EZLN / DOSSIER / December 2023

By Yásnaya Elena A. Gil

For Celso Cruz Martínez,
a flower in the desert

For Iván Gil.
Tyoskujuyëp, amuum tu’uk joojt

Every time I can, I ask: Where were you when you found out about the existence of the EZLN? What were your first impressions? I listen to the testimonies, the chronicles of people from very diverse contexts and origins involved in the demonstrations that during the first months of 1994 tried to prevent the violent and repressive responses of the Mexican government to the uprising. They tell me about the marches, the initial speculations about the type of guerrilla it was (was it more like the FARC or the M-19?), the desperate slogans that wanted to prevent the violent annihilation of a movement that was unthinkable in a atmosphere that celebrated Mexico’s supposed entry into the first world through the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada. Some say that this uprising gave new vigor to the struggles that everyone was already fighting; others remember how their belonging to an indigenous people became particularly relevant. Others speak of their visits to the territory controlled by the Zapatistas, of their impressions as front-row witnesses of the dialogue and negotiation tables that led to the signing of the San Andrés Accords. There are those who evoke their time in the Zapatista National Liberation Front, their active participation in the March of the Color of the Earth or anecdotes related to the unprecedented fact that diverse indigenous peoples spoke at the platform of Congress. They say that the two main television stations organized, in the context of that historic march, a concert they called “United for Peace,” with Maná and the Jaguares, but later they refused to broadcast the arrival of the Zapatista contingent and their accompaniments at the main square in Mexico City. They remember the doubts expressed by Saúl Hernández himself, the Jaguares vocalist, in the press conference prior to the concert, as he foresaw that the event could become “a trap and a questioning of the visit of the Zapatistas.” Other people, more calmly, narrate their time through the Zapatista educational projects, some told me about the disappointment that the Zapatistas produced in them years later for not having supported the candidacies of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and others described their participation in the International Meetings of the Women Who Struggle organized by the Zapatistas.

I think about my own story. As a Mixe woman, as an indigenous teenager in 1994, at the beginning of Zapatismo my relationship with the movement was tangential. The first time I heard about the EZLN was from one of my teachers, Maestro Celso, who shared with us newspapers and magazines that he bought in the City of Oaxaca. I particularly remember the covers of the magazine Proceso and the front pages of La Jornada. We did not fully understand what was happening, but we read and discussed the questions that the teacher skillfully posed to us about the EZLN and our own position as Mixe adolescents of only eleven and twelve years old. In 1994 our community, Ayutla, organized a resistance movement to the influence of political parties that threatened—and threaten—communal structures. “Ayutla defends its uses and customs” was written on the walls along the main roads. The issue was in the air, in the ayuujk talks of our elders and in the frequent assemblies that boys and girls also attended. But Chiapas seemed far away. Little by little, we understood that what was happening there also appealed to us.

​ In the Mixe region, as in many of the indigenous peoples who are always resisting in one way or another, a movement to defend the territory had been brewing since the late seventies of the 20th century. Thinkers from the Sierra like Floriberto Díaz held intense debates and built their own categories to explain the functioning of our peoples. Together with the Zapotec anthropologist Jaime Martínez Luna, Floriberto coined the word communality and described it as a political concept. In this context, the waves of the tide that stirred the EZLN reached us, waves that silenced forever and fortunately the roar that the Salinista song [after Carlos Salinas de Gortari, president of Mexico in 1994] “Solidaridad” had left us, performed by Televisa singers and repeated over and over again on the television. Despite the mobilization in our community and the long process undertaken in the Mixe region and in many other territories, indigenous peoples were far from the major media and national debates. It seemed that we were only of interest to the indigenist lens.

Our readings and school discussions focused on texts, in Spanish, which was our second language, that tried to show solidarity with the Zapatista movement. When I migrated to the city, the relatives who welcomed me were quite involved in the issue. I remember arriving at an impressive plaza in Mexico City next to my uncle Iván, who enthusiastically explained many things to me on the day the March the Color of the Earth took the political center of the country.

Perhaps for many people on the left who are now immersed in the defense of what the President of the Republic has called the Fourth Transformation, the EZLN is no longer a valid interlocutor. Perhaps for the youth immersed in the vagaries of the partisan left, neo-Zapatismo is already a thing of the past. But one thing is undeniable: there was a time when the movement, the struggle of the indigenous peoples and the discussions about the architecture of the Mexican State in relation to the possible fulfillment of the San Andrés Accords were in the center of media spaces and constituted one of the most important topic. The spokesmen of the right scandalizedly warned of a possible “balkanization” if the right to self-determination of indigenous nations was recognized. Columnists here and there established debates from opposing positions, and the evolution of the Zapatista movement occupied the front pages. The way this country was conceived before 1994 was forever transformed. It wasn’t just about indigenous people; Zapatismo raised a mirror in which the founding myths of the Mexican State were reflected. The narrative of a single mestizo nation, the ideological aspects of the Mexican identity erected from power, the nationalism that extracted cultural and symbolic elements from the indigenous peoples while doing everything to erase them, and the very structure of the State came under scrutiny. The images reflected in that new mirror fractured the ideological certainties built with diligence, especially by the PRI governments, after the 1910 Revolution. While the EZLN resisted the violence unleashed against it and paramilitarism, society, if we can talk about it in the singular, responded questioning itself deeply. If we are not that mestizo nation where indigenous peoples are just an anthropological curiosity about to disappear, if we are not that country that is about to achieve the developmental ideals of the first world, then who are we?

​Perhaps us younger people who currently fight for the rights of indigenous peoples fail to realize how our practices and discourses are deeply permeated by the uprising that began, visibly, thirty years ago. We could not talk about what we talk about without everything that Zapatismo has bequeathed to us, although we may have not participated directly in that movement that transformed the “spirit of an era.” The EZLN created a new lexicon for realities and utopias, adding elements that were not even considered in the political debate before. Being indigenous became for many something they no longer had to deny, something that pointed to a struggle of which they could be proud. Even those who did not or do not agree with the Zapatista movement have been impacted, by contrast, in their practices and discourses.

Although it was a gatopardista strategy (making things change in appearance so that the structure remains the same), the very architecture of the Mexican State was transformed. For not fully realizing the San Andrés Accords that it had signed, the government implemented a series of changes in many of its institutions. Without the Zapatista uprising, the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas) or the General Coordination of Intercultural and Bilingual Education (Coordinación General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe), to mention a couple of examples, would not have become a reality. While attacks were being carried out against the Zapatista communities, the administrative structures of the State opened here and there projects, departments or initiatives that now considered the existence of the indigenous peoples, with which they intended to serve them.

The powerful discursive influence of the EZLN is still valid. Even the speeches of power in the current pre-campaigns (let’s call them that once and for all) for the Presidency of the Republic have appropriated its language: Claudia Sheinbaum says, paraphrasing the words of Commander Ramona, “never again a Mexico without us;” López Obrador, for his part, often uses one of the principles of Zapatismo as a slogan, “lead by obeying,” despite the fact that his followers have disqualified the EZLN as a political force and have even accused it of being just an “invention” by Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Despite what neo-Zapatismo has meant in the history of this country, a part of the Mexican left has broken with the EZLN. The recent mobilization to stop the war against the Zapatista people had little echo on the partisan left. The armed attacks faced by the base communities and the Caracoles shows us that the violence against the movement and its support bases continues and even worsens through incursions into their territories; but they rarely occupy the front page of the newspapers and in the morning press conferences the president, who once visited Zapatista territory, remains silent about Chiapas and the violence that engulfs it.

Different voices have explained how this estrangement came to be. Beyond the anecdotal and the accusations, I believe that there is a fundamental ideological shift that the EZLN knew how to make, but a good part of the left, now Obradorista, could not do so. After the Mexican government betrayed the San Andrés Accords that it had previously signed, the EZLN and its bases created self-management organizational structures called Caracoles, represented by the Good Government Juntas. The fact that they functioned—and function—outside the logic of the State showed how far we were from that EZLN that in the First Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle called not to stop fighting until forming “a government of our free and democratic country.” It was no longer about the seizure of power so that, from the scaffolding of the State, the rights of indigenous peoples were guaranteed and a new government was formed. The idea was to build another reality with its own self-managing mechanisms. The EZLN, which at first emphasized that its struggle was attached to the Mexican Constitution, now moved away from the desire to reform the State and opted for the creation of concrete structures to coordinate life in common based on anti-capitalist principles. This important shift also reminds me of the change of objectives in the struggle of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which, from fighting for its own State, is now committed to the creation of autonomous self-managed and confederated bodies, a horizon that transcends the nation-state model, a post-state we could say.

A good part of the Mexican left finds it difficult to understand and decode struggles that do not involve the conquest of state institutions. It was to be expected that the new horizon of the EZLN would seem incomprehensible to many. The Quiché anthropologist Gladys Tzul Tzul speaks of the “desire for the State,” and it is precisely the desire that Zapatismo got rid of. Those who continue to see the conquest of state power as the only horizon of political struggle find themselves more comfortable in Obradorismo [the politics of the López Obrador presidency].

This profound misunderstanding is reflected in several phenomena. At the beginning of López Obrador’s six-year term, both Adelfo Regino, current director of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas) and former Zapatista advisor, and López Obrador himself promised that an indigenous reform would finally make the San Andrés Accords a reality, although the EZLN has clearly said that to its members, these reformist agreements had already been surpassed. Another evidence that the partisan left does not fully understand the current objectives of Zapatismo is the confusion and annoyance that its members expressed when the EZLN did not join in the Obradorismo, since they conceived a natural alliance from their “desire for a State.” A third piece of evidence was the insistence with which they called María de Jesús Patricio Martínez a “candidate for the Presidency of the Republic,” despite the fact that she was the spokesperson for a broad movement that did not intend to take over the power of the State, but rather to put bring into the public debate topics that none of the candidates even touched on.

Who feels challenged by the EZLN now? Apparently, it is not the Mexican politicians who appropriate their phrases, although not their principles; nor their detractors, who claim that they have not joined the López Obrador movement, nor even those people who long for compliance with the San Andrés Accords. Who is the EZLN speaking to now? To those who question the developmental model that has placed humanity in the climate emergency, the greatest catastrophe caused by capitalism. If the liberal democracies of the world and the nation-state have been functional for the capitalism that is providing us with death, the EZLN proposes urgent and radical strategies. Zapatismo no longer talks about “advancing towards the capital of the country, defeating the Mexican federal army” and then forming a new government. But it continues to propose, yes, the creation of a world in which many worlds fit, and that world is definitely not achieved by taking state power to reform it. We will have to follow the EZLN in that turn to make life possible in a future that seems to promise us death.

____________________________________

Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil is a writer, linguist, translator, researcher and Ayuujk (Mixe) activist. Aguilar’s work is focused on the study and promotion of linguistic diversity, especially with regards to the endangered original languages of Mexico, as is the case with her native tongue, Ayuujk.

Translated by the Chiapas Support Committee from the original published by the Revisita de la Universidad de México available in Spanish at: https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/articles/f0bcac1c-38b4-4e72-88ee-a99e90bfb0d0/a-quienes-les-habla-el-zapatismo-ahora