By Elio Henríquez, La Jornada correspondent, November 21, 2023

The Zapatista vocation, according to “a laconic definition,” is “to be a good seed,” stated Subcomandante Moisés of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional).

“We do not intend to bequeath a conception of the world to the next generations. Not bequeath to them our miseries, our resentments, our pain, our phobias, or our philias. Nor that they be a mirror with a more or less approximate image of what we assume is good or bad,” but rather that “what we want them to inherit is life,” he added.

He stated that “what other generations do with it will be their decision and, above all, their responsibility. Just as we inherited life from our ancestors, we take what we consider valuable, and we assign ourselves a task. And, of course, we take responsibility for the decision we make, for what we do to accomplish that task, and for the consequences of our actions and omissions.”

‘We see that terrible storm, whose first gales and rains are already hitting the entire planet.’

Moisés, who now also signs as the General Coordinator of the “Journey for Life”, insisted that “we do not intend to bequeath laws, manuals, worldviews, catechisms, rules, routes, destinations, steps, companies, which, if you look closely, is what almost all political proposals aspire to. Our goal is simpler and terribly more difficult: to bequeath life.”

He elaborated: “… Because we see that this terrible storm, whose first gales and rains are already hitting the entire planet, is arriving very quickly and very strongly. So we don’t see the immediate. Or yes, but according to what we see in the long term.”

“Our immediate reality is defined or in accordance with two realities: one of death and destruction that will bring out the worst in human beings, regardless of their social class, their color, their race, their culture, their geography, their language, their size, And another one of starting over on the rubble of a system that did what it does best, that is, destroy.”

He asked: “Why do we say that the nightmare that is already here and, which will only get worse, will be followed by an awakening? Well, because there are those, like us, who are determined to look at that possibility. Minimally, it’s true. But every day and at all hours, everywhere, we fight so that this minimal possibility grows and, although small and unimportant—like a tiny seed—it grows. And, one day, it is the tree of life that will be of all the colors or it won’t be.”

He clarified that “we are not the only ones. In these 30 years (since the armed uprising of January 1994) we have looked into many worlds. Different in ways, times, geographies, own stories, calendars. But equal only in the effort and the absurd gaze placed on an untimely time that will happen, not by destiny, not by divine design, not because someone loses so that someone wins. No, it will be because we are working on it, fighting, living and dying for it.”

‘It is not necessary to conquer the world, it is enough to make it new again,’

He also said that “when we say that ‘it is not necessary to conquer the world, it is enough to make it new again,’ we move away, definitively and irremediably, from current and previous political conceptions. The world we see is not perfect, not even close. But it is better, without a doubt. A world where everyone is who they are, without shame, without being persecuted, mutilated, imprisoned, murdered, marginalized, oppressed. What is that world called? What system supports it or is it dominant? Well, that will be decided, or not, by those who live in it.”

A world, he added, in which “those who desire to hegemonize and homogenize learn from what they caused in this and other times, and fail in that world to come. A world in which humanity is not defined by equality (which only hides the segregation of those who ‘are not equal’), but by difference. A world where difference is not persecuted but celebrated. A world in which the stories told are not the stories of those who win, because no one wins.”

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Translated from the Spanish by the Chiapas Support Committee, originally published by La Jornada November 21, 2023. Read the original in Spanish here.