Chronicles Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, Nayarit, Colima

Here I am going to recount some of the conversations and interventions from the meetings in Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Nayarit, and Colima, chronicle style. See other entries, above and below, for analysis.

3.16.06. Aguascalientes. A self-identified housewife in Cañada Onda, Aguascalientes, who gives an elegant speech thanking Marcos’s mother for creating him and letting him think for himself, speaks of her idea of autonomous thinking and raising children: I have always tried to make my own judgment. Those of us that have children, sons and daughters, students, nieces/nephews, this is the way to change this country: “we have to commit ourselves to not making obedient people, people that process orders. We can’t have a country of “obedients,” not on any level.” I remember a woman in Oaxaca, in the tiny town of Union Hidalgo, who said, condemning both the machista and submissive subjectivities created in capitalism, “better to die a virgin then give birth to fools.” The housewife in Aguascalientes says at the end of her intervention, “Today I escaped my house and my work, but don’t forget about all those women who couldn’t come. Our struggle, like this struggle (the Sixth, the Other), is everyday, everyday we come out different.”

Aguascalientes has a broad spectrum of participants—housewives, students, religious clergy, young people, gay community, students, communist party members, etc. There is a fair representation of anarcho-punks present, pierced and tattooed, dressed mostly in black and hair gelled to defy gravity and conformity. But these are not just aesthetics. “The first thing that is exploited is the body,” they claim in front of their new compañeros housewives, students, priests, EZLN, “our discrimination is not just rejection of our style, it is a hate of difference, hate of the other.” An older man describes an autonomous project that a group of elderly neighbors have created, a house that they share that runs on windpower and solar power. Students from the university in the capital of Aguascalientes make clear that what they fight for can’t be granted them from powers above, but requires another politics altogether: “we don’t just want free and public education, because the education we’re receiving is capitalist training. We don’t want free capitalist training!” A local priest stands up with a plea for a different church: the god of life, he says, is from below, and this god walks to the left, with us, with the soul of this movement. The official church may have its position in the state electoral system, but there is a faith from below too. Another church is possible! Someone from the local LGBT insists to the other participants, our struggle is not far from yours, we are part of you, we also have desire to struggle, and “we don’t want closets any more than we want prisons or graves.” And another participant, “Democracy should be a form of life, not a method to process politicians.”

3.12.06. Guanajuato. In Salamanca, the most contaminated city in all of Mexico, the people talk about the high indices of leukemia and other cancers, skin diseases, asthma, respiratory diseases. The factory Tekim, a US company, employs some 500-700 workers, is the source of the pollution; but it is not just the workers who are sick. The water reserves, the air, and the soil have been contaminated by the factory emissions. The people say that the smell can sometimes make one vomit, that the factory has to release emissions all night because it is too much to bear during the day. A few years ago there was an explosion in the factory, and the people say that when the yellow mushroom cloud arose above the factory the food in their houses went bad and clothes disintegrated. There are only two more factories like this in the entire world—one in China and one in India. Today, when the Other Campaign travels through this city, the yellow smoke and putrid smell have strangely absent—work suspended for the day.

The same people who give us daily “massive toxic cocktail,” one man states at the meeting of the Other Campaign, are those who hide the information about our health. “None of our women our healthy,” a middle-aged woman, a cancer-survivor, claims, we all have cancer, leukemia, other diseases, and now our kids are born with these diseases. The Plan Puebla Panama will create many more Salamanca’s another participant warns, and the crowd chants, “Nunca mas otra Salamanca!” “Never again another Salamanca,” not in the republic of Mexico, one man adds, and not on the planet.

3.13.06. Guanajuato. In the capital of Guanajuato the substance of the meeting is dominated by the local miner’s struggle and by the interventions by young people denouncing their repression. The young people talk of harsh police repression against not just their politics, but their presence in the street, their style, their very existence. One young man with a broken arm and his face covered with handkerchief begins to denounce the repression from behind the hankerchief, and then rips it off as he is speaking, “it does no good to hide myself,” he says motioning to his cast, “they obviously know who I am already.” There is an intensely hopeful moment, characteristic of the most acute realizations of the Other Campaign, when the EZLN directs its words of the young people and the miners, saying: In front of all the orejas (spies) here today, the representatives from the Yunque (semi-secret group of PAN politicians and corporate elite that basically runs states at least where the PAN is in power, more on this later), and the police that are listening, we’re here to say, you are not alone, now among your compañeros in struggle is the Zapatista Army for National Liberation. The miners and the young people cheer wildly, joyfully, militantly.

3.26.06. Nayarit. In Tuxpan, Nayarit, Immigration is once again a principal theme, but for the first time in a long time, someone refers to “Imperio,” or Empire, in relation to the movement of international capital and labor. After one man asks, how can they turn us into consumers of our own products, employees on our own land? Another points to the student protests in France, the immigrant protests in Los Angeles, their own immigration flow in Tuxpan: capitalism is the same in Tuxpan, France, Brazil, the United States, he says, this is the same struggle, it is the same empire. If Fox could, he’d sell Marta another says, jokingly but bitterly, referring to Vicente Fox, the Mexican president, and his wife, Marta Sahagun.

3/29/06. Colima. On our way to Yerba Buena, Colima, an indigenous Nahuatl community situated halfway up the side of a volcanic mountain, the volcano erupts in front of the sunset, treating us to pink and yellow and purple tinged gases rising from the mountain. This is the volcano that powerful caciques and local government are using as an excuse to displace the indigenous communities living there. The “danger” however doesn’t seem to apply to the luxury resort built on the same lava-laden land, one of the most exclusive resorts in the world, costing close to 3,000 US dollars per night. Bad enough would be if these people were turned to the servants of the international rich on their own land, but there is not even this opportunity for work; the hotels, this one with owners in Hong-Kong, come with labor power included, they will have nothing to do with the poor inhabitants of this land. In the meeting in Yerba Buena, where the soil is black with ash, indigenous participants relate: this culture that we have is much older than this flag (the Mexican flag) that we have just saluted. As pre-american people, our values have always been autonomy, autarchy, and self-sufficiency. But we are not purists or traditionalists, there has to be a synthesis of western culture and indigenous culture. And another adds, “This struggle to self-determine cannot work locally, it will only work at a national level, or perhaps only at the global level.”

Other participants denounce the image Colima is given as a pretty, peaceful vacation spot for foreigners. Peace? One man asks, here we have one of the highest rates of cancer in the nation, also for sexual violence; hate crimes abound, and nobody is going to solve this for us, not even the Sup (Marcos). We have to solve this ourselves. In a region ruled by caciques and characterized by the master-peon relationship, our best master, another adds, is our own organization.

In all these places, in response to the complaints and denunciations against the “bad government,” the EZLN clarifies its analysis: The government is not neglecting its duties, it is doing its job and it is doing it well. The chronic sicknesses and terminal illnesses characterizing so many of these places as a result of industrial contamination, the forced displacements and environmental destruction created by the mega-projects of an international capitalist class, and the promises, betrayals, and hand-outs that keep people obedient and subservient to a political class that has long lacked, if it ever had, any representational integrity are not instances of neglect, but of capitalist valorization.

The EZLN in Guanajuato: “This is the same system that considers the indigenous as ignorant, the young people as hell-raisers, the women as sluts, the kids as idiots, the old people as disposable, workers as leaches, students as something to tolerate until they become functional workforce, teachers as mere reproducers of the same thing that already exists above.” Capitalism does not impose through free contracts, they remind us, it is born in blood and mud.

Stakes of the Sexta

“What we’re doing here, comrades, is without precedent. Not even the models of solidarity with Zapatismo will work here, because this isn’t about solidarity with the indigenous communities. Neither do the existing social and political struggles, respectable in their own right, serve as a referent for this, because what we are proposing is take a route where there is not yet a path. What’s more, nobody even thought that it was possible to walk where we want to go….” (Marcos, Veracruz, 1/31/06).
[all the pictures here are either murals in the people listening in the meetings of the Other Campaign, with the exception of two pictures, first and last, of murals in the chiapas caracoles. I have to figure out a way to put captions on them, but for now...].
When the red alert was announced in June of 2005, civil society mobilized in defensive mode, preparing to guard, protect, defend, maintain the security and safety of the EZLN and the Zapatista communities. They prepared to stabilize the situation, to maintain the equilibrium of forces, to help keep things the same.


But the Zapatistas didn’t want stability. They wanted change. They did not want the world to mobilize in their defense, to hold onto what they had, they wanted the world to mobilize in their own struggles, alongside them; for the EZLN this meant to risk everything for something more. This is one of the most beautiful things about Zapatismo. It refuses to be still, to become a rule or a doctrine or a dogma, a subject to identify or an identity to make subject. They refuse to let power accumulate, or find too sure of a rhythm in its path. They keep changing the path, walking a new direction, trying a new talk, teaching us a new word, a new concept of struggle, of the global, of the common.

What the Zapatistas proposed in the Sixth Declaration depends on (at least) four points: our struggle wants to be bigger; what we want can’t be won alone; you can’t help us by lending your support, you must fight with us but you must fight your own struggle; and, the mode and form of this struggle doesn’t yet exist, it must be created.

What comes into question here is “civil society,” the name the EZLN has always used to refer the national and international public, sympathetic with the Zapatista struggle but unarmed and unwilling to take up arms. It was this civil society that took to the streets after the 1994 uprising, demanding the fighting stop so that the EZLN would not be wiped out by the much more militarily powerful Mexican army. In the 1996 dialogues of San Andres Larrainzar, again, the EZLN has recalled, we agreed to meet and negotiate with the government, at the request of civil society. But more importantly than meeting the government, we met you, national and international civil society. The San Andres Accords, in fact, the EZ states, were made among many people, they couldn’t have been made alone, just between us and the government.What Zapatismo became, from the moment when the EZLN listened to the word of the world and called a ceasefire just two weeks after the January 1994 uprising, was a global production.

Over the last decade of struggle, Subcomandante Marcos has said on behalf of the EZLN and the CCRI (Revolutionary Indigenous Clandestine Committee, the body that directs the EZLN on behalf of the base communities), several times and to the deaf ear of many, “autonomy is not just for the indigenous.” This is an important point in light of all the eyebrows raised and foreheads wrinkled with regard to the the EZLN’s harsh criticism of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (supposedly leftist PRD candidate for the presidency). It could have been a strategic move, the wrinkled foreheads have fretted, a strategic alliance or lending of support in order to open more space for the struggle. There are clear and obvious reasons for the EZLN criticism—rejection of the electoral system of representation in general, and the insistence that they couldn’t support a party that had treated them as the PRD had and maintain even a minimum of dignity. But the Sixth makes clear another reason. It may be true that AMLO would have granted the indigenous communities of Chiapas certain rights, certain “autonomy” (though not likely the autonomy they demanded, as this would contradict neoliberal reforms that the PRD supports). But those rights would stay in Chiapas, contained in “indigenous territory.” Perhaps adequate support and protection would be legislated out from the centers of power into these small, “autonomous” communities that, while inspirational, would maintain their distance and marginality from the world, whether that be an oppressive, privileged, or merely isolated margin. But the Zapatistas will not be that margin, that contained and controlled space, that particular.

In the 1996 Dialogues of San Andres, in the 1996 Intergalactic Encounter, in the 1997 March of the 1,111, in the 1999 National Referendum (the Consulta) in the 2001 March of the Color of the Earth, in the Cathedral Plaza in San Cristobal on January 1, 2003, at the biggest and most militant mobilization of Zapatistas base communities ever when Comandante Tacho hinted that something else was coming, “falta lo que falta….”: in all these moments, the EZ heard the echo, that “the struggle wanted to be bigger.” In an EZLN communiqué to national and international civil society June 21, 2005, shortly before the Sixth Declaration came out, “…imagine what we felt when we saw and heard of the injustices and the rage of the peasants, workers, students, teachers, employees, homosexuals, young people, women, elderly, children. Imagine what we felt in our heart. We touched a heart, a rage, and indignation that we recognized because it was and is ours. But in this moment we touched it in the other. And we understood that the “we” that animated “us” wanted to be bigger, more collective….”

In the Sixth Declaration, the EZLN said it louder still: this struggle is not just for the indigenous, “You’ll remember, six months ago we starting talking about ‘what’s missing’ the communiqué continues, “…well, the time has arrived to decide if we’re going to go and find what is missing. No, not find, build. Yes, build something else.”

Here in the Other Campaign, Marcos says it again, “Our struggle is not indigenist, it’s universal” (Tzinacapan, Puebla 2/13/06),

With the Sixth Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle the EZLN broke through not only the military and security issues that kept them in the mountains and jungle of the Mexican Southeast, but through the political thought of a national and international “civil society.” While many struggles across the globe have understood Zapatismo as something infinitely innovative and transformable, many others could only understand Zapatistmo as something located in Chiapas, among the indigenous, where the political role of “outsiders,” national or international, was to donate time, send money, and write denunciations and press releases condemning army and government abuses. This work was important, it allowed the autonomous municipalities to greatly expand their autonomour structures and improve their quality of life in Zapatista communities, but this was not the full capacity or scope of Zapatismo.

In the heavy, silent days after the Red Alert in June 2005, many local Chiapan and international NGOs and Zapatista solidarity groups around the world whispered about a possible military offensive, possible paramilitary prowlings, black market AK-47s and armed hummers, the incredible asymmetry of forces, The guardians of human rights—other people's human rights—bustled around, checking the old positions, reviving the old conversations, adrenaline high with the possibility of armed warfare, the discourse charged with the moral highground of righteous, humble, poor indigenous communities. Even after the EZLN clarifiee that it was neither predicting nor planning a military offensive, that it had no intent to engage militarily, that the Zapatistas would not be returning to war, the hypotheses rebounded back to troop movements, paramilitary rustlings, drug conspiracies and government set-ups. The theories of what could have spurred this reaction—the red alert and the EZLN reorganization—abounded. Except, perhaps, some hinted, this is not a reaction. Perhaps it is unprovoked, formed not out of opposition or in reaction, but in a generative movement toward something else, not something resisted but something desired.

In the communiqués following the Sixth Declaration, the EZ states clearly to civil society, here you have a choice, you can participate directly, or you can distance yourself from what we do next. You can remain in the aura of that political moment, or you can do politics, which always refers to the present. You can stick to supporting the indigenous fight, thank you sincerely for your help, or you can join us and fight for yourselves.

The Zapatistas have always refused to be what any one wants or expects them to be, to be the object of anyone else’s struggle, to be anyone’s excuse not to politicize their own lives and homes. Zapatismo refuses to be anyone’s vanguard, anyone’s god; it refuses the pedestal so often provided it, the stasis of pyramids, the immobility of being on the top of a ladder so that the only direction to move is down, toppling over. It demands more movement, more freedom, the continuing flow of desire and decision that doesn't stagnate, rest on an object, pool in a position of power, concentrate in an ego. It insists on being a struggle and a strategy, a movement, literally, that generates, multiplies, mutates, expands, and networks, always in the rhythm of what is collective. It is struggle in the most profound sense—the desire to transform and be transformed, to create something different instead of hold onto what is the same.

This is the test for global “civil society,” a test not of their support, but of their desire: Do you want to be free? Can you self-determine? Can you create a common, direct a collective desire, produce something together, live more intensely? Can you exercise power or can you only ask for it? Can you produce power or can you only resist it? Can you create or can you only react? Can you be autonomous, anonymous, anomalous, or can you only be affinity, aid, accompaniment? Do you believe in autonomy or do you believe in exceptionalism? Do you believe that, behind the masks, we are you, or do you believe that, behind your masks, there is nothing?