Zapatistas will go to Europe to say that they continue in resistance and rebellion

By: Hermann Bellinghausen

The Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) announced that in April 2021 several of their diverse delegations will travel to Europe, “seeking not difference, not superiority, not affront, much less pardon and pity. We will go to find what makes us equal.” It anticipates that, after touring various corners of Europe “from below and to the left,” they will arrive in Madrid next August 13. “500 years after the supposed conquest of what is now Mexico.” A communiqué signed by Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés explains that such an initiative comes from the “common thought” of the Zapatista communities of Chiapas.

“We look at and listen to a sick world in its social life, fragmented,” where people are “under the oppression of a system willing to do anything to quench its thirst for profits, even and when it’s clear that their path goes against the existence of Planet Earth.”

“The aberration of the system,” it adds, “crashes against a criminal reality: the femicides, which have no criminal logic other than that of the system.” Meanwhile, “nature wounded to death” warns that the worst is yet to come, because of “the action of a human system that causes it.” The EZLN finds “the powerful retreating” in the states and their walls. “They revive fascist nationalisms, ridiculous chauvinisms and a deafening verbiage. In this we warn of the wars to come.” The Covid-19 pandemic “showed the vulnerabilities of being human,” as well as “the greed and stupidity” of the governments “and their supposed oppositions.”

The communiqué reports the death of 12 Zapatistas, notwithstanding the application of health measures. Three of them presented two or more symptoms associated with Covid-19 and had contact with infected persons. Nine others presented one symptom. Given the lack of tests, we assume that they died of the coronavirus. “These absences are our responsibility,” the EZLN admits, “for not taking extreme precautions,” which they now improve to confront “a possible surge.”

The Zapatistas attend to “resistances and rebellions that, because of not being silenced or forgotten,” cease being traces of a humanity that refuses “to follow the mortal train of progress that advances, proud and impeccable, towards the cliff.” Said experiences confirm the importance of the collective, and that: “the solutions could be below, in the basements and corners of the world.” and they wonder: “Who cares that a small, very small, group of natives, of indigenous peoples, lives, that is, fights?” Because it turns out that: “despite paramilitaries, pandemics, megaprojects, lies, slanders and oblivion, we live.”

They announce that they will talk to the Spanish people to show them “two simple things: that they didn’t conquer us, and that we continue in resistance and rebellion” and “they don’t have a reason to ask that we forgive them for anything. Enough of playing with the distant past to justify, with demagoguery and hypocrisy, the current crimes and those underway! The murder of social strugglers, like brother Samir Flores Soberanes and the genocides hidden behind the megaprojects.”

“We don’t want to return to that past,” they say. “Much less from the hand of the one who wants to sow racial rancor and pretends to feed their outdated nationalism with the supposed splendor of an empire, the Aztec [Empire], which grew at the expense of their peers, and who wants to convince us that, with the fall of that empire, the Native peoples of these lands were defeated.” Because of that, “neither the Spanish State nor the Catholic Church have to ask us forgiveness for anything.”

In 2021, they will celebrate 20 years since la Marcha del Color of the Earth, which the Zapatistas and the National Indigenous Congress (Congreso Nacional Indígena) made, “to claim a place in this now crumbling nation.” Now they again invite the CNI to accompany the Zapatistas, “[email protected] with the virus of resistance and rebellion. As such, we will go to the five continents.”

El comunicado Zapatista en español: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2020/10/05/ sexta-parte-una-montana-en-alta-mar/

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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada

Tuesday, October 6, 2020

https://www.jornada.com.mx/2020/10/06/politica/012n1pol

Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee