Chiapas Support Committee
Home of the Compañero Manuel blog on zapatistas & mexico
A talk on Indigenous Struggles for Autonomy & Rights in Chiapas
En español con interpretación al inglés (ver abajo)
Walking together:
INDIGENOUS STRUGGLES FOR AUTONOMY & RIGHTS
IN CHIAPAS & OTHER STRUGGLES
Invites you to a talk with
Luisella Preciado
from the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center, Chiapas
nd Omni Commons
Caminando Juntos
Lucha por Autonomía y Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas en Chiapas, México y otras luchas
Domingo, 4 de diciembre, 2016 | 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Oakland Omni Commons | 4799 Shattuck Ave Oakland, CA 94609
** La asistencia es libre y abierto a todas personas **
Luisella Preciado es defensor de los derechos humanos y abogado con el centro de derechos humanos FrayBa en Chiapas, Mexico. Allí, ella acompaña a los pueblos indígenas luchando por sus derechos como comunidades autónomas.
En su trabajo diario Luisella Preciado escucha y documenta los testimonios de personas defendiendo sus derechos convirtiéndose en sujetos de su propia historia. Es con estos sujetos potentes que analizan los eventos dentro del contexto político para presiónar gobiernos y a la sociedad para respetar a los pueblos originarios de México.
Luisella Preciado hablará sobre las luchas indígenas por la autonomía y sus derechos en Chiapas, México y otras luchas.
Co-patrocinado por
Galeano: Don’t get confused, the EZLN doesn’t bet on the electoral path to reach power
GALEANO; DON’T GET CONFUSED, THE EZLN DOESN’T BET ON THE ELECTORAL PATH TO REACH POWER, MUCH LESS BY MEANS OF ARMS
Sup Galeano of the EZLN. Photo: Chiapas Paralelo
By: Isaín Mandujano
At 33 years from the foundation of the National Liberation Forces (Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional, FLN) in the Lacandón Jungle, the seed from what would later be the Zapatista Nation Liberation Army (EZLN), Subcomandante Galeano clarified today that he doesn’t struggle for taking power and one more time clarified that the independent indigenous woman candidate in 2018 is a proposal that the armed group made to the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) that made it theirs and will impel it.
And that it doesn’t matter if they win la presidency of the Republic or not, “what matters is the challenge, the irreverence, the refusal to submit, the total break with the image of the indigenous as an object of alms and pity.”
Faced with the polemic unleashed, Subcomandante Galeano clarified that the indigenous woman postulated will not be from the EZLN’s ranks, and that nobody supplants the initials of the armed group for that of the CNI because the EZLN continues firm in its word of not betting on the electoral path, that it will not convert into a political party and that it will not seek to attain power through the armed path, because they took to arms to make use of them and not to become enslaved with them.
On November 17, 1983, that first armed group arrived, headed by Fernando Yañez, alias Comandante Germán, who in the heart of the Jungle planted the first seed of what would be the EZLN, was called the FLN, an organization persecuted and repressed since the seventies in different parts of the country. It had a Marxist-Leninist cut with views of achieving power and installing socialism.
In recent weeks, the EZLN as a member of the CNI caused a polemic, because they proposed a consultation to postulate an indigenous woman as an independent candidate in the 2018 presidential elections, a theme that has provoked the most hostile reactions in the Mexican political class, the media and Mexican analysts.
In his missive, “A history to try to understand,” Galeano made clear that they were the ones that made that proposal last October 13 to the CNI, a conglomerate of indigenous peoples from different regions of the country. That occurred within the framework of the 20th anniversary of that national body, but not in a way that they will have active participation in concretizing that candidacy.
“No, not the EZLN as an organization, nor any of its members, are going to participate for a “popular election position” in the 2018 electoral process. No, the EZLN is not going to convert into a political party. No, the EZLN is not going to present a Zapatista indigenous woman as a candidate to the presidency of the Republic in the year 2018. No, the EZLN “has not taken a turn” of any degrees that may be, nor will it continue its fight through the institutional electoral path,” Galeano said.
Then the EZLN is not going to postulate an indigenous Zapatista woman for president of the Republic? They are not going to participate directly in the 2018 elections? To answer that question, he responds with a “No.”
“Why not; because of the arms?
No. Those who think that are roundly wrong because: the Zapatistas took up arms to be useful to us, not to be enslaved by them.
Then, because the institutional electoral political system is corrupt, inequitable, fraudulent and illegitimate?
No. Even if it were transparent, equitable, just and legitimate, the Zapatista men and women would not participate to attain and exercise Power from a post, a position or an institutional appointment.
But, in determined circumstances, for strategic questions and/or tactics, would you not participate directly to exercise a position?
No. Although “the masses” may demand us; although the “historic juncture” may need our “participation;” although “the Homeland,” “the Nation,” “the People,” “the Proletariat,” (ok, that’s very out of style now) may demand it, or any concrete or abstract concept (behind which is hidden, or not, personal, family or group or class ambition) that is hoisted as a pretext; although the juncture, the confluence of the stars, the prophesies, the stock exchange index, the manual of historic materialism, the Popol Vuh, the polls, the esotericism, “the concrete analysis of concrete reality” and the convenient etcetera.
Why?
Because the EZLN does not struggle to take Power.
Galeano said that the postulation of the indigenous woman as an independent candidate is no longer in the EZLN’s hands,
Therefore he asked that they stop awarding it to the armed group, because they are only part of that big organism of the country’s indigenous peoples.
Insisted that no one from the EZLN seeks a position of popular election and that the independent indigenous woman candidate will not come from their ranks.
“No insurgent, male or female, be it of the command or of the troops; nor any comandanta or comandante of the CCRI can even be authorities in the community, nor in an autonomous municipio, nor in the different autonomous organizational bodies. They cannot be members of the autonomous councils, nor of the good government juntas, nor of the commissions, nor any of the responsibilities that the assembly designates, created or to be created in the construction of our autonomy; in other words, of our freedom,” Galeano explained.
“Our work, our task as the EZLN is to serve our communities, to accompany them, support them and not command them. Supporting them, yes. Sometimes we achieve it. And yes, certainly, sometimes we obstruct, but then the Zapatista peoples give us a slap (or several, accordingly) so that we can correct ourselves,” he clarified.
When the EZLN made the proposal to the bosom of the CNI, they told them: “that it doesn’t matter if they win the presidency of the Republic or not, what was going to be important was the challenge, the irreverence, the refusal to submit, the total break with the image of the indigenous as the object of alms and pity –an image so settled in law and, who I should say, also in the institutional left of “real change” and its organic intellectuals addicted to the opium of the social networks-, that their daring would move the entire political system and that it would have echoes of hope not in one, but in many of the Mexicos of below… and of the world.”
He said that it is not sought that an indigenous woman from the CNI is president, but rather that what is desired is to carry a message of struggle and organization to the poor in the countryside and the city of Mexico and of the world.
“It’s not that we take into account that, if we get together the signatures or win the election, it goes well, but rather that it goes well if we can talk and listen to those who nobody talks or listens to. That’s where we’re going to see if it goes well or not, if a lot of people are going to find the strength and hope to get organized, to resist and rebel,” Galeano said.
En español: UNA HISTORIA PARA TRATAR DE ENTENDER
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Indigenous initiate a 12-day march against mega-projects
Indigenous initiate a march against mega-projects in Chiapas.
TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, Chiapas, (apro)
By: Isaín Mandujano
More than a thousand indigenous Choles, Tzeltales and Tzotziles, left this Tuesday morning for Salto de Agua, in a pilgrimage that will tour 11 municipalities (municipios) to denounce and protest against the mega-projects that threaten their lands and the life of their communities.
Throughout 12 days, the indigenous will be added to in each one of the municipios through which the march will travel until arriving in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Today, they left Salto de Agua for Tumbalá where a traditional celebration will be held. They will spend Wednesday night in Yajalón, where they will hold the forum “The Original Peoples’ Fight” from the experience of Pueblo Creyente of Simojovel.
On Thursday they will be in Chilón, where they will participate in the forum “The fight for the defense of water.” On Friday, the caravan will depart for Ocosingo, where the forum “Care of Mother Earth” will be held. On Saturday, they will be in Altamirano where they will hold the forum “Alcoholism in the indigenous communities.” On Sunday, November 20, the marchers will spend the night in Oxchuc where they will hold the forum “Community Governments.”
On Monday the 21st, they will be in Cancuc, where a traditional indigenous ceremony will be celebrated. On Tuesday the 22nd they will arrive in Tenejapa, where the auxiliary bishop of the San Cristóbal de Las Casas Diocese, Enrique Díaz Díaz, will head a traditional religious ceremony. On Wednesday the 23rd they will be in Huixtán to celebrate the forum “Government projects in the indigenous communities.”
On November the 24th, they will arrive in La Candelaria, a rural community within the municipio of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, where they will celebrate another traditional indigenous ceremony and dialogue about the situations that threaten their community life. On Friday the 25th, they will finally arrive in the central plaza of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, where the gathering of thousands of marchers that have added themselves to movement is expected.
The Movement in Defense of Life and Territory (Modevite) called for this march and pilgrimage, composed of 10 parishes of 11 municipios. Since four years ago, the Pueblo Creyente of the Diocese of San Cristóbal has organized in defense of their territory. They have achieved stopping the construction of the Palenque-San Cristóbal superhighway, which would have crossed through their territory. Their objective now is to decide the use and destiny of their territory, principally in the face of threats from the extractive industry and the mega-projects.
“We know our rights as original peoples. We seek to unify our voices and our efforts against the ambition of the impresarios and the government that covet our natural resources,” says Father Marcelo Pérez Pérez.
“We are in a strategic place for the mega-projects. This territory is one the objectives of extractivism,” he added.
For example, Father Marcelo says, in the Tulijá (River) Valley they plan to construct an artificial lake that will flood 396 square kilometers of forests and indigenous lands. The lake would have the capacity of 24 billion 540 million cubic meters, which contemplates the construction of “modern industrial, small farming and aquifer population centers” on the sides of the dam.”
“We don’t want projects that only benefit some, we don’t want projects without consulting us, we don’t want improvements for the rich while the poor continue in the same condition,” the another indigenous Ch’ol speaker said today before departing for Tumbalá.
“We seek to organize the peoples to construct our autonomy; that our right as original peoples to the life that we want is recognized. We need to join our voices in defense of our forests, our rivers. We demand that the governments stop the extractive industry and the mega-projects that are being imposed without consulting us,” Father Marcelo Pérez Pérez stated.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Proceso.com.mx
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Re-published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
It’s not the decision of one person
For the racists:
Well, we’ve been reading and listening to everything you’ve been saying and writing.
We’ve seen all of your mockery, your scorn and racism that you can no longer hide.
I believe that the compañeros and especially the compañeras of the National Indigenous Congress [CNI] are also reading and listening to what you say.
It’s clear that the CNI was right about what they thought and what they told us, that there is a lot of racism in society.
I imagine you amuse and applaud each other over what a good joke you made with your leftist mockery about the EZLN’s “candigata.”[1]
You celebrate your machismo making fun of indigenous women.
You say that we ‘fucking Indians’ let ourselves be manipulated, are unable to think for ourselves, and go like sheep wherever the shepherd points.
But I think when you say this you are actually looking in the mirror.
That’s what you turned out to be: shameless macho racists.
You all talk so much about the racism of the exploitive class and don’t realize you have taken on that racism in body and soul, in your form of thinking, your way of talking, your perspective on life.
Your individualism and egoism doesn’t let you see anything else or any other way, as if you could save yourselves by yourselves, or as if you yourselves could save any other living being.
You don’t realize that you are stuck in your individualism, closed off in your own lives, unable to see that the little that is left is almost gone.
We tell you first to learn to read, then read carefully and then learn to understand what you have read because those who have written in newspapers and social networks are pathetic.
Supposedly some of you have doctorates or honorary doctorates or whatever you call it but it turns out that you don’t know how to read or write; you haven’t understood anything.
Or perhaps you do understand, but you like to create a lie, make it grow, dress it as the truth, repeat it and shout it and spread it around so people don’t realize it’s a lie; or maybe you just don’t know how to read or write.
Thus you mock the decision of the National Indigenous Congress which has gone out to consult the thousands of people in their communities, tribes, nations, and barrios that will decide if they are or are not in agreement [with the proposal].
You make fun of the fact that the National Indigenous Congress functions like that, consulting before making a decision, because you all just do whatever your shepherd tells you, even if it is stupid nonsense.
You claim to be thinkers, critical ones, but you remain silent when your shepherd comes out with his idiocies, because you are just as racist and disparaging as he is.
The National Indigenous Congress is consulting on whether their people will name an Indigenous Governing Council to govern our country of Mexico, a Council to be represented by an indigenous woman, delegate of the CNI, who would be candidate for the presidency of Mexico in the 2018 elections.
This is what was announced the morning of October 14, 2016.
That is what was written in the text; it is clear and it is in Spanish so that you all can understand it.
The text does not say that the EZLN is going to consult its bases of support as to whether they want to run an independent candidate for the EZLN, an indigenous woman who is a Zapatista base of support, and that they will also consult the National Indigenous Congress about whether they agree with this proposal.
It says nothing of the sort, but you all are lazy and ignorant and don’t want to read or pay attention, so you just swallow what is sold by the paid media.
You purport to be so studious, with so much advanced technology, and you don’t even bother to read. You just grab something from what the paid media puts out and then write about it.
You don’t read the text from its original site, nor what it actually says, but rather become a bunch of gossips that don’t even know how to say “National Indigenous Congress,” substituting instead “National Indigenist Congress” or “National Indigenous Council.”
What a shame that professional writers get paid to be ignorant.
How can you ask that people read or listen to you if you don’t read or listen yourselves?
Or is that you quite simply can’t be bothered to read it?
How can you ask to be respected when you don’t know how to show respect?
How can you expect to be understood if you don’t even understand how we make decisions communally? The results of this decision aren’t even in yet and already you have begun with your insults, lack of respect, mockery, and racism.
What a shame that you are so full of yourselves as lawyers, professionals, university professors, and researchers with awards and titles.
What a shame, because you say you are all these things but you don’t know how to read or write.
And it isn’t that you don’t have the means, because you are well stocked with cellphones, tablets, computers, and everything else, but apparently you have these things for mere fashion and not for their usefulness. You have them only to show off who has the newest modern models.
But one thing is for sure, you do use these things to publish every racist and disparaging stupidity that occurs to you.
You mock us because there are only a few of us; there’s no need to concern oneself with the Zapatistas, you say.
You say that we Zapatistas are off in our mountains and don’t know anything about the world, that we are ignorant and backward, that we don’t know how politics works, professional politics, things that only educated people from the city know about.
It’s true; there are only a few of us. Just some thousands of organized people, true.
We are only 23 years old and haven’t gotten far, just a few Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Rebellion where we have told the bad government to fuck off like true teachers of disobedience to the bad system and the bad government.
A few Autonomous Municipalities with health care services where one can access free surgery thanks to the support of conscientious doctor comrades who lend a hand.
With a few autonomous schools where one can truly learn to read and write.
With a few radio broadcasters, a few laboratory specialists, a few compañeras who operate the ultrasound equipment, a few dentists.
Where the people rule and the government obeys.
Ah, and one thing for sure: a few hundred thousand rages against the capitalist system in which we live and die.
There’s that, as well as everything we still plan to do, because we have no plans to stop.
Now then, could you tell us what you have done over the last 23 years?
And not that business of sniffing around for some crumbs or for somebody to throw you a bone, that is, a job or a title.
Because what we are doing here is a true demonstration of how to destroy the bad system, what must be destroyed and what must be created, a decision made by thousands and not just a handful of people in an office or on the order of one individual.
While you all in many cases have spent years talking and arguing without even creating a mirror so that you can see what it is that you are constructing.
Because what counts is when you can actually see what you have been talking about, not just hear empty words. What counts is not what just person one has decided, but what has been the decision of thousands.
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How should one behave as a writer?
As a commentator or journalist?
Or as a seeker of a cabinet position or job appointment?
I think the answer would be not to criticize when you don’t know the actual situation, because you don’t live with those you are talking about.
It would be to inform yourselves honestly, scientifically, not repeat robotically what you have heard, or poorly read, or what the paid media have said.
It would be to not make fun of the people you are talking about and then later refuse to acknowledge what you said, or insist that wasn’t what you meant and that you have been misunderstood. When you do that it is clear that in addition to being ignorant, you are cowardly.
The answer would be not to assume you know everything if you do not live with the people you are talking about, nor study, nor read carefully, nor experience any of the things they experience.
What’s more, how can you be so smug if you have nothing to show for it?
You can’t even see your own shadow.
You have nothing to show for yourselves that is visible and tangible.
Because a slew of words is not the same as a visible deed, a practice composed of thousands of visions and thoughts.
So why do you mock and scorn?
-*-
Ladies and gentlemen, to those who think so highly of themselves for having some organizational leadership position or who are so boastful of their degrees, we want to say:
As indigenous people of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, we feel pity, sadness, and rage because you mock and disrespect us as indigenous people.
But despite this, we will struggle and fight for you too, for this Mexico in which we live.
We have more than 500 years of experience with the poor lives that the rich have inflicted on us, and for more than 500 years we have known how we want a good life to be.
And you?
How many five hundreds of years do you have that you can come mock and scorn us?
We have decided, along with our compañeras and compañeros of the National Indigenous Congress, to consult our communities as to if they are in agreement or not with creating an Indigenous Governing Council that governs all of Mexico, not just the indigenous, and that this Council participates in the 2018 elections through an indigenous woman delegate of the CNI as its representative.
We still don’t have the final decision as to yes or no.
We don’t even know what the decision will be, and look how much the Native peoples, especially Native women, have been mocked and disparaged.
That means that those who attack us are not just those who exploit us. Rather, those who have tried to step on and over us with their critiques include the political parties, even the ones who claim to be on the left, the supposedly great intellectuals, professionals, researchers, commentators, writers, journalists, and university professors.
Who is missing?
Whoever else feels interpolated can add themselves to this list of frauds.
Now even those smug people who treated us like children want to order us around. Let’s hope that someday their work is seen and put up for comparison. Let’s hope someday they tell the truth about why they left.
Let’s see, derisive and disdainful ladies and gentlemen: how many autonomous municipalities have you organized?
In how many of the places where you live do the people rule and the government obeys?
Where in your world are women, children, and the elderly respected?
Where is help given to those who have nothing?
Where do you have freedom, freedom according to you, to go out into the street or countryside without fear that you will be kidnapped, disappeared, raped, murdered?
Where do you have a government that isn’t full of criminals and prisons that aren’t full of innocents?
Did you do the math?
Now respond: why do you turn against the indigenous and treat them as if they have no brains and don’t know what they are doing?
Why, if we aren’t even messing with you?
We don’t even mention you and yet you accuse us of getting paid by the bad government to fuck you over, you accuse us of working for capitalism.
Nobody pays us to be what we are and we don’t work for anybody.
Because no one rules over us.
Perhaps that is why you attack us and disrespect us, because you are in fact ruled over and told what to think, say, and do.
You don’t like freedom because you like to be a slave.
As Zapatistas, we may do things well or we may do them badly, but we do them ourselves.
We don’t do what others, outside of us, tell us to do.
You should study and learn that what’s fucking you over is called “capitalism” and not “the indigenous.”
It is fruitless for you to attack and mock us, because one day we will see each other, we will have to.
Who will obligate us to do so?
The system.
Learn this and stop throwing tantrums and fits because to struggle for the world is not a game.
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Ladies and Gentlemen who are intellectuals:
How is it that you don’t realize that the capitalists change their ways of thinking, exploiting, stealing, repressing, and disrespecting?
You are supposed to be profound thinkers but you are more like dry old trees that won’t bear any more fruit no matter how long you wait.
Now the land even where you live is contaminated, which is what capitalism is doing to it, and you continue to see and think the same things as if your heads had become deformed in the same process and there was no other way to exercise thought.
Leave your rooms, get up out of your chair, walk, lift your heads, looks for your eyeglasses so that you can see further and better.
Now imagine all of the possibilities of the combinations of what you have seen, and you’ll see that you get new ideas, not the same ones repeating over and over.
And if you didn’t manage to see anything, well then your eyes must be done for.
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So now it seems that you want to tell us what SupGaleano should or shouldn’t do.
SupGaleano, just like the rest of the insurgent troops, does what I tell him.
And I do what the people tell me.
In that regard, it is up to me to tell SupGaleano to do what I say because I do what our people say.
If I tell him not to respond [to something someone has said or written], he doesn’t respond, because it isn’t worth the time.
And if I tell him to respond, he has to even if he doesn’t want to, and he has to respond clearly because he must help others understand.
If I tell him to give interviews, he has to give them, even if he doesn’t want to. I can tell him to give everyone an interview or only some people, and he has to do as I say. If I tell him only with the free media, that’s what he does. If I say the paid media also, that’s what he does.
For those who don’t want to understand this, what they will have to do is very simple:
First they will need to be subjected to death, destruction, and humiliation for more than 500 years.
Then they must organize for 10 years, preparing themselves to rise up as we did January 1, 1994.
Then they will have to resist for many years, without selling out, without giving up, without giving in. Who knows if they can do it, because it’s one thing to write and another thing to do, that’s why we say theory is one thing and practice is another. This is what teaches you and gives you another vision without losing sight of your principles.
But we’ll see if we don’t get bored waiting for them.
We’ll see if we’re even alive then because what the capitalist beast will do in the meantime is so fucked.
Either they realize their lack of or limited vision or it will lead them down the system’s path toward death, and then there really is no remedy, and no one will even remember the tragic history that they played out.
So can it all be blamed on SupGaleano, who manipulates us and takes us down the wrong path? It’s laughable how now you say “Galeano/Marcos.”
You were so in love with SupMarcos that you came to take photos with him and get his autograph; I know because I was there off to the side.
Also off to the side was the maestro Galeano, whose name you did not even ask.
Then later you so hated SupMarcos because he didn’t obey you, but rather obeyed us.
Well he’s dead now.
Stop acting like his abandoned widows.
He’s dead; get over it!
Now there is a Sup Galeano because that’s what we decided. And we put him out there so that you would attack and criticize him and thus reveal who you really are. It doesn’t matter what you say, not even the death threats. It doesn’t matter because that is what we trained him for, that is what we prepared him for and that is his work. And he can take it, not like you all who, after any little thing somebody says to you, cry that the world doesn’t understand you.
If we decide that he dies again, then he dies again.
And if you don’t like the way we do things, oh well. As if we were here to make you happy.
We are here for the people below and to the left, those who struggle, who think, who organize, and who resist and rebel.
We respect those people and they respect us because they know we are equals.
And we are with these people not only in Mexico, but also all over the world.
So stop fooling the people in the schools where you give classes. You know nothing.
And the reason that you don’t know anything is because you lack both humility and honesty. You lost both among all of those papers and desks and medals and honors and other bullshit.
If in the end you understand and organize, well then we’ll see if you find yourselves another Subcomandante Insurgente Pedro, or another SupMarcos, because we haven’t found another yet.
But perhaps you will have better luck in finding them.
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In the meantime, shut up and listen, read, and learn from the organized peoples, tribes, nations, and barrios of the National Indigenous Congress.
They are our families, and it is their turn to teach us, to show us the way.
It is our job as Zapatistas to learn from them.
Hopefully we all manage to do this, and the world will be more just, more democratic, and freer.
The cadaver of the capitalist Hydra lies beneath the bare feet of the Native peoples.
Not injured, but dead.
Thus we will have to make everything anew, but this time right, without an above or a below, without disrespect, without exploitation, without repression, without displacement.
That world will also be for you, you who are racist and disdainful of what you do not understand.
Because you do not yet understand that you don’t understand.
You don’t understand that you know nothing.
What is going to come out of this is not the decision of one person, but of a collective.
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Later we are going to tell the Sixth what happened.
We didn’t tell them before because the National Indigenous Congress asked us to wait until they arrived safely to their communities and began the consultation. They asked us to be their guardian and wait and take the critique and scorn that would have been aimed at them.
So we waited and took it, and now all those we expected have popped up.
The National Indigenous Congress has heard them and read them; they know.
They know where the scorn and the racism comes from.
They know what the professional politicians think.
They know what the Ruler thinks.
They know what those who think they are saviors think.
The CNI’s skin is healthy.
Ours is wounded, but we are used to it and we scar over quickly.
-*-
The CNI is clear in its thinking.
Now we must wait for their decision and support it.
We know that the path that they choose for all of us Native peoples, tribes, nations, and barrios will be born of pain and rage.
It will be born of resistance and rebellion.
It will come not from an individual, not from a person.
It will be born of the collective, as indeed those of us who are what we are, are born.
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés
Mexico, November 2016
[1] Candigato Morris is a cat that several residents of Veracruz ran for mayor of Xalapa, the state’s capital, to give voters a chance to protest alleged corruption going on at the polls. Candigato Morris became a popular character and even has a Facebook page. As used above, “candigata” is simply the feminine form of the word.
En español: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2016/11/11/no-es-decision-de-una-persona/
Latin America and the triumph of Trump
California protests over Donald Trump’s election. Photo: AP
By: Raúl Zibechi
For those who had any doubts that a new right has been born, Donald Trump’s triumph should convince them of the contrary. The new right has wide popular support, especially among workers and the middle classes beaten by the 2008 crisis and the effects of globalization, as already happened in England with the Brexit vote. We are facing a new world where this macho and racist right collects the rage of the millions that the system harmed. A right that’s nostalgic for a past that won’t come back, in a period of imperial decadence and the capitalist world-system.
What the United States elections revealed is the internal fracture that society experiences, the impoverishment of the majority and the obscene enrichment of the 1%. But the elections also revealed the shameful role of the communications media, starting with the “respectable” New York Times and Wall Street Journal that had no scruples in headlining that Trump was the candidate of Vladimir Putin. Robert Parry (the investigative journalist that uncovered the Iran-Contra scandal) asserts that the formerly respectable Times “has lost its journalistic way, becoming a propaganda and apologetic platform for the powerful.”
The campaign also revealed the fracture of institutions as vital to the 1% as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), which was internally broken by pressures from Hillary Clinton so that it would not investigate her emails. Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the international architecture the United States forged since 1945 and the 1% lost with Trump; they bet strongly on Clinton. Now they surround the winner to condition him, something that’s not going to cost them much because they belong to the same class and defend the same interests.
It’s probable that Blacks and Latinos suffer most with a Trump government. But, are they doing well now? Under the Barack Obama administrations African American deaths at the hands of the police increased exponentially, the income gap among Latinos and African Americans as compared to whites grew as a consequence of the 2008 crisis.
In 2013 white income was 13 times greater that that of African Americans and 10 times that of Latinos, while in 2004 it was seven times higher than the former and nine times higher than the latter. (El País)
The situation of immigrants will improve if they strengthen their organizations, extend them and mobilize against the 1%, but not because of what the White House decides. The Democrats’ policy consisted of coopting small elites from the racial minorities to use against the Black and Latino majorities, and to exhibit them as electoral trophies. They did the same thing with respect to women: feminism for white women from the high middle classes.
But it’s not the racism or the machismo that irritated the 1%, but rather Trump’s proposals regarding the financial sector and international policy. He proposed to increase taxes on high-risk fund managers, the new rich submissive to Wall Street. He defends an alliance with Russia to fight the Islamic State and sponsor negotiated exits in the Middle East. In the face of brazen interventionism, he proposes to concentrate on domestic problems. Another thing is if they’ll let him, since the 1% can collapse without a war.
From Latin America, Trump’s win can be understood as a moment of uncertainty in imperial politics towards the region. We must not venture a prognosis. Remember when Bergoglio was anointed Francisco I (Pope Francis), and many assured that he would make a reactionary pope? Under the Obama administration (initiated in 2009) there were State coups in Honduras and Paraguay, the illegitimate removal of Dilma Rouseff in Brazil, the right-wing insurrection in Venezuela, and the deepening of the drug war in Mexico, initiated by his predecessor George W. Bush. What’s worse is he couldn’t leave us with a “progressive” in the White House.
For the Latin America of those below things can change, in several senses.
In the first place, Trump’s macho and racist discourse can encourage the new rights and facilitate the deepening of femicides and the genocide of the Indian and Black peoples. Violence against the peoples, the principal characteristic of the Fourth World War/Accumulation by Dispossession, can encounter fewer institutional obstacles (even less!), greater social legitimation and the silence of the monopoly media. It’s not a new tendency, but rather more of the same, which in and of itself is grave. It will be more difficult to count on institutional umbrellas for protection and, for the same reason, the repressors will see themselves with freer hands to beat up on us.
The second tendency is that the system loses legitimacy when tendencies like those that Trump embodies are discharged. This process is already being profiled, but now a leap forward is produced with the loss of popular credibility in State institutions, which is one of the questions that the elites of the world most fear.
The third question is the division between the dominant classes, a global tendency that must be analyzed in greater depth, but that has destabilizing effects for the system and, thus, for domination. Basically, there are those who gamble everything on the war against the peoples and others that think that it’s better to cede something so as to not lose everything. It’s good news that those above are divided, because the domination will be unstable.
Finally, those below are going to have it worse. Instability and chaos are structural and not time-related tendencies in this period. It’s painful, but it’s the condition necessary to be able to change the world. We will suffer more repression; we will be in danger of being incarcerated, disappeared or murdered. A lot of suffering is seen on the horizon. Capitalism falls apart and the shambles can bury us. The other side is that many will stop believing that the only way to change the world is to vote every four or six years.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, November 11, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/11/11/opinion/020a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
And it trembled repeatedly…!
PHOTO /BERNARDO DE NIZ
By: Gilberto López y Rivas
With the date of October 14 of this year, the National Indigenous Congress [CNI] and the Zapatista National Liberation Army [EZLN] made public an historic document with the prophetic title of: “May the earth tremble repeatedly at its core” upon concluding the 5th National Indigenous Congress, which took place at the Cideci-Unitierra, Chiapas. The text is not the product of the occurrence of one person or minority group, but rather the result of six days of extenuating and prolonged work sessions, carried out based on the well-known method of the pueblos original peoples of debating until achieving consensus.
They celebrated life in the meeting, at the same time that the worsening of the dispossession and repression was denounced “that they have not stopped in 524 years in which the powerful started a war that has as it’s purpose exterminating those of the land that we are and that as their children have not permitted its destruction and death to benefit the capitalist ambition that knows no end, other than self destruction. Resistance for continuing to construct life now becomes word, learning and agreements.”
It was emphasized that the peoples are constructing every day in the resistances versus capitalism’s offensive that becomes more aggressive all the time, which has been converted –as was reiterated in the 2015 seminar Critical thought versus the capitalist hydra– into a civilizational threat, “not only for indigenous peoples and campesinos, but rather for the peoples of the cities that must also create dignified and rebellious ways for not being murdered, dispossessed, contaminated, sickened, kidnapped or disappeared. From our community assemblies we have decided, exercised and constructed our destiny since time immemorial, because of which maintaining our forms of organization and defense of our collective life is possible only from rebellion in the face of the bad governments, their corporations and their organized crime.”
It’s not about a so-called ethnocentrism, self-centered on indigenous peoples, but rather, to the contrary, it’s about an exhortation that, starting with a secular form of struggle, rooted in big historic events with a strong indigenous presence –like the wars for Independence and Reform, the fight against foreign invasions, the Revolution against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz–, calls upon all of us to organize collectively in rebellion against the bad government that has delivered the homeland to the corporations and crime.
It denounces –in detail and with multiple testimonies and documented evidence– the process of re-colonization that the different Native peoples, nations and tribes represented at the 5th Congress are suffering in a particularly aggravated way: invasion of forests, sacred communal lands and territories; imposition of highway and super-highway mega-projects, pipelines, aqueducts and thermo-electric dams, an interurban train, airports and shopping centers; the plunder and privatization of natural springs and other natural resources; affectation of lands and territories because of mining, tourist projects, planting of transgenic soy and African palm, besides livestock brokers; commercialization of ancestral knowledge; contamination of rivers through fracking and imposition of bills for environmental services, carbon capture and ecotourism; all of that, accompanied de la criminalization of struggle and resistance, assassination, incarceration and the forced disappearance of activists; buying consciences, fragmentation of communities, disintegration of the community fabric and contriving of communal assemblies, that “engineering of conflicts” that corporations know well; relentless pursuit from drug trafficking with the complicity of all the government bodies, armed forces and security apparatuses; murders of youth and women and rapes of women; aerial fumigations that produce illnesses; attacks from paramilitary groups and harassment of community authorities. Faced with this storm provoked by new forms of capitalist globalization, participants in the 5th Congress recognize that confronting it is only possible collectively, from anti-capitalism and from decision-making bodies constructed from below: “That is the power from below that has kept us alive, and it is why commemorating resistance and rebellion is also ratifying our decision to continue alive constructing hope for a future possible only over the ruins of capitalism.”
For these considerations that, as is observed, are transcendent and profound, the fifth National Indigenous Congress “decided to initiate a consultation in every one of our towns to dismantle from below the power that those above impose on us and that offers us a panorama of death, violence, dispossession and destruction […] we declare ourselves to be in permanent assembly and we will consult in each one of our geographies, territories and directions about the agreement of this 5th CNI to name an indigenous government council whose word an indigenous woman will materialized, a delegate from the CNI, as an independent candidate that will contend in the name of the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista National Liberation Army in the 2018 electoral process for the Presidency of this country.”
And, effectively, as was foreseeable, the political class trembled repeatedly… and they didn’t expect the marked reactions of secular racism from those creole-mestizo mentalities that couldn’t conceive of the indigenous thinking for themselves, as well as the ideological-political monologue of a “partyocracy” that considers “unity on the left” with arguments like the “least bad,” or “democratic alternating,” the monopoly of “national and popular representation,” and that has not issued any pronouncement against the real, open and shadow powers that have led Mexico to a humanitarian emergency and, above all, that is not capable of respecting the collective decisions, now in consultation, of the country’s most exploited, discriminated and oppressed sectors.
Welcome to this initiative that makes you think, act and even polemicize, beyond singular thoughts, personalities and preconceived ideas.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, November 4, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/11/04/opinion/018a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Joint CNI-EZLN communiqué on Santa María Ostula
JOINT COMUNICADO OF THE CNI AND THE EZLN IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY OF SANTA MARÍA OSTULA, MICHOACÁN
Don’t shoot! We’re children!
November 4, 2016
To the Nahua community of de Santa María Ostula, Michoacán:
To the peoples of the world:
To National and International Civil Society:
To the free communications media:
The peoples, nations and tribes that are the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista National Liberation Army demonstrate our profound repudiation of the actions that the bad governments and the criminal gangs carry out in unison against the indigenous Nahua community of Santa María Ostula, municipio of Aquila, Michoacán, to try to kill their dignified and historic struggle.
The governments were not only accomplices of the May 25, 2015 attack on Cemeí Verdía, but it also freed the guilty Juan Hernández Ramírez (then Aquila’s municipal president) and José Antioco Calvillo. It incarcerated Cemeí Verdía with invented charges and murdered the child Hidelberto Reyes García.
The bad governments now seek to arrest Comandante Germán Ramírez, fabricating crimes and guilt to those who fight and defend the land and their families. Meanwhile, at the same time, members of the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) Cartel regroup and are now re-organized and strongly armed to the east of the municipio of Aquila.
The crime of the comuneros, community police of Ostula and the self- defense groups of the coastal sierra of Michoacán, has been not accepting the death and terror that the bad governments and the organized crime in the region offer as the only option. On the other hand, with its resistance and rebellion Ostula has not only has taught us the dignity of an organized people, but it has also demonstrated to the world that it’s possible to construct peace and justice in the midst of the destruction in which the capitalists have submerged this country.
We denounce this new attack on the indigenous community of Ostula and we place responsibility for this aggression in the hands of bad governments, Enrique Peña Nieto and Silvano Aureoles, accomplices of the Templario leaders El Tena, El Tuco, Chuy Playas and on Federico González (Lico), who the community has pointed out on numerous occasions as the one responsible for the assassination of 34 comuneros and the disappearance of 6. We place responsibility on them for the blood that they want to see run in order to protect their capitalist businesses, for protecting instead of looking for and arresting the Templario leaders, for guarantying impunity to the military killers of Hidelberto, and little boy, for seeking at all cost to dispossess communal lands and natural resources, for seeking to kill that hope for this country that is named Santa María Ostula.
We express our respect and solidarity with the mobilizations of the community to which we say that in the collective heart of the National Indigenous Congress shines an intense light fed by the dignity of Ostula and we call to the Native peoples and civil society of Mexico and the world, to the national and international Sixth, and to the honest communications media to be attentive and in solidarity.
November 2016
For the Holistic Reconstitution of Our Peoples
Never More a Mexico Without Us
National Indigenous Congress
Zapatista National Liberation Army
Originally Published in Spanish by Enlace Zapatista
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
CNI, all flying together
“Our fight is not for power, our fight is for saving Mexico.”
By: Luis Hernández Navarro
Wine consumption in Mexico has increased in the last 10 years. Its consumers have increased significantly. Wine has stopped being a beverage for executives with high acquisitive power, and more women and young people ingest it all the time.
But behind some of the glasses of wine that are tasted in the country there is a bitter history of dispossession. Around 30 percent of the national production comes from Baja California. And there, LA Cetto winery, one of the country’s most important, dispossessed and invaded lands belonging to the Kiliwa people and seeks to appropriate national lands that are not theirs.
The Kiliwas are one of the five original peoples of what is now Baja California. The LA Cetto Company seeks to be awarded national lands in possession of the indigenous. The winegrowers count on the complicity of the Agrarian Prosecutor’s office, which on two occasions has lost the records that give rights to the Native residents.
According to what the Kiliwa chief Elías Espinoza Álvarez denounced, “it’s the agrarian authorities that exercise pressure on the indigenous to give in to the impresarios and accept unjust and inequitable conditions in contracts.”
As if that were not enough, the National Water Commission (Conagua) offers that company preferential treatment, because it granted authorization to perforate a well of water for human consumption, while it denied authorization to the indigenous. Even more, LA Cetto closed the right of way that residents have always used.
Something similar happens with fruits and vegetables for export cultivated with indigenous manual labor in Michoacán, Sinaloa and Baja California. A long memorial of offenses is hidden behind the strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, arugula, radicchio, escarole and endive, as well as the different varieties of tomato that are used as ingredients for elaborating succulent plates.
The names of the companies and impresarios that harvest the wealth from those delicacies are well known. That is the case of the Secretary of Rural Development of Guanajuato (until a little while ago), Javier Usabiaga, nicknamed the Garlic King (Rey del ajo). It’s also the case with the transnational Driscolls, intermittently in check because of the boycotts that are called against it.
The indigenous day laborers that plant these gastronomic riches suffer a kindred exploitation to what their ancestors experienced in the Porfiriato. Starvation wages and interminable workdays are the rule. They lack paid vacations, social security and days of rest. Instead of going to school, their little children work the fields with them. They are usually housed in barracks or in modest houses that lack basic services. Safe drinking water is a luxury.
But the savage exploitation that those Indians suffer passes unnoticed in Mexican society. It’s normal. Occasionally, as happened with the strike of the San Quintín agricultural workers, the world enters their existence. From time to time it is announced that the Rarámuris or the Mixtecos live in conditions of slavery on ranches of Jalisco, Colima or Ensenada. Nevertheless, they are usually as imperceptible as Garabombo, the famous Manuel Escorza character.
Just as happens with the wine or with the blackberries, it’s not unusual that behind a cup of coffee is found a history of dispossession against the original peoples. Seventy percent of coffee growers in Mexico are indigenous, the majority of which have small pieces of land no more than two hectares (about 5 acres). Coffee growing is their way of life and the spinal column of their subsistence. But the transnational companies, colluded with the government, want these producers to abandon their activity or plant very low-quality varieties of coffee.
Recently, Cirilo Elotlán and Fernando Celis, of the National Coordinator of Coffee Growing Organizations, denounced that besides little support to the coffee growers, the government and the corporations want the producers to become discouraged and to stop growing, with the intention that the companies monopolize all of the production and market.
“We have had –they advised– an infinity of threats from the big traders, because what they demand first now is to increase production, sacrificing the labor of the producers, ours fields and biodiversity, at the expense of the interests of transnational corporations.”
The combined action of blight and corporate voracity are leveling the old coffee fields. Until a short time ago coffee plantations were protected by the shade of chalahuites and citrus trees, ixpepeles and banana trees, gourds and jinicuiles. Today, they are barely ghosts of what they were.
Among others, those big companies are basically two: Nestlé and Coca-Cola. More that coffee, Nestlé sells artificial flavorings and it promotes the substitution of Arabica with robust, a low quality variety that it needs for its mixes. Coca-Cola, through the brand name Andatti that it sells in 10,000 Oxxo stores, has flooded the market with junk coffee.
In the 3rd Forum of the original peoples of the Sierra Tarahumara in defense of their territories, Rarámuris and Odamis recognized that their basic problems are the dispossession of their territories, the exploitation of their natural reserves and the intervention of local and transnational companies. They agreed that it’s necessary “to all fly together (all the indigenous peoples) to have greater strength.” Their conclusions are similar to those the Kiliwas have reached, or the agricultural workers, or the small coffee producers or hundreds of communities throughout the country.
Made invisible by the power, the organized original peoples with the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the EZLN now discuss whether they will promote the candidacy of an indigenous woman for the Presidency in 2018; a candidacy that obliges Mexican society to turn around to look at them; a candidacy that will talk not only about poverty and inequality, but also about exploitation, dispossession and discrimination; and a candidacy that permits them to all fly together in order to have more power.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/11/01/opinion/016a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Calendar for the 5th Congress of the CNI and the Gathering Zapatistas and ConSciences for Humanity
Indigenous Zapatista Women!
ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY
MEXICO
October 26, 2016.
To the invited and attending Scientists of the Gathering “Zapatistas and ConSciences for Humanity”:
To the compañeras, compañeros, compañeroas of the National and International Sixth:
Brothers and sisters:
We send you greetings. We write to inform you of the following:
First: Per instructions from the National Indigenous Congress, which at the moment is consulting with the original peoples, barrios, tribes, and nations throughout Mexico on the proposal made during the first phase of the Fifth Congress, we inform you that the permanent assembly of the CNI will be reinstated December 29, 2016, at CIDECI-UNITIERRA in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas.
There the CNI will hold roundtable sessions on December 30 and 31 of this year. During these sessions, or before then if the CNI so chooses, the results of the consultation will be made known. On January 1, 2017, the plenary assembly will take place in Oventik, Chiapas, Mexico, and any agreements necessary will be made there.
The compañeras and compañeros of the original peoples, barrios, tribes, and nations who make up the National Indigenous Congress inform us that they have financial difficulties that impede their travel to this meeting, and so they request solidarity donations from the national and international Sixth, as well as from any honest people who want to support them in this way. To offer this support, the compas of the CNI ask that people communicate directly with them at the following email: info@congresonacionalindigena.org. From there they will explain where and how to send support.
Of course, if you think that by meeting, thinking, and deciding collectively on their path and destiny the compas of the CNI are playing into the hands of the right and endangering the u-n-s-t-o-p-p-a-b-l-e advance of the institutional left, you can make your support conditional on their obeying you, or add a note to your contribution saying something like, “I’m going to give you these 2 pesos, but don’t let yourselves be fooled and manipulated by that sockhead.”
Or you can just make your donation and try, like the rest of us, to learn from them. Second: We also take this opportunity to confirm that the Gathering “Zapatistas and ConSciences for Humanity” will be celebrated at the times and places originally announced:
From December 25, 2016 to January 4, 2017 at the facilities of CIDECI-UNITIERRA in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, with an intermission on December 31, 2016 and January 1, 2017. If you are interested in attending as a listener or observer, you can register to attend at this email: conCIENCIAS@ezln.org.mx Thus the presentations about the exact and natural Sciences and the work sessions of the National Indigenous Congress will take place simultaneously.
That’s all for now.
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés.
Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano.
Mexico, October 2016.
From the Notebook of the Cat-Dog, section titled “neither stories nor legends”:
What Doctor John H. Watson will not tell.
Mountains of the Mexican southeast. It is raining a lot. You can just barely make out the shouts of those who continue working to make holes in the wall, giving each other instructions. There are some who have poorly protected themselves from the downpour with plastic ponchos, but most are just wearing soaked shirts, blouses, skirts and pants, raining once again over the earth.
The wall extends as far as the eye can reach. Despite its apparent strength, every so often there is a crease along its long curtain. It is said that those who inhabit these lands claim that the wall is capable of regenerating itself, and so they must not cease their efforts to keep a crack open. After consulting histories and legends that circulate among the inhabitants, it is concluded that the purpose of the wall is not just to keep them from seeing or crossing to the other side; it also convinces those who encounter it that there is nothing beyond it, that the world ends there, at the feet of its solid base and in the face of the infinite expanse, in length and height, of its surface. Outside one of the huts near the wall, a little girl watches with her chin resting on one of her hands. Her eyes aren’t focused on the arrogant wall, but rather on the feet of those who strike and scratch at the wall. Or really, she is looking at the ground covered in mud and puddles.
A little behind her, a strange being, similar to a dog, or to a cat, shelters itself in the threshold of the hut. The little girl turns to look at it and says: “Hey you, cat-dog, what, you scared of the rain? Not me. They don’t call me ‘Defensa Zapatista’ for nothing. You think that if we’re in the middle of a game and it starts raining we’re going to say, “oh no, I better get off the field or I’ll get wet?” No way. You can just fix your hair with your hand, and since it’s wet it stays smooth and forget about the rest. But it’s not like I fix it like that so I can go around flirting with fucking men. It’s so I can see when the ball comes and goes. If I don’t fix it, I can’t see. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in the hut, even if you’re a cat or a dog, you’re still going to get wet. Look, I just got an idea.”
The little girl enters the hut and then comes out with some pots, buckets, and empty tin cans. She starts placing them beneath the little streams of water dripping from the edges of the tin roof. It would seem as if she was positioning them randomly, but no. Every little bit she changes their location. The being whom the little girl calls the “cat-dog” barks and meows. The little girl looks at it and says: “Just wait, you’ll see what I’m doing.”
The little girl keeps changing the location of the pots and cans and, with each change, she mutes the sound of the raindrops hitting their surface. The little girl listens for a moment and then goes back to changing the places and sounds of this strange symphony.
She is immersed in this task when a couple of men arrive. One is tall and gangly; the other is shorter in stature, of average build. Both carry fine umbrellas and the taller one wears an elegant coat, some type of cap, and a curved pipe between his lips. They say nothing; they just watch the little girl come and go. At some point, the gangly one with the elegant overcoat coughs and says: “Excuse me miss, will you allow me to shelter you with my umbrella? That way you won’t get wet while you…while you do whatever it is you’re doing.” The little girl stares at him with hostility and responds, “My name isn’t ‘miss,’ it’s ‘Defensa Zapatista’ (the little girl puts on her best “get away from my pots and cans or you die” face). “And what I’m doing is making a song.” The man comments as if to himself: “hmm, a song, how interesting my dear Watson, how interesting.” The other man just affirms with a nod while he shelters himself in the doorframe, eyeing the dog suspiciously…well, the cat…well, whatever it is that’s next to him in the threshold.
The man with the strange cap observes attentively the coming and going of the little girl. All of a sudden his face lights up and he exclaims, “Of course! Elementary. A song. It couldn’t be any other way.”
And, turning to the person who now shares the small space out of the rain with the cat-dog, he says, “Pay attention, Watson, here you have something which could never be found in one of those vulgar popularizations of the detective’s science with which you torment your few readers, that is, if you have any at all. Observe carefully. What the young miss…cough…cough…I meant to say, what ‘Defensa Zapatista’ is doing is combining the principles of mathematics, physics, biology, anatomy and neurology. By changing the positions of these strange metal receptacles and placing them beneath different rivulets of water, she obtains different individual sounds that together produce distinct combinations of notes which, I infer, will become a melody. Then, changing the rhythms, she will have music and from there, elementary my dear Watson, a song. Bravo!” The man has passed his umbrella to the other man under the doorframe and applauds with enthusiasm.
The little girl has left her work for a moment and stopped to listen to the man. After the applause, the little girl asks, “you mean a ton [ii] right?”
“A ton?” repeats the man, and then after thinking about it a bit exclaims: “Of course! Ton, tune. Yes, miss, a tune and not a ton, although it’s true that there are some tunes that are very heavy.” The little girl furrows her brow and clarifies, “I already told you my name is not ‘miss,’ my name is ‘Defensa Zapatista.’ And what’s your name?
The man responds, “You are right, what bad manners that I have not introduced myself,” and, with a brief bow, introduces himself, “My name is Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective. And my companion, who is currently shivering from the rain and the cold, is Doctor John H. Watson, a debaser of science.” Extending his hand toward the little girl, he adds “And you are…yes, of course, you told me before, “Defensa Zapatista.” Strange name for a little girl. Well, it seems everything is strange in these lands.”
The little girl ignores the extended hand, but appears interested. “Consulting detective…what’s that?” she asks.
“I combat crime, miss, I investigate by observing, analyzing and applying science,” responds the man with poorly feigned modesty.
“Ah, like Elías Contreras, the Zapatista investigation commission,” interrupts the little girl. The man tries to clarify, but the little girl continues:
“Well, look, I already talked to Elías so he would join our team, but it turns out he’s already dead and tending to the bad and the evil, that is, he’s investigating the fucking capitalist system. I told him he can still join the team, even though he’s deceased, but he says that Supmarcos sends him off on investigations and so he wouldn’t make it to practice. The funny thing is that Supmarcos is dead too. I think that’s why they understand each other. Of course, right now we can’t really practice that much because the field is all muddy and the ball doesn’t roll, it just gets stuck and no matter how much it gets kicked it doesn’t move, or it moves just a little and then gets lazy again. So you get all muddy for nothing and later your moms comes with her ‘you have to wash up’ and then off to the river. Do you like to bathe? I don’t like it. Only if there’s a dance, then I like it, because you can’t be all muddy when they start playing the song “la del moño colorado” [the girl with the colorful bow]. Do you know that one, “la del moño colorado”? That’s a good song because you dance to it like this (the little girl hums while balancing lightly on one foot and then the other). You don’t just jump around like the young people these days who like that music and end up muddier than if they hadn’t bathed at all. But you know mothers, what do they care if there’s no dance? Nothing, you still have to bathe and if you don’t, there’ll be hell to pay. Do you have a mom? Well, look, just think about whether moms know or not. They definitely know. I still don’t know how it is that they know, but they know. You should investigate how it is that they know. I told Elías to investigate it, but he just laughed, the jerk. And SupMoy is even worse, you think he helps? If he’s around and your mom gives the order to bathe, you think he’ll defend you? Forget it, you have to obey your mom, he says. I complained to him one day about why it’s like that, if the struggle says to rule by obeying, it should be that the little girls rule and the moms obey. But he just laughed, the jerk. Well, look, pay attention because I’m going to explain something to you: it turns out we haven’t filled up the team. Why not? Well, because there’s no discipline, that is, they don’t understand the organization of the struggle. One minute they tell you they’re in and the next, they’re out, they took off on another path, for one reason or another. They’re all just excuses. Or if not, they say it’s because of the work of the struggle. As if playing wasn’t part of the work of the struggle? The deceased Supmarcos would say children’s work is to play. Well, he would also say it’s to study, but don’t publish that, eh? So given that, we can’t complete the team, there’s no seriousness, as someone says. But don’t you worry, don’t despair because the team didn’t fill up quickly. We know it takes time, but one day there will be more of us. Since we can’t practice right now and they don’t let me join the work of making holes in the wall because it’s raining and I’ll get wet… can you believe they say that? As if I wasn’t going to get wet bathing anyway. The other day I wanted to give my moms a political lecture and I told her it’s not good for me to bathe because I’ll get wet, and in the autonomous school they say it’s not good for little girls to get wet because what if they get sick with a cough, right?
But my moms just laughed, I think she didn’t understand the political lesson because she was just like, get yourself down to the river and make sure to wash behind your ears and this, that, and the other. Well, don’t you get distracted, whatever your name is. It turns out that, since I can’t practice and I can’t make holes in the wall, I started thinking and thinking. And now I just keep thinking and thinking. Not about silly things though, but rather about the struggle. So I thought that we need music for when we win the game. Because if there’s no music, we won’t be happy that we won, you understand? What are you going to understand, if you’re just standing there staring? Okay, I’ll explain. Look, the moms know, we don’t know how they do it, but they know. If you have a difficult question, you go to your moms and boom, they know the answer. Well, so it turns out that my moms told me something like a story the other day. She said that the deceased one said that the struggle needs science and art. I don’t know what science and art are, so then my moms explained it to me. I think I’ll explain it to you because you definitely don’t know. Look, science and art aren’t just that you do things however you want, half-assed, but rather that first you imagine how what you want to make will turn out, then you study how you’re going to do it, and then you go and do it. But not just any old way; rather you make it happy, with lots of colors and lots of music, you understand? Well, so I thought and imagined what our music should be when we win the game. Yes of course really happy music but not like for dancing, because it’s serious to win a game, even more so since my team is full of lumps, like the cat-dog here who barely obeys, it just runs and runs, and since its paws are a little twisted well, it tends to veer off to the side. So the song has to be cheerful but serious. It should be enjoyable and make your heart happy. Well so I was sitting here thinking about the music, I mean the ton of the song, and then my idea came. I was listening to the sound the rain makes when it falls, and I saw that it sounds different in each little puddle. So I took out my mom’s pots and some cans and buckets from our women’s collective and now I’m here listening to how each one sounds and how they sound in collective. Because it’s not the same as an individual as in a collective, you see. In a collective it’s happier, it sounds good. But each individually, it’s all the same, even if you change the bucket. Now if you put them together, it’s something else. Of course, the issue is how you put them together so that they sound good. You understand? I mean that’s where you bring in science and art and it comes out just right. Not like Pedrito who thinks he knows how to sing, but all he knows are Pedro Infante songs. You think he knows any about love? No, all songs about horses and drunks. And for nothing, because Pedrito twice over doesn’t drink, that is, he doesn’t drink because he’s a little boy, and he doesn’t drink because he’s a Zapatista. You think you’re going to find a wife if you sing to her about horses? No, never, never ever. And even worse if you sing to her about drunkards. If somebody sang to me about horses, it’d be for nothing because I already have one, it’s just that he’s one-eyed, which means that he sees out one eye but not the other. Well, the truth is that the horse isn’t mine, because he doesn’t have an owner. No one knows where he came from, he just appeared all of a sudden in the pasture. I quickly recruited him, as they say, for the team and made him goalie, but since he doesn’t see well I had to put myself on defense. But if somebody sings to me about drunkards, well yeah then, that calls for some smacks and to hell with them. My moms say that alcohol is no good, that it makes men dumb. Well okay, dumber than usual. And then they beat the women. Of course, now it’s different because we defend ourselves as the women that we are. I, as Zapatista defense, also train so that men don’t bother me when I grow up, that is when I grow into a young single woman. But don’t get distracted, write down what I explained to you in your notebook, write that science and art are really important…”
At that, the cat-dog begins to bark and meow. The little girl turns around to look at him and asks, “Now?” The cat-dog purrs and growls. The little girl hurriedly enters the house, just as the rain lifts its wet skirt and the sky clears.
It’s no longer raining when the little girl runs out of the house with a ball in her hands. The cat-dog runs out behind her.
As she gets further away, the little girl manages to shout: “When you finish writing your notes, come. Don’t worry if the team isn’t full yet. It might take a while, but there will be more of us.” The man who is called “Doctor Watson” closes his umbrella and reaches his hand out to make sure that, in fact, it has stopped raining.
The man with the absurd cap keeps watching the little girl as she moves away. Then he takes a magnifying glass from his raincoat and stops to analyze each of the containers, now mute, without rain to make them sing.
“Interesting, my dear Watson, very interesting. I believe it would be worth spending some time in these parts. The atmosphere is clean and the fog keeps reminding me of the London of Baker Street,” says the tall thin man as he stretches out his arms to better breathe in the air of the mountains of the Mexican southeast.
“Spend some time, Holmes? Why?” asks the other man while he shakes off some lingering raindrops. “I don’t think we’d be much help, although this little girl seems to suffer from verbal diarrhea, a tranquilizer would help…whoever has to listen to her.”
“No, Watson, we’re not going to help anyone. I only came to find an old acquaintance. But I think it will be difficult to find him…at least alive,” says the man as he puts away the magnifying glass and begins walking.
The other man rushes to catch up to him, asking, “Then what are we going to do here, Holmes?” “Learn, my dear Watson, learn,” says the man as he takes out the magnifying glass again and stops to look at an insect.
As the two figures fade into the fog, once can hear in the distance barks, meows, and a child’s laughter, a laugh like a song.
Then, although nearly imperceptibly, the wall shudders…
I testify.
Woof-Meow. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: From Baker Street to the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnaorWzg7aQ&feature=youtu.be
Music: “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, with Raphael Ravenscroft on saxophone. 1978. Photographs of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson from the British television series “Sherlock” made by the BBC, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch (as Sherlock Holmes) and Martin Freeman (as Doctor Watson). Coproduced by Hartswood Films and WGBH, the series was created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Accompanied by embroidery (first outlined and then finished) made by Zapatista insurgents for the CompArte Festival, 2016, with the theme “Defensa Zapatista and the Hydra.” The image of the little doll on the foosball table was taken in 2013 by a 9-year-old boy who attended the Zapatista Little School. He saw the foosball table and put the little doll there just as you see it. The illustrations at the end of the video are by the CVI support team, “Tercios Compas” section. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Embroidery and drawings by EZLN insurgents for the CompArte Festival
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koo0Tw5MHMQ
Embroidery and drawings made by Zapatista insurgents for the CompArte Festival. Music: “Resistencia,” from the album LDA V The Lunatics, Los de Abajo.
Talking to each other
The CNI and the EZLN have been talking to each other a lot.
By: Gustavo Esteva
In the midst of war, as part of the general campaign of dispossession, they have also taken the word away from us, words. And that’s how they want to bury Tlataya or Ayotzinapa or make the No win in Colombia.
Words are doors and windows of our perception; the words that we use depend on our experience in the world. And it’s that which is immediately threatened and it affects our ability to speak… and to know what happens. Instead of being an autonomous form of relationship, language is being converted into a dispositive of isolation and an instrument of manipulation and control.
The field of language is as rich and varied as nature… but the war that is unleashed against it makes linguistic diversity decline. Government and the market completely destroy languages, eliminate them and annul the vernacular and creativity of language; they are the promoters of the global unification projected by capital, which organizes the current war and can condemn us to blindness and silence. Some 5,000 languages still exist in the world. One hundred of them are distributed in 95 percent of the global population, the rest, la immense majority, in the other 5 percent. Of the living languages, 30 percent are spoken in Asia and Africa, 20 percent in the Pacific Region, 16 percent on the American continent; only one percent is spoken in Europe, 67 languages. One of those living languages dies every week; a civilization dies with it, a way of being and thinking.
Amoeba-words have invaded us. But maybe we shouldn’t associate this innocent transparent little animal with fuzzy contours, with the verbal monstrosities that we suffer. The term “plastic words” is preferable, as the German linguist Uwe Porksen proposes. He has listed and characterized them with rigor. According to him, they are “the master key of daily life;” easily accessible, “ they infiltrate entire fields of reality and reorder their own likeness.” They are words like identity, development, communication, information, solution, energy, or resource. They have an aura. Their definition has been lost or is entirely imprecise, but they are full connotations, generally positive. They are often born in the common language, emigrate to scientific dominion and are returned to their place of origin with enormous colonizing … and destructive force.
“Development” is one of those words. It means almost anything, from building skyscrapers to installing latrines, the same as drilling oil wells that look for water. It’s a concept with monumental emptiness… that has dominated public discussion for more than half a century. In these years it has been used systematically for packing all the works and actions that dispossess the peoples of their lands, their waters, their territories, and for disqualifying those who resist them: they are retrogrades, opponents of development and progress.
“Energy” is the same. It’s seldom used with its vernacular meaning, which still appears in dictionaries, when one says that someone is very energetic for alluding to a vigorous and active person. The word is used daily for referring to themes like the cost of gasoline or renewable energy. If anyone asks us what energy is we’ll vacillate a little and confess technical ignorance, confident that the specialists will be able to give a good definition. When they inform us that it’s the mass by the square of speed we are perplexed; we’re not talking about that. Helmholtz and others used its vernacular meaning for their investigations and when the word returned to daily language it produced a vacuum. We tell each other nothing by using them, but operate as signs of a sect.
This is not an academic issue. We habitually suffer the consequences of this destruction of language that makes political discourse an faithful expression Orwell’s neo-language. In his dystopia, peace is war, as Big Brother incessantly repeated. Like Goebbels did for Hitler. Procedure is an indispensable ingredient of the authoritarian exercise: it is its condition of existence. One cannot govern with bayonets; one can govern with words.
In recent days, the promoters of the No in Colombia revealed in the refined propaganda techniques that they used to get their proposition. In certain zones they encouraged indignation; in others, the need for subsidies. In each one they were seeking to induce abstention or rejection. And they attained it.
Procedure has ruled among us for a long time. Tomorrow the Senate is voting on an initiative that destroys the right to strike, but it is called labor justice. An authoritarian dispositive that has nothing to do with education is even named an education reform. Or an enormous lie is presented as “historic truth,” with which they attempt to cover up the Ayotzinapa crimes.
The uses of neo-language in Colombia, for influencing the plebiscite, or what surrounds what’s relative to Ayotzinapa, for uncovering the guilty and those responsible in the government and in the Army illustrate well what this operation is about. Against what and who we are fighting… and how language is also territory that we must defend faced with fulfilled threats of dispossession.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Monday, October 10, 20126
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/10/10/opinion/020a2pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 