“The ‘haves’ destroy but we, the ‘have nots,’ rebuild”

The increasing neoliberalism imposed by Mexico’s elite, has moved the struggle of the poor and working class into a new phase. Condemnation is not enough. Indigenous peoples and organized collectives are preparing for intense and sustained resistance.

Jorge Alonso

Mexico’s politicians and economic elites have introduced economic reforms that are intensifying the plundering neoliberal model. The major parties are proud to have promoted these reforms, which are handing the country over to large capitalist corporations. The government has promised improvements but Mexico continues to be affected by serious economic difficulties while the major environmental disasters provoked by extractive policies go unpunished.

Peña Nieto’s second presidential report contained a lot of propaganda, but little transparency and garnered scant public approval. Faced with limited results from the reforms, the government tried to defend itself by saying they aren’t magic solutions and the benefits will only begin to be seen after many years. In international circles, Mexico is said to have changed, but the change has only been for the worse and disillusionment and discontent are growing.

In this context, indigenous peoples and collectives have intensified their resistance while the regime has stepped up its repression. Pablo González Casanova sustains that the country’s long night of neoliberalism is getting darker. He believes it is no longer enough to denounce the illegality of the government’s reforms and people should prepare themselves for a new period of resistance. He insists on the need for consistency of thought and action to confront “the policy of carrots, sticks, corruption and repression.” At the same time, he praises the rise in organization among groups belonging to the emancipatory movements.

Confronting a
soulless machine

In the middle of the year, groups from a majority of the country’s states organized a demonstration that brought 35,000 peasants to Mexico City to protest the reforms promoted by the government and supported by the legislature. They came to defend their land, which they know is threatened by the facilities the reforms give to big businesses. When the civil society organization called Las Abejas denounced the government’s release of 54 of the 70 paramilitaries responsible for the Acteal massacre, it also summed up the government’s long history of responding with repression to indigenous people organizing to resist megaprojects menacing their territory (airport construction, highways, dams, mines, etc.). They know indigenous peoples have no recourse other than nonviolent struggle to defend themselves against the neoliberal capitalist system, to which their autonomy is an obstacle. In their words, autonomy allows them to defend Mother Earth while the neoliberal capitalist system is “a monster, a soulless genocidal machine.”

The Zapatistas and
the “new neoliberal war”

The Zapatistas have continued to organize their autonomy and their resistance. In early August, 312 people representing 29 different indigenous peoples, each with its own colors and language, participated with more than a thousand Zapatista supporters in the National Indigenous Congress, held in La Realidad. In his welcoming words, Comandante Tacho congratulated them for coming so far to recount the suffering and pain caused by the neoliberal system as well as to share precious knowledge, experiences of struggle and organization, and challenges. He reminded them that native peoples, who have long been ignored by the powerful, are facing a new plan to dispossess them, without any protection by the law or the government, but with hope in themselves.

These people and the Zapatistas held their “sharing” without the presence of outsiders. At its end, the free and autonomous media were invited to the closing session, during which two declarations were presented. The first dealt with the repression suffered by indigenous peoples. Once again, they declared that the war against indigenous peoples has been going on for over 520 years and that capitalism was born from the blood of the millions who died during the European invasion as well as of those who died in the wars of independence, through the imposition of Liberal laws, during the Porfiriato as well as nd during the revolution. In the “new neoliberal war of conquest,” the death of the indigenous peoples is a precondition for that system’s survival.

Places and names, one by one

During the last few decades, thousands upon thousands of indigenous people have been tortured, killed, imprisoned and disappeared for defending their land, family and communities, their culture and even their lives. The places where people had been murdered or disappeared were listed and the people themselves were named and remembered one by one. The same was done for political prisoners and people who are wanted for defending their land. The harassment and threats received in recent years were also listed and the demand was made that this hostile climate be ended. The declaration concluded: “Our anger was born from our pain, our rebellion from our anger, and the freedom of the peoples of the world will be born from our rebellion.”

Mexico has always ignored them

The second declaration from the “sharing” between the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) concerned the dispossession suffered by indigenous peoples in the land of their birth, where they live and will rest eternally. “We are the guardians of these lands, of the country, the continent and the world.”

The indigenous people recalled that Mexico has ignored its native peoples since independence, enacting Constitutions and laws that privatize their land and seek to legitimize the pillage of their territories. They haven’t forgotten the thousands of individuals and dozens of entire peoples exterminated through military campaigns and mass exile. They are well aware that, despite the death of a million indigenous people and peasants during Mexico’s revolution, the agrarian laws were conceived by the murderers of Emiliano Zapata to protect large landholdings; block the restitution of communal land, water sources and woodlands; and convert autonomous communal property into ejidal property. Nonetheless, after so many deaths they are still living peoples, responding to dispossession and extermination with rebellion and resistance.

A list of grievances
and dispossession

Hundreds of rebellions, in particular the Zapatista revolution, have challenged the colonizing society throughout the country. “In 2014, the neoliberal capitalists, backed by all political parties and bad governments and led by the criminal paramilitary leader Enrique Peña, are applying the same large-scale dispossession policies that the Liberals pursued in the 19th century and the revolutionary factions of [Venustiano] Carranza and [Álvaro] Obregón renewed in the 20th century, underpinned by militarization and paramilitarization and advised by the US intelligence services.”

The plunder, takeovers and spoilage of land they denounced a year ago continue and have been extended with new modalities and new sites of dispossession. Nevertheless, they have fought against these dispossessions in which they see “mirrors” reflected in the mirror they themselves constitute. The 29 mirrors listed include places where government-supported organized crime and large corporations take over communal land, plunder minerals and precious wood and cause toxic spills; land invasions by agricultural colonizers; pollution of water sources; evictions in favor of wind energy companies; dispossession disguised as land rental; usurpation of water sources… The long list of grievances against indigenous peoples was explained in detail.

Indigenous peoples find themselves in a “life-threatening emergency” but are not giving in or selling out. The people of the corn know the cornfield belongs to the community and announced their renewed decision to build from below a new world in which many worlds can fit. They closed with the slogan: “Our mother earth’s heart lives in our peoples’ spirit.”

Towards a gigantic “sharing”

The National Indigenous Congress delegates and the EZLN announced that the peoples, tribes and nations had agreed to hold what they called the First World Festival of Resistance and Rebellion against Capitalism. After sharing their own experiences, they proposed the slogan: “The ‘haves’ destroy but we, the ‘have nots’, rebuild.”

The proposal is to conduct a gigantic global “sharing” from December 22, 2014, to January 3, 2015, in various venues and different days. The conclusions and declarations will be presented in the Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Earth) in San Cristóbal de las Casas.

Message to the media

Marcos, now known as Subcomandante Galeano, held a press conference with the free, autonomous and alternative media. He referred to the ways in which the disappearance of “the late Subcomandante Marcos” have been interpreted and clarified that what had happened was that the EZLN changed its representative.

He referred to the “paid media that live on publicity and have a top-down, authoritarian and arbitrary structure through which capitalism converts everything into merchandise.” He posed that the Zapatistas had shown how collective anonymity is a real problem for the elite media, which always looks for individuals and personalities. He explained that the best information is that which comes directly from the protagonist, not from the person covering the news, and that the free, autonomous and alternative media are able to report in this way.

He sustained that the paid media are in decline because they’ve allied themselves with a weakened political class and will disappear, replaced by the Internet. He explained that the Zapatistas believe the free media will eventually fill the hole being created in global information sharing and have already radically changed their own media policy: the Zapatistas aren’t interested in talking to the elite media; they want to talk with and listen to the free media. If they want to find out what’s happening, they first turn to the free media.

Remembering Compañero Galeano

Galeano also referred to those who ask why the Zapatistas make such a big deal about one dead person, Compañero Galeano, murdered by paramilitaries.

Subcomandante Galeano emphasized that one death is important to the Zapatistas because if they failed to pay attention to one then tens or even thousands of dead would also go unheeded. The Zapatistas will not allow the murder of even one of their number to go unpunished. For them even one wrongful death is too many so they are ready to take whatever action is necessary. He reminded his listeners that Compañero Galeano was responsible for welcoming the paid press: he carried their backpacks, fed them and escorted them to the locations for their reports but they never even asked him his name, they were only interested in interviewing Marcos. To the paid press, the Zapatistas are a commodity, while the free press sees them as a site of struggle, like many others around the world.

Specialists in listening

Asked where the Zapatistas were going to get their information, Subcomandante Galeano answered that they would use neither the paid media nor the social networks, “fishing in the rough and unstable sea of the Internet.” The Zapatistas view listening as the main means of communication, so they refer to the free media as “the listeners.”

He explained that native peoples are specialists in listening and in the current context of ultrafast and chaotic information, the most important means of communication is direct sharing, as practiced by the participants in the National Indigenous Congress: to listen to what they were hearing and take it to the people so that they can listen too.

A lot of a few makes many

Subcomandante Moisés began his presentation by affirming that indigenous and non-indigenous people should join hands, as indigenous people still have a common life in their communities whereas this is more difficult for city people to attain, as “behind your walls, nobody knows what problems your neighbors have.”

He clarified that he wasn’t asking people to become indigenous and that ideas shouldn’t be imposed. Rather they should see what works and that means they need to listen and watch. He also remarked that the National Indigenous Congress sharing doesn’t end with a closing speech; being an assembly it needs to be closed by the assembly members. During the assembly, nobody said what needed to be done; instead ideas began to be shared until they discovered “what they felt as compañeros.” Moisés further explained the sharing methodology: each person presents his or her thoughts and then there are questions about what was said and seen, what people think and want, and what they imagine.

As a space was created for the free media to participate, some people ended up feeling there should be more “sharings” in many places, observing that it doesn’t matter if there are only a few people in each because a lot of a few in many places make “many many.”

Atenco opposes the airport

During August, there was also a national meeting in Atenco, at which 70 peasant, trade union and social organizations proposed the creation of a National Assembly of Peoples in Resistance to engage in simultaneous protests all over the country against the plundering reforms promoted by the government and approved by the legislature.
Representatives of different peoples in struggle participated in the event where they discussed a range of topics: dispossession; indigenous autonomy; food sovereignty, security, production and consumption; energy and Nature. They proposed creating a national mediation commission to avoid isolated struggles by peoples fighting for the same reasons.

Members of the Peoples’ Land Defense Front (FPDT) in Atenco condemned the federal government’s plan to expropriate their land for the construction of a new airport for Mexico City, as announced in the second presidential report. The FPDT reacted to defend its land with a plan for protests as well as opposition through legal action.

Atenco community members marched

to the agrarian courts to demand the annulment of a bogus assembly promoted by the government several weeks earlier that had approved a soil-use change for over a thousand hectares of land from communal usufruct to absolute ownership so as to be able to transfer their ownership. The FPDT announced roadblocks, marches and other protests, as well as a legal appeal against the authorization of the soil-use change. They made clear that they would be constantly alert and would respond to any federal government attacks because their lands are not for sale.

The government has put in motion a strategy of fear in the region but the community members are continuing to defend their land “against a criminal organization that has no respect for indigenous peoples.” They know that Atenco is just one example of a situation being repeated throughout the country.

They will give their life for their land

The newspaper La Jornada reminded its readers of the brutal repression unleashed in Atenco in 2006 by current president Peña Nieto when he was governor of the state of Mexico. The lack of justice for the victims and the impunity of those responsible for the excesses committed against the people mean this is still an open wound. The newspaper highlighted the lack of consultations and open negotiation with the communities around the projected new airport and the existence of underhanded dealings including the pressure and rigged ejidal assemblies it has been denouncing for months.

The airport project provides confirmation of a land expropriation war that had already begun. With the help of the major media, the government is trying to present the opposition as an intransigent group standing in the way of progress. The elites applaud the revival of the airport project and are applying pressure to suppress the opposition but the FPDT members have declared that they will give their lives for their land. This conflict is at the center of a fight that will be long and hard, but they are not alone as several collectives are supporting their struggle.

This is a crisis of a way of life

The approval of energy laws has legalized the expropriation of indigenous land to benefit major capital investments and will increase the criminalization of social struggles. The government will try to divide communities, buying some leaders and repressing those who don’t comply with its wishes. The collectives that try to defend their land and maintain their autonomy will find themselves in worse conditions than before. A new wave of dispossession is arriving but the have nots’ collectives are looking for new ways to defend themselves.

As Boaventura de Sousa Santos warned, neoliberalism’s destructive prescriptions
are destroying social cohesion. Neoliberal capitalism takes over land with no respect for the communities’ ancestral rights. With their resistance, however, indigenous peoples have exposed the dimension of the crisis. It is not only a crisis of a means of production, but also of a way of life, of living together and relating to the natural world, in short of a civilization.

A nonlinear vision and
a different way of doing things

The innovation envisaged by the Zapatistas is found in “sharing.” By exchanging experiences about the attacks they suffer, indigenous peoples realize they aren’t dealing with unique problems but rather with a generalized pattern of dispossession. In sharing their experiences they find ways of pursuing active resistance together.
The practice of listening replicated in many communities facilitates the analysis of common problems and the search for answers, not only locally but regionally, nationally and even internationally.

These wide-ranging shared reflections start to create a new body of knowledge. Systematizations are done that promote comparisons, both time-bound ones and others with long-term relevance. Questions are raised and new visions are energized. This all strengthens the struggle.

The indigenous people in resistance view their history over the long haul and from a non-linear perspective. In their vision, events far-off in time are also present in the here and now.

The merciless, voracious appetite of the dominant classes makes these difficult times. Nevertheless, they are also times that encourage the creation of new ways of doing, sharing and building from below. Faced with destructive attacks, there really is a reconstructive way to defend life.

Jorge Alonso is a researcher for CIESAS Occidente and the envío correspondent in Mexico.

Print text

Send text