We began with Six

January 9, 2005
Before the tour was suspended a few days ago in Tonala, Delegado O had started to talk about the early days of the EZLN. He states that at the beginning, there were 6 of them, 5 men, one woman, 3 indigenous, 3 from the city. And they began going house to house, community by community. That is how Zapatismo started! Well that’s not true—it started in the accumulated histories and experiences and struggles of the indigenous people in Chiapas and all the other communities, full of desire and living with repression, that received, echoed, and transformed what those 6 people in the jungle initiated. But the organizational effort, the beginning, required a decision. This has been a recurring theme in each place we stop: we have to decide. Decide whether you want to participate in a country that excludes or uses you, or decide to construct a different country. It is only up to us, it is repeated in each place, if we don’t do something, there won’t be anything, there is nothing to wait for, no one will or can solve this for us. The Sup tells the modest beginnings of the EZLN for this purpose—to express that when they decided to do something, they were small, poor, unknown, with nothing but their words and the power of encounter.
On September 16, at the plenary session of the Sexta in the caracol of La Garrucha, the Sup read a poem by Jacobo Silva Nogales, which is called “Secondary Effects,” written two years ago in the Almoloya jail: (translation Irlandesa)

If I could, perhaps
up there by the entrance
of the entrance I would put a sign
and it would say: “Warning,
drive with care.”
At very high doses,
it can produce sadness,
anxiety, neurosis, insomnia,
depression, suicide attempts,
family disintegration, loneliness, bitterness,
addictions to medicines or drugs,
to insipid TV programs,
to any sport, entertainment,
to sleep,
eyes closed or open,
claustrophobia, perhaps narcissism,
onanism or change of sexual option.
A brief contact could produce
repressed anger, a knot in the throat, burning in the eyes.
Prolonged exposure,
even indirect,
could produce hearts that are hard,
even more so than rocks.
And in extreme cases,
hidden sadism behind an austere face,
very serious.
Those are the rules.
In sensitive hearts,
it can cause a desire for some change,
and some little drops of effort.
And on the last line,
the label would read:
instead of the eternal “Consult your physician,”
just a simple:
“Consult yourself
and do something, god damn it!”

August 10, 2003, Almoloya of Juárez
Jacobo Silva Nogales

Returning to the subject of compañerismo in the January 4 entry above, it is important to distinguish between personal relationships, ie being friends, and being compa~eros. This is not the comraderie of the locker-room/corner-office ass-slapping, shoulder-rubbing, back-patting gentlemen’s agreements that characterize the personal alliances of politicians and old left hierarchies. There will be no positions, no pay, no prestige, it is emphasized over and over. The old rules of the game will have no play, the cunning comraderie of the elite will get you nowhere in the Sexta. There may be no individual award, apart from satisfaction of collective and cooperative creation. But this is what it is about: compa~erismo requires a collective subjectivity that, for those schooled in the oedipal education of the nuclear family and bourgeois social institutions, means overcoming the limited identities that have raised us as static subjects instead of dynamic singularities.

Don’t be afraid, the EZ also says repeatedly, or if you’re afraid don’t let it stop you. Our individual fears are isolated and disperse, they hold us back, they hold us down. But when our own fears meet the fears of others, the Sup says, they change into courage. This is what happened to us in the EZLN, he continues. As individuals or little groups we were scared and we didn’t want to enter in. But when we discovered this common pain that all of us had, our own pain multipled but so did our courage and we said, we have to change this. This is the decision that has to be made. Take it, he says at the end of each meeting, take the sexta, claim it, make it yours, and don’t let it go. Everyone can have a place and everyone will be listened to. He draws upon the legacy of his second in command, who fell January 1st, 1994, in Ocosingo, and whose death he didn’t talk about for nearly 10 years: "Comandante Pedro would be pleased to be able to say “compa~ero. This is always what we have wanted.”