El Kilombo Intergalactico

New format for Other Campaign reporting

2006-11-03T20:07:00.000-08:00

[photo: graffiti artists in Tijuana when the Other Campaign goes to the border]

New format for El Kilombo reporting from the Other Campaign:
In recent months, a community assembly has been formed at the El Kilombo Space in Durham, North Carolina. The purpose of the assembly is to make decisions collectively and democratically on how we organize the space, and to begin to discuss the problems and needs in our community and how to resolve them.

Due to this exciting development, we’ve changed the format of Other Campaign reporting, in order to accomodate its presentation and discussion in the assembly, to slide shows with audio in Spanish and English, found on our webpage at: www.elkilombo.org/otraocthistory.html.
These presentations are specifically made for and tailored to our assembly in Durham, but they’re available here for anyone else who’s interested.

Communiqué from the EZLN Intergalactic Commission

2006-07-27T09:29:00.000-07:00

July 26, 2006
Communiqué from the Intergalactic Commission of the EZLN

translation El Kilombo Intergaláctico

ZAPATISTA ARMY FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION

MEXICO

July of 2006

Compañeros and compañeras adherents of the Zezta Internazional,
Brother and Sisters of Planet Earth:

This is Insurgent Lieutenant Colonel Moisés writing to share with you the results of more than seven months of Consultation on the next Intergalactic Encounter. As we said in our November 2005 communiqué, the objective, the idea that is, of the intergalactic is that it is really up to all of you to determine how we organize this Encounter.

We truly want all adherents to participate in its organization, that the Intergalactic not be a decision of the EZLN. In the seven months of consultation that have passed since December 1st, 2005, there have been preparatory meetings in different countries, as well as cybernetic consultations. From these meetings we have received proposals for the Intercontinental, on themes to be discussed as well as the date and place for the Encounter.

Like we said above, here we want to report on how the consultations have gone up until now, and the proposals and discussions that have come up. You should let us know if we are missing something and what it is that we are missing. We will be here working, and pending your input.

For our part, our opinion is that we continue with more discussion and more proposals. We think it is necessary to continue thinking and accumulating ideas before coming together in the Encounter, seeing as it’s a fact that we’re going to have the Intergalactic, and that it will belong to all of us that create it.

The report that we have made for you in order to continue the discussion is the following.

Summary of the adherents and the international consultation for the organization of the Intergalactic Encounter:

I. Adherents: The total number of adherents to the Zezta Internazional registered on the webpage from December 1st, 2005 through July 25, 2006 is the following:

Total adherents in the world: 2,173 from 61 countries on 5 continents

By continent:
America: 1,301 adherents from 23 countries
Europe: 848 adherents from 25 countries
Asia: 8 adherents from 6 countries
Oceana: 10 adherents de 2 countries
Africa: 6 adherents from 5 countries

The countries in which there are adherents are the following:

America: Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Martinique, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela

Europe: Germany, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, the Spanish State, Russian Federation, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Basque Country, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Serbia and Montenegro, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey.

Asia: China, India, Japan, Palestine, Israel, y Uzbekistan.

Oceana: Australia and New Zealand

Africa: Mali, Senegal, Nigeria, Sierra Leon y Morocco

Information on the adherents in each country can be found on the Zezta Internazional webpage.

II. Proposals for place, date, and themes to be discussed

1. Place

We have received the following proposals for where to hold the next Intergalactic Encounter. We should mention that while some of the places were repeated in various proposals, we only list them here once each.

a) One of the Caracoles in Zapatista territory. Chiapas, México
b) San Cristóbal de las Casas. Chiapas, México
c) Cancún, México
d) Teotihuacan, México
e) In a border zone between Mexico and the United States
f) Quito, Ecuador
g) Bolivia
h) Miami, United States
i) New York, Estados Unidos
j) Venezuela
k) Barcelona

2. Dates

The proposals for dates on which the Encounter would be held that have thus far been sent to the Zezta Internazional webpage are the following:

a) Summer of 2006
b) Fall of 2006
c) December of 2006
d) January of 2007

3. Themes to be discussed

This list of proposed themes to be discussed in the next Intergalactic Encounter is long. The proposals came from many parts of the world, and we have here systematized them, for the purpose of this report, in the following manner:

1. Strategies of struggle against transnational industries that plunder and exploit the environment of poor countries.

2. Young people and their issues/problems.

3. International solidarity, what is it and what could it be?

4. The experiences of successful struggles in each country, so that at the end of the Encounter everyone returns to their home with a report on possible actions that have worked in other places.

5. Debate on the necessity of constructing a space of articulation, that would not be yet another electoral referent, but rather the development of a strategy for the accumulation of conscientious social force that would be a tool for those from below.

6. Reflection on the Sixth Declaration of the Lacondón Jungle and the possibility of contributing to it.

7. Neoliberalism and energy policies (struggles related to oil, gas, electricity, against privatization, for example).

8. Water and neoliberalism (struggles related to potable water access, against water privatization, for example).

9. The closing of unprofitable companies (the occupying of factories that were closed by their owners because they were “unprofitable,” and the formation of production cooperatives).

10. Gender and sexual orientation (struggles related to gender equality, the human rights of women, gay and lesbian people, and sex workers).

11. Protection of nature and the environment (struggles against the contamination of rivers, the cutting down of trees by large consortiums, struggles against the “double edge” of so-called “sustainable development,” the appropriation of “biodiversity” by transnational companies).

12. Organizational models and grassroots democracy

13. Democratization of knowledge and of information (struggles against the power of the media consortiums, for the horizontal circulation of information, the creation of alternative media, people’s universities, etc.)

14. Struggles against police and military repression. Debate on “security” as a repressive concept...what type of security do we want?

15. Global autonomous direct actions, and circuits of global autonomous cooperation

16. The struggle against capitalist globalization

17. How to support each other across international borders

18. Actions for the improvement of our communities through sustainable development

19. The creation of open networks against the system

20. The Free Trade Treaties and the unification of Latin America

III. Proposals for the preliminary organization of the Intergalactic Encounter

a) That there be more than one Intergalactic Encounter
b) That the Intergalactic Encounter be an collection of Encounters all over the world
c) That there be preliminary encounters at country and continental levels
d) That an internet chat be opened so that those who cannot attend can participate in the dialogue through cyber-tables with moderators
e) That the Encounter be named after Comandanta Ramona

IV. On the Participants in the Intergalactic Encounter

a) That the participation of those from below be promoted
b) That economic support networks be formed so that people from movements from below (principally in America, Asia, and Africa) that do not have resources can attend
c) That the political parties in Latin America that be convoked
Que se convoque a los partidos políticos de América Latina que reivindican el socialismo.
d) That participative priority be given to indigenous peoples
e) That young people’s movements and networks be taken into account

V. Proposals by Country or Continent

1. Hold various European encounters during the summer of 2006.

2. Interchange of experiences between women of Bolivia with compañeras of the EZLN.

3. Organize meetings of commissions to prepare proposals on a regional level throughout the American Continent

4. Hold an encounter in Costa Rica to discuss an ideology of “below and to the left”

5. Proposal for meetings in Chicago

6. Proposal to create an email list of Chilean adherents of the Zezta that want to participate in the discussion and diffusion of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacondón Jungle

VI. On Activities and Meetings preliminary to the Intergalactic

Although the EZLN communiqué on the Intergalactic came out in November of 2005, international activities were going on as of July of the same year, just days after the publication of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacondón Jungle.

From July 2005 through July 2006, 19 preliminary activities to the Intergalactic Encounter have been registered, in 16 cities in 9 countries around the world. Of those 9 countries, 6 are in the Americas and 3 in Europe.

The encounters were held in Barcelona, the Spanish State (July 2005); Bisegna, Italy (September 2005); Buenos Aires, Argentina (December de 2005); Germany (January 2006); Madrid, the Spanish State (February 2006); Buenos Aires, Argentina (February 2006); Barcelona, Spanish State (February 2006); Vancouver, Canada (February 2006); Paraná, Argentina (February 2006); San Salvador, El Salvador (February-March 2006); Los Angeles, United States (March 2006); Cosenza, Italy (March 2006); Chicago, United States (March 2006); Paraná, Argentina (April 2006); Rosario, Argentina (April 2006); La Garriga, Spanish State (May 2006); Brasilia, Brazil (June 2006); Montevideo, Uruguay (June 2006).

Reports from each of these activities can be found on the Zezta Internazional webpage.

Important note: There are surely omissions in this and previous lists. We apologize for this and we invite you to send information about any encounters, proposals, and adherents not here reported.

Compañeros y compañeras,

This is the report that we wanted to present to you on the Consultation that has been held over these months. The Intergalactic Commission of the EZLN, through the Zezta Internazional webpage and the listserves of adherents, will continue informing you about the proposals that we receive, until there is an idea of what it is that we want and how we are going to do it.

Keep working compañeros y compañeros! Let your voice be heard, don’t let it be left out of the next Intergalactic Encounter!

We also want to comment, brothers and sisters, that we are aware of all the actions that have been organized internationally to demand the liberation of our brothers and sisters of Atenco. You have held 209 mobilizations in 77 cities in 30 countries around the world. All have been good, but of course we say we must keep mobilizing because our compañer@s are still being held unjustly in prison, while those responsible for the repression are free in the streets.

What’s more, this is not the only injustice. We know that there are many more injustices in the world, like that suffered by our compañer@s farmers of South Central Farm in Los Angeles, who were evicted from their land where they lived and worked collectively. We have to support these brother and sisters so that they continue their struggle and do not give up.

There is also the injustice of the imprisonment of our Mapuche brothers and sisters in Chile. We have to tell them that we keep them present in our minds and hearts, that we know that how the bad government of Chile is, that it doesn’t think about the poor people from below, but rather is only interested in those of above, as usual.

We have to get used to struggling and we have to get used to organizing ourselves better. We have to accustom ourselves to seeing those from below and to struggling for what is a true LIBERTY, DEMOCRACY, AND JUSTICE.

The hour is upon us, it's time.
Onward compañer@s!

From the mountains of the Lacondón Jungle

Insurgent Lieutenant Colonel Moisés
Intergalactic Commission of the EZLN

July 2. BLOG TRANSFORMATION

2006-07-02T21:51:00.000-07:00

This post signals the end of this blog as it has existed until now, and its transformation into a space of analysis of the process of the Sixth Declaration via the formation of the Intergalactic. [photos from today’s July 2 march of the Other Campaign, those from below interrupting the farsical election day of those from above]

Today, as the scuffle and spectacle among those “above” climaxes in the Mexican presidential elections—what the mass media deems a brutal battle between left, right, and further right and what those from below see as a mere power struggle between neoliberal, semi-fascist, and clown, the Other Campaign makes itself visible again, not just in the thousands that marched to the Zocalo in Mexico City today, but in a new manifesto by adherents of the Sixth Declaration that represents the national organization of the Other Campaign and the fact that people all over Mexico have indeed, as the Zapatistas set out in the Lacondon Jungle last fall, taken the Sixth and the Other and made it theirs.

The current blog focused on the journey of the Other Campaign from December 31, 2005 through mid-June, 2006. With the instances of police brutality and state terrorism May 3-4 in San Salvador Atenco, and the pause of the Sixth Commission in Mexico City until all the political prisoners taken those two days are freed, the rhythm of the Sixth Declaration has changed, and the organization of the Other Campaign and the Intergalactic have accelerated.

El Kilombo proposes the continuation of this blog as a space of collective analysis, critique, and proposals toward the formation of the Intergalactic, not just the proposed encounter but the potential network. As many have analyzed, and as the Zapatista Sixth Commission has said explicitly in the journey of the Other Campaign, capitalism has no “seat”, no home, no headquarters. The global capitalist class employs state systems when and where it serves them, without loyalty to a nation, representivity of a population, or accountability to a people. As we have determined our own political project as El Kilombo, and in accordance with the spirit of the Sixth, we are responsible not just for organizing ourselves in support of the Other Campaign in Mexican territory, but in the formation of a global anticapitalist network of communities establishing their own autonomy. As people of color communities and working class communities in the United States have shown us, neither the violence and coercion of state repression nor the possibility of autonomous struggle is limited to Mexico and countries considered the global “south.” Our decision to choose a battlefield of struggle where we can construct our own autonomy is not a question of solidarity but of our own survival and dignity. That is, for most in the United States, health, well-being, and survival are increasingly difficult to secure without self-determined and self-sustaining systems. For others, depending on where we are positioned in the hierarchy of races, classes, and genders, lack of autonomy may not mean lack of food, but without our own struggle we can watch the destruction from the window of our stunted subjectivities, from the enslaved safety of our house on the hill, but we will never be able to go outside and create the world as we want it.
[photo: the El Kilombo space and community center, Durham, North Carolina.]
In this sense, as we declare in our explanation of why we chose “Kilombo” as our name, and as we have learned from the Kilombos, Palenques, and Maroon societies of history as well as the Zapatistas and other autonomous initiatives, in Argentina and Bolivia for example, of today, “an effective warfare against our captors is the one we wage on a daily basis with our hands and tools to create what has yet to be, and not the one limited to tanks, guns, and bullets directed at the destruction of what has already been.”

Welcome to the El Kilombo Intergalactico blogspot. Join us (here via comments section) in a project of creation.

Vamos por ellos

2006-06-01T21:49:00.000-07:00

[photo: graffiti artist during the May 28 march in Mexico City, "don't vote, organize and struggle!]
Twelve years ago Mexico was set to enter the “first world” with the implementation of NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement) January 1, 1994. Then president Ernesto Zedillo had made multiple free trade deals, NAFTA being the most comprehensive and important, Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution protecting ejidal, or communally-held lands had been changed to allow for their possession as private property and thus their availability for sale or appropriation through debt. As businessmen and politicians celebrated their new capitalist tract, guaranteed to reap large profits for large companies and to leave farmers and peasants helpless in front of a global market, the indigenous Zapatista Army for National Liberation was coming out of the jungle and down from the mountains, armed with weapons that would successfully enable them to take seven major cities in the state of Chiapas and words that would catalyze not only a new politics in Mexico but a new global movement. When Mexico’s political and business elite woke from their hangovers January 1, the country and the world, with its eyes on the masked rebels in Mexico, was other.

The favorite, in polls and press, to win this year’s presidential elections in Mexico is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, (AMLO) candidate of the PRD, Mexico’s mainstream so-called “leftist” party. What AMLO promises for Mexico is a new management of capital, a more efficient and productive relationship between multinational capitalist interests and the national political class, a more complete and seamless integration of global capital into the work and lives of the people of this nation labeled Mexico. At the National Assembly of Adherents of the Sixth Declaration/Other campaign May 29th, representatives from every state in the Republic, the EZLN, and hundreds of groups, organizations, and individuals, met to organize what is now, as the EZ recognized at the assembly, a national anticapitalist organization. [photo: May 28, 2006 Free the Political Prisoners rally in the Zocalo, Mexico City] After hearing the reports from each state about the mobilizations held May 28th in demand of freedom for the political prisoners taken May 3 and 4 in San Salvador Atenco, proposed that the next national mobilization be held July 2, the day of the presidential elections.

In many stops on the Other Campaign the EZLN has said, “vamos por ellos,” or “we’re going after them.” We will not wait here anymore for them to come rob us of even our poverty. We are going after them. The July 2 proposal for mobilizations is in part this—they want us to stick to small protests and actions; the day of their “party” July 2, when they think no one can bother them, that is the day we will rain on their parade. But it also something else. Those that abstain from voting July 2nd do not abstain because we convinced them too, the EZ clarifies, but because the political class convinced them. We propose the 2nd of July, the EZ continues, “to present an Other Alternative for organization and struggle for our people, the people that will be once again cast aside July 3rd,” an alternative that goes against the system, not just against the government. The EZ recommends that each state, region, zone of the Other Campaign consider the proposal and decide if they concur. Because it is a very different thing, the EZ says, to close streets or occupy government buildings, to mobilize on the 2nd of July, then on any other day: if we do this, they warn, we have everything against us—the media, the political class, the people inconvenienced—“and the only thing we have going for us is our duty to our companeros prisoners, and our duty to our country to construct an alternative, an anticapitalist alternative.”

So as the political class and elite of Mexico excitedly prepare themselves to be the newly efficient managers and administrators of capital, to refine neoliberal policies into a more compatible and profitable relationship with the nation, once again their party will be interrupted desde abajo, by those from below.

May 28 March: Free the May 3-4 Political Prisoners

2006-05-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

"Today a new cycle of movements starts..." --Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, May 28th rally, Zocalo, Mexico City.
"The mobilizations that occured from the 19th of May through and on the 28th show that we now have a national leftist anticapitalist organization." --Subcomandante Marcos, 2nd National Assembly of Adherents of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle, May 29th, Mexico City. The estimated numbers of participants of the May 28th march range widely, from 10,000 to 50,000. Some 25,000 might be a good estimate. [see Kilombo webpage on the Sixth for updates on the Intergalactic mobilizations] There were contingents from each state of the republic, international contingents, children's contingents, campesino contingents, women's contingents, released political prisoners contingents, punk contingents, and many more. The Abejas, members of the indgienous community of Acteal where paramilitaries massacred 45 men, women, and children in December 1997, marched under their banner, "Atenco, brothers, the Abejas of Acteal are with you." People carried signs with pictures of Javier Cortes, the 14-year-old shot in the chest and killed by police May 3rd, of Alexis Benhumea, the young student shot in the head with a tear gas bullet on May 4 who has laid in a coma ever since, of FPDT (Popular Front in Defense of the Land) leader Ignacio del Valle, held political prisoner in La Palma, a high-security federal prison in Toluca, of Felipe Alvarez, another FPDT leader and Hector Galido, human rights lawyer for the Atenco resistance, both also being held in La Palma, of America del Valle, daughter of Ignacio del Valle, who has been in hiding since the May 4 police operation, with arrest warrants hanging over her head, of Valentina Palma, the Chilean student studying in Mexico who was detained, beaten, sexually abused, and deported May 4th. These faces, names, voices, have been claimed by all of the Other Campaign, and of the 6th Declaration internationally, as compa~eros in struggle, as "one of our own." Now in addition to "Todos somos Atenco" "We are all Atenco," the Other Campaign shouts, "We are all America" (del Valle), "We are all Alexis," and "Todos somos todos," or "We are all 'us'!"
The campesinas from Veracruz, whose naked manifestation is their own protest for peasant rights, continue to support the mobilizations of the Other Campaign. They chanted with the Other Campaign marchers, "Free the political prisoners," "You are not alone!"
This woman went police officer by police officer, showing them her sign, referring to the rapes and sexual abuses by police of the women taken prisoner May 4, "If it had been your sister, your mother, you! Would you still stand here with your arms crossed?" If they refused to look at the sign she read it out loud to them. On the other side of her sign reads, "We are all Atenco." Other women, some of them who were taken prisoner May 3-4 and have been since released, shouted "rapist," "murderer," at the riot police lines.

At the rally, in addition to the contributions by representatives from various states, messages were sent to be read in the Zocalo from Trinidad, the wife of Ignacio del Valle, from America del Valle, from Valentina Palma, from the political prisoners still in Santiaguito, Almoyoloya, from those in permanent vigilance outside the prison. At the 2nd National Assembly of Adherents of the Other Campaign, May 29th, we hear reports from around the network of the Other: 26 prisoners in Santiaguito continue their hunger strike, they are now in day 29, and have insufficient medical monitoring. Of the prisoners 6 have severe untreated injuries, including multiple broken ribs, mental illness, and a paraplegic man who was dragged from his home and beaten on May 4. Alexis Benhumea has now been declared officially braindead. The permanent presence outside the prison is at risk of being evicted by police in the next couple days. The lawyer representing many of the political prisoners, an adherent of the Other Campaign himself, clarifies that the complaints and demands of the women prisoners against police are of charges of sexual torture, not just beating or sexual abuse. In each national adherents assembly we see more faces that before we had only known by their bloodied bodies on the videos taken in Atenco May 3 and 4. At the first assembly, Jorge Salinas Jardon, a telephone worker from Atenco, one of the most savagely beaten, who appeared on live tv the morning of May 3 under the flailing batons and boots of 24-27 police, appeared, bandaged and in heavy casts, but walking and talking and fighting. At the 2nd assembly the UNAM student whose bald head we knew from its bloodied appearance in the prison videos, appeared, wounds scabbed over, the white of one eye blood red, but walking and talking among us. The spirit of the Other, in the face of brutal violence and state repression, has been militant, of unprecedented compa~erismo and commitment and creativity, and most importantly, organization. "The worst we could do right now is be disorganized," a member of the prison sit-in declares. "My father taught me never to hate," America del Valle said, "to know our enemy, and to fight, but never to hate."
The EZLN Intergalactic Commission reports global solidarity mobilizations in the following cities (see the Kilombo webpage on the Sixth for the complete Intergalactic report): San Diego, San Francisco, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Riverside, La Puente, Santa Ana, San Diego, Houston, Sacramento, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Tucson, Portland, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Montreal, Vancouver, Bogotá, Quito, Caracas, San Salvador, San José, Buenos Aires, Rosario, Bahía Blanca, Mar de Plata, Brasilia, Cochabamba, Santiago, La Havana; Stockholm, Bilbao, Barcelona, Madrid, Munich, Munster, Heidelberg, Berlin, Paris, Toulouse, Athens, Venice, Rome, Mestre-Marghera, Bologna, Naples, London, Oslo, Copenhagen, Vienna, and Salzburg. In addition, letters in solidarity with Atenco and condemning repression directed by the Mexican government have been sent from: Palestine, Turkey, Basque Country, Greece, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Austria, Denmark and Belgium; and from Argentina, Puerto Rico, Canada, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Venezuela, United States, Cuba, and Chile.

And the Flowers Bled

2006-05-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

[photo: from Indymedia Mexico City; sign by Chicana artist, from LA protests yesterday]
Yesterday's national and international day of action--"todos desde su lugar y en su modo;" or "everyone in their own place and their own way"--reaped at least 85 actions in 22 countries, including Catalunia, Argentina, Ecuador, El Salador, Chile, Canada, Colombia, Venezuela, United States, Brazil, Cuba, Basque Country, Austria, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, france, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Sweden, the UK, and Norway. Check the El Kilombo page on the Other Campaign for the complete account of the intergalactic actions May 19.

Currently 39 of the original 211 prisoners taken in Atenco remain in jail, 29 acused of kidnapping, the most serious charge, and another 10 for attack on channels of communication, a charge which allows them to pay bail. As many have left the prison their testimonies are made public, and the accounts of the May 4 police attack on Atenco and the subsequent transfer to the prison at Santiaguito, Almoloya are horrific. See the Narco News artice posted on our page:
Yesterday Mexico State government distributed over 2,000 buckets of white and yellow paint to residents of San Salvador Atenco, with the intent that they paint over the signs of support and graffitti in favor of the FPDT (Popular Front in Defense of the Land, the organized resistance in Atenco). La Jornada reports that the response by residents was "nil."

The Struggle for Everything

2006-05-18T14:45:00.000-07:00

[photo: Zocalo, Mexico City, May 1, 2006]

[This was a blog entry I prepared before the events in Atenco took place. I’m going to put it up here because some of the same themes are coming up again now, only with a greater intensity in light of the now clear willingness of the state to use a cruel and unrestrained violence to stop this movement. In Atenco-related news, some prisoners have been released and with new testimonies from both within and outside of the prison, the evidence accumulates with proof of the rapes, sexual assaults, and brutality waged by the police—and not in the heat of the moment; there was no resistance in Atenco May 4 when 3,000 police—this number now confirmed—entered Atenco and hauled people out of their houses. The police not only carried guns that day—something denied for weeks by officials—but also condoms. The content and brutality of the attack was not only premeditated, it came as an order from above. [photo: Police guarding Starbucks during May 1, 2006 march in Mexico City]In Mexico City and around the country the resistance continues, in road blockades, marches, sit-ins, strikes, occupations, etc. Tomorrow (Friday the 19th) in Mexico and around the world actions will take place in every place and every “way” chosen by adherents and supporters of the Other Campaign, followed by a week of information diffusion and mobilization culminating in the massive Mexico City march with the participation of contingents from all over Mexico May 28th].
*************

“It is not possible to construct indigenous autonomy without a radical transformation of the system,” The EZLN has repeated in many spaces of the Other Campaign. “Not only is it not possible, it has a deadline.” If everything continues above as it is and we continue divided, separated, they continue, we will be destroyed. If we do not manage to create an alternative, an anticapitalist alternative, that creates something else at the same time as it destroys what is above, there will not be anyone left with whom to create solidarity, not people to fight with nor a struggle to fight….” Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

The are several important themes of the Other Campaign here at work: the radical transformation of the system, the biopolitical nature of the struggle, and the deadline.

First, briefly on the necessary radical transformation of the system, Kilombo North Carolina wrote me the other day observing that in many of the commentaries that were coming out in national and international opinion pieces, there are those that think this, the Zapatista struggle and the movement proposed by the Sixth Declaration and the Other Campaign, will be resolved if the San Andres Accords are passed into legislation. Or, in another example, there are the sectors in Mexico and the US that put primacy and priority into organizing electoral monitoring teams to ensure the “fairness” of the elections and to guard against fraud, an honest and valid project but one that promises little if one intends social transformation, as if the proper operation of the ballot box ensured the legitimacy of the representative system. Neither new legislation nor proper electoral procedure has anything to say to this movement now. It is both simpler and bigger than this. We don’t want just to survive, we don’t want just recognition, we are not fighting for the basics, the Other Campaign declares, we want everything. (I’ll return to this later.) [photo: May 1, 2006 march, Mexico City]

The deadline is also a recurring theme. In response to a participant in one meeting who stated that the results of this struggle would be a long time in coming, that maybe we, those present, would not see the changes worked for in the Other Campaign, maybe not even our children, but rather our grandchildren would see and live these changes, Subcomandante Marcos replied, no compañero, I think we’re going to see it, and I think we’re going to see it in the next few years.

That “something is going to happen,” an economic crisis, a social explosion, a culmination of the multiple crises of the system of representation, of nation-state sovereignty, and an unequal global economy, is fact; whether we are ready for it or not, whether we are part of it or not, whether we contribute to its direction or not, it’s going to happen. The EZLN said this at the very first stop of the Other Campaign, in San Cristobal de las Casas, and in many states along the way: the system is going to fall; we can wait and see what happens or we can decide what happens next.

They specify: we don’t think it is a correct attitude to think that everything will disappear up there above, that it will self-destruct, and that we’ll be fine here, with our life vests. It has never been that way. We have to create something else if there is going to be something else…”if we are to return the earth its function as producer of fruits and nurturance instead of cancer and sickness.” [photo: Rally, Zocalo, Mexico City, May 1, 2006]
Kilombo NC was saying the other day, imagine if, when a moment of crisis hits, when the system of representation falls, like in Argentina, like in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in places that have been subject to harsh neoliberal reforms without the wealth or global positioning to cushion the blow, there is an organized alternative project there to meet it? What if there is the “Other Campaign?” [and in recent interviews this week, Marcos confirms: in the country right now we see the same signs we saw in 1992 when the (zapatista) communities voted to go to war. If there had been an Other Campaign then, we wouldn’t have had to rise up in arms in 1994.]

Sup Marcos in Colima: Imagine when we gather all this pain together, in a pacifist and peaceful struggle, not to return to something else, the nostalgia of (Pancho) Villa and (Emiliano) Zapata, but in what we can be now, what you…want to be, but with us, the EZLN, with others, with workers, with some you will never see or meet…
And in Aguascalientes: This conviction that we have in the Other Campaign that gives us the impulse to build this movement, is about creating something new. You all have a place, you, compañera housewife, you have a place. What we have gathered in our trajectory is the rage and indignation of this country, but now with different matrix. [and in this week’s discourse: “…but our rage won’t be the rage of before, the rage of always. No. Now it is an organized indignation, an other rage.”]
And in Morelia, Michoacan: “The days that are coming are going to be terrible, hard, dirty, low, like few times this country has seen. If we don’t do anything it’s going to be like that. And if we do do something, well it’s still going to be like that. But there’s going to be hope, the hope of something else, of another organization of organizations, of another movement that provides an exodus from this night that they are proposing to make, and now for real, eternal, in the only way that things can be eternal, with death….”

The deadline is not a mere milestone after which things are reorganized: “Before we thought [if the struggle didn’t go anywhere] we could continue in our poverty. What we’re seeing now is that this isn’t going to be possible. They are coming for us, for our land…” (Sup Marcos, El Rincon, Guerrero) and “...even our poverty they want to take away from us,” (Sup Marcos, Aguascalientes, Guerrero). In a simple explanation of biopower and biopolitics (Morelia): “The Other Campaign, to put in terms we all understand, is the struggle for life. And capitalism is the struggle to impose, on all of us, death, and it doesn’t matter to them that they destroy the same world that they themselves inhabit. As long as there’s profit it doesn’t matter that the water is contaminated, that nature destroyed, that communities are left abandoned and deserted. And we must not forget to give this the name is deserves: capitalism. It is the enemy, not just in Mexico but in the whole world. This struggle that we are generating is for humanity, because on the other side….they need war, and the only war remaining is one against humanity. If they win, we disappear. If we win, not only do we survive, but we live with dignity, liberty, democracy, and justice.”

Also in Morelia, Michoacan, “…As Zapatistas we think that for particular circumstances that we won’t discuss here, (that will be the job of the historians of the 21st century) this work is falling to Mexico. It’s not just our duty and our hope in this country, but in the continent and the rest of the world. If in some way Zapatismo has achieved a synchrony of global sympathy, it’s not because we have made certain use of the word, or because of the unquestionable heroism of the indigenous communities, but because from this moment it was proposing an alternative, the seed of something else. And this is what the Other Campaign means to do: name the enemy, capital, and the ally of this enemy, the political class….we mean the defeat of this government and the destruction of capital. And then, like someone said once, we will have only just won the right to start over…but we will have to start where one always has to start, from below.”

EZLN Sixth Commission Communiqué May 14, 2006

2006-05-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

Translation El Kilombo Intergalactico

Zapatista Army of National Liberation
Mexico
Sixth Commission of the EZLN

May 14, 2006

To all the adherents of the Sixth Declaration and the Other Campaign:

To the coordinators, commissions, state committees, regions, subregions, municipalities, and sectors of the Other in all of Mexico:

Compañeras y compañeros:

Receive our greetings. Yesterday, May 13, some of the organizations, groups, collectives, families, and individuals from 17 states of the Mexican Republic who are adherents of the Other Campaign met in the Auditorium “Che Guevara” of Ciudad Universitaria, UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico]. In this meeting we looked at how the struggle is gong for our compañeras y compañeros repressed and prisoners since May 3 and 4 in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico State.

We have come to a few agreements that we want to PROPOSE to you, all of the compañeras y compañeros of the Other Mexico:

1. To maintain our demand to free all of the political prisoners
2. To convoke the Other in Mexico and on the Other side to a period of information diffusion, promotion, and activism, in the entire country and around the world, on the following points:
—This happened: explain what happened in Atenco May 3 and 4 of 2006.
—Explain that the same has happened, is happening, or could happen to whomever of those of us from below, to humble and simple people
—What we want: that all [political prisoners] are set free
—Invitation to participate in the programmed events
3. To summon the Other in all of the states of the country, regions, subregions, municipalities, and sectors to carry out civil and pacifistic actions, everybody in their own place and in their own way, Friday May 19th, 2006, at 8 a.m., with the central demand of freeing all those detained in Atenco May 3 and 4.
4. To convoke all the adherents of the Sixth and the Other Campaign to a national gathering in Mexico City, Sunday, May 28th, 2006, meeting a the Angel of Independence at 10:30 a.m. to march to the Mexico City Zocalo [town square]

We invite all the people of Mexico to participate in this march.

5. To convoke a national assembly of adherents, that will take place Monday, May 29th, 2006, at 10 a.m. in the auditorium “Che Guevara” of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the UNAM.

May we each participate with and from our own difference and identity within the Other. That is, as states, regions, subrgions, municipalities, families, individuals, sectors; as women, children, elderly, lesbians, homosexuals, transgendered, sex workers, laborers, peasants, indigenous peoples, students, teachers, artists, communications media, environmentalists, believers, street workers, scientists and researchers, intellectuals, rockers, all of us that are below and to the left.

Vale. Cheers and may the cry of “You are not alone!” break down the walls of the prisons.

From the Other Mexico City

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
Mexico, May, 2006

March in Mexico City against Atenco Repression

2006-05-14T18:28:00.000-07:00

[photo: "Stop Police Repression"]

These photos are from the march against the repression in Atenco held in Mexico City on May 12. The estimated numbers range widely, from 5,000 to 20,000. The best estimate is likely between 10,000 and 15,000.

[photo: "We are all Atenco"]

There is so much happening in these days I can’t hardly get things translated and reported at the rate they occur, but El Kilombo continues to put up relevant articles and translations on the webpage www.elkilombo.org. Click on the Zapatismo link. [photo: Mostly naked campesinos from an organization in Veracruz who are waging their own protest in Mexico City support the March, shouting their support, "You are not alone!"]
[photo: There were reportedly between 2,600 and 3,000 police at the march, which was peaceful and civil]

The following is an excerpt from Subcomandante Marcos’s discourse at the rally at the march, where he spoke with particular emphasis and passion on the crimes committed by “forces of order” against the women the 3rd and the 4th of May, 2006:

“…today we are convoked by rage and indignation. The rage and indignation provoked by the knowledge that, for those above, women are loot, war booty promised ahead of time to the forces of “order.” The aggression inflicted on our compañeras was for the fact of being women. The intent not just to detain and beat them, but to humiliate them and destroy them morally. The message was not just for them as women in struggle for a better country, another Mexico. It was for all the women of Mexico. [photo: "189 prisoners, beaten, abused, raped: state of law?"] For this economic and political system, women are the booty paid to those that impose with force what they cannot sustain with reason. To submit to this level of despise, of mistreatment, of sexual aggression, of rape; to be obligated to submit to this with the legal use of violence…this is the alternative that they system offers, regardless of what political sign they represent, to all the women from below, humble and simple.

[photo: "Free the Political Prisoners! Fox, your hands are stained with blood"] Who can proudly applaud this as a symbol of democratic modernity in this country? Who can be honest and maintain silence in the face of this cruelty? Who, as a woman, as a human being, in Mexico or whatever part of the world, can understand what it meant to be a woman in San Salvador Atenco, in the state of Mexico, May 3rd and 4th, 2006, and not care, not do anything, and continue carrying one’s own humiliation, disguising as destiny and bad luck what has been converted into damnation…”

[photo: "Human Rights? ha ha ha!] “…but our rage won’t be the rage of before, the rage of always. No. Now it is an organized indignation, an other rage. We have only just begun, and we will not stop. Liberate the prisoners, all the prisoners, or put us all in jail once and for all.”

Letter from Women Political Prisoners

2006-05-14T10:40:00.000-07:00

Letter from the women taken political prisoner May 3 and 4 in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico, sent from the prison in Santiaguito, Almoloya.

Translated by El Kilombo Intergalactico

Santiaguito, Almoloya, May 12, 2006

To the population in general:

We women, workers of the country and city, housewives, students, etc.; political prisoners since the 3rd and 4th of May of the current year, are enraged by the formal indictment handed down on May 10th. Not only were we insulted, humiliated, beaten, tortured, sexually abused, and raped, but now we are also prisoners and delinquents. We have lived with repression, not only in social struggle, but also in a particular way as women, because if it’s true that the men were beaten the hardest, we were attacked sexually and raped.

We were submitted to every type of repression during our detention, first with insults like “you are a bitch,” “goddamn f*&#ing bitch,” “we’re going to rape you like the bitch that you are,” etc.; and then, not content to beat us, for some, unconscious, they threatened to kill or disappear us, even to torture us into giving names and information of our families with the threat to kill them, too.

Nothing can heal us of the sexual abuse and rape we suffered; we were touched, pinched, kicked, hit with fists, batons, and shields on our breasts, buttocks, and genitals. While they continued threatening us we were bitten on the breasts, nipples, ears, lips, tongue, etc.; some of us were penetrated with fingers and objects, some were forced to perform oral sex, all of this while they made fun of us as women.

In addition to being subjected to this abuse, we continue to be victims of medical negligence. Some of us should have been bandaged and cured since the day we arrived, some of us have vaginal infections, others infections in our wounds, others of us can’t even sit down because of the blows we received, and despite all this we continue in hunger strike, because we will not take one step back in this struggle, because we want justice for all, for everyone, because if we must fight from this prison that is what we will do. We continue to stand in struggle!

We demand our liberation!
We demand justice for the physical and sexual abuse and rape!
May no one be indifferent to the pain that we have lived!

Free political prisoners!

Sincerely,
The women political prisoners, below and to the left, standing in struggle

The orders came from above

2006-05-11T23:59:00.000-07:00

May 11: As of 1:50a.m. 17 of the political prisoners held at Santiaguito were freed. 144 will be released on bail (now 24,000 pesos per person, or USD$2,400), and 23 have been charged with serious offenses.

Today was national highway blockade day in demand of the liberation of the political prisoners taken in Atenco. Blockades took place on most of the major highways in and out of Mexico City. Police presence was heavy. [photo from Independent Media Center Mexico City] Students marching from the ENAH (National School of Anthropology and History) report the march was completely surrounded by police forces threatening to “partirles la madre” (f&*% them up); at one point this morning they report 2 buses of riot police had pulled up; the number is promptly raised to 12 buses. The students report that police released tear gas inside the ENAH. They also denounce government infiltrations and provocations within the school. Once again commercial media report that the police were unarmed, while protesters report that they were not only armed, but on the Mexico-Puebla highway, a helicopter of PFP (Federal Preventative Police) elite forces landed right on the highway, unloading reinforcements directly in front of them. The Mexico City Independent Media Center reports that despite all this, the protesters did not fall into provocations.

A Human Rights Center Miguel Agustin Pro interview with three anonymous police officers published in La Jornada (May 11, 2006) today confirms that the bullet that killed 14-year-old Francisco Javier Cortes was fired by state police (this after the it had been denied by government and police officials that the police were armed). The officers interviewed reported that “some officers carried weapons like the R-15, and 38 and 9 millimeter rifles, we received orders to hit anything that moved, as longs as the media couldn’t see us, and to enter the houses and haul out all the people we could.” In command of the operation was the ex-commissioner of the PFP during the presidency of Ernestoz Zedillo, Wilfrido Robledo Madrid. “There were more than 3,500 of us in the operation, just of the state police, and the PFP in addition to that. In command of our group was the commander David Pintado Espinoza, code name Zafiro.” They go on to list commanders of all the regions of Mexico state involved in the operation. When asked if their orders were to detain the people who had participated with the leaders (of the FPDT) in the blockade, they respond, “No, anything that moved. Because many of the people detained had nothing to do with it. Some were going to work, some were on their bicycles just watching, they were taken too. Everybody we found in the street and that we took out of houses..” “We even took out people who were still sleeping, young people still asleep, we grabbed them and cuffed them. That was the order. Grab any and all people, doesn’t matter if they’re leaders or not, it wasn’t about looking for who did it, but rather who would pay...”
What was the order to advance into San Salvador? They were asked. “Nothing other than that we were mobilizing, they hadn’t given us information, they hadn't told us what the problem was, or what the operation consisted of. We didn’t find out until that night that it was about some vendors in Chapingo.” Later in the interview they add, “I’m indignant, ashamed about everything that happened. Seeing it all on television now, the truth is I’m indignant about what I saw, what was done to this community, after all we are all human beings. There were many excesses that shouldn’t have happened. We want the people to know that those were orders from above. They make us do this kind of work. And we want to tell the government that this is not the way to govern, by repressing the people. We want them to give us training, but professional training.”

Update on Political Prisoners

2006-05-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

[photo: Indymedia Chiapas. "Federal Police, Assassins!")]

Update, Wednesday May 10, 2006: The permanent sit-in outside Almoloyita, where those detained May 3 and 4 in San Salvador Atenco are being held, continues, now with added intensity and mobilization as today expires the 72 hour period in which the detained must be formally charged or set free. There are apparently two sets of charges. For those from Atenco detained in the May 3 highway confrontation: “delinquent association” and “attack on channels of communication”; for those detained May 4 during the police raid on Atenco
(this group from the community as well as supporters of the Other Campaign), those same two charges plus a charge “equivalent to kidnapping.” [photo from Independent Media Center Mexico City: Indigenous Masagua women protesting outside the prison at Almoyolita for the liberation of the political prisoners at Atenco] Letters and communiques have been sent out by the prisoners denouncing their arbitrary arrest, the physical and psychological violence against them in their detainment, including torture during the transfer from Atenco to the prison, and continuing abuse within the prison. Some are on hunger strike and denounce that they are being forced to eat in front of video cameras. Letters and testimonies have been publicly released from 3 of the 5 internationals deported, recounting the violence with which they were detained and transported and which they witnessed in the treatment of other prisoners, as well as the illegality of their detainment and deportation. Victor Ballinas for La Jornada reports today that the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH is the Spanish acronym) that it has received 150 complaints from Atenco inhabitants, of which 16 are of sexual abuse and 7 of rape of women between 20 and 50 years old. The complaints filed for sexual abuse include forced disrobing, molestation, forced oral sex, objects inserted in the rectum, among others, all of these acts committed by police during the transfer of the detained to the prison at Santiaguito. Until now these denunciations had been heard secondhand but as of yesterday the women that experienced these abuses have testified personally. Other prisoners with serious injuries remain handcuffed to their hospital beds.
Much of this information is only in Spanish but what we can find in English or translate ourselves I will post at www.elkilombo.org. Click on our “Zapatista page” in the upper right hand column under News and Events.

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos began granting interviews to the mass media this week, La Jornada has published an interview in two parts on May 9 and 10, www.jornada.unam.mx, and Televisa has video of its May 9 morning interview at its website http://www.esmas.com/noticierostelevisa/mexico/ (scroll down, right hand column in the video gallery. I will have summaries up on these interviews promptly and again, where we can find or do translations of these interviews we’ll post them at www.elkilombo.org.

Indymedia Chiapas has a summary of the international mobilizations in support of the liberation of all political prisoners detained in Atenco (http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=12197), taken from the Intergalactic page of the Sixth Declaration (http://zeztainternazional.ezln.org.mx./). They include actions in 29 cities: Stockholm, Berlin, Bilbao, Barcelona, Munich, Paris, Athens, Munster, Madrid, Venice, Rome, Mestre-Marghera, Bologna, Minneapolis, Tucson, New York, Montreal, Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Riverside, Santa Ana, San Diego, Houston, Sacramento, Boston, Chicago, Quito, and Buenos Aires.

Update on Atenco

2006-05-07T11:35:00.000-07:00

[photo: Reforma/AFP]

A quick rundown of the events of the last few days and the current status of things, including most recent information about the imprisoned, deported, and injured.

May 3, morning: State police attempt to violently remove a group of flower growers from the marketplace in Texcoco (town close to San Salvador Atenco). Supporters from San Salvador Atenco (mostly from the FPDT—Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra, or People’s Front in Defense of the Land) arrive to support the flower farmers. Atenco residents set up a highway blockade in protest of the violent eviction, and hundreds of police arrive to try to lift the blockade, instigating an extremely violent clash with the FPDT. In the highway confrontation between hundreds of riot police and some 60 community members, La Jornada reported the next day, the community clearly won, holding down the blockade with burning tires, Molotov coctails, rocks, and machetes. But the price was high: 50 people injured, 100 detained, and a 14-year-old boy from Atenco shot in the chest and killed. State politicians and mass media sources reported that the boy had been hit by explosives carried by the Atenco protesters themselves, but it was later proven that he died of a bullet wound, and the protestors don’t carry guns. Protesters temporarily held 11 police officers hostage.

May 3, afternoon: At the meeting of the Other Campaign in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco (where hundreds of students were massacred by the army in 1968, a massacre that was denied by the government and ignored by the media until many years later), news of the death of the first fallen of Atenco, the14-year-old, arrives. Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos declares the EZLN on red alert, the Zapatista caracoles closed, and postpones the EZ’s participation in all activities of the Other Campaign until further notice. He expresses unconditional solidarity with the resistance in Atenco, and says that the EZ will await directions from the FPDT. He emphasizes that should anything happen to him, an alternative EZLN command is ready to take over.

[photo from www.ezln. org.mx] May 4, dawn: Over 2,000 police arrive in Atenco. They break the Texcoco- Lecheria highway blockade, surround Atenco and invade the town. They fire tear gas and wield clubs, violently beating everyone in their path, including community members, observers, and press. Reports from the scene say that several protesters were shot in the head with metal gas pellets at close range. The police occupation of Atenco was complete within several hours, but the violence not. The police went house to house, breaking down doors and hauling people out into the street. These people were badly, badly beaten—it should be said clearly because while the initial TV footage showed the violence live early Thursday morning, that footage stopped rolling on main media stations shortly thereafter. Over 200 were thrown into police vans, and a communiqué coming from prisoners held Santiaguito la Loma, Toluca, Mexico State, on May 5 reports that they were beaten continuously during the 5-6 hours that it took to transfer them to the jail. Other sources reported rape of the women picked up by police in the hours between their detention and their arrival at the jail; yesterday reports put up on the Independent Media Center site claimed that the sexual assault was more widespread then previously imagined and that both men and women were raped; today La Jornada reports numerous cases of gang rapes.

Ignacio del Valle, leader of the FPDT, was one of those dragged from a house and beaten, pictures show him bleeding from the head, face, and groin. He was reportedly taken to a high-security prison in Toluca, separate from the rest of the prisoners. He daughter, America del Valle, is currently in hiding, and his son, Cesar del Valle, is also in prison. Del Valle is internationally respected for his role in Atenco’s successful resistance in 2001 against the building of an airport on their communally held lands; he had spoken at the May 1st rally of the Other Campaign in the Mexico City Zocalo.

Another tragedy of the raid is 20-year-old Alexis Benhumea. John Gibler, writing for Global Exchange, reports that Benhumea was shot in the head, most likely with a gas pellet, early in the morning Thursday. With his skull broken in two places and brain exposed, Behumea laid unconscious 12 hours, hidden in a house with his father and 23 other people, bleeding profusely from the head and, as told by witnesses also hidden in the house, entering periodically in convulsions. Gibler reports that Behumea’s father didn’t dare leave the house with his son to seek medical help, fearful that the state and federal police blocking both ends of the block and patrolling the streets would kill him and dump him somewhere. Finally supporters were able to get Behumea out of Atenco and to a hospital in Mexico City where Gibler reports he survived 4 hours of brain surgery and is in critical condition with brain damage to an unknown degree.

At least five international citizens were picked up by the police during the raid, though some early reports said 13. There have been different accounts of what happened to the internationals. The first reports coming out said they hadn’t been taken to Immigration offices yet because they were too badly beaten to be presentable. Human rights workers confirmed their physical state, including evidence of blows to the head, blows to the knees, and eye injuries from the tear gas attack. They were later given expulsion orders from Mexico, but shortly after word had arrived that they were being transported to the airport, they again disappeared. On site reports said that once again their appearance in public was undesirable as their injuries were visible and that they would be deported unseen. Yesterday it was confirmed that Cristina Vals Hernández and María Cortés Torrida, from Spain, as well as Samantha Dietmar, from Germany, had arrived in their home countries. They are forbidden from entering Mexico for five years.

It is confirmed that there are 219 detained, 37 disappeared, 5 hospitalized. A list of the detained and disappeared can be found at www.ezln.org.mx.
[photo BBC: Police running away from community members in highway confrontation]

May 5: Between 4,000 and 8,000 march from Chapingo to Atenco, including thousands of students from the UNAM (Autonomous University of Mexico) and supporters from Mexico City. Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos marches also and the massive crowd enters the town square of Atenco where 24 hours earlier police had occupied and brutalized the community. The march and the rally are peaceful. The EZLN at the rally announces that the itinerary of the Other Campaign is suspended and that Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos will stay in Mexico City until all of those detained in Atenco, now considered political prisoners, are released. He also denounces the mass media “campaign of contempt” against the people of Atenco and the lies published and aired via the two principal TV stations in Mexico, TVAzteca and Televisa. He addresses the reporters and photographers of these news agencies directly, recognizing that their work is cut and changed by their editors and directors, who never face the pain and the rage of the people on the ground. In a major shift in the Other Campaign, Marcos states that he will now grant interviews to the mass media, on condition that the interviews are published unedited.
[photo BBC: police diving for cover in face of community defending blockade with rocks and molotov coctails]

May 6: An assembly is held in Atenco to design a national plan of action in support of the resistance. The plan is as follows:
Sunday the 7th: Information distribution, each organization should use the means available to them to spread news of the various abuses committed by authorities in the last several days
Monday the 8th: Information distribution continues, leaflets for distribution will be available at the Science Faculty of the CU at 12 noon, and at UNIOS at 1pm.
Tuesday the 9th: National information distribution campaign
Wednesday the 10th: Student Strike
Thursday the 11th: National Highway Blockade
Friday the 12th, 4pm: March from Gobernacion (seat of government) to Los Pinos (presidential residence)
Saturday the 13th: there is a proposal for an Assembly in Atenco
[photo BBC: police re-enforcements sent in to repress resistance]
The national plan of actions is accompanied by a call to the international community to organize protests in solidarity with the activities in Mexico

May 7: There are now 200 people gathered outside the jail in Almoyolita pressuring for the liberation of those taken prisoner in Atenco. Legally the authorities have 48 hours to charge detained people with crimes. That timeline expired at 8am this morning, so as of now the detained are beling held illegally. The Independent Media Center of Mexico City (IMC-DF) reports that lawyers are not being allowed access to the prisoners, which is also illegal. Families gathered outside the prison have also been denied access.

EZLN on Red Alert

2006-05-03T21:56:00.000-07:00

Companer@s,
As of this afternoon, the EZLN is on red alert and has cancelled its participation in all activites of the Other Campaign for the time being. This morning ejiditarios (communal land owners) in Salvador Atenco, the community that gained international rapport when it successfully resisted the building of a new airport on its communal lands, came under attack by police forces. The community defended themselves, and as of now, over ninety community members have been arrested, including a prominent leader of the resistance. Eleven police officers are being held by the Atenco community. The Other Campaign was in the middle of a meeting in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Tlatelolco (site where over 300 students and civilians were massacred by the Mexican military in 1968) when the news arrived of the first Atenco death--a 14-year-old boy. Shortly thereafter Subcomandante Marcos announced the red alert and stated, "from this moment on an alternative command structure is in place in case anything were to happen to me."
"I don't know about all of you," he added, "but today, as Zapatistas, we are all Atenco"

Lieutenant Colonel Moises, of the Intergalactic Commission, posts this on the Intergalactic site of the Enlace Zapatista webpage:

Zapatista Army of National Liberation

May 3, 2006

Compañeros and Compañeras around the World:

This is Insurgent Lt. Col. Moisés speaking to you,

Today we have entered into a Red Alert.

Our compañeras and compañeros from Texcoco near San Salvador Atenco (State of México) were attacked. This is a place where our compañero Subcomandante Marcos has just visited.

We are calling for a national and international mobilization against the government of Vicente Fox for April 4th beginning at 8 in the morning in front of Mexican embassies.

Up to this point we do not know how many dead and injured there might have been because our brothers and sisters from Atenco were confronted by the forces of the bad government and they defended themselves.

Stay tuned compañeros and compañeras.

We will be in contact when necessary.

May 1st

2006-05-03T21:24:00.000-07:00

25,000 March with the Zapatistas and the Other Campaign in Mexico City
News and photos from May 1 coming soon

The American Dream vs. the "Other" Dream

2006-04-11T09:34:00.000-07:00

The US is another country today, and there's no going back.
In addition to the hundreds of thousands that marched yesterday in New York, Washington, Atlanta, San Francisco, the big cities, in Garden City Kansas, two hours from my home and the heartland of white republican conservatism, 3,000 people marched, a number that may look small but in this part of sparsely populated western Kansas, in a city of 30,000, that's 10% of the population.

Reports from east coast cities say that Spanish has become the official language of the protests--not just for the millions of Latin American migrants, but for the migrant community in general, with Chinese and Senegalese people taking the microphone top say "si se puede!"

La Jornada, Mexico's leftist daily newspaper, reports a huge gathering in New York of the older immigrant community--Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, Chinese, Polish, Russian, and more--with the new immigrant community--largely Mexican, Central American, Korean--but now as all New Yorkers. A huge contingent of Mexicans left from Washington Square, to meet the Korean contingent from Queens, the Philippine contingent that left from Wall Street, the Chinese contingent that met in Chinatown in downtown Manhattan, the students that came from everywhere...¨
"We are the United States"
"Invisible no more!"
"If you throw us out, we'll come back!"

The US is another country today, but it is not all sweetness and light. To shouts in the streets of "immigrants built this country!" one African American man shouted from his porch, "no, black people built this country!" In some cities organizers requested that people put down their "home" country flags and carry American flags. Doubtless there is a certain cooptation by Democratic party, an attempt to harness this movement for their own purposes, an attempt to channel creative, liberatory energy into pragmatic electoral patriotism. It's doubtful they will be able to—so many of these people have already learned to disobey, to walk away from representative structures and toward what they can create themselves. The more worrisome part is that these marches and this movement turn into a defense of the "American Dream," a perpetuation of the myth that individual opportunity in a bustling “free” economy is going to liberate anyone. What we need in the US is an “Other” dream, a collective, contextual analysis, as the Zapatistas have done in Mexico, of what the enemy is, who are its managers, how does it function, what is our strategy for fighting it, and finally, what is it we want! In a place where people don’t know which flag to fly, perhaps we are in position to construct a community that doesn’t rely upon a flag for its collective imagination or cooperative power. One that has commonality as a political project to be created instead of what has been, in the history of sovereignty, a contract of submission.

But such a project can’t be constructed by immigrants alone, nor by the African American community alone, nor by activists or students or environmentalists alone. It is like Sup Marcos has insisted to so many sectors in the Other Campaign in Mexico: it does not matter how strong, how brave, how noble our distinctive struggles, if we remain separated, we will all be defeated, and so totally defeated that there will be nothing left.

Imagine if the Latino community talked to the white rural farmers of the Midwest, if Arab and Asian communities met the Chiapan, Oaxacan, Guerreran communities en route toward the north, if New York talked to Garden City, if those that live in trailer parks could talk to those that live in inner-city tenements…

That will be our “Other Campaign,” a political project that is a community. But the idea of a “nation of immigrants” will have to reject sentimental nonsense of the melting pot, of the assimilationist nostalgia of an (American) dream that has never been anything but a myth at best and more frequently a nightmare. It will have to create something literally unheard of, unprecedented, something truly other that comes from the decision and desire of a new collectivity.

April 10 Migrant/Latino March on the US

2006-04-10T22:24:00.000-07:00

"We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us." –Sign held by migrants in April 9th march in Dallas, USA, 4/9/06.
[picture: Los Angeles protests 3.25.06]
"…and the indigenous peoples also…indigenous in all of the republic rise up again, not to ask to be recognized, but rather to impose their existence, as we have imposed our existence all of us that are from the bottom and from the left." –Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Morelia, Michoacan. 4/6/06.

“None of the "social movements" of recent years has achieved in months of "struggle" what the insurgents of November discretely obtained in three weeks of riots: cuts to public assistance in the affected areas were suspended, funding for local programs was reinstated. All of this without making any demands. Demanding means defining your existence in the mutilating terms of those in power, it means conceding an advantage to the enemy... No one has the right to tell us that what we are doing is "illegitimate…If politicizing consists in a struggle of different legitimacies, of different ideas of happiness, our task from now on is to give means to this struggle with no other limit but what appears to us to be just and joyful.” –The Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile, Communique # 4, 3/20/06

In three months of the Other Campaign, at a little over the halfway point of the Zapatista tour of the Mexican nation, the one theme that has never failed to be mentioned, in city, town, and village, indigenous and mestizo, urban and rural, worker and campesino, is immigration. In many of the small towns of Puebla mostly women spoke, because mostly women lived there—their sons and husbands and brothers had migrated to the US. In Oaxaca an older woman told us that the only way to survive was to have at least one child in the US sending back money; one child was required; more might be necessary. In Tuxpan, Nayarit, one woman characterizes their town as childless, “How many mothers cry for their children who have gone north? How many men lament not having their children at home to help them?” A participant at a meeting of the Othe Campaign in Guanajuato said, in one of the most striking moments of analytical clarity and honesty, “If it weren’t for the remittances sent from the US, this country would be in civil war already.”

[photo: Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos talking with Braceros--the Mexican workers contracted to work in the United States to fill labor shortages during World War II.] From the 1992 modification to Article 27 of the Mexican constitution allowing collectively held ejido lands in Mexico to be sold individually to the passage of NAFTA in 1994 and the subsequent exposure of the Mexican countryside to the global market, and back to the implementation of neoliberal reforms starting in the late 70s and early 80s, immigration from Mexico to the US has grown exponentially. Today Mexico is the second largest country-recipient of remittances in the world, following onlyIndia. In 2005, 20 billion dollars were sent from workers in the US to families and communities in Mexico, making foreign remittances the second largest source of Mexican income, larger than tourism and second only to petroleum. Immigration is not a new phenomenon, but the quantity and capacity of the remittance economy is—in the past 13 years, the amount of remittances has quintupled. Of an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US, half are Mexican. In 2006, 400,000 Mexicans are expected to cross over into the US to work, where it is estimated that 10 million Mexican immigrants already reside, or nearly 10% of the Mexican population.

It is not only on the Mexico side of the border where immigration is a principal theme. The immigrant marches in the United States over the past few weeks in protest of the criminalization of immigrants have been the biggest mobilizations that some US cities have seen in this century, in some cases, ever. On March 10, 2006, between 100,000 and 300,000 marched in Chicago, the biggest march ever seen in this city, larger even than the historic worker’s march in 1885 demanding an8-hour work day. On March 25th, 2006, more than a million people march against the criminalization of undocumented workers in Los Angeles, also possibly this city’s biggest march ever. And yesterday, on April 9, 2006, 500,000 march in Dallas, by far biggest protest in Dallas history. Also on March 25th, 50,000 marched in Denver, 3,000 in Charlotte, NC, 4,000 in Sacramento, between 500,000 and one million in San Francisco; and in previous weeks: 30,000 in Washington, 1200 in Trenton, 2,000 in Kansas city, 2,000 in Tuscon, 4,000 in Salem, Oregon. Tens of thousands of Latino highschool students have walked out of class in California, Texas, and other parts of the nation in recent weeks in protest of anti-immigrant reforms. The numbers for the mobilizations today, April 10, A Day without Immigrants, have not yet come out yet, but the massive immigrant mobilizations are historic by any measure, and, more importantly, undeniable evidence of a new political subjectivity, a new political community, a new gesture of the multitude.

What does it mean that some of the biggest marches in US history are carried out by recent immigrants? They carry Mexican flags and signs that say “We are America!” Others carry US flags and signs that say “Did the pilgrims have papers?” Where immigrants have taken over the streets, not to mention made their homes, in a country where they are usually considered “illegal,” how can we fail to see a movement that doesn’t just expand across borders but rather starts from the global, that has not just realities but desires that don’t fit in nation-state borders, that has already remade the world because it cannot be represented by any previous reality? Think of what we are currently participating in even just as El Kilombo Intergalactico: today Kilombo members in Durham join Latinos nation-wide on strike from work and classes in Durham, the city with the fastest growing population of Latin American immigrants in the nation; one of our members is in Paris witnessing an unprecedented social uprising that stretches from the November riots around race discrimination to the current massive student and young people’s mobilizations against a new youth employment law; another of us is following the Other Campaign in Mexico where people from every class, sector, and background speak of their globalized families and lives, of commonalities and affinities that do not follow borders, of political imaginations and collective dreams that do not fit in nation-state structures.

This is the world we live in. The conversations in the congressional halls of Washington and the conservative state and county capitals across the US about “what to do” with the flood of immigrant labor and the communities of undocumented laborers in the US mark a total disconnection with reality, the collective delusion that this is something they can decide to curtail or allow, something they can control and regulate. The question, rather, is what these workers, these millions of global subjects, will do with the local and national governmental “representatives” that imagine they still have the capacity to rule over these labor flows and these subjects.

Who are these now global subjects that maintain two economies at the same time without citizen rights in either one? In the last few weeks they have not only become suddenly visible, and suddenly loud, but suddenly and brilliantly political subjects in their own right, expressing an autonomy—a collective self-formation and political subjectivity—that does not rely on national identity, state recognized citizenship, or “legitimate” contract with the standing law of any controlling power or controlled territory.

It is vital, in the context of April 10--the massive migrant marches and the upcoming May 1 "A Day Without Immigrants" strike in the US, and the 6-month journey of the Other Campaign in Mexico, that we can theorize the migrant not just as a subject of lack. Migrants may move principally by force and displacement, but they also move by desire. And the communities and cultures they make and remake everyday do not rely upon assimilation into one nation-state or a homeland return to another. They constitute new forms of production and subjectivity that transform realities daily and demand an agility and hybridization of theory that matches their own movement.

Chronicles Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, Nayarit, Colima

2006-03-27T22:11:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-12T19:13:00.000-08:00

“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?

Chronicles Oaxaca, Puebla, Tlaxcala

2006-02-25T20:31:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-16T11:27:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

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

2006-02-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

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.

Discourse in Cancun

2006-01-26T14:23:00.000-08:00

January 20, 2006

Here I want to translate a particularly potent piece, part of the Delegado’s discourse in Cancun.
“Believe me, what we are seeing from here—that is, from this side of the ski masks—is a movement richer in ideas, proposals, and struggles than this country has known in all of its history. What is being built right now is the most beautiful lesson of love that this country could receive, and we have to choose if we are going to give this lesson or receive it. Each person has their own heart, their own thought to consult, we’re not going to obligate or impose anything on anyone. Weigh your reasons, think through them, and decide for yourself, because it is this is what we’re fighting for: liberty. We’re not going to supplant one tyrrany for another, what we want is to construct from below something else that is going to be so new that not even we—and they’ve always told us that we are too imaginative and dreamy—can imagine. That’s why we still can’t define it, that’s why we say: we can’t go further as just us, the next step we have to take with more people, with you.” January 17, Cancun.

3 Trajectories of the Sixth

2006-01-26T14:22:00.000-08:00

January 18
Three important trajectories emerge in the writings, meetings, and words of the Sexta, both in the preliminary meetings in the fall in the Selva and in these first weeks of January circulating through Chiapas (this appears again below because I placed it wrong and I'm having editing difficulties in changing it)
The first is that the Sexta, the movement that has been launched with the 6th Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle, is anti-capitalist. This is significant because the discourse around zapatismo has often been specifically anti-neoliberal, certainly critical of current global economic policy, but only sporadically vocally anti-capitalist, though the practice has always been that. Now, however, all the language of the Sexta is explicitly, repeatedly, and with much emphasis anti-capitalist. In each city and village the caravan travels, in fact, Delegado O takes the local economy as an example—whether that is fisheries, farms, factories, the tourism industry—and describes the current conditions of inequality and exploitation in terms of primitive accumulation—the theft, plundering, expropriation, and legalized robbery that enables the capitalist class structure. That accumulation process continues, the people in nearly every part of Chiapas have pointed out: we work hard all day everyday and in the end all we have is the same shit or worse. It’s the same everywhere, Delegado O repeats, it’s the same in the jungle, in Palenque, in Tonala, in Huixtla, here in this tiny coastal fishing village of Joaquin Amado, it’s the same in Sinaloa, Tijuana, Mexico City, and it’s the same in “el otro lado,” or the “other side” of the border, the United States. In Huixtla, the damage from Hurricane Stan was fierce and the aid and repairs never arrived, despite all the TV spots, sponsored by political parties, showing a ceremonial photo-opp delivery of goods to affected communities. A student from the UNAM gets up to speak in Huixtla and describes the clean-up activities the students did for the damnificados, or victims of the hurricane. But we have not done enough, she continues, because we are all damnificados, not of Stan but of capitalism and the unemployment, poverty, and misery it brings to all of us. We are fighting for a free and public university system, she says, but what good does a free education do if young people don’t have the resources to feed themselves day to day?

The interesting thing here is that, through the discourse of the Sexta, there is growing, widespread critique of the economy throughout Mexico not just in terms of inflation, corruption, and foreign expropriation, but specifically of capitalism as a system. Capitalism becomes a recognizable phenomenon, instead of a system hiding behind it’s symptoms of “consumer confidence,” “market fluctuations,” or inevitable economic cycles. Imagine a common critique, or at least recognition, of capitalism in the U.S.!

Second, and closely related, is the clear rejection of electoral politics and state solutions, rather than just a critique of corrupt politicians or the party in power. Change will not come from above, Delegado O repeats in nearly every meeting, and inevitably the people murmur and nod when he clarifies: what is screwing us over here is a system, sometimes its is tri-colored, sometimes blue, sometimes black and yellow (referring to the respective colors of the PRI, PAN, and PRD, the three primary political parties in Mexico), but who cares what color they put on if we continue seeing the same gray? If everyday is a gamble whether we will wake up the next? Or if we will be in jail by tonight? Choosing a candidate and a party is just choosing which one will beat us up, refuse to pay us for our work, put us in jail, kill or disappear us. But it is not just that these parties are corrupt, he pushes further, it is a system, not just political and economic but also representational, that we do not want. How long are we going to sit here waiting for someone to do for us what we have to do ourselves? How long will we waste our time voting to delegate someone above to do what can only be done from below?

Which brings us to the third trajectory: subjectivity. There is no room in the Sexta for anyone to stand on the outside and offer support, service, solidarity with the movement. We ARE the movement. This is a big adjustment for “civil society”: for twelve years they had to learn to listen to the Zapatistas, even (and especially) when they were silent. But now they/we are being asked to speak, and to speak of their own struggles. The only way to join the Sexta is to join as a compañeo in struggle. The question the EZ poses in the Sexta is no longer do you understand our struggle and do you support it, but, what is your struggle?

January 16
In Quintana Roo, Subdelegado O talks about the decision Comandanta Ramona had to make. She had to decide whether to get married and have a home and a family, or to do political work, because, as a woman, this was a choice she had to make. Ramona and Susana, another insurgenta began the organizational work with women, going community to community, kitchen to kitchen, talking to the women of the communities, and all this before there were roads or transport. And after 10 years of this organizing work, they wrote the Zapatista Revolutionary Law for Women which the delegado describes, “where they claimed important rights that may sound funny to you, but they were radical claims, like women could be drivers! They could move about without depending on a man, probably drunk anyway, to drive them.” Susana is coming back, he informs the people in Quintana Roo, this fall when the Zapatistas comandantes leave the jungle to spread throughout the country and stay with the people for a longer time to learn about their lives and struggles, Susana is coming here. So take your time, think about it carefully, he urges as he has in each city and town so far, and then decide if you want to join us. We won’t come solve your problems, we will only bring more, news of the problems everywhere else. But we will come and we will stay and we will all work together.

This is one of the fascinating turns of the Sexta: for 12 years national and international “civil society” have accompanied the Zapatista communities in their struggles, in their defense and their initiatives and their construction of autonomy. Now, as part of the Sexta, and as of September 2006, the Zapatistas are coming out of the mountains and the jungle to accompany communities in the rest of the country in their struggles: “So this is what we are going to do, and we’re not asking you to do a task for us, but rather to receive us, when we return, so that, alongside you, we will go to Chichen Itzá to be with the artisan companeros there while they are making and selling their merchandise, we will go with the companeros of Oxcun, we will be with the women in Yucatan that are meeting to discuss their problems, with the children when they go to school, with the housewives where they are discussing problems of the household or the neighborhood, and this is how we will learn from you, because we are going to struggle all of us together and begin to unite our struggle to others.” Quintana Roo, January 16.

links

2006-01-26T14:21:00.001-08:00

January 14
Today the adherents of the Sexta in Chiapas meet representatives adherents from Yucatan and the caravan leaves Chiapas to continue the tour in the rest of the nation. Again, there is good covereage of the events in the Yucatan Peninsula at www.narconews.com and at www.chiapas.indymedia.org. The EZLN webpage puts up all of the Delegado 0's discourses at www.ezln.org.mx

Huixta and Nueva Villaflores

2006-01-26T14:21:00.000-08:00

January 13
Huixtla
In Huixtla and Nueva Villaflores the discussion on self-organization moves into self-governance (this is continued from the post below, you have to read backwards, that is, chronologically):
You saw what happened after the hurricane, there was no aid, they said it was coming but they didn’t deliver, they just took pictures. We have to find another path, we have to talk to each other and build a different way. We have to learn to govern, that’s what we mean when we say our right to self-govern, that’s what we do in the autonomous municipalities. We rotate governance, nobody gets paid, and after they finish their turn, they don’t get rich and leave, they go back to the fields with everyone else. People who can’t read or write can govern! All you need to govern is a good heart and the willingness to listen to the people—that is indigenous autonomy for us...(paraphrased from the Delegado's words in Huixtla/Nueva Villaflores)

When Indignation is Organized

2006-01-26T14:19:00.000-08:00

January 11
Tonala, Joaquin Amaro, San Isidro.
The effects of long-term politician-paternalism are strong, even where the people have been able to carry forward autonomous struggles. In Tonala, when they see the caravan and all the motion around Delegado 0, some people ask, when will the sandwiches be distributed? What time are they going to start handing out the hats and t-shirts? This is common campaign practice, the candidates pull into town to give their speech, hand out a snack, a t-shirt, maybe a little bit of money, and then continue on to the next town. Sometimes the local people who speak at the events ask Delegado O to represent them, to take their cause to the capital, to defend their rights, to correct the injustices they live with. One woman in Tonala accidentally says “Presidente O” instead of Delegado O. Marcos laughs, but he speaks clearly and bluntly when it is his turn: We can’t fix the electricity or the shrimp price, we can’t fix the bridge here or the taxes on the tricycleros (the public transport via tricyle). But we will take what you have told us here and inform everyone. He continues—the thing is, the politicians won’t fix it either, they don’t care, they won’t follow through, and they can’t resolve what we are talking about here anyway. The people murmur in agreement. Politicians don’t produce anything, the Delegado had pointed out a few days ago in Tuxtla, their job is to direct traffic and they don’t even do that very well. And most importantly, we can do better than this? Why do we go buy these pathetic products at superstores? Why don’t we buy better things from each other directly?

I want to recount some statements here, collected from the past few days in Chiapa de Corzo, Tuxtla, Tonala, Joaquin Amaro, San Isidro where the EZ’s discourse moves from the problems presented to self-organization to the creation of a new common:
The problem with our rebellion is that it is dispersed, loose, he insists. Zapatismo isn’t enough, we need all of us. The only way to survive today is to resist collectively, as individuals they will destroy us. And although the EZLN is a big collective, they can destroy us too if we don’t unite with others....
We have to construct from the beginning (of this campaign) a form of participation and information that keeps us united, as if we were permanently in assembly, like what we’re doing here but at a national level....
This movement doesn’t depend on Delegado O or Subcomandante Marcos or this caravan; it depends on the feeling of rage and indignation that drives all of us to this next step, and what makes those “above” tremble is that this rage and indignation will organized itself....
This feeling of indignation and rebellion needs a destiny, we think, and that destiny is organization in struggle. But the struggle is not just blocking a street or holding a protest or having a meeting, it also has to do with culture, with music, with song, with theater, with movies, texts, poetry, literature, with the media, like those that accompany us now to take your voice to all the others that are in the Otra and make it loud.

We began with Six

2006-01-26T14:17:00.000-08:00

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.”

Comandante Ramona

2006-01-26T14:16:00.001-08:00

January 6, 2005
Tonala
Today Comandanta Ramona died. One of the best -known and most-respected commanders of the EZLN, Ramona fought for 20 years as part of the EZLN and the CCRI (Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee) and helped write the Zapatista Revolutionary Law for Women. Much has been made of Ramona’s tiny stature and enormous courage, her near illiteracy and powerful words. She was the first Zapatista to break the military enclosure of the insurgents in Chiapas when she went to Mexico City in 1996 to receive a kidney transplant for the same illness that eventually took her life. In that trip she spoke to millions in the zocolo, previewing what would come ten years later with the Sexta: “We hope that all of you walk with us. We want to unite our small Zapatista voice with the big voice of all of you that fight for a new Mexico. We came here to shout, with all of you, the ‘ya basta,’ enough, never again a Mexico without us. This is what we want, a Mexico where we all have a place, a dignified place.”
The Sup receives the news in the middle of a town meeting in Tonala. After an hour’s mysterious wait, he returns to announce her death, stating, “In this situation it is very difficult to speak. What I can say is that the world has lost one of those women who births new worlds. Mexico has lost one of the kind of fighters it needs, and we have lost a piece of our hearts.” The tour is suspended for 2 days as the EZ and the communities mourn Ramona’s death.

Other Loves

2006-01-26T14:16:00.000-08:00

January 5, 2006
A clip from Delegado O’s participation last night in the Plaza Catedral of San Cristobal de las Casas, starting off the Sexta/Otra with a recognition of love and difference:
“In the struggle, the question of love has come up. And what we see is that there are many ways to love, and it’s not true that love only happens between a man and a woman. What we have learned, as Zapatistas, that in the world there are many ways to love. Sometimes men love each other, sometimes women love each other, there are many ways and paths of love. And we know for those that love in ways other then just between a man and a woman, society, authorities, even we ourselves, see them as bad, as delinquent, as people who could do us damage. But no! That’s not our experience, what we’ve seen at least is they are like all other people, and in fact the majority of the time they are more authentic than heterosexuals in their lives and struggles. And we think, we have studied, that, like indigenous, young people, women, they are also exploited, repressed, victimized by capitalism. So we have to see that they too have a space too within the Sexta/Otra, in the struggle, we have to make this space.”
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
January 1, 2006
San Cristobal de las Casas

The Sixth: Anti-capitalist, non-electoral, and the subjectivity of struggle

2006-01-26T14:14:00.000-08:00

January 4, 2006
Three important trajectories emerge in the writings, meetings, and words of the Sexta, both in the preliminary meetings in the fall in the Selva and in these first days of January circulating through Chiapas (some of this I’ve added in later, in days and visits after the 4th)
The first is that the Sexta, the movement that has been launched with the 6th Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle, is anti-capitalist. This is significant because the discourse around zapatismo has often been specifically anti-neoliberal, certainly critical of current global economic policy, but only sporadically vocally anti-capitalist, though the practice has always been that. Now, however, all the language of the Sexta is explicitly, repeatedly, and with much emphasis anti-capitalist. In each city and village the caravan travels, in fact, Delegado O takes the local economy as an example—whether that is fisheries, farms, factories, the tourism industry—and describes the current conditions of inequality and exploitation in terms of primitive accumulation—the theft, plundering, expropriation, and legalized robbery that enables the capitalist class structure. That accumulation process continues, the people in nearly every part of Chiapas have pointed out: we work hard all day everyday and in the end all we have is the same shit or worse. It’s the same everywhere, Delegado O repeats, it’s the same in the jungle, in Palenque, in Tonala, in Huixtla, here in this tiny coastal fishing village of Joaquin Amado, it’s the same in Sinaloa, Tijuana, Mexico City, and it’s the same in “el otro lado,” or the “other side” of the border, the United States. In Huixtla, the damage from Hurricane Stan was fierce and the aid and repairs never arrived, despite all the TV spots, sponsored by political parties, showing a ceremonial photo-opp delivery of goods to affected communities. A student from the UNAM gets up to speak in Huixtla and describes the clean-up activities the students did for the damnificados, or victims of the hurricane. But we have not done enough, she continues, because we are all damnificados, not of Stan but of capitalism and the unemployment, poverty, and misery it brings to all of us. We are fighting for a free and public university system, she says, but what good does a free education do if young people don’t have the resources to feed themselves day to day?

The interesting thing here is that, through the discourse of the Sexta, there is growing, widespread critique of the economy throughout Mexico not just in terms of inflation, corruption, and foreign expropriation, but specifically of capitalism as a system. Capitalism becomes a recognizable phenomenon, instead of a system hiding behind it’s symptoms of “consumer confidence,” “market fluctuations,” or inevitable economic cycles. Imagine a common critique, or at least recognition, of capitalism in the U.S.!

Second, and closely related, is the clear rejection of electoral politics and state solutions, rather than just a critique of corrupt politicians or the party in power. Change will not come from above, Delegado O repeats in nearly every meeting, and inevitably the people murmur and nod when he clarifies: what is screwing us over here is a system, sometimes its is tri-colored, sometimes blue, sometimes black and yellow (referring to the respective colors of the PRI, PAN, and PRD, the three primary political parties in Mexico), but who cares what color they put on if we continue seeing the same gray? If everyday is a gamble whether we will wake up the next? Or if we will be in jail by tonight? Choosing a candidate and a party is just choosing which one will beat us up, refuse to pay us for our work, put us in jail, kill or disappear us. But it is not just that these parties are corrupt, he pushes further, it is a system, not just political and economic but also representational, that we do not want. How long are we going to sit here waiting for someone to do for us what we have to do ourselves? How long will we waste our time voting to delegate someone above to do what can only be done from below?

Which brings us to the third trajectory: subjectivity. There is no room in the Sexta for anyone to stand on the outside and offer support, service, solidarity with the movement. We ARE the movement. This is a big adjustment for “civil society”: for twelve years they had to learn to listen to the Zapatistas, even (and especially) when they were silent. But now they/we are being asked to speak, and to speak of their own struggles. The only way to join the Sexta is to join as a compañero in struggle. The question the EZ poses in the Sexta is no longer do you understand our struggle and do you support it, but, what is your struggle?

Palenque

2006-01-26T14:11:00.000-08:00

January 3, 2006
The army base outside Palenque, where the caravan is scheduled to arrive today, is covered with Zapatistas. The Zapatista communities from the Northern Zone have come by the thousands to the city to usher in the Sup and the Sexta. They form human chains on either side of the caravan and they walk us from the base to the town square, though it feels as though they are carrying us. There are kids, old women, babies, everyone wears a pasamonta~as in the boiling heat, some of the women walk barefoot on the hot asphalt, young girls march for hours in jellies, or plastic sandals. For the 2 hours it takes us to move a little over a mile, they never stop chanting, “Viva el Subcomnandante Marcos!” “Viva el Delegado O!” “Viva los municipios autonomos!” Viva la sociedad civil nacional y internacional! And one I’ve never heard here, “Viva la izquierda!” (Long live the Left!)
The people of Palenque peer out of their houses as the masses of masked indigenous people, who live far from the concrete houses and commercial districts and paved streets of Palenque, take the city by the thousands, the first time they have entered Palenque en masse, ushering in their commander and now delegate, making the city theirs and the sixth’s. The people watch, it seems to me, with a mix of admiration and fear. It is striking, the incredible force and respect these people command, that they have constructed, that they have created from, materially, nearly nothing. The ski mask with the indigenous dress has come to signify an incredibly powerful militancy, a force that commands respect, a dignity that keeps the world’s eyes on them and the military’s hands off them.
The Zapatista chains close behind the last vehicle of the convoy, encircling us and, it seems like, carrying us forward like a precious delivery into the middle of Palenque. After the long, hot, events of the day, they keep guard all night, in a circle, arms linked, around the entrance to the building where the Sup sleeps. Each autonomous community is identified by a different color ribbon tied to their pasamonta~as, and every couple hours, a new ribbon color forms straight lines to march into the security circle, binding hands and expanding to burst and replace the old one. In the morning they form chains and walk us back out of the city again.

January 1, 2006

2006-01-26T12:08:00.000-08:00

January 1, 2006
The Sup, Subdelegado O that is, left the jungle today on a motorcycle, unarmed and unprotected by anything other than the support of what the Zapatistas have always called “civil society.” In the caravan that followed him we could barely keep up with the pace he set, weaving through the rocks and potholes of the rough dirt road that requires two hours of jaw-rattling driving from La Garrucha to the highway in Ocosingo. On the back of the motorcycle rides “El Pinguino,” the new EZ mascot, a crippled chicken-turned-penguin that walks upright, in part per its disabled leg but more importantly, the EZ insists, per one’s right and desire to choose or self-determine what one wants to be.

That Marcos leaves the jungle as a “delegado” rather than a comandante is important: the EZLN has sent him not as a soldier or a military spokesperson, but as a kind of scout for the Sexta, sent to explore the territory for a new campaign that is political, public, pacifistic. The Sup still wears his pasamonta~as—this is still not about the man, any man, under the mask. Marcos is something we have all created, a result of global Zapatismo, a collectively generated figure produced from the interactions of the EZ with a global public. The humble chicken/penguin mascot, the insistence on “subdelegado” rather than “subcomandante”, the lack of military fanfare, ceremony, or security around Marcos, all contribute to the EZ’s message and purpose in sending the delegado first—neither he nor we are your leaders, commanders, or campaign incumbents, we are trying to be a bridge, not only between you and us but to help you, in the plural, to meet each other. Like the example we, as Kilombo, posed in our letter of response to the Sexta, this first part of the “Otra” is like the musicians of the Colombian vallenato, that travel village to village accumulating stories and converting them into a song to sing in the next village, sharing and circulating the news and experiences, and in the case of the Sexta, the struggles, and creating a web of shared knowledge without a centralization of information.

It should be understood that this departure, this shift in strategy of struggle is an enormous risk. It is a military risk to the Zapatista communities for the EZ commanders to leave the jungle, although insurgents remain, organized, trained and ready to defend the communities, in the mountains. It is a physical risk to Marcos, to emerge unarmed and unprotected into society, in plain site and range of a government and a state military upon which he, as a commander in an insurgent guerrilla army, declared war twelve years ago. But most of all it is a political risk. What they have built from behind the masks, in the clandestinity of the mountains and the jungle, what they have built in community assemblies, in the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, in their words and their silences, in communiqués to and encounters with the “civil society”, has put them in a position of international recognition and respect, given them a prominence within the global anti-capitalist movement, created a local, sustainable, resistance and a functioning autonomy, and provided a certain stability or security upheld by those constructions. National and International civil society had gotten comfortable with Zapatista modes and manners of existence, always ready to denounce aggressions against the communities, to support the construction of autonomy in Chiapas, to send aid—manual, monetary, material—when needed. But the Zapatistas refuse to be static, they refuse to be the object of anyone else’s politics, to sit on anyone’s pedestal, to fulfill expectations, to do what is expected of them. They refuse to let power pile up, they are constantly shifting the terms of the game, the terms of involvement, the circulation of power so that it may not accumulate. They keep changing the path, walking a new direction, trying a new talk, teaching us a new word, a new concept of the global, of the common, of the created.

Persecution is a risk, but perhaps the bigger risk is that “civil society” will not hold up its end of the bargain once the mountain mystique is gone, that it will not mobilize itself for itself, to be a mass movement instead of supporting one. The Zapatista refusal to be contained to Chiapas is a both an incredible vulnerability and an incredible strength. But they can’t do it alone.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the “leftist” PRD candidate and frontrunner for the 2006 presidential elections that the Zapatistas have harshly denounced, may have granted the indigenous communities “autonomous” rights, if elected. But those rights would stay in Chiapas, contained in "indigenous territory," managed and legislated out from the centers of power into these small, self-determined communities that, while inspirational, would maintain their distance from the world and retain their marginality, whether it be an oppressive, privileged, or merely isolated margin. They will not be that margin, that contained space, that particular. Autonomy is not just for the indigenous Marcos has said over and over. And now they will prove it. You can participate directly in this struggle, they say to civil society, 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, thanks for your help, or you can join us and fight for yourselves.

As the Subdelegado O states this first night of the Sexta, this new strategy of struggle, upon addressing the thousands gathered in the plaza in San Cristobal de las Casas, “You have always told us, 'No estan solos,' that we were not alone. Well now we say, neither are you.”

2006-01-26T12:02:00.000-08:00

Hola Kilombo and fellow intergalacticos,
Here I am pasting the posts from the last 3 weeks, dates included, that I couldn’t post daily for lack of internet access during the first few weeks of the caravan of the Otra in Chiapas. The caravan is currently in Tabasco—you can hear audio of the events there (as well as Campeche, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo) at the EZLN site: www.ezln.org.mx. Within the week I will rejoin the caravan in Veracruz and keep you updated from the road. Other good sources of information are Narco News, which has been doing background work on local struggles at the sites visited by the caravan, you can see their reports at www.narconews.org, and Indymedia Chiapas www.chiapas.indymedia.org, which has posts or links to almost everything written from the road.

2005-12-31T20:49:00.000-08:00

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

2005-12-02T11:29:00.000-08:00

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.