Today in Chiapas all traffic headed southeast. I'm writing in fact from the mouth of the Lacandon jungle, shortly before midnight of December 31st, 2005, with an internet connection fueled by a satellite painted like a Zapatista, and Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos is to scheduled to leave from here tomorrow morning, 10:00a.m. New Year's Day 2006, for the official launch of "La Otra Campa~a,"" or the Other Campaign. Communiques have spilled out of the jungle in the last week, one to other political-military groups in the country whose territory the Sup, or "Subdelegado O" as he to be known in the context of the Otra, will pass through, expressing and requesting respect in the passage, one to alternative media, supporting their presence and effort, another to the national and international press, sympathizing with the pain of journalists tethered to the boring presidential election campaigns under the orders of their editors when they would rather be covering “la Otra.”
The 6th Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle, or the Sexta, though, has already started, in the countless encounters and endless meetings that have brought people together to organize the emergence of the Subdelegado from the Selva. Punks from Mexico City meet the old stalwart local left, traditionalists meet anarchists, peaceniks, hippies, intellectuals, homemakers, and students raised in a new movement that refuses to follow orders or respect hierarchies. The Sexta Coleta, the group of adherents of the Sexta in San Cristobal, full of NGOers and internationals and professional activists, and the displaced indigenous communities of La Hormiga, a settlement on the edge of San Cristobal with the reputation for being rough territory, find themselves together trying to agree on a meeting methodology, to talk in a common language, and above all, to listen to each other. The real political project surfaces as people try to grasp their own political subjectivity, the role of solidarity and support from "outside" swept out from under them with the call to “stand not behind us or in front of us, but beside us, as compa~eros and compa~eras” urged by the EZLN in September's public plenary session in the jungle as they turned the Sexta and the struggle over to civil society.
The Mexican newspaper La Cronica, citing a CISEN (like the FBI) document, reported a few days ago that the Zapatistas had all but lost grassroots support, that Marcos was attempting to supplant Lopez Obrador as leftist leader of the country, that the goal of the Sexta was to turn the Zapatista insurgent army into the primary party of the left. The thousands of people here tonight, from the Zapatista communities and from national and international civil society, the tens of thousands that will gather tomorrow in San Cristobal when the pasamonta~as leave the monta~as, and the hundreds of thousands around the world that watch and listen from their own struggles for a Sexta-politics without parties, politicians, or presidents, make clear what nonsense this is. More in 2006--the year is about to turn and the Sexta about to launch!

Kilombo Commons

Welcome to Intergalactica! This is the El Kilombo global blog spot, with news and analysis from Durham, NC, Paris, France, and Chiapas, Mexico, as well as the virtual assembly space of our global community.