening and enriching both means and ends.[22]
The practice of democracy in Zapatista territory is best understood as a
noun-verb, a noun-verb that, despite its recent distance from the eye of
the media, is far from exhausted. Among the most compelling components
of this practice are:
The Zapatistas have used this practice in order to look beyond
themselves and build an âarchipelago of islands,â or a massive network
of global resistance. According to the Zapatistas, the first such
âencounterâ that occurred was within the EZLN itself, and it took place
between the guerrilla members of the Frente de LiberaciĂłn Nacional
(National Liberation Front) and the members of the indigenous
communities of Chiapas. As the EZLN tells this history, it was here that
the communities forced these guerrilla fighters to listen and dialogue,
to, in effect, learn to encounter others even when the deafening noise
of weapons and vanguardist ideals would have it otherwise. Thus,
encounter is first and foremost an ethic, an ethic of opening oneself to
others even, or perhaps especially, at the risk of losing oneself.
Although these lessons were painful for the guerrilla fighters of the
EZLN and their community counterparts, they became deeply ingrained
within the ethos of the EZLN, and they have led to the organization of
encounters as a central practical activity between the EZLN and
innumerable others. Even a rather incomplete selection of the encounters
proposed and hosted by the Zapatistas in the last 13 years is
overwhelming in its diversity and innovation. The First National
Democratic Convention was held in August of 1994, the First Continental
Encounter in April of 1996, and the First Intercontinental Encounter for
Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, also known as the âIntergalactic,â
in July of 1996, all attended by thousands of people flooding into
Zapatista territory to meet not only the Zapatistas, but each other. Any
surface investigation of these encounters will show that they were
absolutely crucial to the formation of the alterglobalization movement
and the subsequent events that were to take place in Seattle, Prague,
and Genoa.
Then, in spectacular disregard for the containment the Mexican military
claimed to have on Chiapas, the Zapatistas began to come out of their
territory to create additional encounters with Mexican society: 1,111
civilian Zapatistas in September 1997 attended the founding of the
National Indigenous Congress in Mexico City; 5,000 Zapatistas in March
of 1999 hosted a national and international referendum on the EZLNâs
demands; and in February of 2001, 24 Zapatista commanders took the issue
of constitutional rights for indigenous people to Mexico City in âThe
March of the Color of the Earth.â Back in rebel territory, in July 2003,
five âCaracolesâ were inaugurated as bastions of Zapatista cultural
resistance, portals from Zapatista territory to the world, and spaces of
encounter for global resistance. With the release of the Sixth
Declaration of the LacandĂłn Jungle in 2005, the Zapatistas proposed
another series of encounters: the Other Campaign, which included the
visit of an EZLN commission to every state of the Mexican Republic in
2006, and another Intergalactic. That Intergalactic is now pending,
preceded by a series of âEncounters between Zapatista Peoples and
Peoples of the Worldâ in December 2006, July 2007, and December 2007,
which has been specified as the first âEncounter Between Zapatista Women
and Women of the World.â Yet, no matter how many encounters are
actualized, the Zapatista ethic of encounter cannot be exhausted.
Rather, as the Zapatistas insist on reminding us, any ethic of encounter
worthy of the name must necessarily be based on the premise that âwhat
is missing, is yet to comeâ ( falta lo que falta).
From the beginning of their movement, the Zapatistasâ bases of support
have organized themselves into local assemblies. These assemblies are
collective decision-making bodies that function not only to make
consensus a reality but also to ensure the circulation and socialization
of information that will make an informed decision possible. Regional
groupings of community assemblies make up Zapatista Autonomous
Municipalities, which in turn, and after years of silent and steady
social construction, correspond to autonomous self-governing bodies
called âGood Government Councils,â one in each of the five zones of
Zapatista territory. The councils are made up of community members from
each autonomous municipality who rotate in and out of the council
positions, which are delegated by and accountable to the assemblies. The
council term lengths vary by region but may range from a few weeks to a
few months, with every position subject to immediate revocation by the
assemblies if a delegate does not follow the community mandate. This
system of assemblies and governing councils demonstrates that the only
way to avoid the division of society into the oppressive dichotomy of
rulers and ruled is to invent structures where all rule; everyone at
some point governs, just as everyone after governing, returns to the
cornfield or to the kitchen to continue the daily work of the
community.[23]
Despite the near total hegemony that advertising and âart for artâs
sakeâ has had on the notion of creativity, the Zapatistas remind us that
creation is in no way related to the production of objectsâbe it for
aesthetic enjoyment or otherwise. Creation does not (and must not)
belong to an isolatable social sphere that stands above the collective,
there to be mastered by the genius or the recluse. Rather, in the
Zapatista model, creation is born of collective necessity; capitalism
has imposed on us a life that is far from fulfilling, and in the face of
this situation we have but one choiceâto create our lives otherwise. To
do so, we do not have to wait to âstorm the winter palaceâ or for a new
junta to declare âThe Revolution.â We must gather the materials at hand
today (including our periscopes, our âmemories of tomorrowâ), and build
another world. What seems to come from this project is not âa thingâ per
se, but a process, a way of relating to all things (including each
other). The âartâ of Zapatismo has, as its producers and its product, a
subjectivity capable of opening and relating to all types of others as
subjects in their own right, leaving behind capital and its restriction
of all relations to relations between objects.
With this understanding, the Zapatistas have created a series of
autonomous institutions which function throughout their territory. There
are autonomous primary schools in all five zones, and now autonomous
âhigh schoolsâ in two of them, already with several generations of
graduates. All five regions also have basic health clinics that
integrate western medicine with traditional healing and focus both on
learning new medical technologies and recovering the knowledge, use, and
supply, of herb- and plant-based medicines. Some zones have their own
ambulances and minor surgery centers, and all are developing specially
trained health promoters in womenâs and reproductive health. The health
systems focus on illness prevention as well as social health and
nutritional information and practice, so that people not only learn to
take care of themselves but begin to buildâwith the understanding that
heath (physical, emotional, and mental) is a collective
characteristicâthe kind of community well-being they seek. A juridical
system based in the Good Government Councils of each zone functions as a
body to resolve local problems, investigate crimes and complaints, and
hear and decide on disputes. The decisions made in the Councils focus on
restorative justice, and their manner of hearing and resolving disputes
has been so popular and successful that non-Zapatista communities often
bring their cases to the Councils rather than to the municipal or state
courts.
Other autonomous projects include a variety of cooperative projects on
community, municipal, and zone-wide levels. These include collective
warehouses for coffee and other crops that allow farmers to evade the
âsell-low, buy-highâ pattern forced on small and subsistence-level
producers; transportation collectives that coordinate movement between
municipalities and zones to facilitate trade, meetings, and encounters
between the communities in resistance; and womenâs cooperatives which
provide an entire institutional phenomenon in themselves. The womenâs
cooperatives range from chicken coops to garden collectives to
artisanship groups to supply stores, all of which are managed
collectively. These provide not only new income and possibilities for
autonomous sustenance, but also a collective space for women, which has
long been scarce due to the incredibly heavy workload required for
individual household maintenance. One other noteworthy autonomous
activity is the creation of Radio Insurgente, Zapatista radio which
transmits in multiple indigenous languages throughout the state,
breaking through the mass media mo-nopoly on information and the
government tactic of isolation.
A confrontation with the Empire of Money is not a goal, nor is it a
desire; it is a reality, and it is necessary to find the tools most
powerful to defend oneâs constructive projects against repression. As
the Zapatistas quickly realized, traditional armaments were a very poor
weapon in this new war. They have silenced their âfireâ and have instead
insisted that today, âour word is our weapon.â Their word(s): Encounter,
Assemble, Create. The question remains whether these weaponsâthe
practices of Encounter, Assembly, and Creationâare powerful enough to
ensure the protection of the Zapatista communities and the continued
empowerment of their vision. We hope that the following pages will
provide you with an opportunity to decide for yourself.
By El Kilombo IntergalĂĄctico
After having spent all of 2006 traveling by land to visit the 32 states
of the Mexican Republic, the EZLN said that they have found much more
pain than what they had expected. Since the Sixth Declaration was
written, how have the EZâs ideas changed, in terms of what Mexico is,
suffers, and could be?
Well to start with, before writing the Sixth, we did a kind of x-ray or
study of the country. Not by reading books, but, like the intellectuals
say, through fieldwork. So we sent a group of compañeros and compañeras
to various parts of the country to see what the situation was like.
After 2001, when the indigenous law was betrayed [by the National
Congress], the question left pending was, what now? At that point, after
so many years of efforts to establish a conversation with the political
class, which failed, we were deciding to change interlocutors, and we
had to answer the question, now who? With whom are we going to speak?
Which is what I was asking you before we started: âWho am I talking to?â
So we sent out these compañeros and compañeras, and we gave them the
collective name, âElias Contreras,â in honor of a support-base compañero
who died around that time. They brought us this type of radiog-raphy
that told us something about the subject of land, something about the
subject of young people, and something about women.
In broad strokes, this study coincided with our perception or intuition
that the sectors that had worked most closely with us, or which had best
understood our word as Zapatistasâindigenous peoples, women, and young
peopleâcontinued to be near us and continued to maintain this synchrony,
not as a result of the virtue of our discourse, but because of their own
realities. That is, it is not the eloquence of our word that has earned
their ear, bur rather the fact that they are seeing and living things
similar to what we are; this is why we are speaking the same language.
We told ourselves we could construct a movement if we could construct a
common terrain. The terrain that the EZLN inhabits is a clandestine
political-military one, and we would need to construct another level,
another terrain of encounter, another space, like you guys say, to meet
each other. And this was what the Sixth proposed. The place where we
would meet would have to be in their places, on their terrainsâno longer
just Zapatista initiatives in Zapatista territory, because this would
imply once again the hegemony of the EZLN with respect to the tasks and
priorities set and the paths and companions taken, which is what had
marked the previous 10â12 years. So we said, if we make this common
territory and common terrain, it has to be with them, where they are,
and that means we will have to come out.
So we did this kind of diagnostic of suffering, of the criminalization
of the young people, of this, how do I put it, this fraud of gender
equality. By this I mean the assumption that the struggle over gender
has advanced, because, within the political class or the wealthiest and
most powerful business sector, women have been able to appear more
visibly, which hides the fact that intrafamilial rape continues to be a
problem, that aggression against women just because they are women
continues in the streets, at work, in school, everywhere. And on the
subject of indigenous peoples...Yes there had been much attention given
to the indigenous Zapatistas of Chiapas, and secondarily to the National
Indigenous Congress. But there are other indigenous peoples that were
not even named, not recognized, as if they did not even exist. These are
the things that were discovered, among other things, in the first
journey of the first phase [of the Other Campaign].
We had thought, we must construct this terrain of encounter, but we must
also ask ourselves, âWhat for?â Then the basic principles of the Sixth
were established, and we decided we were against the political class,
against the system, and we were going to identify the common enemy of
our pain and the form in which we would find that enemy and fight it. We
were given the image of a country with many pains but still marked by
what the mass media presents us with: this great divide between the
north of the country, which supposedly has a quality of life similar to
that of the southern United States, and the Mexican south, which is said
to have a quality of life closer to that of Central America. This is why
it is presumed that the great movement of people to the Other Side [the
United States] came principally from the states of the south and from
Central America.
When we began the journey, the first part, it was confirmed that there
is in effect a significant acceleration of the loss of lands and thus
the expulsion of indigenous peoples and poor farmers to the cities and
toward the north-ern border. Schools in general, from kindergarten to
postgraduate studies, are undergoing an accelerated process of
privatization, which leads to a lowering of the quality of teaching, the
quality of education, and the quality of research, above all scientific
research, which is converted into a kind of factory for large
transnational corporations. This is what they said in one state,
Veracruz, where they told us, we didnât realize that scientists are
participating in a huge war industry. We were buying the myth that we
are doing objective or neutral science, even humanitarian science, and
it turns out that it is one part of the knowledge that, in another
partâin this case in large research centers paid for by private
companiesâis being converted into something harmful for humanity.
On the subject of women, with regard to politics from above within the
political class, when the struggle of women is institutionalizedâthat
is, when it is accepted that there are rights that must be
recognizedâhere in Mexico appears this great generalization that there
can be good laws but they are not implemented. But what we found was
that in addition, there are bad laws that are also not implemented. The
other thing that we found that was not detected by the first group
[Elias Contreras] was the destruction of nature, now no longer because
of the inattention or care-lessness of governmental authorities or of
the population, but rather as a purposeful policy of destruction, which
is the case in all the coastal zones, in the Yucatan Peninsula, in
Veracruz, and on the Oaxacan coast. Up to the Federal District [Mexico
City], the center of the republic, when we had traveled all of the south
and southeast and the Yucatan peninsula, the diagnostic was close, but
things were actually worse, because there was an element which had not
been detected by the commission we had sentâthe sensibilities and
feelings of the people.
If you recall, the journey changed as it went along. At the beginning, a
lot of people came to present their complaint or request, thinking that
the Sixth Commission was a channel for getting their demand to the
government. But as the journey advanced, this began to disappear, and
little by little the forum of denouncement turned into a forum of
expression for forms of rebellion and resistance. And the people started
getting to know each other. And we discovered a hurting country but also
a very organized countryâorganized, but dispersed. Many of these
rebellions we had not known of; that is why we make reference to the
mass media, because it seems as though if one doesnât appear in the
media, one doesnât exist. In this sense, the EZLN existed because it
appeared in the media, and since now it doesnât appear, then it must not
exist anymore. If that happened to us, what was happening to the rest of
the people that had never appeared in the mass media? The Other Campaign
means to be the forum where one begins to say, âI am this, I am here.â
When Atenco occurred and we stopped in the Federal District, the record
so far was more or less balanced [between pain and resistance], with the
addition of this surplus, this extra learning, that we had discovered in
these organized rebellions, which is not the same as just a rebellion.
And the Other Campaign had the opportunity to generate a network between
these rebellions. At this point the danger was the hegemonification of
what had flourished precisely because of the fact of being so different.
At that time, certain tendencies had already arisen within the Other
Campaign that tried to create a single party, a single movement, a
single organization, which in our view would have meant that these
different rebellions would have to retreat or retire. [We saw that] they
were not already in a single movement or party for a reason.
When we took off to the North, we left with the prophecy that we were
going to go completely unnoticed, that the conditions were completely
different. But what we discovered in our path, if you remember, was that
the conditions are the same or worse than in the South. We had bet that
the North shared with the South historic and cultural roots, and for
this reason continued to be Mexico. But in the progress of the journey
to the North of the Republic, we discovered that in addition to sharing
similar living conditions, the North also shared with the South
experiences of organized rebellion, though dispersed.
So after this yearâs journey, on one hand we have a country in a more
serious state of destruction than we had thought, more in a state of
ruin, we say, but also much richer in terms of the organization of the
people than what we had thought. In fact, in some parts we were already
insisting that it was time to design an organizational form that didnât
erase the existence of the great plurality that characterized these
organized rebellions. Unfortunately, this was understood then as if the
Other Campaign is the place for whomever, even if they arenât in
agreement with the Other Campaign. We think that there does have to be a
basic political definition, but that it has to respect, maintain,
cultivate, and make grow its spaces of autonomy and rebellion. So, in
broad strokes, we have these two results or these two axes: that of
destruction, which is telling us that there is no longer any turning
back, that this is the last call, as we say, and that if we take the
slow road, little by little, we are not going to have anything left to
save or rebuild; and on the other side, that of the rebellions that are
clamoring for a national organized space, without losing their
identities.
How do the Zapatistas imagine the Mexican Nation in its
deterritorialized reality, deterritorialized on one side by a globalized
economy and a transnational division of labor, and on the other by
indigenous peoples, Mexicans, Chicanos, all of whom were crossed by the
border, instead of the other way around, and now find themselves on both
sides of this line? What would a new nation and a new constitution look
like in this context of scrambled geography?
What we try to teach peopleâand to practiceâis modesty. We have to
recognize that there are realities that we cannot imagine, just like
there are worlds that we cannot imagine; and the fact that we canât
imagine them does not mean that they arenât possible. This Mexico, so
complex in its destruction, could be equally complex in its richness.
But we canât imagine it, because when we try to imagine it, we use
referents that we already know. That is, if by the new constitution we
are imagining a group of intellectuals that get together, write up some
good, well-intentioned laws, decree them and have a party and set a date
to celebrate, where the children sing the national anthem and salute the
flag, well no! We are saying that to make a new constitution is to
create this common bridge, a new agreement. You and I are going to come
to an agreement on how we are going to relate to each other; and this
agreement is going to be different from what we have ever known, because
you and I are going to be different from what we have ever been, because
of the place we occupy. Neither women nor indigenous peoples nor young
people, to speak of the primordial sectors of the Other Campaign, are
going to be the same in the new Mexico. Not their demands, not their
forms of conceiving of themselves, and not their futures.
Talking to a compañera in the Other Campaign, I said to her, you can
imagine, as a woman, a Mexico where the factories are the property of
the workers, but you canât imagine one where you can walk in the street
dressed however you want without being harassed. You canât imagine this,
and here we can help, because we can imagine it. If we think another
world is going to be possible, the fact that we canât imagine it because
of our education, our history, because of where each of usâwe as
indigenous peoples, others as migrants, others as academics, others as a
cultural-artistic group, etc.âdirects our gaze, does not mean that it
isnât possible to make. It seems impossible to think that one could
construct a nation with that border there, with immigration, with the
Minutemen, with Bush and all that, no? But the journey of the Other
Campaign demonstrated that from one end to the other, organizations,
rebellions, and movements are arising for whom this border doesnât
exist; that is, it doesnât exist in real terms. In this sense, we can
find cultural roots deeper in North Carolina than in Polanco in Mexico
City, despite the fact that this line, this border, divides one country
from the other.
So we say, how are we going to do this? By guaranteeing that the Other
Campaign, or this great movement whatever it will be called, will always
have a space for listening, and that this listening will always take
into account what it hears. If itâs not one group, however good a group
it is, the Zapatistas, or a group of really good intellectuals, if
instead of this one group deciding what the path will be, we all decide,
or we take the word of each and every person and start to construct
something, that is where we will go. If you remember when we went
through Jalisco, we went through a place where there was a mural, and it
was a compañero of the Other who painted the mural. So when he was
showing us the mural, I think it was in Ciudad Guzman, I asked him, âSo,
when you made this mural, did you imagine how it was going to look?â
âYeah, I imagined it already finished,â he said.
âBut even so, you started to make it and some things changed and the
result is different but similar to what you imagined.â
âYes.â
âCould you make a mural,â I asked him, âstart a great drawing with many
colors, without knowing the result?â
âNo,â he said, âThat would take a lot of imagination.â
That is the Other Campaign. We are starting to make the outline of
something, though we donât know how it will end up. Our honesty and our
humility is to recognize that we donât know. The only guarantee that we
have that itâs going to be better is that we are choosing an ethics. And
the ethics we are choosing is the ethics of the people, the people from
below; we are choosing to give them their place. Itâs not about seeing
if in the future there are going to be better salaries, or better
prices, or whatever. We donât even know if there are going to be
salaries. This is a recognition of the limits that we have, that our
horizon is this world that we have. And what lies beyond, that is for
others to determine.
This is what the Other Campaign is proposing. Those who try to explain
us as a movement, an organization, or a political party, take as their
referent what is already at hand. We say no. They say a federation of
organizations, or a united front of organizations will have to form,
some kind of single unit, or a national dialogue, or a popular assembly
like in Oaxaca, or a National Democratic Convention like that of Lopez
Obrador. No! The surest thing is that it will be none of these things,
because each of these has the horizon of a specific problemâand the
problem here isnât defined still, other than that it is a system. None
of these other movements or organizational forms take seriously that
there is another reality in another place that is the same. If the first
journey of the Other Campaign removed the barrier that separated the
north from the south of Mexico, then the second phase, which we are
going to launch starting in the north, we think will erase the
[US-Mexico] border, in real terms, that it will be a bridge to the
migrants, the Chicanos, to all of the realities that are on the other
side. Iâm not talking only about people of Mexican origins, also the
original peoples of North America, to people of color, to immigrants
from other parts of the world, for example from Asia, to the white
low-income population, to all those there who are saying, âAnd us? What
about us? Here in the belly of the beast, is solidarity the only thing
left for us?â Saying that there, one canât do anything because
everything is about television, everything is about drugs, everything is
just shit...We think that these people are going to start making their
bridges, and that there is where we have to give some room to
imagination.
If someone from the other side of the border and from this side of the
border had the imagination to imagine him/herself as a rebel, then think
how much more we could imagine a world that has nothing to do with this
oneânot the relations between men and women, not the relations between
generations, not the relations between human beings and things or
nature, nor between races, to put it one way, or between nations with
different cultural roots. That is why we say that the Other Campaign,
and I am referring not just to what was originated by the EZLN but to
what has been born in the journey out of the participation of everyone,
is going to be a great lesson for the world that one has to know how to
read, and to read with humility. That is what we have not found in the
intellectuals that have talked about the Other.
In the United States, we have a concept of âpeople of color,â people
that for economic reasons have been forced, or their ancestors have been
forced, to live in the United States. But even though these people have
been marginalized and discriminated against, they do not consider
themselves ex-nationalsâthey are not simply ex-Mexicans, or
ex-Colombians, or ex-Africansâbut neither do they consider themselves
(US) Americans. That is, while they may have deep memories of their
lands, many havenât seen those lands for 400 years; but neither do they
identify with a national project in the United States. In our own
personal experiences, we recognize a growing population of
de-nationalized people that could never recognize the reconstruction of
a nation as their project, because they have never belonged to a nation.
Currently, we see in the marginalized communities of the United States
and Europe that this subjectivity is growing, and we think that this
subjectivity may have an important role to play in the construction of
resistance against global capitalism/neoliberalism. In your experiences
in the encounters with the Other Side and along the border in general,
how have you seen this experience and its possible role in the
construction of the Other and the Sixth?
The problem is identity. This, what you are saying, is exactly what an
indigenous compañera from Oaxaca in New York said. She said, âThe thing
is that Iâm here now.â And whatâs more, she said it by video from New
York because she couldnât cross [the border], so she said, âIâm here
now, and here Iâm going to be something else. Iâm not going to be
gringo, Iâm not going to be an indigenous Oaxacan because Iâm not in
Oaxaca though I have my roots there, and Iâm not going to be Mexican.
Iâm going to be something else.â But she wasnât comfortable with this,
and she asked, âSo if thatâs how it is, that Iâm not anything, do I have
a place in the Other Campaign or not?â We think this is the problem of
identity, when one says, âWho am I? â And they skim the yellow pages
thinking, letâs see, my referent should be here somewhere. Yet it
doesnât occur to them that this referent doesnât exist, that it must be
constructed. The problem is not if someone is African or North American
or Mexican, but rather that one is constructing their own identity and
that they define themselves: âI am this!â The basic element of the
notion of indigenous peoples determined by the National Indigenous
Congress (CNI) in the San Andres Accords, is that indigenous are those
who self-proclaim themselves indigenous, who self-identify as
indigenous. Thereâs no DNA test, no blood test, no test of cultural
roots; to be indigenous it is enough to say so. And thatâs how we
recognize ourselves, the CNI says.
There is no referent in these realities, above all in marginalized
sectors, which have been stripped of everything, or have been offered
cultural options that donât satisfy themâbecause this happens a lot to
young people, no? Because one says, âIf the option of rebellion is what
the mass media offers, between Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, then
Iâll make my own rebellion.â Or, âIs this the only way to be rebellious
or unruly? Or can I create my own way?â And they start to construct an
identity, and they form small collectives, and they say, âWho are we? We
are...â whatever they call themselves. [And when someone asks] âBut you
guys, what are you, anarchists, communists, Zapatistas?â [They answer]
âNo, weâre such and such collective.â
We think that with regard to communities and collectives, this is going
to arise. The world that we are going to construct has no reason to use
former national identities or the construction of a nation as a
referent. If some group in a North American city constructs its own
identity and says, âI am whatever-they-call-it,â maybe not even a
recognized name, then a community in Southeast Mexico can do the same
thing, to say weâre not indigenous Tzeltales or Tzotziles, weâre
indigenous Zapatistas. We constructed that identity. Now [that identity]
is not something that we grant, nor something that we belong to. It is a
new identity, though there may be elements of, I am a woman, I am a
young person, I am indigenous, and I am a soldier, in the case of an
insurgenta,[24] for example.
Itâs the same for the indigenous woman in New York. Her husband hits her
and she canât even report it because the police can deport her instead
of protecting her. She says, I have this reality and here I am going to
construct my identity, and it has to do with the fact that I am
indigenous, that I come from Oaxaca, with the reality that I suffer as a
woman, that I am undocumented, that I work in a restaurant. And her
children are going to have an identity that has to do with all this but
is different still. In all of the groups that are on the North American
border, the southern border with Mexico, there are some that say, âWeâre
Chicanos,â others that say, âWeâre Mexicans,â others that say, âWeâre
not Mexicans or Chicanos or North Americans, weâre....â And they give
themselves a name. And this is our identity, and these are our cultural
forms, and we dress like this and we talk like this, and this is our
music and our art. And they begin to construct their own civilization,
and just like a civilization their existence doesnât depend on history
books with references to the Roman civilization or the Aztec or
whatever, but rather that there is a relationship in a community, a
self-identity, a cultural, artistic, economic development.
So we say that in this reality that you mention and explain, where you
all live and work, the surest thing is that these people create their
own identity, and that thereâs no reason for us to pressure them to
define themselves: âAre you Mexican or arenât you?â There remains this
problem of, âAm I in the Sixth International or am I in the Other
Campaign?â Well, wherever you want to be! And they say, âWell the thing
is, Iâm from the Other Side.â Well yes but no, this doesnât matter. We
think what has to be done in these cases is not so much talk to the
people, but listen to them. And with questions and everything, they
start to draw their profile. And [they begin] to say, âWell, I donât
identify as Mexican. I donât identify as African. I donât identify as
North American. I have these characteristics of all of them, but I also
have these others, so Iâm going to call myself...â And they give
themselves a name, like the Chicanos gave themselves a name. The problem
isnât existence; itâs identity. Because theyâre going to exist whether
or not they are named. The problem is how this identity relates within
itself, between those that identify as such, and how this identity
relates to others. This is the relation that we want to construct, the
new world, where these identities have a place, not just that they are
there, but the way in which we relate to them.
Beyond the deterritorialization of the population or the reconstruction
of the nation, the Zapatistas have said that now is the moment in which
we need concrete forms of transnational organization and resistance. How
do you imagine a possible intersection or possible seamlessness between
the practical work of the Intergalactic and the entity of a future
Mexican nation? For example, in forms of citizenship or labor
regulations; one thing we have been thinking about is the free movement
of people with a citizenship that applies to the same boundaries as the
North Atlantic Free Trade Association. As part of the Other Campaign,
what would the EZLN think with respect to these possibilities?
This isnât defined yet. In reality, the majority of people in the Sixth
are also in the Other, looking for their place. The moment will arrive
when they will say, this is my place. But it is also evident that
someone who has their historic horizon in Europe will think of different
things from someone with their historic horizon in Australia, or
Guatemala, or Belize, or Bolivia, Ecuador, or whatever part of the
world, Russia. They are going to construct their identity and
perspective, their own historic horizon. The new world for a European in
the Spanish state means one thing. For the Russian it means another. For
a North American it means another. For the indigenous something else,
and it varies like that. But what doesnât exist is what you mentioned
before we started, the space to meet each other, to come into contact,
to get to know each other. What guarantees us that the reality that the
European woman constructs has a relation with that reality lived by a
North American who doesnât know what she is, or with that lived by a
woman in the mountains of the Mexican Southeast, if thereâs no space for
this? Or if only space is solidarity on the border with charity. That
is, I remember that you exist when theyâre killing you, when youâre
dying. In what moment are we going to construct a relationship of
respect? This is what we are trying to do in the Other. Yes, we ask to
be supported, but we can also give support, even within our poverties
and limitations. That is why we sent corn and other goods out to others.
Weâre not just here to receive; we are an organization, and we can also
give.
In this space, the European from the Spanish state, from the Basque
state letâs say, to make it an even more conflictive place, is going to
contribute her idea with the woman in New York who is a migrant but is
not Mexican and is not American even though she has her papers, with the
woman who is part of the Good Government Council in a Zapatista
community, with the Seri woman on the coast of Sonora. Each person is
going to start to say, âFor me, my world is this way,â and theyâre going
to start constructing it and the other is going to learn. Not just to
have the ideas, like Moy (Lieutenant Colonel Moises) explained, who said
that when people talk to each other they begin to get ideas, and to
understand each otherâs ideas. Not just this but also to create paths,
coming and going, to meet each other.
What is the basic proposition of a dialogue? A common place to speak and
listen? No. No, because this is only possible if there is already a
stable bridge of communication, a common language. No, the basic
proposition of a dialogue is to recognize the existence of the other, to
respect them, to say, s/he is other, and I am going to relate to the
other, discarding beforehand, not even thinking that s/he has to be like
me, or that I will make him/her my way. Like we always say, âThe thing
is he wants to do it his way,â and thatâs where things get screwed up
and cause fights and so on. Rather, it must be, this one is different,
this other, as I am different. If the problem is no longer who commands,
or who makes everyone else do whatever, then we can go on to something
else. Because even when there is similarity in the language, or
understanding, thereâs no common path because there is no respect, even
if weâre speaking the same language.
So the basic point that the Other Campaign and the Sixth International
try to resolve is this: What place will each person have? And each
person will decide that for themselves. The most likely, within the
Sixth, is that people say, âWe are other,â and they do an Other thing,
and this is what it is about, that everyone goes about generating
movement. But in this trajectory they are getting to know each other and
in the process creating bridges. And the same thing will happen as what
happened in the Other Campaign, where the path of the Sixth Commission
was the pretext so that others got to know each other, and began to
construct bridges and to relate to each other. These relationships are
maintained and will continue whether or not the Other exists. The Other
could disappear or fail or change names, but this bridge that the
NĂĄhuatl of Jalisco made with the Comcaâac and with the Seris of Sonora,
that doesnât have anything to do with us anymore. We were the pretext
for them to meet, so they could arrange for our visit. But now theyâve
met each other. Theyâve heard each other: âThings are really messed up
here.â âHere too, we should get together.â
When the Meeting in Defense of Water and Mother Earth took place in
Mezcala, in the edge of the Chapala Lagoon in Jalisco near Guadalajara,
the Yaquis came. This is a group that generally would very rarely meet
with others, not just with mestizos, but also other indigenous groups,
because they are a tribe that has grown from battling other tribes. All
of the tribes of the North are warriors, because they were attacked by
the Apaches and the Comanches, the Mexicaneros, by everyone. But they
began to meet, now not dependent upon what the Other Campaign says or if
the Sixth Commission convokes them. The problem is not going to be how
the Sixth International relates to what comes out of the Other Campaign,
but rather, what is the place that we are going to construct all
together? And it probably wonât have anything to do with what we see
now. If the Other Campaign that you see nowâa transnational movement
already, because already it is more than a national entityâis different
from what you saw in September of 2005 here in this very place in La
Garrucha [where the early meetings and plenaries of the Sixth
Declaration were held in the fall of 2005], if it changed that much in
one yearâit changed protagonists, it changed its objective, it changed
its voice, it changed its horizon, it changed its pace, it changed its
company, now we are all others, we became ourselves, who we are now,
along the wayâthen just think, the same thing could happen in the rest
of the world and the rest of the country.
There is something that today we call âGeneration â94â: young people in
the majority but also people of all ages, who had their political
education in Chiapas or via Zapatista discourse and practice
communicated through informational networks. These people, or this
network, have made, politically, something like a Zapatista diaspora,
which has had a profound and reciprocal effect with other movements and
spaces: the alter-global movement, the World Social Forum and the
regional forums, for example, in a Left that is young, global, and
committed to making an âother politics,â in organizing itself without
doing the politics of politicians. The impact from our perspective has
been deep and strong. What has been the effect in Zapatista territory of
these interchanges and of the birth of what could be called a diasporic
Zapatismo?
First of all, it may be what is least seen but it is also what is most
felt here inside. Almost since the very beginning, the presence of all
these groups removed from our struggle the horizon of fundamentalism. An
organization that is 99.9999% indigenous has always the temptation of
becoming a race movement, especially in the Mexican Southeast, where the
mestizo has cultivated hate and resentment in the indigenous for
centuries. So in the moment when a fundamentally indigenous organization
comes into the light of day, and with great strengthâand Iâm not
referring to the media impact in other countries, but rather how we saw
ourselves here, we saw that we are many and we are organized and we can
do all of thisâits immediate horizon is to become a race movement, that
is, a fundamentalism, convert-ing the Zapatista movement into a movement
against another race (indigenous against mestizos, or between races, the
Tzeltales against the Tzotziles, Tzotziles against... and so on). So
this shared interchange, this give and take with what you all call
âGeneration â94,â immediately opens for us a new horizon and takes us
out of this fundamentalist risk. Now, we never suggested that! I mean
that it is a risk that I for one saw, that the moment was going to
arrive when they say, take out the light-skinned ones because theyâre
light-skinned... and of course there are historical arguments which back
up [the idea] that from there comes the pain.
So the appearance of these people and this form of relating to people of
other colors and other cultures opens the world to us without our
moving. We become able to see the rest of the world and other cultures
like no one else has been able to, I think, without moving from our
communities, because of these people who came from other places. This
âtalk to me,â this âshow yourself to me,â to us as indigenous, was
unknown. We would have said, âWho is going to want to listen to us and
who is going to want to look at us?â And it turns out that all over the
world there is this generation like you say that wanted to see us and
listen to us. So we began to listen and to speak and to show ourselves
and to see others. We began to see the rest of the world through a whole
bunch of windows that were these young people that came to us all this
time. And whether we wanted it to or not, this had a beneficial effect
on us, because, without losing our indigenous essence, because we are on
our own court, in our territory, we can see everyone else without losing
our identity. This opens our horizon and changes us; it makes us
understand, in an almost natural pedagogical process, sui generis, that
the world goes far beyond our noses, however big our noses may be. And
that this world is much bigger, richer, better and worthwhile.
So there is the impact that this interchange produces on the outside,
which is what you have pointed out in the question. But what it produces
inside is, first, it eliminates from us the possibility of
fundamentalism. If not, you would have here a war like in the Balkans,
first between mestizos, then between groups, between indigenous peoples,
between Tzeltales and Tzotziles, later between communities and between
valleys, and so on, because that is how history has gone. The survival
of the EZLN has to do with the fact that we didnât fall into this, and
we still havenât. All this has to do with the fact that these other
people came to us, that we were able to see out, and these other worlds
made our hearts big. And a big heart is not capable of stinginess. To be
stingy, to be petty, to be egotistical, you must have a very small
heart, and the Zapatista indigenous communities donât. And this is why,
because of this contact, they have been able to construct.
So this generation that comes after the uprising, our new generation,
which I talked about one time to say that there is a new generation and
it is better than we are... the thing is, this generation already has
this richness. Itâs not a generation that was formed in the mountains,
which is where we were trainedâisolated, in very difficult living
conditions, barely scratching out a survival. But [the new generation]
grew up in the resistance itself, in rebellion, but always in contact
with others with another horizon. When we were in the mountains, we were
on the socialist path. We came out into public light knowing that there
was now no referent for this, that these movements were finished, that
even armed struggle was done. And these compañeros and compañeras that
were children when we rose up in arms, grew up. They became adolescents,
teenagers, young people, adults, in this world that is now much bigger,
despite the fact that it is still their community.
If before 1994 a woman in this house would say, âI havenât even been to
Ocosingo. Iâve never been away from here,â and she would have this
temptation to go to Ocosingo, and later to San Cristobal, and then
Tuxtla, and then to Mexico City, that would be something else. The
generation that is now governing in the autonomous municipalities, which
makes up the Good Government Councils and the middle commands of the
EZLN, they donât have this problem. They grew up in their communities
but they have seen the world through all this we are talking about,
through these people. Because it is not the same thing, for example, to
see Italy on a National Geographic television program as to see Italy
through the stories of the people who are struggling in Italy. Itâs not
the same to see the United States of North America through the
declarations of Bush, when he manages to say something coherent, which
is seldom, as it is to see the people organizing themselves there,
people struggling, working, most of all the communications media which
are the ones who come here most. You see the world differently. So you
could take the same journey that we have just taken following a tourist
guide and you would say no, this doesnât have anything to do with what I
saw. The Mexico that we saw has nothing to do with tourist Mexico. Well
in the same way, the world that we [Zapatistas] were able to see had
nothing to do with the geographic world, or with the world you study in
school. It had to do with these people who struggle.
So these are two great achievements, or advantages, or learnings we have
been given by this âGeneration â94ââto avoid fundamentalisms, and to
form together this new generation which is the one that created autonomy
here. All that shined just now in the encounter between Zapatista
peoples and peoples of the world is a product of that generation, not of
us.
This generation, repressed by a capitalism that does not recognize its
reality and bored with the tactics and proposals of a left with no
relation to its world, has found something that interpolates it in the
GeografĂa Revuelta[25] [Scrambled Geography], the Calen-dario
Confundido,[26] [Confused Calendar], the identity of el pinguino[27]
[the Penguin], in the Pueblo Girafa[28] [Giraffe People], in an
institutional irreverence but a great personal respect...
There is something here that we recognize, if not explicitly then
intuitively, as the rejection of the imposition of a universal measure
of value, that is, capitalism. This generation has launched a diversity
of projects and ideas of self-valorization, in concrete projects but
also in terms of a general understanding of what it means to say, âvamos
por todoâ [weâre going for everything], or âpara todos todoâ [everything
for everyone], or, as weâve now seen grafittied on walls all over the
world, âWe Want Everything.â
This desire has developed within the Fourth World War, within the
globalized market, the nation-state as storefront in the world mall,
within the fragmentation of globalization. And these people, this
generation, they are everywhere.
Many that have opposed the movement of this political generation, the
movement of movements, still insist that there is not a general
discontent with the effects and programs of neoliberalism. Anyone
speaking sincerely would have to conclude that the Other Campaign in
Mexico has made this conclusion impossible. That is, in all the places
visited by the Other Campaign, one constant was found: resistance to the
devastating consequences of capitalism. For us, one of the undeniable
virtues of the Other Campaign has been the task of putting these
resistances in circulation, making them visible. However, it is a second
idea announced by the EZLN and demonstrated in the Other Campaign that
most calls our attention: the idea that resistance alone is not enough
to change our situation. Taking into account that the EZ has been very
clear that the Other Campaign is not a call for armed struggle, and
using the experiences that the Other Campaign has found this past year,
what do you imagine beyond resistance? Rebellion? Constituent power? A
massive civil insurrection?
It has to do with the parameter in which things are valued. In reality,
what is the criteria people are using when they say there isnât a
universal sentiment of discontent with regards to neoliberalism? Why?
Because the governments are neoliberal governments, because leftist
parties do not arise. So these are considered indicators to say that the
people are not discontent, that if they were they would demonstrate
their discontent. No. We say that the people are discontent, but we
donât have paths [for change], or we donât have satisfactory paths. If,
in Mexico or the North American Union, to be a rebel is to be part of
the Democratic Party, well a lot of people are going to say, âHmm, no. I
think Iâll just stay where I am.â If in Mexico that means being part of
the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), a lot of people are going to
say no. [The choice is] youâre either a Democrat or a terrorist, or in
favor of armed struggle. And in the face of this farce of a dichotomy,
many people say, âNo, Iâm not a Democrat and Iâm not for armed struggle
or violent action, or even direct action.â
So then they say, âWell that means these people are very conservative,
conformist, or they are not being affected by neoliberalism.â When
really what is happening is that we need another way that has nothing to
do with the radical Left of armed struggle, or with the reformist left
of the electoral realm. We think that this discontent and inconformity
exists across the world, and that you have to find it. It doesnât have
one channel of expression, or the channels of expression that exist do
not satisfy it. And in the case of young people, who are the majority of
the world population, this is exactly what is happening. Not even the
parameters of fashion, or musical style, or artistic forms can encompass
this. Thatâs why new movements, new musical generations arise, because
people donât identify with one or the other, so they create another and
then another, and this one is co-opted, and so they make another and yet
another, and thatâs how it goes.
So we think that if this path of inconformity isnât constructed, well
everyone will go about constructing their own ways of manifesting it,
but we will continue to lack the place of encounter. That is why we say,
this isnât about constructing a world rebellion. That already exists.
Itâs about constructing the space where this rebellion encounters
itself, shows itself, begins to know itself. To those that say there
isnât discontent in the American Union, the thing is there is, but we
canât see it. Or we canât see it because it doesnât show itself. And it
doesnât show itself because it has no place to do so.
In this situation, we think that in this âwe want everything,â there is
above all a valorization, how do I put it, not of personal capacity, but
of a willingness to take risks. In 1994 in the dialogues in the
cathedral, the government representatives told us, âThe thing is, youâre
asking a lot.â And we said, âThose who are willing to die for their
demands have the right to ask for everything.â That is when one begins
to ask, how much is life worth? What life do I want? And this is what
itâs about, right? We said resistance is not enough. Resistance may be
sufficient to detain the enthusiasm of neoliberal destruction, but we
would need a global resistance, an effort of such force that you have to
ask, âIf we already have this much strength, plus excess, why am I going
to settle for stopping here?â Because this is the problem, right?
Because between âsomethingâ and âwe want everythingâ... Yes, we want not
to die, agreed. But in order not to die, we need a force of such
strength that we arrive at the question, the place of not dying is the
desire to live like this. How? I donât know. However each person
determines. And the answer is different from one place to the next.
We think that this movement has to encompass the international network
of resistances, but even with this strength of force we must ask, is it
only about this, that the army stays away from me, that Iâm not harassed
as a woman, that Iâm not criminalized as a young person, that Iâm not
attacked as an indigenous person? Or is it about, now with this
strength, I can conquer and create my own identity as a woman? Because
the problem with a woman saying,
âItâs enough if they just leave me alone,â is that another woman may
say, âThat isnât enough! I have other aspirations. And that theyâre
supposed to be praised because they arenât raping or beating me, well
no. I want more.â Itâs the same with indigenous people. Young people,
too. So when this is put on the table, one begins to ask, âWhat am I
capable of? How far can I go?â Because the politician is always going to
tell you, âUp to here, no further,â or, âOkay, there, thatâs
sufficient,â or, âThis is progress, and if you donât accept this, youâre
going to lose everything.â
Because one thing is that itâs not armed struggle, and another thing is
that itâs not non-violent. One example is the APPO. In Oaxaca, there was
not armed struggle, but there was violence, on both sides. And this
popular violence, I donât condemn it. On the contrary, I salute how they
confronted the Federal Preventative Police and defeated them numerous
times. And many have advised and are advising them [the Oaxacan
resistance], and this is the dispute over the movement in Oaxaca, that
they should stop where theyâre at, that they have made significant
progress, they achieved some things, and that now they should try to get
a few prisoners out and leave it at that. But the kids, the young
people, men and women, the ones who maintained the movement, they are
saying, âWhy?â And here lies the issue. âWhy am I going to settle for
Ulises Ruiz stepping down and someone else the same steps in? Why donât
I ask at this point, who do we want to be the government? Or why donât I
ask if weâre going to have a government?â Some-body said, I think it was
a drawing that said, âThey are trying to obligate us to govern. We wonât
fall into the trap!â That is, they want us to be like them.
And when this is what is put on the table, imagine this at the national
and global level: why are we going to settle with saying, well okay,
good enough that the capitalists just donât destroy nature completely.
Weâre going to make laws so they canât contaminate the rivers, destroy
the beaches, the air, and all of this. But, why do we have to settle for
there being capitalists at all? That is the next question. We could
demand that they give us good salaries, or that prices not be so high,
or that they donât manufacture such trash. But why does there have to be
someone that does this? Why donât we do it ourselves? Even the most
radical leftist sectors in Mexico, the non-electoral Left, said, âthe
truth is we hadnât even asked these questions. We were talking about the
taking of power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, but we never put
on the table that everything just belongs to the people.â
This is what we are doing here in Zapatista territory. We didnât rise up
in arms to say, âOkay, letâs ask for better salaries from the plantation
owners.â No! We said, âWe are not going to die anymore and we are going
to run off the plantation owners and keep the land ourselves.â Are we
going to ask that they give us a good municipal president? No! The
municipal president has to go and weâre going to make our own
government. It is this force, not personal strength, not âIâm strong
because I do exercise,â but I am strong because I am willing to offer
this, risk this, in the struggle. We think that in the Other Campaign,
the Zapatistas are strong because we risked everything. And we challenge
everyone else: and you, what will you risk? And weâll see the size of
the risks, and thus the size of the demands, and the [size of the] fear,
of each person.
So this is what we say: if it is great movements that have recently
turned over governments and opened the possibility for change in a
place, even if that [change] hasnât been concretized, those movements in
the last few decades have not been armed struggles. But neither have
they been non-violent. In the cases of Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina,
these werenât armed struggles but neither were they struggles of âflower
power.â There were confrontations, there were clashes, fighting that
resulted in injured and dead on both sides. And we think this is what
must be done. But this is the problem, the problem of, for what? There
are some that say, âIn order to create a party,â and others that say,
âNo, in order to change society.â This is the great difference. And this
is what those who are lobbying for the Other Campaign to join forces
with Lopez Obradorâs movement donât understand. Itâs not the same thing!
They want to change presidents, to switch governments. We donât want the
government. We want another country, another world.
To give us a framework of the âweâ that you already are, can you explain
the organization of the MAREZ [Rebel Zapatista Autonomous
Municipalities] and their relationship to the military structure of the
EZLN? How many autonomous municipalities exist? How many people live in
these municipalities? What are the basic functions of these
municipalities?
All of this is born with the First Declaration of the LacandĂłn Jungle,
which says that the EZLN will advance and liberate the territories over
which it advances from the oppressor government and will implant
civilian, just, free, democratically chosen governments. This doesnât
happen. But in December of 1994, almost a year after the uprising, the
autonomous municipalities were created, though still very dependent on
the military structure, because at that time, we [the EZLN] were
stationary there. We were in the territory where we formed, but now
there was going to be a civilian government, not from the official
government, but of civilians from the communities.
But as an organization very tied to the political-military apparatus,
the political-military apparatus was carrying out governmental
functions, the organizational part, but it continued to be a
hierarchical structure. Itâs not that the military officers of the
insurgents give orders, but the committees do, which are the
political-organizational commands. So during this time, the committee
that should organize the people and represent the organization to the
outside is carrying out governmental functions. We began to see justice
issues, agrarian distribution problems for example, but all of this kind
of stayed as âweâll see,â because we didnât yet know how the dialogues
were going to turn out. When it became clear that these werenât going
anywhere, or at least that it was going to take a long time, the
autonomous governments were installed. But we also began to see an
unbalanced development in the regions. Where the commanding officers
were closest to operations in a region, the development was slower, and
where the officers were further, the development was faster. Because the
distance of the military command obligated them, like Moy explained, to
resolve their problems. I mean, between âletâs go ask the command what
to doâ and âwe have problems here and we have to resolve them,â in one
of these they start resolving their own problems.
So the first characteristic that arose was how they [the autonomous
governments] would be named. This falls to tradition: the assembly named
them. And these are very local governments, geographically very local.
They didnât manage resources or projects or anything else at the
beginning. They were just in charge of resolving community problems in
their own community, like land disputes or land distributionâbecause
remember that we took over lands [in the uprising] and now it had to be
decided how they would be distributed. Later, as the organization of the
autonomous municipalities advanced, we began to see that precisely where
we werenât directly involved, the comandantes and comandantas, is where
there was the most progress. The place where there was the most progress
at that time was in Amparo Agua Tinta, which is almost to the southern
border, far from all the other zones, in the zone of La Realidad but
remote. This municipality, in 1998, four years after the uprising,
already had a civil record. That is, they were able to have civil
marriages, which no other municipality did. The others are just starting
to now, at that time they only had religious marriages, and Agua Tinta
was doing it then. They had civil marriages, public registers of births,
deaths, and official appointments/duties, with a minimal paperwork to
keep records. They were governing and giving an identity to the people,
resolving problems. And this began to develop gradually into programs of
education and health, though still very much in the mode where people
from outside would come to give medicines or provide medical
consultations and so on.
So as the EZLN began to delink itself from the labors of civil
governance, the municipalities advanced and developed. The EZLN at that
time was receiving international aid and sending it out as it saw fit;
it wasnât of course for the EZLN in any case, but we were still deciding
where it went and for what, because at that time the only person that
knew the situation was the military commander for that region. This was
who knew the territory, knew where things were the worst and where aid
must be sent. And this was almost always material aid, like clothes,
supplies, etc., when things were really bad. Later people began to offer
productive projects and then the military commander began to say, well,
now I donât know. And so the autonomous authorities said, well, thatâs
us. And the autonomous municipalities began to grow, but still very
unevenly. So the order was given that we [the EZLN] should back out of
this part completely to see if the development would even out. And yes,
after the order was given for military commanders not to get involved in
civil decisions, things did even out more or less in the different zones
and the compañeros were obligated to make the decisions. Because if
youâre asking âHey what do I do,â and the answer is âI donât know,â then
they have to decide themselves.
Later we had the problem of the land. There are about 32 autonomous
territories. Between Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas that recognize the
autonomous authorities, there would be around 300,000 indigenous
personsâmen, women, and children, Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas. So this
relation develops and the issue comes up of what goes on between one
municipality and another in the same zone. And the history that Moy
tells is how the first society of autonomous municipalities formed,
which was in the Tojolobal zone. Four autonomous municipalities say
okay, weâre going to start projects that work for all four of us and
unite the strength of all four of us. They start with a warehouse for
corn, which is what they produce there, because there, the coyote comes
and buys cheap and then sells high. So [the municipalities] say, âWe
need a warehouse where we can store and sell at a better price, and the
coyote can go to hell.â So the four municipalities get together, make
the warehouse, and the coyote has to pay the warehouse price or go home
without any corn.
This turns out well there and so we say, what we have to do is
coordinate according to zones, and this is where things really begin to
even out. Because thereâs also this problem that before, the autonomous
municipalities only governed Zapatistas; only the Zapatista support
bases recognized them. But as this structure develops, people that are
not Zapatistas also begin to recognize them as their legitimate
government. So we said, weâre an organization for Zapatistas, but the
government isnât just for Zapatistas. It should be for anyone who wants
it. So the Good Government Councils are created to resolve problems
between Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas. And Non-Zapatistas is different
from anti-Zapatistas; these people arenât Zapatistas, but neither are
they against us. So they recognize the government and they want to work
with this government but they are not part of us. So this mediating role
develops. Later [the Good Government Councils] function also to
distribute projects and to serve as another interlocutor for civil
society. Because before, this was always done through the military
commanders. You had to talk to the military command in order to propose
or talk about a project. So now in each zone people could talk directly
with the local authorities.
The next challenge was how to make a team, a Zapatista political system.
[The communities] said, they canât be permanent positions. They have to
be rotating, just like in the autonomous municipalities. And it canât be
that someone steps out of one position and steps into another. They have
to go back and work the land because this is what guarantees that the
political class is not corrupted, that there isnât a political class! So
what happens is that every week or every 15 days, depending on the Good
Government Council, the council changes. And this is a mess for the
people that come from outside because they make an agreement with one
council and later when they get there itâs already another council. But
for the people it has meant the demystification of the labor of
governing. So every now and then Mrs. Tortilla-maker says, âpretty soon
Iâm going to be the government and then after a little bit Iâm going
back to making tortillas.â So itâs one more job to do; itâs not being
the boss. Not here. Here the problem isnât going to be who rules. The
problem is the relationship that you build. Even though this frustrates
those of you that come from outside and talk to one authority and later
they change authorities on you, for us it has served us well. And that
has been what has really launched the autonomous municipalities.
And the last element that I would add is this generation that grew.
Apart from the delinking of the political-military apparatus, apart from
the fact that this allowed for the recuperation of the traditional
customs and practices for choosing governance democratically, for
resolving problems via dialogue and consensus and so on, apart from the
fact that the positions and responsibilities are rotating in order to
prevent corruption or that it is detected rapidly, apart from all of
this, the generation that were children during the uprising grew up with
autonomous education, health, and have begun to hold delegated positions
in the autonomous municipalities. But they are Others. They arenât the
ones that rose up in arms. They are the ones that grew up in the
resistance.
And the rotating and the length of turns are decided at the regional
level?
Yes, by zone really. That is, letâs say the Tzeltal people of the Jungle
zone, which is this one, have one rhythm. The Tzeltal people in the zone
of Altamirano have another. The Tzotzil people of the Highlands have
another. Everybody decides for themselves the length of the [governing]
turns. This has to do with how they see themselves, how long they need
to learn, the distance they have to travel in order to trade off, the
cycles of each autonomous municipality, because the Good Government
Councils come out of the autonomous municipalities. And the
municipalities come from the communities, and thatâs how everything
rotates.
The autonomous education and health systems also vary by zone?
Yes, health, education, and also agrarian issues, the problem of land.
Because there are places that distribute in some ways and others in
other ways, and there are places that donât have land, like the
Highlands. But the education system in one zone like Roberto Barrios is
decided there by the Chol people, and it doesnât have anything to do
with La Realidad, which is Tojolobal.
There is another reverberation between movements that is seen and heard
in the masks, in the âbehind us we are you,â of the Zapatistas which has
been converted into the, âthe other is Iâ of the Piqueteros,[29] in the
recuperation of the âI am weâ of the Black Panthers in the US in the
70âs, in the âWe are all Atenco/ We are all Oaxacaâ of the current Other
Campaign, and in the âWe are all others!â of the other loves[30] and the
transsexual community, adherents of the Sixth Declaration. This has been
one of the most important lessons Zapatismo has given us, the challenge
to the figure of the individual author, the individual subject, and
individual production. And in combination with movements and
contemporary tendencies like copyleft and the piracy cooperatives of
artistic, communicative, and informational material, we are teaching
each other that stories are collective, style is a communal production,
and ideas are the accumulation of the histories and experiences of many.
However, in many parts of the world, including Mexican society, the
individualist subject is a very big obstacle to organization, and while
in many places people have learned to think and produce in cooperation,
it is still very hard for us dream collectively. How have the Zapatistas
seen this paradox, if you see it that way?
We think that the only real guarantee of individuality, of subjectivity,
is the collective. The problem is how the collective relates to its
parts: if it is imposing a hegemony or respecting these differences.
Just like this collective demands respect from other collectives in a
larger movement, it must deal with the same issue among its parts. The
fact that in the Other Campaign there are thousands of individuals does
not mean that they donât have a group. It means that no group has
satisfied them, that in no group have they felt respected in their
individuality. Letâs say that half of those more than 3,000 individuals
are spies or police or whatever, and that the other 1,500 are authentic.
Well those 1,500 could be the biggest collective yet if they all got
together. But they havenât found a space where they feel like, âI, as an
individual with my faults and my strengths and my defects have a place,
and I am going to be respected.â They may think that Zapatismo isnât
going to include them, but it is going to open a space and it will not
forget them. We think that it is just a question of time before they
understand that it is in collective where our problems can be resolved.
But the worlds offered are not the only ones possible. It may be that
the collectives that appear are not the only ones possible, that maybe
another must be made. In fact, many collectives are confronting this
problem. They are coming apart, not because of political difference, but
because there is no space for their individuality.
And the individual-individual, well no! This doesnât exist! It is a myth
of capitalism. Individualism in reality is the negation of the
individuality of subjectivity. We think that it is in the Other
Campaign, this huge collective, where these individuals are finding an
identification. [They say,] âIâm not willing to join this or that, but I
am willing to do such and such for this cause, and this is the space to
do it. I paint, I sing, but Iâm not going to any meetings.â Or, âI sing
well, I paint well, or I make recordings or I hand out fliers or I set
up a table, but Iâm not going to do anything else. I donât want to go to
meetings to listen to speeches or any of that. But this great space
guarantees me that my individual action will become collective in a
cause.â
This is what we need to convince the rest of the world. The fact that
the only place where you can be yourself, whatever you consider that to
be, is in a collective that guarantees you that respect and where you
guarantee respect in return. In this case, your commitment is not to an
organizational structure but to a cause. Now, if I am in a cause and in
an organizational structure as well, then I commit myself to respect
their decision-making processes, their way of working in collective, and
there are people who donât go for that. What theyâre interested in is
that their efforts enter into a cause. But even so, we think that the
world that we are dreaming, in this great society of societies, the
great collective of collectives that will be the world, only there can
the individual be, without this crisis of identity of, âWho am I?â and
âWhere am I going?â knowing always that they have all the liberty to
decide and create who they are and want to be. And that is what does not
exist now.
Many have asked you for your analysis of the current national situation.
We want to take this opportunity to ask also about the political moment
currently lived at the global level. Here we have in mind a few things
in particular: first, the war in Iraq, which from any perspective is a
failure, and Bushâs subsequent power and popularity plummet in the US;
two, the taking of power of various self-proclaimed leftist or
progressive governments in Latin America; and third, the political and
economic growth of various previously considered marginalized countries,
as is the case with China, or India, or Brazil. How do you see these
phenomena? Do you see in them, or outside of them, any hopeful signals?
What could be the starting point to analyze these phenomena from a
perspective from below?
All empires, or all of the great world oppressions, seemed invincible up
to the eve of their fall. The Roman Empire, for example, the Nazis in
Germany, and now that of North America, or more generally of
neoliberalism, as we call this stage of capitalism. The fact that more
and more frequently war is resorted to, in order to defeat what was
before defeated by an influx of capital, hides the fact that the science
is the same. When the Iraq war started, a leftist intellectual, well,
they say leftist, Regis Debray, of France, said, âHow stupid the North
Americans are. They could have overturned Hussein and conquered Iraq by
making them loans.â The International Monetary Fund could give the
loans, indebt the country, do what it has done in other countries, and
it will have Iraq and the entire Middle East on their knees. But Mr.
Debray and the European intellectuals were forgetting that war is
essential to capitalism, that destruction is essential to capitalism.
War is an industry that generates profit for capitalism. In this case,
it wasnât about dominating Iraq; it was about generating profit. And the
form to generate profit was with a war.
Like in Vietnam, like in other places, the North American government has
realized that neither military tech-nology nor the number of men
available is important in order to conquer a territory. That it is only
possible to conquer it completely if it destroys that territory
completely, and total destruction is not in [the USâ] plans at this
point. So it turns out that it isnât enough to get rid of Hussein and
the Iraqi army, but that they would have to get rid of the entire Iraqi
population in order to defeat the resistance. So where the large
companies are already installed, those that arrived behind the North
American army, they say, wait a minute, where is the market? A desert
market of buyers and sellers is of no use to me, not even as a
production base; weâre going to have to import from everywhere, workers
yes, but also the buyersâproducers and buyers. At which point we get to
this absurd logic of capitalism where you have to make war to make
profit and then stop the war so that the profits come through, and this
is reaching its limit in Iraq, if you look at it from above.
In the case of the other colossus that is arising, which is what is
putting the gringos on alert, it turns out that the expansion of Chinese
society is generating a market worth millions, and everyone is asking
themselves, who is going to build these houses? Who is going to feed
these people? Who is going to dress these millions of Chinese? The
Chinese government plans to concentrate the population, because it is so
large, in great metropolises. Magnificent idea some say, but others say,
who will be the firm contracted to build these metropolises? Because
thatâs where the profit will be. And making war with China is
unthinkable, because itâs not just the territory but also the people! So
they [the North Americans] say, here we are all tangled up in Iraq and
the market is over there, and the Europeans are there and the Japanese
are there and the whole world is saying that over there is this great
mass of people that needs someone to sell them things, because the
Chinese donât have that. They [China] are saying, âWho wants to come
sell?â And everyone is saying, âVamonos!â It is a market infinitely
superior to that which opened when the Soviet Union fell, when all of a
sudden the North Americans said, âBingo!â And they began to come in and
it turned out much better than if they had defeated the Soviet Union
militarily, because the market stayed intact, that is, the producers and
the consumers.
So, broadly speaking, we see all this. And in neoliberalism, the fight
is for the market. It doesnât matter what is destroyed in the process:
the fundamental logic is profit. So when a war produces profit, they are
going to make war. When stopping war makes profit, they are going to
stop the war. But on the other side are the tendencies that are below,
subterranean, disperse. Evidently, the Ford Directory of corporate
giants are not the only ones able to convince the North American
government; it also takes the Iraqi resistance movement, just like
occurred in Vietnam and in other places.
In this great struggle for the market, between these companies fighting
for the market, in this logic of profit, there is something that is
leftover, and that is the political class. [In this logic they ask],
âThese politicians from before, why do we need them? Why, if a business
can do the job better? Why do we want political parties if we can put in
the president that we want?â Because, now no one even remembers, but
Bush was installed via electoral fraud in the country that proclaims
itself the defender of democracy! A scandalous fraud at that, and
documented, provable! That is, he got to the presidency without having
the majority of the votes, of those that they counted that is. So, why
do we need the political class if we can put in the president that we
want or the government that we want? The United Nations is a place to
deposit money exempt from taxes, like a world telethon; that is the UN,
because it does absolutely nothing else. So, what do we do then with
these politicians? There the problem is that the big companies say [to
the political class]: âOkay, you guys tell us why we shouldnât sacrifice
you. Convince us youâre worthwhile.â And thus begins the dispute over
who will administer this crisis. And it turns out that the big powers
donât necessarily conform to the proposals of the Right. If there is a
proposal from the Left that guarantees them a better administration,
they go with that one.
About a decade ago, when a leftist candidate was about to winâin Uruguay
or Paraguay I think it wasâsomeone at the World Bank was asked if this
wasnât going to be a problem, especially with the tradition of
dictatorial regimes against the Left there, and the official said no! If
itâs a good administration of our political economic policy, whoever is
fine. And in effect, ever since then, for the last 10 years to date,
these governments have been taking power and have turned out to be
excellent administrators [of neoliberalism]. Lula is the best example of
the fact that a left-handed government functions better for this in
Latin America. No other country in Latin America has as many economic
successes as Brazil, economic successes for those above that is, and
this is a government supposedly of the Left. So we said, this option is
going to continue appearing here and there, and we thought it was going
to happen in Mexico. But it looks like the possibility of Lopez Obrador
in power frightened these people, and the people with the money said no,
better not. But if they had been more prudent and not so greedy...
So we see in the whole world this tendency from above to fight for
markets, not just this internal agreement in North America, but also in
the European economy once the European Union was consolidated, in the
resurgence of Japan, and now with the Chinese there saying, âHere I am,
I buy, I sell.â And [the Chinese] are calculating that whatever happens,
whoever they let in, they are moving up as a world economic power that
can sell and buy and in some moment will be decisive in the geopolitics
of that hemisphere. But on the other side are these sparks of rebellion
that appear on the national level, and that later have these great
flashes like in parts of the alter-global movement that may seem still
to be very small and dispersed but which are going to be a great world
power. But that is how history works. On the eve of the fall of the
Roman Empire, the appearance of the Barbarians here and there was
thought to be nothing to worry about. And thatâs how the Roman Empire
reacted until they realized what was happening, and by then, there was
nothing left. The problem isnât this [lack of resistance]; we think that
the problem is that in addition to constructing the network that makes
world linkage possible, world solidarity, a world network that is, when
all this begins to surge from the bottom, there must simultaneously be a
discussion and a proposal: What now? Because if we donât respond to this
question, we return to what was before.
And here I want to include a parenthesis. If Kilombo hadnât posed the
question after the movement against the war in Iraq, âWhat now? After
this, what?â they would have returned to their normal lives. They would
have went on like nothing had happened. They would be living and eating
and breathing like anybody else. It is when this question is asked, âAnd
now what? Weâre going to do this, but then what?â that the opportunity
arises for history not to repeat itself. Because if not, it seems to me
that it will repeat. You can make a global movement and take down
everything that exists now, and not offer an alternative and come back
to make something equally bad or worse. This is what has happened in the
history of the world. We canât always say that the world that comes out
of the destruction of the previous one is better. Thatâs just not true.
The world that the Spanish built wasnât better than that of the Aztecs,
which was already badâthe Aztec Empireâbecause it wasnât an alternative.
So it could be just this, a historic anecdote, everything that the
museums study, everything that was the North American Empire or the
French Empire or the British Empire, if there still is one; the problem
is if weâre not just going to make the same thing all over again. In
another interview they asked us, what is Marcosâ worst nightmare? That
nightmare would be that after all this, we would end up the same. That
we would return to being the same thing, with another name, with another
face, that the indigenous peoples in Mexico would be free at the cost of
the submission of the mestizos. That is a nightmare. That would be to
change history but only to change its protagonist and not its path. And
what we want to change is the path. That there are mestizos, indigenous,
everybody able to do their own thing, with good relationships to each
other, not one above or over the other. So the nightmare would be that
we would win and we would lose winning. Or that in winning what we
wanted, we did what we didnât want to do.
How do you see, from the perspective of the Other Campaign, the
importance of the burgeoning immigrant movement in the United States?
Did the May 1^(st) marches of last year in US cities, which were, it
must be said, the biggest one-day protests in the history of the United
States, carry some resonance for Zapatismo? What do you think could be
the foundations for a common imagination between this movement and
Zapatismo in Mexico?
To die for! This movement is the best example of the fact that things
arenât until they are. Because if you remember how the media managed
thisâall of the [Mexican] media, national but also the more leftist
onesâthe image of North America they were creating was that the people
there were worried about whether they were going to have the right to
vote or not, and for whom they were going to vote. So they were asking
if the [Mexican] Senate was going to approve the vote from the exterior,
if they were going to be able to run campaigns there. And the media
correspondents were saying, âOur compatriots in the US, the migrants,
are concerned about this. And theyâre also worried about if theyâre
going to get hit by the Minutemen, by these assassins, all this that the
Texas ranchers were doing.â And then all of a sudden they have a march,
and itâs a huge march, and everyone said, âOf course, we saw this
coming.â But itâs not true! Nobody saw it coming! There wasnât anything
that said this was going to happen.
I think the most surprised were the migrants themselves, who said,
âCabrĂłn, there are so many of us!â The reaction of Power to try to
co-opt and control as many of the visible leaders as possible, to take
the movement down, was apparently successful. I say âapparently,â
because itâs the same thing in Oaxaca. It looks like the movement is
over and it turns out that the lessons learned there stuck, or that they
continue germinating there and that they will arise again.
The problem that this great migrant movementâin all of its
differencesâbrought up is the same that the Other Campaign is
addressing. And this was summed up well by that little girl [in Tijuana]
who said, âHere we are.â The problem isnât what are they going to do
with us. The problem is that here we are and we want this. Not if weâre
leaving or if theyâre going to send us back. They have to get used to
the idea that weâre here. This is our identity, whatever that may be for
each one of us. And the world has to get used to the idea that I exist,
that here I am.
We think that there is where this bridge will be built, that this is a
great movement independent of its political affiliations and its
identities, and it has in the Other Campaign and the Sixth International
a space to encounter other realities. Because at some point, someone
always comes to us to try to get some kind of political backing in order
to hegemonize the rest of the migrant movement in the United States. And
we say, âNo, itâs not that there arenât others [in the movement]. There
are others.â âBut these others are bad,â they tell us. [And we respond],
âNo, all are migrants; it is their identity.â What they are disputing is
who has the role of interlocutor with those in power. We say weâre not
interested in who has this role, or in giving political backing to
anyone. [The Other Campaign] is the space for you to meet the indigenous
peoples who are here but who also have people on the other sideâthe
Oâodham, the Kiliwa, the Kumiai, and also the Zapatistas, the NĂĄhuatl,
the Zapotecos. This is the space where all these can meet. And this is
the space where the Zapotec from Oaxaca can say, âI am Zapotec from
Oaxaca,â and another will say, âIâm Zapotec from New York,â and so on.
And at the same moment that they are saying this, that is exactly what
we are doing. We loved it [the May 1^(st) marches], because they didnât
warn anybody! It was like January 1^(st) of 1994, when everyone said,
âWell they surprised us!â Well yes! Because everyone was looking
somewhere else. But if it was possible that tens of thousands of
indigenous in the mountains where there is no communication were
preparing an uprising for 10 years and nobody realized it, how is it
possible that hundreds of thousands of migrants in the cities, where
there is so much communication, organized this and nobody realized it?
Not the journalists, the editorialists, the analysts, not even the FBI
or the CIA! One has to say, well, if they havenât had more towers fall,
they must not have any more towers! If this is their security system!
Itâs ridiculous! How can it be that all this was being generated,
because it wasnât just 10 or 20 that came out... It seems to me that in
the American Union, a big march is 5,000, 10,000 people, that even that
is nearly unprecedented.
Or something really amazing would be the million that marched in the
people of color march in Washington years ago. But this, millions of
people, simultaneously, unprecedented... Man, what an intelligence
service! This would be cause to take down the chief, no? And instead
they gave him another job! Itâs true! They gave Bush another four years!
But oh well, these things happen in whatever part of the world....
And this is a government worried about its internal security. And this
[migrant] reality has us quite happy, because, what we were told in â94
was, âListen, you all keep it up and grow and good luck there, but the
gringos are not going to permit it. Itâs going to be like Vietnam.â And
I said, âNo, Mexico is farther from the United States than Vietnam.â
âHow?â they ask. Because weâre already there. We are inside the American
Union, and there werenât as many then [â94] as there are now. That is,
you canât just attack like that. Itâs not like you can go to the people
and say,
âLook, there are some horrible yellow Chinese that want to hurt us, and
weâre going after them.â Even when they did that, the people didnât
swallow it. And now, to say that weâre going to attack these people who
come from your same land, itâs not that easy.
So over all, this is how we saw the movement there; it made us very
happy. We laughed quite a bit at the editorialists and analysts. Because
later they wanted to say, âWell you guys didnât see it coming,â and I
told them, âNoooooo, I remember what you wrote about the migrant
movement before this march! You donât remember now?â This is what they
always say about us, that the bad thing, well, I donât know if itâs bad;
they say, âBut the thing is that the compañeros remember everything!â
And I said yes! We do remember everything! [Laughing]
Oh, and the Seris said that [about identity] too, âWeâre not part of
Mexico. We donât recognize Mexico. We are the Comcaâac nation. We are a
nation.â I guess weâll see how they do it. And why not?
Many times you have said that this movement is the greatest lesson of
love that these lands have ever seen. Another time, in Tijuana, you said
that the EZ prefers to use the word ârespectâ instead of âlove.â This
concept, love or respect, how do you conceptualize it as a political
concept, perhaps the most important political concept of our times, the
concept that lacks nothing?
What we said was that the problem of love is a problem of respect. That
love understood as possession, property, is not what we think is love.
That fundamentally a relationship, of whatever kind, not just in a
couple but between people who relate to each other, has to be based in
respect. If not, sooner or later it becomes a kind of domination or
destruction. I say that without condemning any of the healthy
perversions like sadomasochism and all that, which are also ways to
relate. [Laughing]
The problem of respect is toward the Other. We say that when we as
Zapatistas say we love this land, it is that we respect it. And we look
for the best for it, not according to our criteria but according to what
we understand from [the land] itself. Because itâs not the same to say,
âI love you and I want whatâs best for you but according to what I think
is best for you, and I donât give a shit what you think.â Thatâs not
respect. We say that this has to be according to what each person
thinks. And this is the reading that one does, where one commits errors
or finds truths. In this case, that is the reading the Zapatista
indigenous peoples make of the land. That is respect. It [the land]
says, âThe best thing for me is that you protect me, you care for me;
they are trying to destroy me, etc.â We say, we must do something.
Whatever political relationship that is not based in respect is a
manipulation. Well-intentioned or bad-intentioned, it doesnât matter,
because it is a manipulation. If you donât respect the thinking of the
other, of their word, if you donât speak to them clearly, then you donât
respect them and you are manipulating them. There was a compañera who
was asking, âOkay, all this about peaceful struggle that the Zapatistas
are saying, thatâs a strategy right? I mean really you are thinking in
terms of armed struggle, right? I mean, because with the army and all!â
And I told her, âDo you believe that we are going to be dishonest with
people, telling them that it is a peaceful struggle and to sign on up
but really weâre preparing an armed struggle?â Of course not! We would
say so, publicly. We would say, âCompañeros, weâre going to say this is
a peaceful fight, but really itâs going to be armed struggle.â [Not to
tell them] would be to disrespect them, to manipulate them. And we canât
construct a political relationship like that. Or we could, but thatâs
not the relationship that we want; we want something else, a new
relationship. If youâre going to do something, good or bad or whatever,
you have to say so clearly. And the people who are with you, who support
you, or who are your compañeros, in that they donât just support you but
you mutually support each other in a project, they have to know that you
spoke straight. Now if it turns out badly, thatâs something else, but
they have to know you didnât fool them, that you didnât manipulate them.
And to do that you have to respect them, and to respect them you need to
know them.
We canât construct a relationship of respect with the Chicano movement,
or with the Mexicans on the other side, or with the migrant movement, or
with the movement of people of color, or with the movement of all the
identities that are going to ariseâIâm thinking, for example, of the
communities of Asian origin that already have their own logic in the
American Unionâif we donât know them. And we say that this is not about
making an introduction, about exchanging cards. Itâs about creating the
space where we can introduce ourselves and get to know each other.
Where we can do this thing of, âI am, I am here, and these are my
problems. Iâm telling you so that you know me, not so that you help me
or have pity on me or admire me or learn from me.â Not with this
enthusiasm for dependency. But rather, âLook at me, this is my face.â
And then if you like it or not, well, that is very much your problem.
Thatâs why we said, starting there, we can construct respect or we can
construct a relationship of domination.
There are people who come to see, to figure out what this is about, and
who say, âHere, good, here theyâre doing something with political
purchase.â Or, âHere, no.â So their interest is where there is political
purchase, where they can reap some benefit. And where they canât, then
no. But if there is a relationship of respect, then itâs not that way.
So the knowing each other follows respecting each other. That is what
has to be constructed.
And this is what we say is a demonstration of love: respect. This, along
with subjectivity, is something difficult to construct in these times.
That is, in capitalism, it is difficult to construct a relationship of
respect, even between two individuals, and that much more difficult in
collectivity, in society, or in a nation. What respect can you say the
North American government has for its people? At the hour that it turns
out that, âOh, guess what, the weapons we were searching for in Iraq,
well they didnât really exist. And we knew they didnât exist but we
needed something to tell you in order to be able to attack.â And what
respect does CNN or the other major North American media companies have
when they tell the people, âWe fooled you; the images that we showed of
Iraq arenât of Iraq. Or there were more but we only used these.â And
what respect does the teacher have for the student, the student for
his/her classmate, neighbor for neighbor, and so on, if there is nothing
in this society telling you itâs possible to create a relationship based
in respect? And we say that is the only solid relationship it is
possible to createâthat which is based in respect. And that is what we
want to do, and what we are learning to do. And we make mistakes.
Sometimes we make mistakes in saying, âI am thinking you are saying
this,â and you arenât saying that. Take land for example, or the example
of indigenous peoples, of student groups, or of the young people who we
saw on the journey, of landless peasants, of the poor, or the migrants,
the women, etc. We say that what we agree upon, even when we are hearing
wrong or understanding wrong, is that we need a space to listen to each
other.
Zapatista Army of National Liberation
(EZLN)
This is our simple word which seeks to touch the hearts of humble and
simple people like ourselves, but people who are also, like us,
dignified and rebellious. This is our simple word to tell what our path
has been and where we are now, to explain how we see the world and our
country, to say what we are thinking of doing and how we are thinking of
doing it, and to invite other persons to walk with us in something very
great which is called Mexico and something greater which is called the
world. This is our simple word in order to inform all honest and noble
hearts what it is we want in Mexico and the world. This is our simple
word, because it is our idea to call on those who are like us and to
join together with them, everywhere they are living and struggling.
We are the zapatistas of the EZLN, although we are also called
âneo-zapatistas.â Now, we, the zapatistas of the EZLN, rose up in arms
in January of 1994 because we saw how widespread had become the evil
wrought by the powerful who only humiliated us, stole from us,
imprisoned us, and killed us, and no one was saying anything or doing
anything. That is why we said, âYa Basta!â that no longer were we going
to allow them to treat us as inferior, to treat us worse than animals.
And we also said we wanted democracy, liberty, and justice for all
Mexicans, although we were concentrated on the Indian peoples. Because
it so happened that we, the EZLN, were almost all indigenous from here
in Chiapas, but we did not want to struggle just for our own good, or
just for the good of the indigenous of Chiapas, or just for the good of
the Indian peoples of Mexico. We wanted to fight along with everyone who
was humble and simple like ourselves and who was in great need and who
suffered from exploitation and thievery by the rich and their bad
governments here, in our Mexico, and in other countries in the world.
And so our small history is that we grew tired of exploitation by the
powerful, so we organized in order to defend ourselves and to fight for
justice. In the beginning there were not many of us, just a few, going
this way and that, talking with and listening to other people like us.
We did that for many years, and we did it in secret, without making a
stir. In other words, we joined forces in silence. That took us about 10
years and then we grew, and then there were many thousands of us. We
trained ourselves quite well in politics and weapons, and, suddenly,
when the rich were throwing their New Yearâs Eve parties, we fell upon
their cities and just took them over. And we left a message to everyone
that here we are, that they have to take notice of us. And the rich were
good and scared and sent their great armies to do away with us, just
like they always do when the exploited rebel, they send orders for them
to be done away with. But we were not done away with at all, because we
had prepared ourselves quite well prior to the war, and we had made
ourselves strong in our mountains. And there were the armies looking for
us and throwing their bombs and bullets at us, and making plans to kill
off all the indigenous at one time, because they did not know who was a
zapatista and who was not. And we were running and fighting, fighting
and running, just like our ancestors had done. Without giving up,
without surrendering, without being defeated.
And then the people from the cities went out into the streets and began
shouting for an end to the war. And we stopped our war, and we listened
to these brothers and sisters from the city who were telling us to try
to reach an arrangement or an accord with the bad governments, so that
the problem could be resolved without a massacre. We paid attention to
them, because they are what we call âthe people,â that is the Mexican
people. And so we set aside the fire and took up the word.
And then the governments said they would indeed be well-behaved, and
they would engage in dialogue, and they would make accords, and they
would fulfill them. And we said good, but we also thought it would be
good for us to know those people who went out into the streets in order
to stop the war. So, while we were engaging in dialogue with the bad
governments, we were also talking with those people, and we saw that
most of them were humble and simple people like ourselves, and that
both, we and they, understood quite well why we were fighting. And we
called those people âcivil society,â because most of them did not belong
to political parties; rather they were common, ev-eryday people, like
us, simple and humble people.
But it turned out that the bad governments did not want a good
agreement, it was their underhanded trickery to say that they were going
to talk and to reach agreements while all the while they were preparing
attacks to eliminate us once and for all. And so then they attacked us
several times, but they did not defeat us, because we resisted well, and
many people throughout the world mobilized. So then the bad governments
thought that the problem was that many people were seeing what was
happening with the EZLN, and they started their plan of acting as if
nothing were going on. Meanwhile they surrounded us, they laid siege to
us in hopes that, since our mountains are indeed remote, people would
forget about us, since zapatista lands were so far away. And every so
often the bad governments would try to deceive us or to attack us, like
in February of 1995 when they came at us with a huge number of soldiers,
but they did not defeat us. Because, as it began to be said, we were not
alone, and many people supported us, and we resisted well.
So then the bad governments had to make agreements with the EZLN, and
those agreements were called the âSan AndrĂ©s Accordsâ because the
municipality where those accords were signed was called âSan AndrĂ©s.â
And we were not alone in those dialogues, it wasnât just us speaking
with people from the bad governments. We invited many people and
organizations who were, or are, engaged in the struggle for the Indian
peoples of Mexico, and everyone spoke their word, and everyone reached
agreement as to how we were going to speak with the bad governments. And
that is how that dialogue was, not just the zapatistas on one side and
the governments on the other. But rather, with the zapatistas were the
Indian peoples of Mexico and those who supported them. The bad
governments said in those accords that they were indeed going to
recognize the rights of the Indian peoples of Mexico, that they were
going to respect their culture, and that they were going to make all of
this law in the Constitution. But then, once they had signed the
accords, the bad governments acted as if they had forgotten about them,
and many years passed, and the accords were not fulfilled. Quite the
opposite, the government attacked the indigenous in order to make them
back down in the struggle, as they did December 22, 1997, the date on
which Zedillo ordered the killing of 45 men, women, old ones, and
children in the town in Chiapas called ACTEAL. This immense crime was
not so easily forgotten, and it was a demonstration of how it does not
touch the hearts of the bad governments to attack and assassinate those
who rebel against injustices. And, while all of that was going on, we
zapatistas were putting our all into trying to get the accords fulfilled
and in resisting in the mountains of the Mexican southeast.
And so we began speaking with other Indian peoples of Mexico and their
organizations, and we made an agreement with them that we were going to
struggle together for the same thing, for the recognition of indigenous
rights and culture. Now we were also being supported by many people all
over the world and by persons who were well-respected and whose word was
great because they were great intellectuals, artists, and scientists
from Mexico and from all over the world. And we also held international
encounters, that is, we got together with persons from America and from
Asia and from Europe and from Africa and from Oceania to talk, and we
learned of their struggles and their ways, and we said these were
âintergalacticâ encounters, just to be silly and because we had indeed
invited those from other planets, but apparently they did not come, or
perhaps they did come but they did not say so clearly.
But in any case the bad governments did not keep their word, and so we
made a plan to talk with many Mexicans so they would support us. First,
in 1997, we held a march to Mexico City called âof the 1,111,â because
one compañero or compañera from each zapatista village went, but the bad
government did not pay any attention. And then, in 1999, we held a
referendum throughout the entire country, and there it was seen that the
majority were indeed in agreement with the demands of the Indian
peoples, but again the bad governments did not pay any attention. And
finally, in 2001, we held what was called the âmarch for indigenous
dignity,â which had much support from millions of Mexicans and people
from other countries, and it arrived to where the senators and
representatives were, in the Congress of the Union, in order to demand
the recognition of the Mexican indigenous.
But it turned out that no, the politicians from the PRI, the PAN, and
the PRD reached an agreement among themselves, and they simply would not
recognize indigenous rights and culture. That was in April of 2001, and
the politicians demonstrated quite clearly there that they had no
decency whatsoever, that they were shameless swine who thought only
about making their money as the bad politicians they were. All of this
must be remembered, because youâll see that now they are going to say
they will indeed recognize indigenous rights, but it is a lie they are
telling so we will vote for them. They already had their chance, and
they did not keep their word.
So then we saw quite clearly that there was no point to dialogue and
negotiation with the bad governments of Mexico. That it was a waste of
time for us to be talking with the politicians, because neither their
hearts nor their words were honest. They were crooked and they lied,
saying that they would keep their word but they did not. In other words,
on that day, when the politicians from the PRI, PAN, and PRD approved a
law that was useless, they killed the dialogue once and for all and they
made it clear that it does not matter what they had agree to and sign,
because their word is no good. So from then on we did not have any
contact with the federal powers because we understood that dialogue and
negotiation had failed as a result of those political parties. We saw
that blood did not matter to them, nor did death, suffering,
mobilizations, consultations, efforts, national and international
pronouncements, encounters, accords, signatures, commitments. And so the
political class not only closed, one more time, the door to the Indian
peoples, they also delivered a mortal blow to the peaceful resolution â
through dialogue and negotiation â of the war. It can also no longer be
believed that accords will be fulfilled with whomever they are made.
Take note of that and learn from our experience.
So we saw all of that, and we wondered in our hearts what we were going
to do.
And the first thing we saw was that our heart was not the same as
before, when we began our struggle. It was larger, because now we had
touched the hearts of many good people. And we also saw that our heart
was more hurt, more wounded. And it was not wounded by the deceit of the
bad governments, but because, when we touched the hearts of others, we
also touched their sorrows. It was as if we were seeing ourselves in a
mirror.
Then, as the zapatistas that we are, we thought that it was not enough
to stop engaging in dialogue with the government, but that we must
continue on in the struggle, in spite of those lazy parasites of
politicians. The EZLN then decided that it would carry out, from its
side, the San Andrés Accords regarding indigenous rights and culture (in
other words, âunilateral,â because it was just one side). For four
years, since the middle of 2001 until the middle of 2005, we have
devoted ourselves to this and to other things that we are going to tell
you about here.
Well, we then began putting a lot of effort into the Zapatista
Autonomous Municipalities in Rebellion â which is how the peoples
organized to govern themselves â in order to make them stronger. This
method of autonomous government was not simply invented by the EZLN, but
rather comes from centuries of indigenous resistance and from the
zapatistasâ own experience. It is the self-governance of the
communities. In other words, no one from outside comes to govern, but
the people themselves decide, among themselves, who governs and how,
and, if they do not obey, they are removed. That is, if the person who
is supposed to govern does not obey the people, they pursue that person,
that person is removed from authority, and another comes in.
But then we saw that the Autonomous Municipalities were not equal. There
were some that were more advanced and which had more support from civil
society, and others were neglected. We needed to organize things to make
them more on a par with each other. And we also saw that the EZLN, with
its political-military component, was involving itself in decisions that
belonged to the democratic authorities, âcivilians,â as they say. And
here the problem is that the political-military component of the EZLN is
not democratic, because it is an army. And we saw that the military
being above and the democratic below was not good, because what is
democratic should not be decided militarily, it should be the reverse:
the democratic-political governing above, and the military obeying
below. Or perhaps it would be better with nothing below, with everything
completely level, without any military, and that is why the zapatistas
are soldiers, so that there will not have to be soldiers anymore.
Anyway, what we did about this problem was to begin separating the
political-military from the autonomous and democratic aspects of
organization in the zapatista communities. And so, actions and decisions
which had previously been handled by the EZLN were passed, little by
little, to the democratically elected authorities in the villages. It is
easy to say, of course, but it was very difficult in practice, because
many years had passed, first in the preparation for the war and then the
war itself, and the political-military aspects had become customary.
But, regardless, we managed to do it, because it is our way to do what
we say we are going to do, because if not, why are we go around saying
things and then not do them.
That is how the Good Government Juntas were born, in August of 2003,
and, through them, self-learning and the exercise of ârule by obeyingâ
has continued.
From that time and until the middle of 2005, the EZLN leadership has no
longer involved itself in giving orders in civil matters, but it has
accompanied and supported the authorities who are democratically elected
by the people. It has also kept watch that the people as well as
national and international civil society are kept well-informed
concerning the aid that is received and how it is used. And now we are
passing this work of vigilance over the good governments to the
zapatista support bases, with temporary positions which are rotated so
that everyone learns and carries out this work. Because we believe that
a people which does not watch over its leaders is condemned to be
enslaved, and we fought to be free, not to change masters every six
years.
The EZLN, during these 4 years, also handed over to the Good Government
Juntas and the Autonomous Municipalities the aid and contacts which they
had attained throughout Mexico and the world during these years of war
and resistance. The EZLN, during that time, had also been building
economic and political support which gave the zapatista communities
fewer difficulties as they advanced in the building of their autonomy
and in improving their living conditions. It was not much, but it was
far better than what they had prior to the beginning of the uprising in
January of 1994. If you look at one of those studies the government
makes, you will see that the only indigenous communities which have
improved their living conditions â whether that be in health, education,
food or housing â were those which are in zapatista territory, where our
villages are. And all of that has been possible because of the progress
made by the zapatista villages and because of all the support which has
been received from good and noble persons, whom we call âcivil
societies,â and from their organizations throughout the world. It is as
though all of these people have made âanother world is possibleâ a
reality, but through actions, not just words.
And the villages have made good progress. Now there are more compañeros
and compañeras who are learning to govern. And â little by little â
there are more women going into this work, but there is still a lack of
respect for the compañeras, and a lack of their participation in the
work of the struggle. And, also through the Good Government Juntas,
coordination has been improved between the Autonomous Municipalities and
in the resolution of problems with other organizations and with the
official authorities. There has also been much improvement in the
projects in the communities, and the distribution of projects and aid
given by civil society from all over the world has become more balanced.
Health and education have improved, although there is still a good deal
lacking for it to be what it should be. The same is true for housing and
food, and in some areas there has been much improvement with the problem
of land, because the lands recovered from the finqueros [large property
owners] are being redistributed, though there are areas which continue
to suffer from a lack of lands to cultivate. And there has been great
improvement in the support from national and international civil
society, because previously everyone took aid wherever they wanted, and
now the Good Government Juntas are directing them to where the greatest
need exists. And, similarly, everywhere there are more compañeros and
compañeras who are learning to relate to persons from other parts of
Mexico and of the world; they are learning to respect and to demand
respect. They are learning that there are many worlds, and that everyone
has their place, their time, and their way, and therefore there must be
mutual respect between everyone.
We, the zapatistas of the EZLN, have devoted this time to our principal
strength, to the people who support us. And the situation has in fact
improved some. No one can say that the zapatista organization and
struggle has been for nothing, but rather, even if they were to do away
with us completely, our struggle has indeed been of some use.
But it is not just the zapatista villages which have grown, the EZLN has
also grown. Because what has happened during this time is that new
generations have renewed our entire organization. That is, they have
added a whole new strength. The comandantes and comandantas who were in
their maturity at the beginning of the uprising in 1994, now have the
wisdom gained in the war and through 12 years of dialogue with thousands
of men and women from all over the world. The members of the CCRI, the
zapatista political-organizational leadership, is now counseling and
directing the new ones who are entering our struggle, as well as those
who are holding leadership positions. For some time now, these
âcommitteesâ (which is what we call them) have been preparing an entire
new generation of comandantes and comandantas who, following a period of
instruction and testing, are beginning to learn the work of
organizational leadership and to take on these duties. And another thing
is that our insurgents, insurgentas, militants, local and regional
leaders, as well as our support bases who were young people at the
beginning of the uprising, are now mature men and women, combat veterans
and natural leaders in their units and communities. And those who were
children in that January of â94 are now young people who have grown up
in the resistance, and they have been trained in the rebel dignity held
up by their elders throughout these 12 years of war. These young people
have a political, technical and cultural training that we who began the
zapatista movement did not have. More and more this youth is now,
sustaining our troops as well as leadership positions in the
organization. And of course all of us have seen the deceits of the
Mexican political class and the destruction their actions have caused in
our patria. And we have seen the great injustices and massacres that
neoliberal globalization causes throughout the world. But we will speak
to you of that later.
And so the EZLN has resisted 12 years of war, of military, political,
ideological and economic attacks, of siege, of harassment, of
persecution, and they have not vanquished us. We have not sold out nor
surrendered, and we have made progress. More compañeros from many places
have entered into the struggle so that, instead of getting weaker after
so many years, we have become stronger. Of course there are problems
which can be resolved by separating more the political-military from the
civil-democratic. But there are other things, the most important things,
such as our demands for which we struggle, which have not been fully
achieved.
To our way of thinking, and what we see in our heart, we have reached a
point where we cannot go any further, and where in fact we could lose
everything we have if we remain as we are and do nothing more in order
to move forward. The hour has come to take a risk once again and to take
a step which is dangerous but worthwhile. Because, perhaps united with
other social sectors who suffer the same needs as we do, it will be
possible to achieve what we need and what we deserve. A new step forward
in the indigenous struggle is only possible if the indigenous join
together with workers, campesinos, students, teachers, employees⊠the
workers of the city and the countryside.
Now we are going to explain to you how we, the zapatistas, see what is
going on in the world. We see that capitalism is the strongest force
right now. Capitalism is a social system, a way in which a society goes
about organizing things and people, who has and who has not, who gives
orders and who obeys. In capitalism, there are some people who have
money, or capital, and factories and stores and fields and many things,
and there are others who have nothing but their strength and their
knowledge in order to work. In capitalism, those who have money and
things give the orders, and those who only have their ability to work
obey.
So capitalism means that there a few who have great wealth, but itâs not
that they won a prize, or found a treasure, or inherited from a
relative, but rather they obtained that wealth through the exploitation
of the work of the many. So capitalism is based on the exploitation of
the workers, which means they exploit the workers to extract all the
profits they can. This is done unjustly, because they do not pay workers
what their work is worth. Instead they give the worker a salary that
barely allows them eat a little and to rest for a bit, and the next day
they goes back to work in exploitation machine, whether in the
countryside or in the city.
And capitalism also makes its wealth from plunder, or theft, because it
takes away from others whatever it wants â land, for example, and
natural resources. So capitalism is a system where the thieves are free
and admired and used as model examples.
And, in addition to exploiting and plundering, capitalism represses
because it imprisons and kills those who rebel against injustice.
Capitalism is most interested in merchandise, because buying or selling
merchandise produces profits. So capitalism turns everything into
merchandise, it makes merchandise of people, of nature, of culture, of
history, of conscience. According to capitalism, everything must be able
to be bought and sold. And it hides everything behind the merchandise so
we donât see the exploitation that it carries out. And then the
merchandise is bought and sold in a market. And the market, in addition
to being used for buying and selling, is also used to hide the
exploitation of the workers. In the market, for example, we see coffee
in its little package or its pretty little jar, but we do not see the
campesino who suffered in order to harvest the coffee, and we do not see
the coyote who paid the campesino so cheaply for his work, and we do not
see the workers in the large company working their hearts out to package
the coffee. Or we see an appliance for listening to music like cumbias,
rancheras, or corridos, or whatever, and we think that it is really good
because it has a good sound, but we do not see the worker in the
maquiladora who struggled for many hours hooking up the cables and
putting the parts of the appliance together, or that they barely paid
her a pittance of money, and that she lives far away from work and
spends a lot on the trip, and, and that, in addition, she runs the risk
of being kidnapped, raped, and killed as happens in Ciudad JuĂĄrez in
Mexico.
So we see merchandise in the market, but we do not see the exploitation
with which it was made. And capitalism needs many markets⊠or a very
large market, a world market.
And so the capitalism of today is not the same as before, when the rich
were content with exploiting the workers in their own countries. Now
they are on a path which is called Neoliberal Globalization. This
globalization means that they no longer control the workers in one or
several countries, but that the capitalists are trying to dominate
everything all over the world. And the world, or Planet Earth, is also
called the âglobeâ, and that is why they say âglobalization,â or the
entire world.
And neoliberalism is the idea that capitalism is free to dominate the
entire world, and that oh well, you have to resign yourself and conform
and not make a fuss, in other words, not rebel. So neoliberalism is like
the theory, the plan, of capitalist globalization. And neoliberalism has
its economic, political, military and cultural plans. All of those plans
have to do with dominating everyone, and they repress or marginalize
anyone who doesnât obey so that their rebellious ideas arenât passed on
to others.
Then, in neoliberal globalization, the big capitalists who live in the
powerful countries, like the United States, want the entire world to be
made into something like a big business where merchandise is produced,
and into a big market, a world market for buying and selling the entire
world and for hiding the exploitation of the whole world.
Then the global capitalists get into everything everywhere, in all the
countries, in order to do their big business, that is, their big
exploitation. They respect nothing, and they come in however they wish,
as if they were conquering other countries. That is why we zapatistas
say that neoliberal globalization is a war of conquest of the entire
world, a world war, a war being waged by capitalism for global
domination. Sometimes that conquest is by armies who invade a country
and conquer it by force. But sometimes it is with the economy, in other
words, the big capitalists put their money into another country or they
lend it money, but on the condition that the country obey what they tell
them to do. And they also insert their ideas, that is, the capitalist
culture, which is the culture of merchandise, of profits, of the market.
Then the one which wages the conquest, capitalism, does as it wants, it
destroys or changes what it does not like and eliminates what gets in
its way, for example, those who do not produce or buy or sell modern
merchandise, or those who rebel against that order. And they despise
those who are of no use to them. That is why the indigenous get in the
way of neoliberal capitalism, and that is why they despise them and want
to eliminate them. And neoliberal capitalism also gets rid of the laws
that do not allow them to exploit and to have a lot of profit. They
demand that everything can be bought and sold, and, since capitalism has
all the money, it buys everything. Capitalism destroys the countries it
conquers with neoliberal globalization, but it also wants to rearrange
everything, to make it over again, but in its own way, a way which
benefits capitalism and which doesnât allow anything to get in its way.
So neoliberal globalization, capitalism, destroys what exists in these
countries, it destroys their culture, their language, their economic
system, their political system, and it also destroys the ways in which
those who live in that country relate to each other. So everything that
makes a country a country is left destroyed.
So neoliberal globalization wants to destroy the nations of the world so
that only one Nation or country remains, the country of money, of
capital. And capitalism wants everything to be as it desires, according
to its own way, and it doesnât like what is different, and it persecutes
it and attacks it, or shoves it into a corner and acts as if it doesnât
exist.
Thus, in short, the capitalism of global neoliberalism is based on
exploitation, plunder, contempt, and repression of those who refuse it.
The same as before, but now globalized, worldwide.
But it is not so easy for neoliberal globalization, because the
exploited of each country become discontented, and they do not say oh
well, but rather they rebel. And those who are unnecessary and who are
in the way resist, and they donât allow themselves to be eliminated. And
that is why we see, all over the world, those who are being screwed over
creating resistances, not letting it happen, in other words, they rebel,
and not just in one country but wherever they abound. And so, just as
there is a neoliberal globalization, there is a globalization of
rebellion.
And it is not just the workers of the countryside and of the city who
appear in this globalization of rebellion, but others appear who are
persecuted and despised for the same reason, for not letting themselves
be dominated, like women, young people, the indigenous, homosexuals,
lesbians, transsexual persons, migrants, and many other groups who exist
all over the world but who we do not see until they shout enough of
being despised, and they rise up, and then we see them, we hear them,
and we learn from them.
And then we see that all those groups of people are fighting against
neoliberalism, against the capitalist globalization plan, and they are
struggling for humanity.
And we are astonished when we see the stupidity of the neoliberals who
want to destroy all of humanity with their wars and exploitation, but it
also makes us quite happy to see resistances and rebellions appearing
everywhere, such as ours, which is a bit small, but here we are. And we
see this all over the world, and now our heart learns that we are not
alone.
Now we will talk to you about how we see what is going on in our Mexico.
What we see is that our country is governed by neoliberals. So, as we
already explained, our leaders are destroying our nation, our Mexican
Patria. And the work of these bad leaders is not to look after the
wellbeing of the people, instead they are only concerned with the
well-being of the capitalists. For example, they make laws like the Free
Trade Agreement, which end up leaving many Mexicans destitute, like
campesinos and small farmers, because they are âgobbled upâ by the big
agro-industrial companies, as well as workers and small businesspeople,
because they cannot compete with the large transnationals that come in
without anybody saying anything to them or even thanking them, and they
set their low salaries and their high prices. So some of the economic
foundations of our Mexico, which were the countryside and industry and
national commerce, are being destroyed, and just a bit of rubble
remains, which they will surely sell off as well.
And these are great disgraces for our Patria. Because food is no longer
being produced in our countryside, just what the big capitalists sell,
and the good lands are being stolen through trickery and with the help
of the politicians. What is happening in the countryside is the same as
what happened under Porfirismo, but now, instead of hacendados [haciendo
owners, like plantation owners], there are foreign businesses that have
really screwed the campesino. And, where before there were credits and
price protections, now there is just charity⊠and sometimes not even
that.
As for the worker in the city, well the factories close and they are
left without work, or these things called maquiladoras [factory
workplaces, often in border zones] are opened, which are foreign and
which pay a pittance for many hours of work. And then the price of the
goods the people need doesnât even matter, because whether theyâre
expensive or cheap, there is no pay anyway. And if someone was working
in a small or midsize business, now they are not, because it has been
closed and bought by a big transnational. And if someone had a small
business, it disappeared as well, or they had to start doing clandestine
work for big businesses which exploit them terribly, and which even put
young children to work. And if the worker belonged to a union in order
to demand his legal rights, well now that same union tells him he will
have to put up with his salary being lowered or his hours or his
benefits being taken away, because, if not, the business will close and
move to another country. And then there is the âmicrochangarroâ [small
business] which is something like the governmentâs economic program for
putting all the cityâs workers on street corners selling gum or
telephone cards. In other words, there is absolute economic destruction
in the cities as well.
And then what happens is that, with the peopleâs economy being totally
screwed in the countryside as well as in the city, many Mexican men and
women have to leave their Patria, Mexican lands, and go to seek work in
another country, the United States. And there they do not treat them
well, but rather they exploit them, persecute them, treat them with
contempt, and even kill them. Under neoliberalism which is imposed on us
by the bad governments, the economy has not improved. On the contrary,
the countryside is in great need, and there is no work in the cities.
What is happening is that Mexico is being turned into a place where
people are working for the wealth of foreigners, mostly rich gringos, a
place you are just born into for a little while, and in another little
while you die. That is why we say that Mexico is dominated by the United
States.
And its not only that. Neoliberalism has also changed the Mexican
political class, the politicians, making them into something like
employees in a store who have to do everything possible to sell
everything and to sell it very cheap.
You have already seen that they changed the laws in order to remove
Article 27 from the Constitution so that ejidal and communal lands could
be sold. That was Salinas de Gortari, and he and his gang said that it
was for the good of the countryside and the campesino, and that was how
they would prosper and live better. Has it been like that? The Mexican
countryside is worse off than ever and the campesinos more screwed than
under Porfirio Diaz. And they also say they are going to privatizeâthat
is, sell to foreignersâthe companies held by the State in order to help
the well-being of the people, because the companies donât work well and
they need to be modernized, and itâs better to sell them off. But
instead of things getting better, the social rights which were won in
the revolution of 1910 are now cause for pity... and outrage. And they
also said that the borders must be opened so that foreign capital can
enter, and that way all the Mexican businesses will catch up and things
will be better. But now we see that there arenât even national
businesses, that foreigners ate them all up, and what they sell is worse
than what Mexico made.
And now the Mexican politicians also want to sell PEMEX, the oil which
belongs to all Mexicans, and the only difference is that some say it
should be sold off completely and others that only a part of it should
be sold. And they also want to privatize social security, and
electricity and water and the forests and everything, until nothing of
Mexico is left, and our country will be a wasteland or a place of
entertainment for rich people from all over the world, and we Mexican
men and women will be their servants, dependent on what they offer,
living badly, without roots, without culture, without Patria.
So the neoliberals want to kill Mexico, our Mexican Patria. And the
political parties not only do not defend it, they are the first to put
themselves at the service of foreigners, especially those from the
United States, and they are the ones who are in charge of deceiving us,
making us look the other way while everything is sold, and they pocket
the money. And thatâs all the political parties that exist right now,
not just some of them. Think about whether anything has been done well,
and you will see that no, itâs nothing but theft and scams. And look how
all the politicians always have their nice houses and their nice cars
and their luxuries. And they still want us to thank them and to vote for
them again. And it is obvious, as they say, that they are without shame.
And they are without shame because they do not, in fact, have a Patria.
All they have are bank accounts.
And we also see that drug trafficking and crime has been increasing. And
sometimes we think that criminals are like they show them in songs or
movies, and maybe some are like that, but not the real criminal bosses.
The real bosses go around very well-dressed, they study outside the
country, they are elegant, they do not go around hiding but rather eat
in good restaurants and appear in the papers, very pretty and
well-dressed at their parties. They are, as they say, âgood peopleâ, and
some are even government officials, representatives, senators,
secretaries of state, prosperous businessmen, police chiefs, generals.
Are we saying that politics serves no purpose? No, we are saying that
THIS politics serves no purpose. It is useless because it does not take
the people into account. It does not listen to them, it does not pay any
attention to them, it just approaches them when there are elections. And
they do not even come after votes anymore, the polls alone are enough to
say who wins. And then itâs all promises about theyâre going to do this
and theyâre going to do that and then later goodbye, you donât see them
again until they appear in the news for having stolen a lot of money and
nothing is going to be done to them because the law â which those same
politicians made â protects them.
Because thatâs another problem, the Constitution is all warped and
changed now. Itâs no longer the one that had the rights and liberties of
working people. Now itâs about the rights and liberties of the
neoliberals so they can have their huge profits. And the judges are
there to serve those neoliberals, because they always rule in favor of
them, and those who are not rich get injustice, jails, and cemeteries.
Well, even with all this mess the neoliberals are making, there are
Mexican men and women who are organizing and making a struggle of
resistance. And we discovered that there are indigenous, that their
lands are far away from us here in Chiapas, and that they are creating
their autonomy and defending their culture and caring for their land,
forests, and water. And there are workers in the countryside,
campesinos, who are organizing and holding marches and mobilizations in
order to demand credits and aid for the countryside. And there are
workers in the city who do not let their rights be taken away or their
jobs privatized. They protest and demonstrate so the little they have
isnât taken away from them and so that the country isnât robbed of what
is its own, like electricity, oil, social security, and education. And
there are students who donât let education be privatized and who are
fighting for it to be free and public and scientific, that is, so it
doesnât cost money to go, so that everyone can learn, and so they donât
teach non-sense. And there are women who do not let themselves be
treated as ornaments or be humiliated and despised just for being women,
but who are organizing and fighting for the respect they deserve as the
women they are. And there are young people who donât accept being
brutalized with drugs or being persecuted for their way of being, but
who make themselves aware with their music and their culture, their
rebellion. And there are homosexuals, lesbians, transsexuals, those of
other ways who do not put up with being ridiculed, despised, mistreated,
and even killed for having another way which is different, or with being
treated as abnormal or criminal, but who make their own organizations in
order to defend their right to be different. And there are priests and
nuns and those they call lay people who are not with the rich and who
are not resigned to merely reciting prayers, but who are organizing to
accompany the struggles of the people. And there are those who are
called social activists, men and women who have been fighting all their
lives for exploited people, and they are the same ones who participated
in the great strikes and workersâ actions, in the great citizensâ
mobilizations, in the great campesino movements, and who suffer great
repression, and who, even though some are old now, continue on without
surrendering. They go everywhere looking to organize, seeking justice,
and they create leftist organizations, non-governmental organizations,
human rights organizations, organizations in defense of political
prisoners and for the disappeared, leftist publications, organizations
of teachers or students, social struggle, and even political-military
organizations, and they are not quiet and they know so much because they
have seen lived and struggled so much.
And so we see in general that in our country, which is called Mexico,
there are many people who do not just put up with things, who donât give
up, who donât sell out, that is, people with dignity. And that makes us
very happy and content, because with all those people itâs not going to
be so easy for the neoliberals to win, and perhaps it will be possible
to save our Patria from the great thefts and destruction they are
carrying out. And we hope that our âweâ includes all these rebellions...
Now we are now going to tell you what we want to do in the world and in
Mexico, because we cannot see everything that is happening on our planet
and remain quiet, as if only we are where we are.
We want is to tell all of those who are resisting and fighting all over
the world in their own ways and in their own countries that you are not
alone, that we, the zapatistas, though we are very small, support you
and we are going to see how we can help you in your struggles and how
speak to you in order to learn from you, because what we have learned,
in fact, is to learn.
And we want to tell the Latin American peoples that we are proud to be a
part of you, even if it is a small part. We remember quite well how the
continent was illuminated some years ago, and there was a light that was
called Che Guevara, just like before it was called Bolivar, because
sometimes the people take up a name to show that they are taking up a
flag.
And we want to tell the people of Cuba, who have now been on their path
of resistance for many years, that you are not alone, and we do not
agree with the blockade they are imposing, and we are going to see how
to send you something, even if it is just maize, for your resistance.
And we want to tell the North American people that we do not confuse
things, we know that the bad governments you have and which spread harm
throughout the world are one thing and that the North Americans who
struggle in their country, and who are in solidarity with the struggles
of other countries, are quite another. And we want to tell the Mapuche
brothers and sisters in Chile that we are watching and learning from
your struggles. And to the Venezuelans, we see how well you are
defending your sovereignty, that is, your nationâs right to decide where
it is going. And to the indigenous brothers and sisters of Ecuador and
Bolivia, we say you are giving a good history lesson to all of Latin
America, because you are indeed putting a halt to neoliberal
globalization. And to the piqueteros and to the young people of
Argentina, we want to tell you this, that we love you. And to those in
Uruguay who want a better country, we admire you. And to the landless in
Brazil, we respect you. And to all the young people of Latin America,
what you are doing is good, and you give us great hope.
And we want to tell the brothers and sisters of Social Europe, that
which is dignified and rebellious, that you are not alone. That your
great movements against the neoliberal wars bring us joy. That we are
attentively watching your forms of organization and your methods of
struggle so that we can perhaps learn something. That we are considering
how we can help you in your struggles, though we are not going to send
euros because they will be devalued because of that whole European Union
mess. But perhaps we will send you crafts and coffee so that you can
market them and that could help you some in the work of your struggle.
And perhaps we might also send you some pozol [corn and water drink],
which provides much strength for the resistance, but who knows if we
will actually send it to you because pozol is more our way and what if
it were to hurt your bellies and weaken your struggles and allow the
neoliberals to defeat you.
And we want to tell the brothers and sisters of Africa, Asia, and
Oceania that we know that you are fighting also, and we want to learn
more of your ideas and practices.
And we want to tell the world that we want to make you big, so big that
all those worlds which are resisting will fit, because the neoliberals
want to destroy them and because these worlds donât simply let them but
keep fighting for humanity.
Now then, what we want to do in Mexico is to make an agreement with
persons and organizations of the left, because we believe that it is on
the political left where the idea of resisting neoliberal globalization
really exists, as well as the idea of making a country where there will
be justice, democracy, and liberty for everyone. Not like it is now,
where there is justice only for the rich, where there is liberty only
for their big businesses, and where there is democracy only for painting
walls with election propaganda. And because we believe that only from
the left can a plan of struggle emerge so that our Patria, which is
Mexico, does not die.
And, then, what we think is that, with these persons and organizations
of the left, we will make a plan for going to all those parts of Mexico
where there are humble and simple people like ourselves.
And we are not going to tell them what they should do or give them
orders.
Nor are we going to ask them to vote for a candidate, since we already
know these are all neoliberals.
Nor are we going to tell them to be like us, nor to rise up in arms.
What we are going to do is to ask them what their lives are like, what
their struggle is like, what their thoughts are about our country and
what we should do so that we are not defeated.
What we are going to do is to take heed of the thoughts of the simple
and humble people, and perhaps we will find there the same love that we
feel for our Patria.
And perhaps we will find agreement between those of us who are simple
and humble and, together, we will organize all over the country and
reach agreement in our struggles, which are now each alone, separated
from each other, and we will find something like a program that has what
we all want, and a plan for how we are going to achieve the realization
of that program, which is called the ânational program of struggle.â
And, with the agreement of the majority of those people to whom we are
going to listen, we will then engage in a joint struggle together with
everyone, with indigenous, workers, campesinos, students, teachers,
employees, women, children, old ones, men, and with all those of good
heart who want to struggle so that our Patria called Mexico, which is
between the Rio Grande and the Rio Suchiate with the Pacific Ocean on
one side and the Atlantic on the other, does not end up being destroyed
and sold.
And so this is our simple word that goes out to the humble and simple
people of Mexico and of the world, and we are calling our word today:
The Sixth Declaration of the LacondĂłn Jungle.
And we are here to say, with our simple word, thatâŠ
The EZLN maintains its commitment to an offensive ceasefire, and it will
not make any attack against government forces or any offensive military
movements.
The EZLN maintains its commitment to insisting on the path of political
struggle with this peaceful initiative that we are now undertaking. The
EZLN reaffirms, therefore, its resolve not to establish any kind of
secret relations with national political-military organizations or with
those from other countries.
The EZLN reaffirms its commitment to defend, support, and obey the
zapatista indigenous communities of which it is composed, and which are
its supreme command, and will â to the best of its abilities and without
interfer-ing in their internal democratic processes â contribute to the
strengthening of their autonomy, good government, and improvement in
their living conditions. In other words, what we are going to do in
Mexico and in the world we are going to do without arms, in a civil and
peaceful movement, and without neglecting nor ceasing to support our
communities.
ThereforeâŠ
In the WorldâŠ
persons and organizations that are resisting and struggling against
neoliberalism and for humanity.
handicrafts for those brothers and sisters who are struggling all over
the world.
In order to begin, we are going to ask the Good Government Council of La
Realidad to loan their truck, which is called âChompiras,â and appears
to hold about 8 tons, and we are going to fill it with corn and perhaps
two 200 liter barrels of oil or petrol, whichever they prefer, and we
are going to deliver it to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico for them to send
to the Cuban people as aid from the zapatistas for their resistance
against the North American blockade. Or perhaps there might be a closer
place where it could be delivered, because it is long way to Mexico City
and what if âChompirasâ were to break down and then weâd be in bad
shape. Weâll do this when the harvest comes inâthe crops are growing
right now in the fieldsâand if we arenât attacked, because if we were to
send it during these next few months it would be nothing but young
corncobs, and that wouldnât get there okay not even as tamales, better
in November or December, depending.
And we are also going to make an agreement with the womenâs crafts
cooperatives in order to send a good bit of embroidered work to those
Europeans who are perhaps not of the Union, and perhaps weâll also send
some organic coffee from the zapatista cooperatives, so that they can
sell it and make a little money for their struggle. And if it doesnât
sell, they can always sit down and have a little cup of coffee and talk
about the anti-neoliberal struggle, and if itâs cold then they can cover
themselves with the zapatista embroidery, which does in fact hold up
quite well, even being laundered by hand and with rocks, and, besides,
the colors donât run in the wash.
And we are also going to send the indigenous brothers and sisters of
Bolivia and Ecuador some corn that is not genetically modified, though
we donât know exactly where to send it so it gets there okay, but we are
willing to give this little bit of aid.
there must be more intercontinental encounters, even if just one more.
Perhaps December of this year or next January, we should think about it.
We donât want to say when exactly, because everyone together and equally
should decide on where, when, how, and who. But letâs not do it with a
stage where just a few speak and all the rest listen. Rather lets not
have a stage, just a level field where everyone speaks, but in orderly
fashion, otherwise it will just be a hubbub and the words wonât be
understood. But with good organization everyone will be able to hear and
jot down in their notebooks the othersâ words of resistance, so then
everyone can go home and talk with their compañeros and compañeras in
their own worlds. And we think it should be in a place that has a very
large jail, because what if they were to repress us and incarcerate us,
that way we wouldnât be all piled up, prisoners, yes, but well
organized, and there in the jail we could continue the intercontinental
meetings for humanity and against neoliberalism. Later on weâll tell you
what we could do in order to come to agreement on this. So thatâs how
weâre thinking of doing what we want to do in the world. Now followsâŠ
In MexicoâŠ
but now not just for them and not only with them, but for all the
exploited and dispossessed of Mexico, with all of them and all over the
country. And when we say all the exploited of Mexico, we are also
talking about the brothers and sisters who have had to go to the United
States in search of work in order to survive.
intermediaries or mediation, the simple and humble of the Mexican
people, and, according to what we hear and learn, we are going to go
about building, together with those people who, like us, are humble and
simple, a national program of struggle, but a program which will be
clearly of the left, that is, anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal, in other
words for justice, democracy, and liberty for the Mexican people.
politics, one which once again has the spirit of serving others, without
material interests, through sacrifice, dedication, honesty, keeping
oneâs word, and which has as its only payment the satisfaction of duty
fulfilled, as it was before with leftist militants who were not stopped
by blows, jail, or death, let alone by dollar bills.
that we make a new Constitution, new laws which take into account the
demands of the Mexican people, which are: housing, land, work, food,
health, education, information, culture, independence, democracy,
justice, liberty and peace. A new Constitution which recognizes the
rights and liberties of the people, and which defends the weak in the
face of the powerful.
TO THESE ENDSâŠ
The EZLN will send a delegation of its leadership in order to do this
work throughout the national territory and for an indefinite period of
time. This zapatista delegation, along with those organizations and
persons of the left who join with this Sixth Declaration of the LacondĂłn
Jungle, will go to those places where we are expressly invited.
We are also letting you know that the EZLN will establish a policy of
alliances with non-electoral organizations and movements which define
themselves, in theory and practice, as being of the left, in accordance
with the following conditions:
No to agreements made above to be imposed below, but to make accords to
go together to listen and to organize outrage; not to generate movements
which are later negotiated behind the backs of those who made them, but
to always take into account the opinions of those participating; not to
seek gifts, positions, advantages, public offices, from Power or those
who aspire to it, but to go beyond the election calendar; not to try to
resolve from above the problems of our Nation, but to build FROM BELOW
AND FOR BELOW an alternative to neoliberal destruction, a leftist
alternative for Mexico.
Yes to reciprocal respect for the autonomy and independence of
organizations, their forms of struggle, their ways of organizing, for
their internal decision making processes, for legitimate
representatives, aspirations, and demands; yes to a clear commitment for
joint and coordinated defense of national sovereignty, with intransigent
opposition to the privatization attempts of electricity, oil, water, and
natural resources.
In other words, we are inviting the unregistered political and social
organizations of the left, and those persons who lay claim to the left
and who do not belong to registered political parties, to meet with us
at the time, place and manner which we will propose at the appropriate
time, to organize a national campaign, visiting all possible corners of
our Patria in order to listen to and organize the word of our people. So
it is like a campaign, but a very otherly campaign, because it is not
electoral.
Brothers and sisters:
This is our word which we declare:
In the world, we are going to link ourselves more closely with the
resistance struggles against neoliberalism and for humanity.
And we are going to support, even if itâs just a little, those
struggles.
And we are going to exchange, with mutual respect, experiences,
histories, ideas, dreams.
In Mexico, we are going to travel all over the country, through the
ruins left by the neoliberal wars and through those resistances which,
there entrenched, are flourishing in those ruins.
We are going to seek, and to find, those who love these lands and these
skies as much as we do.
We are going to seek, from La Realidad to Tijuana, those who want to
organize, to struggle, and to build what may perhaps be the last hope
this Nation â which has existed at least since the time when an eagle
alighted on a cactus in order to devour a snake â has of not dying.
We are going for democracy, liberty, and justice for those of us who
have been denied it.
We are going with another politics, for a program of the left and for a
new Constitution.
We invite the indigenous, workers, campesinos, teachers, students,
housewives, neighbors, small businesspersons, small shop owners,
micro-businesspersons, retired people, disabled persons, religious men
and women, scientists, artists, intellectuals, young persons, women, old
persons, homosexuals and lesbians, boys and girls, to participate,
whether individually or collectively, directly with the zapatistas in
this NATIONAL CAMPAIGN for building another way of doing politics, for a
national program of struggle of the left, and for a new Constitution.
And so this is our word as to what we are going to do and how we are
going to do it. Itâs up to you all to see whether you want to join.
And we are telling those men and women who have good thinking in their
hearts, who are in agreement with this word we present and who are not
afraid, or who are afraid but are controlling it, to state publicly
whether they are in agreement with this idea we are presenting, and in
that way we will see clearly who and how and where and when this new
step in the struggle is to be made.
While you are thinking about it, we say to you that today, in the sixth
month of the year 2005, the men, women, children, and old ones of the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation have decided to subscribe to this
Sixth Declaration of the LacandĂłn Jungle. And those who know how to
sign, signed, and those who donât left their finger-print, though there
are fewer now who do not know how because our education has advanced
here in this territory in rebellion, for humanity and against
neoliberalism, that is in zapatista lands and skies.
And this was our simple word sent out to the noble hearts of those
simple and humble people who resist and rebel against injustices all
over the world.
Democracy!
Liberty!
Justice!
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee â General Command of the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
Mexico, in the sixth month, or June, of the year 2005.
[1] Zapatista Army of National Liberation, First Declaration of the
LacandĂłn Jungle. Published January 1, 1994.
.
[2] With regards to the figure of Marcos, we feel it is important to
make two points very clear: 1) Those who think that Marcos could have
thought up the concepts of Zapatismo on his own and without the
communities that have delegated to him his task and role have not
understood the nature and magnitude of what is happening in those
communities; 2) Those who think that the Zapatista communities should
simply do away with the figure of Marcos have either not read his texts
or not observed the sympathy and support that these have created for the
Zapatista communities throughout the world. In other words, Marcos is
the delegated spokesperson for a capable and extremely well-organized
political movement and, exactly because we respect the delegatory
capacity and decision of those communities, we see no reason to treat
him otherwise.
[3] Zapatista Army of National Liberation, âWhat Makes Us Different Is
Our Political Proposal.â August 30, 1996.
.
[4] Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, âNo To The War in the Balkans.â
June, 1999.
.
[5] This section of our text is an elaboration and synthesis of the
concept of âThe Fourth World War,â as found in Zapatista literature. See
âThe Fourth World War,â an excerpt from a talk given by Subcomandante
Insurgente Marcos to the International Civil Commission of Human Rights
Observation in La Realidad, Chiapas on November 20, 1999, published in
Spanish in La Jornada, October 23, 2001.
. See also by Subcomandante Marcos: âSeven Loose Pieces of the Global
Jigsaw Puzzle,â June, 1997.
; âBetween the Satellite and the Microscope, the Otherâs Gaze,â November
20, 1999.
; âThe World: Seven Thoughts in May,â Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos,
May, 2003.
; and âClosing Remarks at the First Intercontinental Encounter for
Humanity and Against Neoliberalism,â
.
[6] See Vo Nguyen Giap, Peopleâs War, Peopleâs Army. Frederick A.
Praeger, Inc. New York, NY, 1962.
[7] For Marcosâ use of this term, see âThe World: Seven Thoughts in
May.â Subcomandante Marcos. May, 2003.
.
[8] As the EZLN has stated, âThe âotherâ is no longer somewhere else,
but everywhere and all the time.â âThe World: Seven Thoughts in May.â
Subcomandante Marcos. May, 2003.
.
[9] It is important to note the slight but significant difference
between General Giapâs insight and that of Subcomandante Marcosâ.
Although Giap highlights the geographic blurring of front lines (i.e.
the physical dispersal of friends and enemies), he is always insistent
that friends and enemies face off as two originally and irredeemably
distinct entities. In contrast, the notion of a war with NO front
directly challenges the notion that warfare is limited to physically
external entities identifiable as friends and enemies.
[10] âDurito and A Story About Cracks and Graffitis.â Subcomandante
Insurgente Marcos. April, 2003.
.
[11] âThe World: Seven Thoughts in May.â Subcomandante Insurgente
Marcos. May, 2003.
.
[12] See âAn Inverted Periscope (or âMemory, a Buried Keyâ).â
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. February 24, 1998.
.
[13] For a similar formulation, see Raul Zibechi, âEl Otro Mundo Posible
Es El Adentro de Los Movimientos,â
.
[14] For the development of the concept of âthe mirror of power,â see
for example âPower as the Mirror and Image.â Subcomandante Marcos. June,
1995.
.
[15] âTo the Commanders and Combatants of the Popular Revolutionary
Army.â Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. August 29, 1996.
.
[16] It is important to note that although John Hollowayâs notion of
âchanging the world without taking powerâ closely resembles that of
Zapatismo, his emphasis on the âNO!â makes it very difficult to find
within his work the coupling that is made so explicit by the EZLN
between the negation of a Power âfrom aboveâ and the affirmation of a
power âfrom below.â In fact it seems that, in contradistinction to
Hollowayâs thought, this coupling of negation and affirmation is a
constant within Zapatismo: âagainst neoliberalismâ and âfor humanity;â
or, âno to bad governmentâ and âyes to good government.â
[17] For evidence of the persistence of this thesis, see âChanging The
World by Taking Power, an Interview with Tariq Ali,â by Claudia Jardim
and Jonah Gindin at www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1223. In
this exchange Ali, in an explicit refutation of the Zapatistas, claims
that the example of Hugo Chavezâs Venezuela is proof that social
movements must direct their energy to taking the State. In Aliâs own
words, âin order to change the world you have to take power, and you
have to begin to implement changeâin small doses if necessaryâbut you
have to do it. Without it nothing will change.â
[18] Although the EZLN is well known for its development of a critique
of orthodox socialism in the guise of the Ejercito Popular
Revolucionario (EPR), it is relevant also to highlight Subcomandante
Marcosâ response when pushed on the issue of the influence of anarchism
and Magonismo on the EZLN: âI have to be honest. When we talk about
Magonismo, it also makes me think of the orthodox line, close-minded and
stupid. This is the truth. The Magon brothers are only talked about in
the context of the labor movement, although we know that they developed
many other important projects as well.â Interview with Subcomandante
Marcos, May 11, 1994.
.
[19] For an explicit reference to âmandar-obedeciendoâ as a crystal that
shatters the mirror of power, see âOf Trees, Criminals, and Odontology.â
Subcomandante Marcos. September-November, 1995.
.
[20] âDemocracy, Liberty, and Justiceâ is a common sign-off used by the
EZLN in nearly every one of its communiqués.
[21] This theme of moving beyond resistance has been constant since the
EZLNâs convocation of the âOther Campaign.â For just one example, see
the interview that follows this âBrief Manual.â
[22] For a similar view of democracy in the context of the Aymara
uprising in El Alto, Bolivia, see Raul Prada, Largo Octubre: Geneologia
de los Movimientos Sociales. La Paz, Bolivia. Plural Editores, 2004.
Although indigenous communities such as the Alteños in Bolivia or the
Zapatistas in Southern Mexico have shown a keen understanding of the
power of this vision of democracy, it would be a mistake to think that
this vision is only accessible on the other side of some non-western
epistemological or geographic border. For example, C.L.R. James showed
that such a vision was also present in the assemblies of ancient Greece;
see âEvery Cook Can Govern,â at
. Michael Hardt has also shown how this very vision of democracy was at
play during the American Revolution; see his introduction to The
Declaration of Independence, New York, N.Y. Verso Books, 2007.
[23] In this regard, the parallels between the Zapatista assemblies and
âjuntasâ (Councils of Good Government) and the practices of the Paris
Commune of 1871, as described by Karl Marx in The Civil War in France,
are unmistakable and give a new context for understanding the centrality
of this text today.
[24] Female soldier, insurgent. The term is insurgente in Spanish but
the Zapatistas use the feminine âaâ ending to specify that there are
women soldiers and that they should be named.
[25] A reference to a general theme in Zapatista writings, which speak
of a geography that does not follow politically-defined borders anymore
(the third world lives in the first and the first in the third), and to
a war (the Fourth World War) not between nations but between those above
and those below.
[26] A reference to the Zapatista refusal to work on the timelines,
deadlines, and lifelines presented by the Powers that be, and an
insistence that resistance and revolution create its own calendar,
according to the collective desires and doings of those below.
[27] A reference to the crippled chicken that the EZLN commanders could
not bring themselves to eat as they were picking up camp and the rest of
the animals were destined for the stew pot, and which became a kind of
Zapatista mascot. âEl pinguinoâ waddled like a penguin in its effort to
walk upright, and insisted on eating and sleeping with the EZLN
commanders. It becomes a symbol for the simultaneous awkwardness and
dignity of changing oneself and the possibility of walking with
unexpected comrades in the struggle. See
for the original EZLN communiqué in Spanish on the subject. For English,
see
. At the launch of the Other Campaign on January 1, 2006, Subcomandante
Marcos left the jungle on a motorcycle with El Pinguino on the back.
[28] A reference to an EZLN communiquĂ©, âIn (self) Defense of the
Giraffes,â using the giraffe as a symbol of difference, because it has a
very âotherâ form and its beauty comes from showing its âothernessâ
proudly. The communiqué asserts that defending difference with dignity
is a form of rebellion, and by doing this collectively, across
differences, one becomes part of a âGiraffe People.â See the communiquĂ©
at
.
[29] Movement of unemployed workers in Argentina. See
for more information on the piquetero movement.
[30] âOther lovesâ is a term the Zapatistas have used to refer to
non-heterosexual relationships.