Mexico
Zapatismo is back and its messages are hitting a chord
The Zapatistas’ return to the Mexican stage,
with their numerous communiqués
and the silent, ordered presence
of their thousands of rank and file
berating the bad governments,
has hit a chord all over the country.
Zapatismo is back,
its return reviving hopes
and encouraging alternative voices
that are laying bare national and world injustices.
Jorge Alonso
The Zapatistas’ first new communiqués were issued at the end of last year in the Third International Seminar called “Planet Earth, anti-systemic movements,” called by the Zapatistas and held in the Universidad de la Tierra in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. All the issues raised in that seminar were related by Gloria Muñoz in her alternative magazine Desinformémonos (Let’s Get Disinformed).
From below and to the leftMuñoz stressed that voices from a dozen countries had been heard that were worthy of outlining alternative paths and instilling movements with hope, and that this call to action came from thinkers and battlers for social justice who identify themselves as from below and to the left. Another thing celebrated by the hundreds of participants in this third seminar, together with thousands more who followed it on line, was the renewed energy of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN).
Thousands of people also celebrated the last night of 2012 and first sun of 2013 in cultural and sports activities organized by the Zapatistas to commemorate the 19th anniversary of their armed uprising in January 1994. One Zapatista leader predicted that there will be no more suffering and poverty for indigenous peoples in 2013 because they aren’t going to allow it any more.
Years and decades of struggleThe participants shared their collective experiences of resistance, autonomy, forms of organization and struggles that are keeping alive the hope of building other possible worlds at a time in which the national, continental and global situation is viewed with concern and uncertainty.
Former Black Panther member Emory Douglas spoke about the segregation and resistance of US Afro-Americans and their search for solutions to the problems of segregation. He underscored the important participation of women, often outnumbering men in assemblies and community work.
A representative of New York’s Movement for Justice in El Barrio, made up of 73 barrio committees, described how the Zapatista strategy had influenced his movement. He presented a video-message about the resistance processes undertaken in New York City, especially by Mexican migrants, one of whom reported that their struggle in the United States is also for a new calendar “below and to the left” that respects life time rather than money time.
Ivonne María Soto from Puerto Rico recounted her people’s independence struggles and recalled that 19 years ago the Puerto Rican Workers’ Revolutionary Party began sending letters to the EZLN, sharing their identification of a common enemy and suggesting the globalization of solidarity, exchanges of ideas and love for humanity.
Members of an Argentine anti-capitalist movement reported that it is still blocking roads to demand solutions to problems in the barrios and has experiences of an autonomous education.
Indigenous peoples...Members of the Southern Cone’s Mapuche people explained the collective process through which they learn not to lose their identity. In their ongoing struggle to recover lands, 150 Mapuche leaders have been tried and those jailed have responded to the repression with hunger strikes. Chilean health specialist Andrés Cuyul Soto, himself a Mapuche, described his people’s health advances through the implementation of a different model than the official one.
A representative of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) self-critically argued that instead of abolishing the State, the indigenous movements actually buttressed it by entering into the electoral terrain, which is not theirs. He said it’s no longer enough to resist; it’s time to take rebellion a further step forward.
Salvador Campanur of the National Indigenous Council of Mexico (CNI) spoke about the autonomous community in the municipality of Cherán, in Michoacán. He praised the CNI as an arena where all indigenous peoples and nations willing to walk in autonomy, freedom and resistance can come together and reflect.
Also attending were representatives from Mexico’s Wixaritari, who highlighted their defense against the mining companies in their sacred desert of Virikuta; the Yaquis, who defended their river against the National Action Party (PAN) government of Sonora; the Amuzgos of Suljaá, Guerrero, who said their voice is broadcast on Radio Ñomndaá; the Assembly of Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus in Defense of Land and Territory, who denounced abuses by the wind energy transnationals; and the Ikoot peoples of San Dionisio and San Frandisco del Mar in southern Oaxaca, who are also defending their territory. The Nahua people of the Federal District thanked the EZLN for encouraging indigenous peoples to create the CNI and denounced the continuation of the government’s policy of exploitation and robbery. A representative from Las Abejas of Acteal spoke of the need to resist, and Zapatistas from the Voice of Amate sent a greeting to the seminar from the San Cristóbal jail where they are imprisoned.
Feminists, writers, intellectuals…Feminist Silvia Ribeiro denounced the imminent appropriation of Mexican maize by Monsanto and reminded the seminar that industrial agriculture emits 44-57% of the greenhouse effect gases, but only produces 30% of the world’s food. She explained how maize isn’t just a food; it is responsible for a set of relations essential to the subsistence of thousands of communities that have maize at the heart of their time, their culture and their life.
French economist Silvia Pérez described how the peasants of Africa, Asia and Europe are survivors of the extermination caused by transnational corporations and have the potential to build a more just society. Former Iranian diplomat Majid Rahnema told how he left his government post to live in a community in which he came to understand the importance of the place from which you see the world, since those above, whether from the right or the left, see people as objects, whereas from below one sees the power of life in each person. He acknowledged that he had learned from the “walk-asking-questions” method practiced by the Zapatistas.
Belgian sociologist François Houtart discussed the contradiction between the fall of a real productive economy and the rise of fictitious capital based on speculation and injustice that prevails in a world in which 20% of the population controls 83% of all existing wealth. All that remains to the excluded 80% is to organize and struggle for another possible world.
Historian Eric Baschet discerned possibilities of creating and expanding liberated spaces within capitalist society and pointed to the Zapatista autonomous municipalities as an important achievement and example.
Anthropologist Mercedes Olivera referred to the Zapatista marches at the end of last year and the new period of peoples’ struggles in terms of the start of a new Mayan cycle, which implies a resurgence of life. Her colleague Xóchitl Leyva criticized cultural tourism’s appropriation of the Maya cycle, highlighting the Zapatistas’ interpretation as more in accord with the spirit of that calendar.
Writer Gustavo Esteva pointed out that even within the context of the crisis of capitalism, Mexico is in the midst of a social, political, economic, food and environmental disaster. He denounced the sale of 40% of the nation’s territory to mining companies and the government’s use of intercommunity conflicts as a cover for grabbing up Zapatista lands. Esteva, a self-defined “deprofessionalized intellectual” activist, founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, and adviser to the EZLN in its negotiations with the government, charged the government with designing devious plans to reduce the Zapatista initiative to a strictly indigenous issue, when it is in fact much broader.
Pablo Casanova, former rector of the Mexican National Autonomous University, said we have the opportunity to organize an immense worldwide network of collectives in defense of territory and the planet. His take on the crisis the world is facing is that it’s not cyclical and neither short nor long, but is broad-spectrum, comes from the very roots of capitalism and is jeopardizing the planet’s survival. He envisions the alternatives as forms of human emancipation that will be peaceful projects of democracy and autonomy.
Philosophers Luis Villoro and Fernanda Navarro held up the Zapatistas as a great lesson and described them as inciting us to build a world in which every living thing is loved and respected.
Dozens of important Mexican academics backed the Zapatista demands in a public letter talking of difficult times ahead for Mexico because the national territory has been given over to huge corporations to develop mega-projects that are destroying the indigenous peoples and because of the hard blow represented by the recent labor reforms.
Is Zapatismo still a major referent?Although the reliability of polls in Mexico took a serious hit after the presidential elections last year, they do offer clues to the intentions of both the polling firms and some surveyed sectors. For example, the way Parametría reported the results of its nationwide poll on the Zapatistas’ silent marches and communiqués attempted to show that Mexicans “have left the Zapatista movement in the past.” But this doesn’t even square with its own data, as 44% of those polled think it isn’t outdated, and only 37% think of it as something from the past.
What Parametría should have reported is that only a third of those polled were aware of the EZLN’s “reappearance” and over half are as yet unaware of the motives of its recent demonstrations. The poll confirmed that 64% know the EZLN still exists and 72% have heard Subcomandante Marcos speak at some time.
Alluding to this poll, analyst Massimo Modonesi suggested that militant youth have entered a new stage in which Zapatismo is no longer the main referent. He believes that Zapatismo has been downsized, reducing itself to the indigenous dimension and abandoning the vast urban, particularly student spheres in which it was firmly inserted in the past. He concludes that youth, urban and civil Zapatismo has either disappeared or been reduced to a minimum expression. But to really appreciate the continuing impact of Zapatismo on the youth sectors, we’ll have to see what happens starting in August when the new “Zapatista School” opens its doors.
In contrast to Modonesi’s take on events, researcher Neil Harvey reported that the recent silent marches of thousands of Zapatistas had demonstrated the EZLN’s organizational capacity and political presence (see the March 2013 issue of envío for coverage of this new stage of activity). He also observed the freshness in their rank and file, with the participation of new cadres of young men and women who have grown up and become activists despite so many aggressions against the autonomous communities. Harvey stressed that the government has tried to divide, coopt and repress, yet the Zapatista marches are peaceful responses to its armed aggression and demonstrate the Zapatistas’ great social strength.
A 90-year-old student in the new Zapatista SchoolDozens of Zapatista supporters from the San Marcos Avilés ejido have suffered threats, harassment and forced evictions since 2010 for building the first autonomous school on that communal land. In February they were again threatened with forced eviction by Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Green Party and Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) activists who were aggressively demanding that they pay a land use tax. The Zapatistas argue that they see no reason to pay taxes because they receive nothing from the government. When the threats continued, the Good Government Junta of Oventic issued a communiqué recapitulating the aggressions against San Marcos Avilés just in the past two years: robberies, destruction of crops, land evictions, aggression against individuals...
The increased wave of violence against the Zapatista communities has not halted preparations for opening the “Zapatista School” in August. Ninety-year-old Pablo González Casanova announced that he plans to attend. He said that the Zapatistas have been turoring him in an extended and fruitful post-doctorate study from which he has learned so much.
“Good news”Bishop Raúl Vera, referring to the new Zapatista communiqués, said the indigenous project represents an alternative to the failure of neoliberal capitalism, which has taken Mexico to greater levels of poverty, misery and inequality, particularly among the indigenous peoples. He urged the Mexican State to raise the San Andrés Agreements to constitutional rank to benefit all indigenous Mexicans.
Dominican priest Gonzalo Ituarte, who was vicar of the San Cristóbal diocese when the EZLN uprising took place, called the recent communiqués signed by Subcomandante Marcos “good news” that encourage many to speak out about the country’s situation. Recognizing errors and difficulties, the Zapatistas want to build new bridges with others who are also seeking different formulations and platforms for transforming the system.
The new governor of Chiapas accepted that the San Andrés Agreements on indigenous rights and culture must be fulfilled and has pledged his government to respect Zapatista lands and recognize their right to resistance and self-determination. He promised to work to resolve the tense situation in the Zapatista communities of San Marcos Avilés and Comandante Abel. He also called for Alberto Patishtán’s quick release of from prison. The Zapatista campaign to free its nine political prisoners, Patishtán among them, has intensified in 2013.
The Patishtán caseAlberto Patishtán Gómez’s case is paradigmatic. A Tzotzil Mayan teacher from the town of El Bosque in Los Altos, Chiapas, he was arbitrarily jailed in 2000 as a warning to others struggling for social justice, and has since been victim to an array of further injustices. His innocence has been proved and the government knows it, but it has refused to release him. To pull the plug on demonstrations demanding his release, he was even sent to a prison over a thousand miles from his community. In February 2012, Patishtán won a suit to be returned to his community, but the authorities refused to obey the judge’s order.
Patishtán has challenged the Supreme Court ruling ordering the release of those accused of the Acteal massacre while keeping innocent people imprisoned. This March, Patishtán asked God to enlighten the Supreme Court justices so they would be guided by truth and help free him. But the next month the Supreme Court reconfirmed its arbitrariness by freeing still others implicated in the Acteal massacre.
In addition, the indigenous people convicted of that crime, some of whom had even confessed yet have been free since 2009, are now returning to their communities, contravening agreements and official declarations that they would be relocated elsewhere. Their reinsertion is not only an affront to the victims, but also once again endangers the victims’ surviving relatives, not to mention the region’s unstable peace. Despite being considered one of Mexico’s worst ever massacres, neither its intellectual nor its material authors have been sentenced. Bishop Arizmendi charged that in the Acteal case the Court had concerned itself only with legality, not with justice, in evident contrast with Patishtán’s case, which is legally flawed and affects an innocent man, yet the Court refuses to order his release.
European collectives have expressed their solidarity with Patishtán’s cause and written to him to say that independent of the Court’s ruling, they know the authorities want him in prison because his heart was born rebellious, indigenous and poor. Another important international as well as national effort to secure his freedom took place in April, when some 6.000 letters demanding his release were sent to the appropriate authorities while 15,000 marched in the capital of Chiapas to demand justice.
A crusade against hunger or a “lack of moral compass”?Meanwhile, on January 21, President Peña Nieto officially unveiled what he dubbed a “National Crusade against Hunger” in Las Margaritas, Chiapas, pompously announcing it would massively reduce malnutrition, poverty and social marginalization.
Journalist Luis Hernández saw Peña Nieto’s decision to launch his paternalistic program in a place so symbolic for the Zapatista struggle as a sign of the PRI government’s arrogance and “lack of moral compass” to resolve the conflict with the EZLN. Las Margaritas is the community in which the Zapatistas initiated their uprising on January 1, 1994.
The Zapatistas mocked the official act’s terrible choreography while the organized civil society of Las Abejas criticized the crusade by stating that those who live off the land are free while those who live from the government’s handouts are slaves. They also reminded the government that they have a memory and aren’t oblivious to the fact that Emilio Chauyffet, who together with President Zedillo masterminded the Acteal massacre, has a post in Peña Nieto’s new government.
The indigenous people mobilized in defense of Patishtán argued that Peña Nieto’s crusade isn’t against hunger but against the hungry. They defiantly insisted that they don’t want the crumbs the government throws their way to quiet its conscience. What indigenous peoples and peasants are hungry for, they argued, is truth and justice in the Acteal and Patishtán cases, as well as compliance with the San Andrés Agreements.
Is the govenment apple poisoned?Magdalena Gómez, a specialist in indigenous law, applauded Zapatismo’s peaceful presence with its great symbolic weight. Her analysis of the reaction to its communiqués stressed the importance that those below are receptive to and open to dialogue with Zapatismo. She also warned of the initiation of a governmental strategy which beneath its benevolent discourse represents a virtual poisoned apple aimed at the EZLN. She explained that the national crusade against hunger must be seen in that light.
The federal government has also appointed a commissioner for dialogue with indigenous peoples, who would not have returned to the center of national debate were it not for last December’s Zapatista mobilization. For its part, the legislative branch named the members of the commission to dialogue specifically with the EZLN in line with the existing Law for Dialogue, Concertation and Dignified Peace in Chiapas so it can collaborate with the federal commission.
At bottom, however, the federal commission violated the objective of that law, whose first article defines the EZLN’s status and establishes its objective as establishing the legal underpinnings that will encourage dialogue and conciliation to achieve a concord and pacification agreement that provides a fair, dignified and lasting solution to the armed conflict that began in 1994. The law specifies that it understands the EZLN to be the group of mainly indigenous people who identify themselves as an organization of Mexican citizens who are upset for diverse reason and thus got involved in the conflict.
Magdalena Gómez charged that the new commission wasn’t a product of legislative agreement and only duplicates the functions of the former official indigenist authority. She believes its real aim is to continue its policy of giving money to some indigenous groups to divide them rather than resolve the underlying problems.
Building bridgesThe new Zapatista proposal to “build bridges” was well received by leaders of peasant organizations and indigenous representatives. They all agree they have more in common with the Zapatistas than differences, since the government is operating with a close-minded charity vision, indifferent to the rights of the poorest indigenous peoples and peasants.
The Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, headed by poet Javier Sicilia, backed the EZLN and expressed its desire to continue walking alongside the Zapatistas. Like the Zapatistas, that movement’s members have seen in their painful travels through Mexico how this world is falling apart. The movement thanked the Zapatistas for having shown the world that morality, ethics and truth are the most powerful tools for building a world with peace, justice, dignity and democracy.
The #IAm132 movement also responded happily to the Zapatista invitation to walk together with other movements, as did a sex workers’ collective that calls itself the Street Brigade. The collective praised the Zapatistas’ dignified example and said their courage is inscribed in the heart of its members.
Seeds of civilizing changeEthno-ecologist Víctor Toledo commented on the current breakdown of industrial civilization, which is sustained by competition, markets utterly dominated by capitalist logic, the predominant use of fossil fuels and science and technology as instruments of control and power. Whereas the reigning model destroys nature and exploits human labor, he sees Zapatismo as affirming local and regional self-management in concrete territories and thus demonstrating how to get away from capitalism.
The experience is not limited to the Zapatista region. Toledo has detected autonomous processes in 16 other Mexican regions that, while not explicitly political, function with similar values. He insists that change won’t come through either the ballot box or arms; representative democracy has become inoperative due to the deterioration, corruption and inefficacy of the institutions and violence isn’t a viable option given the gigantic military power of States. Only social or civic power exercised in territories, first on a small scale and later expanded by the joining together of geopolitical spaces, will achieve the needed transformation. And in Mexico Zapatismo represents the seeds of such civilizing change.
What they’re teaching usRafael Sandoval, who specializes in Zapatismo, enumerated the elements he considers relevant in the communiqués: 1) The Zapatistas have no cult to the dead but rather to life; 2) They are not getting caught up in the dilemma between electoral struggle and armed struggle; 3) They are not selling out to those at the top, nor do they accept State handouts or aid; 4) The leaders are invisible because they are everyone; 5) They live better than those who submit to the state programs; 6) They build schools, clinics, hospitals and housing; 7) They have been able to lower crime rates and wipe out alcoholism; 8) They have prohibited the production, distribution or consumption of narcotics; and 9) they recognize themselves as part of a bigger “we” still to be constructed.
According to Sandoval, the Zapatista communiqués raise the following questions: Why are things as they are? Could they be otherwise? How do we imagine this other way, this other society, in fact this other world we want and need? What must be done? And with whom?
What they’ve learnedSandoval also observes that in these past seven years the Zapatistas have learned a lot and come to realize that they have to change the rhythm and speed with which they are moving, as well as change company. In this regard, they’ve made it known that they remember who was where and when, what was said and done, or not said and undone, what was written, what erased. They explain that their invitation doesn’t mean uniting, directing, coopting, recruiting, supplanting, imitating, simulating, deceiving, subordinating or using.
He values the heterogeneity and autonomy of the different ways in which the Zapatistas move forward. They have concluded The Other Campaign. The territory of their action will now be the Planet Earth. Now, after the recent communiqués, being part of “The Sixth”—their shorthand for the new vision contained in their Sixth Declaration—doesn’t require affiliation, dues, or signing up to be on the list. There will be no huge concentrations. The Sixth will move with a “long stride.” They won’t ally with any electoral movement, and will reject any attempt at hegemony and vanguardism.
Sandoval criticized efforts in the Mexican Left to push the EZLN to adopt a policy of alliances in the traditional way politics is done, even though the Zapatistas have time and again urged the forming of a Left below and to the left, outside the State and away from capital.
The Zapatistas emerged stronger from the government’s military and social encirclement and annihilation policy. They continue teaching us that there are other ways of doing politics that don’t revolve around occupying state institutions, but rather around autonomy as a daily practice.
Going forward in silenceMeanwhile, Mexico’s “below” is expressed in hundreds of environmental conflicts, a multiplication of community police, teacher mobilizations against the privatizing educational reform and worker demands for a change of economic course because the current one is a disaster.
Some think that because Zapatismo isn’t in the media or in the discussions of those above, it no longer has influence and is disappearing. But in this silent walk with those below, exchanging experiences, jointly and subterraneously coming to understand the creation of something new, Zapatismo is taking important steps towards building alternatives.
Jorge Alonso is a researcher for CIESAS West and envío correspondent in Mexico.
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