By: Gloria Muñoz Ramírez

While throughout Mexican territory candidates of the different political parties are smashed to pieces in every possible way, inside a tent that excludes society and includes the juggling of electoral authorities, other ways of doing politics are being constructed and encounters are made possible among equals who don’t have the search for power –call it a bone– in the middle.

Last April 10, a group of Zapatista women and men got together in a space called the Comandanta Ramona Seedbed. They make up part of the first group that will leave for Europe in the context of a tour of the five continents that the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) announced in January of this year. The objective: “To look and listen to the other,” then, they explained, “knowing what’s different is also part of our struggle and of our endeavor, of our humanity.”

The French autonomous movement known as the “yellow vests” that rose up two years ago in France against the neoliberal reforms of Emmanuel Macron, will be one of the hosts of the Zapatista delegation, which will also have the participation of representatives from the National Indigenous Congress and the Peoples Front in Defense of Land and Water of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala.

In a letter made public by the “vests,” they assure that with respect to their movement “they have not said the last word,” and that the Zapatistas’

arrival will be an opportunity to exchange with them what they have learned. The meeting with the Mexican delegation: “will be a way to send a message of hope and freedom,” and to call on the peoples who struggle to “recuperate control of their lives” all over the world.

In France and in thirty European countries the collectives in struggle are already preparing tents, rooms or barns for receiving the invited delegation, part of which is already in quarantine. The virus has stopped the lives of millions of people around the world, but not that of capitalism, nor that of those who resist it. The ship sails.

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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada on Saturday, April 17, 2021 and re-published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee