Chronicles Oaxaca, Puebla, Tlaxcala

As the number of states and regions visited mount, the Other Campaign begins to accumulate stories like sediment layers into a topography of contemporary capitalism. In the Isthmus, the skinniest place in all of North and Central American between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, the Plan Puebla Panama, funded mostly by foreign investment, proposes a massive megadevelopment project including wind power, dams for hydroelectric power, major highways and transport systems. Where campesinos have not lost their land to debt or the removal of constitutional protections, they are outright evicted or displaced. With the support of the Mexican government, local resources—air, water, land—are purchased and managed by large national and international companies; farmers become peons in their own lands and women get work as servants in the houses of the managers, like a new plantation system. The Other Campaign arrives at La Venta, Oaxaca, where all the trees, bushes, even the weeds lean permanently in one direction due to the strong south winds that blows through this flat land, and massive windmills tower over fauna that is now not allowed to grow over three feet tall as not to inhibit the harnessing of the wind power. The isthmus, Delegado 0 says in one town of the isthmus,, is where the ocean hugged the earth and left her a waistline. This isthmus has its own identity, it crosses two states, Veracruz and Oaxaca, but the people who live there identify not as Oaxaquenos or Veracruzanos, but as people of the isthmus. Their struggle is acute—the organizations that have resisted the megadevelopment projects have suffered severe repression in the last few years, their members have been jailed, beaten, disappeared, and killed. And their position is key—they are the geographical and symbolic link between the Mexican southeast and the central and northern zones of the country. Plan Puebla Panama would essentially create a new border, turning the central and southeast into tax-free maquila zones much like the Mexico-US border, summarily erasing any self-sustaining economic systems and sweeping local, mostly indigenous communities into the global labor market as cheap hourly labor. In Boca del Monte, Oaxaca, Marcos directs his message to the women. In our ranks, he says, are many indigenous women. One of our commanders, Comandante Ramona, gave me a message for the women of the isthmus before she died. Her instructions were to look for the dignity of the women of the isthmus, in the white hair of the elder, in the lips of the young woman, in the eyes of the child. Don’t let the men choose the path, compa~eras, don’t let them sell the isthmus.

The Other Campaign moves west to Altepexi, where the local economy is dominated by large maquilas. The 166 workers recently fired from the maquila Rich’s Calidad y Confecciones for speaking up about bad working conditions are protesting their dismissal, They went to municipal authorities and then to state authorities, but, one worker explains in the town meeting hosting the Other Campaign, “they detained us like we were criminals. I felt like an immigrant trying to get to the US. But I was in my own state, Puebla, my home state! They said we’re in a state of law, well what law, for whom.” Other maquila workers talk of 12-16 hour shifts without overtime pay. One woman who sews soccer balls explains that she gets paid 10 pesos per ball (which will later sell for 10 times that amount), but if one doesn’t turn out she is docked 30-40 pesos for the cost of the materials. Who is responsible for this, they ask, for the fact that the person who works 16 hours a day is poor and the one who doesn’t work is rich? The scene changes as the Other Campaign travels to the Nahuatl town of Tzinacapan, but the story is repeated. We enter a dense fog as we climb the curves into this high mountain community, until the spires of an old, crumbling, gothic church emerge above the clouds. The town has gathered on the basketball court to receive the EZ commission. A full band—tubas, flutes, clarinets, trumpets—plays several pieces, the children perform a old Nahuatl marriage ritual in traditional dress, Here the local economy is dominated by artistans who sacrifice most of the profit from their handmade goods to coyotes (like traveling merchants) and coffee producers who receive 2.5 pesos, about 25 cents per kilo of roasted coffee that will sell for 6-10 dollars on the market. The Other Campaign crosses into Puebla, stopping in the Nahuatl indigenous community of Ixtepec, region Totonacapan, Sierra Norte, where they fight to maintain possession of their land, at the Telephone Worker’s Union in the City of Puebla which has fought for decades for just working conditions, at the Iberoamerican University, one of the most prestigious universities in the country, where a young man stands up on the stage and says, “our blood runs through these streets, not through our veins. I’m not afraid to sin, I already live in hell.” Each place is different, each struggle distinct, and each problem so similar: the person who produces the pants, the basketball, the corn, the sugar, the knowledge, the culture, is not the one who gets reaps or receives the benefits of that production. As the Other Campaign accumulates stories, the EZ recounts in each city and countryside:

"So we think the people, simple and humble, should ask, why is this? We need to hear the story and the voice of the person who made these pants, ‘I am so and so, and I made these pants, this day, and in this amount of time.’ For each merchandise, each pair of pants and kilo of sugar—if we knew this, it would change this country…what if the young person who buys a pair of pants in DF put his/her hand in the pocket and found a piece of paper that said who made it and where Altepexi is: ‘Here I am, this is what I am, know me, this is my dignity. I demand respect and I will also respect you.’"

The continual return to the basement of Capital vol. I, the analysis of the place of production, is accompanied always by a contemporary analysis of current conditions of capitalism and also a decision, on behalf of the local communities, students, farmers, city-dwellers, to create something else. The analysis, which frequently consists of a concrete critique of biopower, is in the words of the university students outside Oaxaca City who say “we are exploited in all we have to offer, our bodies and our ideas;” in the transsexual participants in Oaxaca City who claim the body as a place and their place of struggle; in the discourse of the transgendered collective that know that “other loves” are a place of production and revolution and that they are thus attacked directly by capitalism; in the elderly gentlemen in Toluca de Guadalupe, Tlaxcala, who spoke passionately against the consumption habits ruling their culture: he points to the BIMBO (major Mexican producer of packaged bread and snacks] wrappers and cheap soda drinks lying around “we eat this shit, drink this shit that will give us stomach cancer and intestinal disease, we read trash, what is what is in the newspaper stands? soap opera news! We watch trash movies and don’t read…and this is what they [ruling powers] want of us.” It is in the intervention of a maquila worker in Altepexi, Puebla, who insists “we are not excluded, we are a fundamental part of what is happening, it is our work that is fueling this thing; it is our lives and labor,” he adds, “my kids have been born all over this country because I had to move around looking for work—they don't have a hometown-these are the things that are creating our sociality as it exists today”; and for another Altepexi worker, “we are people of the world, not people of Altepexi, nor of Puebla, nor of Mexico. We have to be people of the world.”

The Zapatista analysis of power—not to take power, but to exercise it—finds resonance in the corners it visits all over these states. An indigenous leader in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, claims “we are fighting for a dignified power, not a power from above that is filthy, but rather a power that shares, that is of the people,” and an teenage girl from the poor, unpaved city outskirts of Oaxaca, “we fight to be free, not to take power,” in the words of the same elder quoted above in Toluca de Gualalupe, “we are not what we are now, we are what we could be.”

What “we could be” as proposed in the Other Campaign is together in a common struggle. Marcos greeted the Telephone unionists in Puebla saying, “Good morning, compañeros and compañeras, you don’t know how long we have waited to say this—22 years. It is for us an honor to listen to your word and know, as Zapatistas, that finally, after so much time, we have compañeros workers of the city”; and his answer to a woman at the Iberoamerican University who stated defiantly that she was “neither with Marcos nor Lopez Obrador [leftist PRD candidate for president] “that’s no problem, compañera, the difference is that López Obrador wants to be your president and I want to be your compañero.”

Marcos finished the analysis on the basement of production that day in Altepexi, Oaxaca, with the maquila workers like this: “Perhaps the day will arrive when we buy pants or the jacket and we’ll get not only the story of the exploitation, but the story of rebellion that started February 11, 2006, in Altepexi, where arose the most beautiful lesson of love that these lands have seen. Because when we struggle together, this is what we have, where each person asks another, who are you? And the other answers, this is my life, this is my work, this is my struggle. And the first answers, unite with us, without stopping being who and what you are, fight with us."

EZLN History: pre-1994 to the Sixth

Today, on the 10th anniversary of the date the San Andres Accords were signed, I want to piece together the history of the EZ and the Zapatista communities as it has been told little by little on this journey, from before the 1994 uprising when indigenous people on the streets in San Cristobal, Chiapas had to walk in the street instead of the sidewalk and bow their heads and lower their eyes when someone passed, to the First Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle when the Zapatistas declared war on the Mexican state, to the 6th Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle and the current moment in 2006 where Zapatismo has become a global phenomenon and to be indigenous and Zapatista in Chiapas is to be proud, radical, and respected. The Other Campaign, though, puts very little emphasis on the Accords—that was an agreement made with those above. “Now we are doing something else,” the EZLN clarifies, “and it is from and for below.”

In many parts of the country rumors have circulated that Marcos is coming to try to start another war, that he is going to ask them to fight, or to put on masks, to go to the mountains. Place by place the EZLN keeps patiently explaining how and why the Subdelegado O has been sent there, filling in history, explaining who they are, where they came from, how they have gotten to where they are, and what they are trying to do now. Delegado O explains how it is that he wears a mask, who sent him and who is behind him.

In Lomas del Dorado, Veracruz, January 31, 2006, Marcos began by saying, “I want you to hear this, because I know you have been scared that we come here to bring problems or to bring war. We don’t bring guns; [he points to each of his pockets and belts] I have here a few pens to take notes with, here I have a radio, to get news updates or find out how the road is ahead; here I have a spare skimask in case this one gets really dirty, here I have something to charge batteries, and here I have a pliers in case the car breaks down, and here’s a compass in case I get lost.”

The following is taken largely from a meeting with the teachers union in Oaxaca City, February 9, 2006, with inserts from other cities and towns that I note by dates). Where there are quotes it’s a quote, the rest I’m paraphrasing closely but from my notes, not direct transcription:

Good evening, comrades. I am Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, I am the boss of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, an armed force. But I am a subcommander because I follow the orders of an indigenous council, most of them older men and women now, who listen to the indigenous Zapatista communities. The EZLN is in its great majority indigenous men and women. When our organization was still secret, our indigenous members had to cover their faces because, and you know this if you have been in indigenous communities, everybody knows everybody. I am the boss of this army, and I was not prepared to do anything my troops weren’t prepared to do, so I covered my face, too. We took San Cristobal de las Casas January 1, 1994; that morning dawned with us, the EZLN, in control of the city. That day some of the companeros called me over because they said there was an American journalist who wanted to talk to somebody. It turned out that it was a French tourist asking if he could leave the city. I said no, not yet, but that he would be safe with us and not to worry. But while I was there talking to him a bunch of journalists and photographers came over and started taking pictures and asking questions. That’s where “Marcos” was born. The mask will stay on until they kill me or take it off me by force….”

(It’s interesting to note that while the masks interest or frighten or fascinate people in other parts of the country, in Chiapas, people in the cities and even more often in the villages expressed the same sentiment over and over: before, here in Chiapas we were forgotten and invisible to the world. When the Zapatistas put on masks, all of a sudden everyone could see us.)

In Tzinacapan, and indigenous town in Puebla, 2/13/06, he adds: Before 1994, in San Cristobal de las Casas the indigenous still couldn’t walk on the sidewalk, we had to walk in the street like animals…we had no schools, or if there was a school there wasn’t a teacher, no hospitals, no work, no food. When one of us got sick we had to decide, which is cheaper, try to get transportation to the city to see a doctor that may refuse to treat us or treat us badly, or die? It was usually cheaper to die. Poverty and death was growing so quickly and the desperation and anxiety increasing so rapidly leading up to 1994, and we thought, we might get old and nothing will happen, nothing will change. So we rose up in arms. And we thought, we can wait here in the mountains for the soldiers or we can go after them in the cities. And we decided to go get them. The large landowners in Chiapas has their own White Guards (like private paramilitary groups) and that’s where we got our weapons. That night (December 31, 1995) the rich were having drinks to celebrate New Year’s Eve; we didn’t even have anything to make coffee with.

Delegado O continues (back to the Oaxaca discourse 2/9/06): When we rose up we expected one of two things, either the people would rise up with us and fight, or they wouldn’t pay any attention to us and we’d get blown to pieces, we’d die like all the others that have tried to resist. But nether one of these happened. Instead, the people supported us but they didn’t support the war. And we wanted to know, who were these people who agreed with us politically but didn’t agree with the war, who wanted us to dialogue and negotiate with the government? So we agreed to talk to the government, but we used this opportunity [the dialogues] to meet the people who asked for the ceasefire, who demanded that the Mexican government not let the army not kill us. We invited a bunch of people—artist, intellectuals, writers, etc.—because we said, we’re not going to do this alone. And what we produced, the proposal for Indigenous rights and autonomy, couldn’t have been produced alone. […]

In Tzinacapan 2/13/06, the EZ explains the evolution of the 6th Declaration: The Fifth Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle was directed to those above. We negotiated with the government because national and international civil society asked us to. […] First, in 1995, we told the government we were sending “our most powerful weapon” to Mexico City, and the government got scared and defensive. And tiny Comandante Ramona with a bough of flowers in her arms, addressed a million people in the Mexican capital.
In 1996 we signed the San Andres Accords with the government, but they failed to follow through.In 1997 we sent 1,111 people from the Zapatista communities, one from each Zapatista community (now there are more, but there were 1,111 at that time) to Mexico City, and the government responded with the Acteal Massacre in December 1997. In 1999 we held the National Consultation, where 5,000 zapatistas, 2,500 men and 2,500 women, went out into the country to ask the Mexican people if they agreed with the Indigenous law and 3 million answered in agreement. In 2000 the PRI lost the presidency to the PAN, and Vicente Fox promised change and changed nothing.We went all the way to Mexico City, in 2001, in the March of the Color of the Earth, to talk to the congress. First they didn’t let us in, then they did, and Comandante Esther talked to the Mexican House of Representatives. But we were betrayed again, and we thought, why are we wasting our time with this, they never follow through! Now we see clearly that no change will or can happen from above. […]

So we made the caracoles (Zapatista autonomous centers) and the Councils of Good Government and we organized our communities to live better. Because that’s what it’s about in the end, to live with dignity.

An insert from Villahermosa, Tabasco, 1/24/06: This isn’t about, we’re going to fight, as indigenous peoples, and then continue living in wood shacks, burning sticks for light, and worshiping father sun or mother moon or whatever it is one thinks it is to be indigenous. We want to live well, with dignity, but with respect for our own way of being, our culture, our language, our way of dressing. And we’re going to fight for that.

Back to Tzinacapan: But now what we’re saying is that we can’t do it alone. Not just as Zapatistas, not just as farmers, not just as artists […] The Sixth Declaration is directed below, because what we saw in all those years when we were meeting civil society, was all the stories and struggles that existed but had no TV or newspaper to make them visible. In the Sixth what we do is this: we ask, “who are we?” and we ask that everyone ask the same question. The EZLN is majority indigenous, with 2-3 mestizos, but it is directed by all indigenous people. And then we ask, “where are we?” And then, how do we see the world?” […[ One can think of their own misery, things are this way because the stars were aligned wrong when I was born. But we don’t think so, we think it’s capitalism that robs us, puts the poor in jail. And then we thought, if we think this way, maybe others do to. So what we want to do is get together with all the others. Not so that we are all the same but so that we are not alone. And so we thought, how do we do this, bring them all to the jungle? But we knew that only those with the money and time to do this could come. So what we’re doing now is coming to you, to listen to you. But at the same time we’re listening, everyone else hears each other, too. This is the Sixth.

Cit of Oaxaca: “The commanders of the EZLN have given me the orders to go out into the country and travel to every corner of the republic and look for the indigenous people who in struggle, but also the man, woman, child, young person, homosexual, lesbian, that aren’t indigenous, and find the way for us all to work together.” […]

We, indigenous peoples from Chiapas, have endured the cold and tolerated the heat, we have been soaked by the sweat of our work, the rain that falls on us because we don’t have a decent roof over our heads, the blood of our pain and our dead. […]

Tzinacapan: The Sixth is about indigenous struggle, but it is also about oil workers, and taxi drivers, and artists…it is about all those who want to cry with rage, but that burning inside is a rebellion. We want to be your comrades in this rebellion, but without arms and without war, where no one rules and no one obeys. Where the land belongs to those who work it. Where the political prisoner of any of us it the political prisoner of all of us. Where we make new social relations, new agreements, new ways of relating between men and women, men and men, women and women, adult and child…that’s why instead of marches we’re having meetings, rich discussions, here with you.

The Struggle is a Battle

February 8, 2006

The Other Campaign has made a point of expressing its inclusiveness, it’s openness, its desire for diversity and its love of difference. But it also makes a point of avoiding any kind of relativism—the lack of judgment or discernment that asks, ‘who are we to say who’s right?’ To each their own, perhaps, but this is an embrace of difference and uniqueness, not an indiscriminate acceptance. In a February 2nd meeting, in Jalapa, Veracruz, one participant says, in a plea for peaceful coexistence, “we are all human beings.” Marcos, when it is his turn to speak, responds, “No. Yes we are all human beings, but some of us are real assholes and some of us aren’t’. And that’s the truth. Some have built their wealth on the misery, death, and exploitation of others. What we want is to organize, discuss, and make conscientious this sector [of the exploited] in order to together confront them. Because if we don’t, if we let them continue, they’re going to destroy everything. This much has been demonstrated. If we don’t do something now there’s not going to be anything to fight for.” Subdelegado O continues this point in another meeting, making clear the Other campaign is not a matter of peaceful coexistence, nor simply an objection and a pleas for justice. The proposal of the 6th Declaration and the Other Campaign may be unarmed and nonviolent, but it is still a battle: “Now we’re not just going to be resisting. We’re going on the offensive. We’re saying clearly that we’re going after them.”

That this is a struggle as a battle, not a struggle as a lobbying campaign, legal dispute, or difference of opinion is also clear. In separate occasions, both in the Yucatan peninsusla, Subdelegado O adds a distinction: when we criticize the PRD and the “leftist” politicians in Mexico we are not disputing a party platform or a policy. We are talking about acts of violence that have been committed against our communities by the PRD (a result of which one of our companeros is surviving with a bullet still lodged in his skull). We are talking about the fact that not only have they betrayed us (with the meaningless, watered-down indigenous law) but they have tried to kill us (the PRD ambush in Zinacantan on Zapatista support bases returning to their communities after delivering water to comrades whose water had been cut by the local PRD). He adds, later: the Other Campaign defines an enemy, not an adversary. With an adversary you can be in agreement on some things, with an enemy, no. When the Other Campaign defines itself as ant-capitalist it says, “our survival comes with death of what is in front of us now,” not a compromise. The friend-enemy distinction, though, is not identifying a person who represents the other side, but rather a system which has practices and valorizations that must be fought wherever they are found.

The Other Campaign has been clear and broad in claiming its friends—workers, young people, … clear in defining its enemy—capitalism, the party system, the electoral/representational model of governance, and clear in defining who it will accept as allies and who not. When Evo Morales invited the Zapatistas to his inauguration, they didn’t grace the invitation with a direct response, but when asked on the road in the Other Campaign if they would go, Subdelegado O responded: “Yes, they invited us and we received the invitation, but we’re not going to go because we are in the Other Campaign from below. The EZLN does not relate to governments, good or bad. No, we relate to peoples. And in this case, if the Bolivian people say yes [to Evo], well re respect that, but we don’t go to presidential inaugurations, good or bad. Our way is what we are doing now, and that it how we have gotten to where we are now. (Narco News report, January 16, 2006). This is important: what is happening in Mexico is not the same thing as leftist electoral politics in South America. It is not even worthy of alliance. The Zapatistas could gain enormous resources and recognition from these high-profile leftist state leaders who would be delighted to have Zapatista support or even contact, but this is a clear disinterest in and open rejection of that route. Yesterday in Oaxaca, he repeated the point, after a young man apologized for his “pessimism,” but that there could be no success for the Other Campaign in Mexico if they don’t join the present momentum in Latin America with its “seven leftist presidents.” Delegado O replied that he wasn’t pessimistic, but rather mistaken: “Looking at their trajectories, as many times as I count, I don’t come up with seven.” He added, When we say that we don’t turn toward Latin America nor Bolivia, we are saying clearly: we don’t turn in any direction toward above, we always turn toward those below, and that’s why we’re here with you right now in this meeting and not in a presidential inauguration.”

The anti-electoral politics position is not about abstentionism or the lack of a responsible party that follows through with its promises. The EZ clarifies, “They keep saying that Marcos is promoting electoral abstention. No, comrades, it’s that we have encountered and abstentionist movement that identifies with what we’re saying because they’re sick of the political class. And if it has been assumed that abstentionism is apathy, the Other Campaign is discovering that it is rather a lack of alternatives.” Luis Hernandez Navarro makes a key point in a January 25 La Jornada article: “The radicality of this struggle doesn’t have to do with its illegality, but rather with its capacity to reject the system and construct subjects of change. The project [the Other Campaign] puts at issue the mediations as much as the mechanisms of existing political representations.” In other words, it is not just the existing parties that are the problem, an issue of irresponsibility or corruption, but rather that the very structure of party organization and electoral representation that must be questioned.

I am talking a lot here about what “Subdelegado O” or the EZLN says, but it is important to note that what the delegado says is not just what he says, or what he says on behalf of the EZ, but the voice he carries from one city to another, between towns and villages, from state to state. One journalist covering on the Other Campaign, (John Gibler, Znet, 2/5/06), reported on one of the small town meetings where an older woman took the microphone and said of Marcos, “The wisdom of this man is that he keeps quiet so we have to listen to each other.”

The Other Sex

February 6, 2006

Oaxaca also brought sex to the forefront. Not just gender, sex. The picture today in La Jornada, Mexico’s left-but-not-too-far leaning daily newspaper, was of Marcos with a group of sex-workers, who spoke at one of the assemblies in Orizaba. Bellinghausen reports on the meeting:
“Magdalena, representative of a group of organized prostitutes, the organization, stated their denunciations: ‘The authorities harass us, they take our money, they encourage our clients to mistreat us. In the hotels we are forced to pay for condoms from the Secretary of Heath, which are supposed to be free, and the sheets are dirty. And I have to maintain my children with my work.’ Claudia, a transsexual with a large scar across her face, states that she is in the “other Campaign” because ‘sexworkers fight against discrimination,; we also have citizen rights.’ Marcos declared himself honored to have these women as comrades.”

The Other Campaign’s embrace of difference—in which sexual difference has been repeatedly emphasized—in the January 2 discourse in San Cristobal, the meetings with sex workers, male and female, in Orizaba, flourishes as well in the people’s own representations of their support. At the town meeting in Juchitan, Oaxaca, a drag queen, naked except for a tiny g-string, high heels, and wrapped in clear plastic, heavily made up and quite frankly stunning, strolls through the town square with a sign that says, “$$ PRI, PAN, PRD, Information here $$” The plastic is covered in brand logos, making it clear that these letters (the three principal political parties in Mexico) are as easily bought and sold as the McDonald’s French fry cut-out that (barely) covers the crotch of his/her plastic dress. It is a clear, and clearly different, act of support for the Other Campaign.

Capital Vol. I

February 5, 2006

In Villahermosa, Tabasco, and Orizaba, Oaxaca, the Other Campaign continues its analysis of capitalism, what amounts to collective studies in Marx’s Capital, volume I: primitive accumulation, individualization of subjects and the abstraction/extraction of their labor in the market, the destruction of collective mechanisms for self-sufficiency and the elimination of other measures of value. Marcos recounts the stories they have heard in the isthmus of the mega-development projects, the hydroelectric dams and the giant wind turbines that generate the majority of the nation’s energy needs but leave the surrounding communities, and the thousands displaced by the devastation of their lands by the projects, without even household electricity. Why is this happening, he asks? Venus didn’t lineup right with Jupiter? Divine destiny? Bad luck? No. It is a system, he repeats in every city, every village, a system based in theft, dispossession, exploitation, discrimination, and racism. This analysis is necessary in the Other Campaign to destroy the normalization of capitalism that disguises the theft, eviction, and violence of primitive accumulation as the result of hard work, good blood, god’s will, or plain luck, and the continuing dispossession of lands, resources, and human labor as “the way things are.”

Subdelegado O repeats the point in Orizaba Veracruz: We can choose. We can say that everything we see and live every day is our fault, that we haven’t sufficiently developed our spiritual being, our good vibes, or because we haven’t lit enough candles. Or we can realize that responsible for all of this—and destruction and poverty—is the capitalist system, which has as its managers these political parties that are now fighting over the elections.

A January 31 public event outlined, in terms of the local context, the necessary capitalist strategy of removing all possibilities for self-sustainability, self-valorization, and collectivity so that people are forced to enter the market as individual laborers: “We see that the government brings these [farm] programs that are supposed to help. And we see that they’re privatizing the ejido (collectively held farmland), converting the peasants and community land-holders into small private land-owners. Then they give them fertilizers and genetically modified seeds so that the land gets used to these products and won’t accept other [products, or techniques of farming], and each time these farmers have to go further into debt in order to buy this particular fertilizer and seed and no other, because now the land won’t produce [with native seed or without the chemical fertilizer.] And since the money is never enough of course, they have to get a loan and the debt accumulates, and it turns out that when we go back to the city or the market where we sell our product at bad prices anyway, now, having done the same amount of work, we enter the market not only with the little money the product brings, but also a lot debt. And this keeps growing and growing… this is about converting us into men and women that don’t have anything for themselves and have to find employment in other parts, but now not as land-owners, farmers, or communal land-holders, and now not as communities.