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Zibechi: The End of the progressive cycle accelerates
June 2013 demonstration in Rio de Janeiro marches along Copacabana Beach
By: Raúl Zibechi
Each one chooses the place from which she views the world, but that choice has consequences and it determines what she can see and what irremediably escapes her. The point of observation is never a neutral place, as she cannot be what she observes. Moreover, the observer is formed by the place elected for realizing the task, to the point that she stops being a mere spectator and becomes a participant –although she may say she is objective– in the scene that she thinks she is only observing.
The most diverse views are displayed before us: from those located within the states (parties, armed forces, academics), those that are emitted from the powerful countries and from financial capital, to the views anchored in the indigenous and black communities, and in the anti-systemic movements. A broad fan that we can synthesize, with certain arbitrariness, as views from above and views from below.
The views expressed in recent months about the situation that runs through the progressive South American governments say more about the observer than about the political reality that they pretend to analyze. From the popular movements and organizations that resist the extractive model, things are seen very differently than from the state institutions. Nothing new, although that it usually alarms those who think they see the hand of the right in the criticisms of progressivism and in the resistance movements.
To the writer, it’s the activity or inactivity, the organization for the fight, the dispersion or cooptation of the movements, the central aspect to take into account at the time of analyzing the progressive governments. Other considerations only appear in second place, like the economic cycles, disputes between the parties, electoral results, and the attitude of financial capital and of the empire, among a lot of other variables.
More than two years ago we talked about the “end of the Lula consensus” at the root of the massive mobilizations of millions of Brazilian youth in June 2013 (http://goo.gl/lS9K9R). Various Brazilian analysts explained the mobilizations of that year in a similar sense, emphasizing that we’re dealing with a parting of waters in the region’s most important country.
A year ago I said that: “the progressive cycle in South America has ended,” in relation to the balance of forces that emerged from the Brazilian elections, a direct consequence of the June 2013 protests (http://goo.gl/z92152). The Parliament that emerged from the first round was considerably more right-wing that the previous one: the agribusiness defenders got a smashing majority; the “bullet caucus,” composed of police and military members that propose arming against crime, and the anti-abortion caucus, rose to positions as never before. The PT went from 88 deputies to 70.
Many underestimated the importance of June 2013 and of the new correlation of forces in the country, trusted in the charisma of leaders like Lula, in his almost magic capacity for countering a scenario that had turned against them. The results are seen now.
We can see the end of the progressive cycle with greater clarity in light of the new data that recent acts shed on it.
First. We are facing a new phase of movements that are expanding, consolidating and modifying their own realities. We are still not facing a new cycle of struggles (like those that Bolivia experienced from 2000 to 2005 and Argentina from 1997 to 2002), but big actions are registered from those below that can be announcing a cycle. The mobilization of more than 60,000 women in Mar del Plata and the enormous demonstration “Not one less” (300,000 in Buenos Aires alone against chauvinist violence) speak as much of expansion as of reconfiguration.
The resistance to mining is paralyzing or slowing down projects of the transnational corporations, above all in the Andean region. Peru, in which is concentrated a high percentage of environmental conflicts, registered various popular and communitarian uprisings against the mining companies. For the first time in years, mining investment in Latin America is receding. It fell 16 percent in 2014 and in the first half of 2015 it fell another 21 percent, according to the Cepal. The reasons that they adduce are the fall of international prices and the stubborn popular resistance.
Second. The fall of commodity prices is a hard blow to progressive governability, which had settled on social policies that were possible, in large measure because of the excesses that high export prices were leaving. In that way the situation of the poor could be improved without touching the wealthy. Now that the economic cycle has changed, social policies can only be sustained by fighting privileges, something that passes through popular mobilization. But mobilization is one of the biggest fears of progressivism.
Third. If the right capitalizes on the end of the progressive cycle, it’s not the fault of the movements or the popular struggles, but rather of a model that promoted “inclusion” through consumption. An excellent work of the Brazilian economist Lena Lavinas about the financialization of social policy assures that: “the novelty of the social development model is having instituted the logic of the market in the entire system of social protection.” (http://goo.gl/XyrcPF).
The Lula and Dilma governments were able to exploit mass consumption by means of financial inclusion, “conquering the barrier of social heterogeneity that stopped the expansion of the Market society in Latin America.” We’re talking about a setback for the popular sectors, the supposed beneficiaries of social policies: “Instead of promoting protection against risks and uncertainties, it increases vulnerability.”
Consumerism, Pasolini said almost a half-century ago, depoliticizes, strengthens individualism and generates conformity. It’s the breeding ground for the Rights. They’re reaping what they sowed.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Friday, October 30, 2015
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/10/30/opinion/021a1pol
Raúl Zibechi: Toward a new cycle of struggles
Police confront Indigenous protesters in Peru prior to the Bagua Massacre
By: Raúl Zibechi
The noisy fall in the price of raw materials closes an economic cycle, but also a political one. The illusion that we’re dealing with a momentary decline is giving way to the conviction that the low prices can drag out for a long time, even 20 years, according to specialists cited by Bloomberg (http://goo.gl/fAFktC).
The reasons for such a decline are debatable. There are those who attribute the drop in gas prices to a U.S. maneuver to affect Russia, Venezuela and Iran, while others maintain that it’s impelled by the Saudi monarchy to render extraction by means of fracking infeasible in that country, which threatens to displace it as the prime global producer global. The lesser demand of China is the most plausible explanation about the fall of other merchandise, without discarding the imprint of financial speculation in all commodities.
What’s certain is that the commodities price index elaborated by Bloomberg, which includes gold, oil and soy, has fallen to half of its historic maximum in the first half of 2011. The multinational Glencore-Xstrata, which controls the largest part of the production of minerals and grains in the world, registers losses on the London Stock Exchange greater than 30 percent in recent weeks, totaling a fall of 74 percent so far this year (http://goo.gl/HTi1Wu). Other multinationals in the sector confront similar situations.
In Latin America this change of cycle anticipates grave problems and some opportunities. All the countries confront fiscal and trade difficulties that lead them to reduce State budgets and public expense. In some countries, like Ecuador, a 5 percent reduction in expenses is contemplated, and next year’s budget will be calculated based on the price of oil at 40 dollars.
As the Ecuador economist Carlos Larrea points out in a recent interview, “that’s all good, but the problem is that it’s not enough. That would be a very good strategy if we have a quick recovery of oil prices, but if that doesn’t happen, as is very probable, then this strategy doesn’t work” (http://goo.gl/LFzxYV).
The new economic cycle is already affecting the social policies that were possible thanks to the surplus due to the high prices of exports. In various countries like Ecuador, there was already a reduction of state functionaries (appointed positions). In the opinion of the economist Eduardo Fagnani in the September IHUOnline magazine, a fiscal adjustment in Brazil “is provoking a grave social regression” (http://goo.gl/D9D4oq).
In the opinion of many economists the best social policy is employment. In Brazil the minimum wage grew 70 percent on top of the last decades’ inflation and unemployment attained a minimum of 4.8 percent in December 2014. But today it’s already situated at 7.5 percent (8.6 million unemployed) and it is estimated that it will end the year at 9 or 10 percent. The social indices are starting to erode in the other countries, still slowly, with increases in the levels of unemployment and poverty.
These are, very briefly, some of the problems derived from the change in the economic cycle that will sharpen if, as everything indicates, the United States Federal Reserve raises the interest rate in the coming months. We are facing a crisis that can take two directions: fiscal adjustments or questioning the extractive model.
In the first case, the governments would suffer a strong erosion of their support base, since a good part of the popular sectors that brought them to power will start to desert. Some can attempt to mobilize again to pressure for their demands, but others can gamble on the conservative parties and the right. Something like that seems to be happening in Brazil, where the adjustment that the government of Dilma Rousseff imposes has provoked a sharp decline in her popularity, which fell to 7 percent of the electorate.
A similar situation cannot be settled, in the medium-term, except with an electoral triumph of the rights, which can also obtain the president’s displacement through the parliamentary path.
We are facing an opportunity to leave the current model; in other words growth based on the export of commodities. For that it is essential to break with the policy of inclusion through consumption, to face structural reforms that as of now have not been realized or have been too timid: tax, agrarian, urban and health reforms, as well as reforms to the political system, the latter still pending in Brazil.
But exiting the extractive model presents, at this conjuncture, two great challenges.
The first is that the global scenario walks in an opposite direction. On the one hand, the dominant classes seem to be pushing societies to return to the 19th Century, through de-modernization and de-democratization, as Aníbal Quijano points out, from the hand of financial capital that is promoting a strong re-concentration of global power. On the other hand, the emerging powers like China gamble on the same extractive model as the empire.
The second challenge is inferred from the first: there is no exit from the model without a political crisis. Exiting the model supposes defeating the financial capital that maintains it and the local elites that implement it. It will be a group of tough battles, as the case of Peru demonstrated, where a new massacre against the communities that resist mining is produced these days in the Andean region of Apurímac.
The subjects for defeating extractivism will be the peoples and the communities organized into movements. The governments and the political parties are more worried about maintaining their privileges than facing the battle against the model. The facts say that the new cycle of struggles that will bring down the model is being championed by the indigenous and campesino communities, followed by the poor from the urban peripheries and the youths and women of the popular sectors.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Friday, October 2, 2015
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/10/02/opinion/020a2pol
Mexico now deports more Central Americans than the U.S.
THE SOUTHERN BORDER PROGRAM INCREASES DEPORTATIONS and RISKS FOR MIGRANTS
In seven months, 92,889 undocumented detained; The U.S. Migra arrested 70,448
At immigration office in Tenosique the Banner says: “Southern Border Plan, Stop the violence!”
By: Arturo Cano, Envoy
Tenosique, Tabasco
To be a migrant one must have good legs and poor hearing. That’s what the young men know who delay in hearing the purring of the train and climb to the roof of the higher building of “La 72,” as Fray Tomás González baptized it –in honor of the undocumented murdered in Tamaulipas in 2010– at the shelter for those without papers that receives hundreds of walkers every day.
The most agile climb to the roof of the house to see whether the train goes towards Merida or leads northward. If the railroad goes “up,” it immediately sets up a race towards the tracks, some three blocks away. The Central Americans know that their possibilities are few: only the youngest and most daring –who must also have acrobatic qualities– achieve climbing onto The Beast. “Sometimes 10 achieve it, other times no more than two or three,” they say at the shelter.
La Bestia (The Beast) used to stop here, but now not only does it keep going, the operator increases its speed until reaching 40 or 50 kilometers per hour.
José Alexander, a Salvadoran, looks at the hubbub calmly. For him, The Beast is not an option. Even so his gaze passes over his entire body, from bottom to top, to launch a resigned breath: “I am no longer able, I am almost 42 years old;” too old to run like that.
If he ever had the idea of attempting it, he abandoned it last Sunday when he saw a young Honduran lose a leg under the train’s wheels.
So, for José Alexander, as for the majority of the migrants that pass through that shelter –the poorest among the poor, without dollars for a pollero–, there is no other alternative than to continue on foot.
The scene “we’re going to try to climb onto the train” is repeated every day, since the government of Mexico put the Southern Border Program (SBP) into effect, announced by President Enrique Peña Nieto on July 7, 2014, for the purpose of “ordering the migratory flow” and “protecting the human rights” of the undocumented.
The real results have been the explosion of deportations and the increased risks for the poorest migrants that, lacking the train, travel the same way on foot.
Mexico, “an arm of the United States”
Fray Tomás González, the Franciscan founder of La 72, lives in the same shelter where he daily takes the pulse of the effects of the SBP. With those credentials he summarizes: “For the migrants, this program has meant persecution, massive deportation and death.”
González remembers the SBP’s key fact: Mexico now deports more Central American migrants than the United States.
According to official numbers, during the first seven months of fiscal year 2015, Mexico detained 92,889 Central Americans, compared to 70, 448 that were apprehended by the U.S. migra. The numbers correspond to the period that goes from October 2014 to April 2015, and were taken from reports de the United States Office of Customs and Border Protection and from the National Institute of Migration.
As the Washington Office on Latin America (Wola) concluded last June, the numbers illustrate that Mexico is now “the principal arm of the United States for impeding migrants from arriving in their territory.”
For Wola, the above data demonstrate, on the one hand, that the so-called 2014 migratory wave continues and that thousands of Central Americans continue fleeing; the difference is that now the majority of them are being “captured in Mexico instead of in the United States.”
The routes and their polleros
Threats are something habitual in the life of Fray Tomás. There is always a patrol outside of La 72; the municipal police during the day, and the state police at night. Soldiers dressed as civilians that are glued to the door and accompany the religious man wherever he goes complete the cadre of precautionary measures that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights dictated in April 2013.
There is no abuse or tragedy that escapes La 72. The religious people, the professionals and the volunteers that attend to the migrants have an exact list of the motives, the times that they have attacked them, the causes of the flight and the abuses that the travelers suffered.
Fray Tomas also has at his fingertips the routes that the migrants use. There are three on this border of Tabasco with Guatemala. One goes in the direction of Escárcega, Campeche, where a network of trailers the coyotes make wait for them. Another passes through the area surrounding El Ceibo, the formal immigration entry gate, where the modern installations built by the Mexican government contrast with the shacks where merchants sell clothes and trinkets on ambos sides of the border. The third, perhaps the most used, runs the 60 kilometers that separate Tenosique from El Pedregal, the first village that the migrants come upon when they cross the borderline.
Until 2013, the migrants were accustomed to entering by boat, six hours on the San Pedro River, which comes from the Guatemalan Petén, and that farther ahead flows into the Usumacinta. They used to arrive in a town known as La Palma, one-half of the distance they now have to travel. But that route ended after an operation in which the Mexican Army detained various Guatemalan boatmen.
The migrants continue crossing, although now the boats leave them on the Guatemalan side. That’s how they arrive in El Pedregal, a pollero town where most of the houses are made of wooden planks and weren’t painted until a decade ago. But, there is a pick-up truck in each patio. Most of the vehicles are old and have license plates from other states. They are part of the trafficking network that the polleros –controlled by Los Zetas, according to what they say in a low voice in this region– have constituted in the zone.
The rates vary according to the number of persons and the mood of the traffickers. They charge twenty pesos for the boat, 200 for a motorcycle ride and between 300 and 350 pesos aboard a car or small truck. Many times they let them out mid-way, with the pretext that the migra is coming, and they toss them out on the road to walk only to charge them again farther ahead. “They are advancing them piece by piece,” Fray Tomas explains on a muddy road close to the line.
Since its arrival, the falcons have watched the group of visitors. The spies don’t disguise themselves: first a young man on a motorcycle and later men aboard three vehicles. A green pick-up truck with polarized glass and license plates from the state of Mexico approaches the group of outsiders without any pretext, a few steps from the borderline.
–Where is the border?
–There, just a few steps away, one of the men responds after lowering the window. But only the Toyotas pass by here, no others –he says in reference to the Islamic State’s favorite pick-up trucks.
His truck is not a Toyota, so that they have approached the place simply to verify the identity of the visitors, which they do without dissimulating. One more vehicle, stopped in the middle of the road, verifies that the outsiders won’t make trouble.
On the return path, while the vehicle advances through the long stretch of dirt road, González explains the Mexican migra’s tactic for capturing the undocumented (“securing” them, in the official argot). The zone is full of pastures and marshes. Thus, the modus operandi of the Mexican immigration agents is “exhausting” the migrants: a convoy of vehicles “drives them away from the road” and they have to walk around through the pastures, the reeds or openly through the marshes. Thus, at the time of detaining them, they are tame bodies because of exhaustion. Those that escape usually arrive at the shelter worn out and full of wounds from the barbed wire and thorns.
They need to make adjustments every day in La 72. This morning, for breakfast, there is only one third of what they ate for dinner last night. The rest has followed their path. If you leave Tenosique at night, it’s possible to see them walking along the side of a highway without a ditch, in small groups, all with their migrant “uniforms:” tennis shoes sewn with thread and small backpacks where they carry their entire life.
See also: http://compamanuel.com/2014/06/16/securing-mexicos-border-with-central-america/
And see: http://compamanuel.com/2014/06/20/chiapas-militarization-and-looting-threaten-indigenous/
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Monday, October 19, 2015
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/10/19/politica/010n1pol
Victims of Acteal Massacre seek justice
“THE WEAR AND TEAR HAS BEEN STRONG THROUGHOUT THESE 6, 512 DAYS,”
Chiapas, Mexico, October 20, 2015
“They gave us a blow, but now we are here to seek justice,” Juan Vázquez Luna, a member of Civil Society Las Abejas of Acteal, said at the hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), in Washington DC, to demand justice for the massacre perpetrated against 18 adult women, 4 of them pregnant; 16 adolescents; 4 children and 7 men, on December 22, 1997, 6,512 days ago, in Acteal community, Chenalhó municipality, Chiapas.
Vázquez Luna, a member of the Board of Directors of Las Abejas, who lost nine of his relatives in the massacre, presented a study to the IACHR about the Acteal Massacre, titled: Psychosocial Study of the background, factors associated with the act and management of the emergency, psychosocial consequences and the collective impact on the Acteal community. “Said psychosocial study includes a Forensic Medical Expert Report,” he added.
“The Mexican State planned this massacre,” the indigenous of Los Altos of Chiapas assured in the voice of Vázquez Luna, and therefore they asked the IACHR: “that it emit an in depth report about the Acteal Massacre Case, declaring the State responsible for the violations.” The Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba) accompanied Las Abejas de Acteal), as it has done since December 1997.
“The Mexican State continues promoting impunity through its corrupt system,” evidenced Civil Society Las Abejas, upon pointing out that: “Far from punishing those responsible for the massacre, they have rewarded them with lands, homes and even monthly pensions.” “Those directly responsible for the Acteal Massacre have been liberated,” they affirmed.
The representative of the indigenous Tsotsils and the Frayba warned that: “there is no will for guaranties of non-repetition,” and that “the soldiers’ return to Acteal is a time bomb.” “There are military incursions into territory in resistance where peoples construct processes of autonomy,” Las Abejas of Acteal added, and they specified that: “within the territory there are 72 military encampments that are in a war situation.”
For his part Commissioner Ortiz questioned representatives of the Mexican government: “what basis did the Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) have for concluding that the Acteal Massacre was not perpetrated by paramilitaries.” “If the State said that the site of the Acteal Massacre was not preserved, then how can it draw trustworthy conclusions,” the human rights defender asked.
In his participation at the IACHR hearing, the Mexican government’s envoy, Roberto Campa Cifrián, recognized that faced with the massacre in the community of Acteal, the State “was incapable of preventing these acts and of responding adequately afterwards.” Despite everything, “The Mexican State denies the internal armed conflict and the low-intensity war that prevail in Chiapas,” the Frayba pointed out.
“Impunity is part of the counterinsurgency strategy because it wears out and divides the survivors, and that has brought us grave pain. The Mexican State’s policy of integral wear and tear is its weapon for killing our memory, for leaving its crime unpunished,” the indigenous in resistance also expressed in an October 2 communiqué.
After the hearing at the IACHR in Washington, the Civil Society Las Abejas of Acteal organization held a press conference in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. “The impact of the Acteal Massacre is manifested by chronic stress, an absence of justice and wear and tear on the community,” the Indigenous Tsotsils shared, in the Frayba installations.
“The majority of those who died in Acteal were women,” emphasized María Vásquez, a survivor of the massacre. “The Mexican government wanted to exterminate us, but we’re here continuing to denounce this State crime,” the indigenous Tsotsil emphasized.
“Two years and nine months after the presentation of observations on the Background on the Acteal Massacre Case (January 30, 2013), the petitioners have not received the Mexican State’s alleged observations,” the Frayba said. “Because of what was said earlier in this hearing, we have asked the IACHR Commissioners to insist that the Mexican State present corresponding observations and that the IACHR emit the Background Report with respect to this case,” the human rights organism added.
“The counterinsurgency stage, during the government of Ernesto Zedillo, consisted in undermine the civilian population’s support for the guerrilla, in the Highlands (Altos) and the Northern zones with police and paramilitary actions, under the command of the Mexican Army and its Rainbow Task Force, commanded by General Mario Renán Castillo,” the Frayba remembered. “This strategy was revealed in the document “Chiapas 94 Campaign Plan,” its representative expanded.
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Sources:
Boletín Frayba: http://www.frayba.org.mx/archivo/boletines/151019_boletin_25_cidh.pdf
Audiencia ante la CIDH sobre la Masacre de Acteal: http://www.frayba.org.mx/archivo/boletines/151020_cidh.pdf
NO aceptamos llegar a una solución amistosa con el Estado mexicano: Abejas de Acteal: http://acteal.blogspot.mx/2015/10/no-aceptamos-llegar-una-solucion.html?spref=fb
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Originally Published in Spanish by: POZOL COLECTIVO
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
En español: http://www.pozol.org/?p=11420
The second level of the Zapatista Escuelita II
By: Gilberto López y Rivas / II
The texts of the Zapatista women included in Chapter 1 of the book Critical thought versus the capitalist hydra, which students of the second level of the Zapatista Escuelita must analyze, are frightening, especially Comandanta Miriam’s narrative about women’s situation before 1994: Since the arrival of the conquistadors we suffered the sad situation of women. They stole our land and took away our language, our culture. That’s where the domination of caciquismo [1] and the landowners came into being, along with triple exploitation, humiliation, discrimination, marginalization, mistreatment and inequality. Because the fucking bosses had us as if they were our owners.” Her extraordinary description of being housed (on the haciendas) touches on the different types of the women’s humiliation and forced work at the hands of the finqueros [2], to the degree that some decided to take refuge in the hills. “They got together, talked and formed a community where they were able to live. That’s how they formed a community. But again, once they are living in the communities, those ideas that came from the boss (or the acasillado) are brought in. It’s as if the men dragged these bad ideas with them and applied them inside the house, like the little boss of the house… It’s not true that the women were liberated. Now it’s the men that are the little boss of the house. And once again the woman stayed at home as if it were a prison. Once again, the women didn’t leave the house, the were shut in their houses again…”
Comandanta Rosalinda tells the story of the recruitment of the first women in the clandestine years, town by town, of the necessity of organizing and that are both milicianas [3] and insurgents, “until ’94 arrives when we appeared in public, when we no longer endured the mistreatment that the fucking capitalists did to us. There we saw that it’s really true that we have courage and strength equal to men, because they were able to confront the enemy, without fear of anyone… Later we realized (that) making a revolution required both women and men.”
Comandanta Dalia continues the narration of women’s work with the EZLN, of the talks in each town, of the problems that they confront when even today some become assholes, of how they passed through all of the jobs with responsibility until they attain being on the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee. She asserts that they are going to continue organizing themselves “because there is still sadness, pain, incarceration and rape, as well as the mothers of the 43 disappeared… Men and women must struggle at 100 percent. Having a new society in which the people are the ones that command.”
The young support base Lizbeth and the listener Selena maintain that they didn’t know the life of the haciendas and now they have the freedom and the right as women to express their opinion, discuss, participate in the multiple tasks of the resistance and autonomy, resisting the counterinsurgency and the mirages of capitalism that they show on television, trying to use cell phones and the very same television for their struggle. They distinguish the poor-poor, the party members, materially poor and poor of thought, from the Zapatistas, who are also poor but rich because of their work for the good of the people and so that there are no dominators or exploiters.
For his part, Sub Galeano, in his “Vision of the conquered,” points out how those generations of Indigenous women now say their word in the genealogy of their struggle. “Three generations of rebel Zapatistas –he emphasizes–, not only against the system, also against us… male Zapatistas.” He declares defeat because of that struggle, although like the capitalist hydra he maintains that the males always try to regain lost privileges. He again takes up the origin of that struggle and describes that everything started with the insurgents. He reiterates that non-indigenous women also participate in the EZLN, and in the better part of his singular narrative-testimony the various opinions of these compañeras are transcribed, which refer to the very intimate man-woman relationship and to the characterization of the dominant and violent male, a schizophrenic hunter that as sensitive and receptive as he may consider himself, he cannot be a feminist, because he represents the same system against which he supposedly struggles.
The three parts of the notes on resistances and rebellions, expounded by Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, constitute key texts for comprehending the Zapatista struggle. He begins by remembering that the Zapatistas make up an armed organization, but contrary to the militarist tradition of some Latin American guerrillas, in this case the arm doesn’t become a fetish, it is seen as one more instrument, like the machete, the axe, the shovel, although one is conscious that each tool has its function, and the function of the arm is to kill.
After the ’94 withdrawal, it was understood that the struggle could involve many forms and that resistance and rebellion could be in various senses. “Resistance is becoming strong, tough, responding to everything, to any attacks from the enemy, from the system; and rebellion is being brave to take actions, or whatever we must do… One must resist the provocations of the Army and the police, the media reports and the psychological bombardments.” They discovered that with resistance and rebellion it’s possible to govern and develop initiatives. In fact, the Zapatistas have not carried out a single armed attack since January 1994. “It doesn’t mean, compañeros and compañeras, brothers and sisters, it doesn’t mean that we are renouncing our arms, but rather that it’s that political, ideological, rebel understanding, which gives us the way to see how one must really convert this resistance into an arm of struggle.” Political work and explanation are required for all this, and that governing is not conducted with orders, but rather agreements.
Notes:
- Caciquismo – Local despotism
- Finqueros – Ranch or estate owners
- Milicianas – Female political organizers with military training that can be called up in an emergency, somewhat like a national guard.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Friday, October 23, 2015
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/10/23/opinion/020a2pol
Capitalism, war and counterinsurgency in Chiapas III
Marcos speaks in the Mexico City Zócalo in 2001.
By: Gaspar Morquecho
In the jungles and mountains of the Mexican southeast 46,000 indigenous families are resisting the most prolonged counterinsurgency war in the recent history of Mexico. They are grandparents, men and women, youths, girls and boys of four generations of those that a half century ago were abandoning the path and long walk of resistance per se to construct another, the Resistance for Itself… The task was not simple… In the Chiapas of the Indians, war has been systematic, practically permanent.
The war strategy that comes from far away… a brief framing
We can place one part of the War Against People in Mexico a half-century ago. The workers and teachers experienced it in 1958. As students, we experienced brutal repression of the Student Movement in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in 1968. The CIA, the federal government and their armed forces were the intellectual and material actors of the massacre. In the 1970s, the federal government and the armed forces created the Halcones (Falcons) paramilitary group that made was present near the Mexico City International Airport the day that a group of exiled Mexicans returned from Chile. They attacked us on two occasions: the first near the Casco de Santo Tomás, and the second in San Cosme, where they murdered dozens of students on June 10, 1971.
Those State crimes encouraged and gave way to a growing number of movements and armed groups in Mexico. In the mountains of Guerrero, Lucio Cabañas commanded the armed forces of the Party of the Poor. On August 6, 1969, on 5 de Mayo Street in Monterrey, N.L., a group of 7 persons founded the National Liberation Forces (FLN, their initials in Spanish), three more witnessed the act. The Cuban Revolution, the guerrillas and the figure of Che, the National Liberation Movements in Asia, Africa and in Latin America and the wars revolutionary wars in Central America were the referents that spirited the armed struggle in Mexico. The United States and the USSR were bottled up in World War III, the Chinese communists were confronted with the Russians and the Yankees were headed to the defeat in Vietnam. To guard its backyard patio, the US imposed the dictatorships, gorilla governments in Latin America.
Within that context, the government of Luis Echeverría Álvarez (LEA) adopted the Counterinsurgent War Strategy in which he conjugated, alternatively, the Dirty War (military and paramilitary violence), the Democratic Opening and the programs derived from the Social Policy. LEA’s international policy was characterized by the defense of the Sovereignty of Nations, Self-determination of the Peoples and political asylum to the persecuted from the military dictatorships. In that way, LEA projected a democratic, humanitarian and Third World image.
With the Dirty War, the federal government and its armed forces disarticulated and/or annihilated the main body of the armed movements, urban and rural, in Mexico. The result of the Dirty War was 10,00 disappeared persons. In Chiapas, the federal government militarized and populated the jungle and the border with Guatemala with Indians, and started the construction of the Border Highway. With those measures, LEA’s government constructed El Yunque for containing the Guatemalan guerrillas.
In the region of Los Altos (the Highlands), with the majority of the population being indigenous, the Social Policy was concretized in the Socioeconomic Development Program of Los Altos of Chiapas (PRODESCH); a preventive program for social containment. United Nations organisms such as the FAO and UNICEF intervened in it, and the three levels of government. The PRODESCH was a product of the global policy designed by McNamara at the World Bank, whose objective was: “avoid the political costs of a rebellion.”
Within that context of war, the National Liberation Forces (FLN, their initials in Spanish) was discovered on February 13, 1974. The police were looking for guerrillas of the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre (September 23 Communist League) that had murdered the impresario Eugenio Garza Sada one year before. That operation led them to an FLN security house in Monterrey. They arrested and tortured two of its members. On February 14, the Mexican Army attacked the headquarters in Nepantla. Five combatants died there and two were detained.
The soldiers found data in the Nepantla house about the foco established in Rancho El Chilar in the municipio of Ocosingo Chiapas. Later, 3,000 federal Army members carried out Operation Diamante. Between February and March they extended a circle to locate, occupy and destroy the camp of the FLN’s first primer Emiliano Zapata guerrilla nucleus in Ocosingo, Chiapas. Seven combatants were murdered and disappeared: Elisa Irina Sáenz, Raúl Pérez Gasque, Carlos Vives, Juan Guichard Gutiérrez, Federico Carballo Subiaur, César Germán Yáñez and Fidelino Velázquez. After a very complicated decade, the FLN was in the position to found the second guerrilla nucleus in the Lacandón Jungle.
Meanwhile, the Poverty Programs were grouped together with the violent repression against the indigenous and campesino movements, in Chiapas in which the PRI governments, the federal Army, the police and the private armies of the ranchers known as Guardias Blancas (White Guards) systematically participated.
Here are some cases: 1974, 40 soldiers of the 46th battalion burned 29 huts in the Colonia San Francisco in Altamirano municipality. 1975, Tzotzil leaders of Venustiano Carranza were murdered by pistoleros of the ranchers Augusto Castellanos and Carmen Orantes; 1976, confrontation for several hours between the federal army and comuneros [1] of Venustiano Carranza. The result was 2 comuneros dead, 3 injured, 13 detained, 6 women raped and several dead soldiers; 1977, the federal Army extended a military circle in Simojovel, Huitiupán and Sabanilla, 16 ejidos were evicted and the schools were converted into barracks; 1978, in Ocosingo, the Army evicted the indigenous residents of Nuevo Momón, destroyed and burned 150 homes, resulting in 2 Tzeltals dead and 6 tortured; 1979, paid gunmen carried out attacks on campesinos of Venustiano Carranza and Villa de las Rosas and murdered 7 campesinos; 1980, circle, intimidation and military maneuvers in charge of 9,000 soldiers in the Tojolabal municipio of Las Margaritas; 1981, 45,000 soldiers effectuated counter-guerrilla maneuvers and simulations in the Chol region – Tila and Sabanilla -, in the Lacandón Jungle and on the border with Guatemala; 1982, finqueros and police attack the Tzeltals of Flor de Cacao village; 1983, the indigenous caciques of Chalchihuitán organized the massacre of 11 indigenous and the destruction and burning of homes in the village of Tzakiuc’um.
In that scenario of Social Policy and a war against the peoples, Bishop Samuel Ruiz and the pastoral agents had opted “for the poorest among the poor.” Committed, they accompany their resistance and walking in the Construction of the Kingdom of God. They did not walk blindly. The 1974 Indigenous Congress had profiled a program of struggle that would be in effect for the next two decades. A program that guided their accompaniment and the movement of the peoples: Land, health care, education and housing. In the midst of the war against the indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of Chiapas, the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas also founded, with the communist, revolutionary, political military social activist organizations that forged the Kiptic ta Lecubtesel, the Independent Central of Workers and Campesinos (CIOAC), the Organización Campesina Emiliano Zapata (OCEZ), the ARIC Union of Unions, Solidaridad Campesina Magisterial (SOCAMA) and the Organización Indígena de Los Altos de Chiapas (ORIACH).
On November 17, 1983 the FLN finally established, after five attempts, the Secondo Emiliano Zapata Guerrilla Nucleus in the Lacandón Jungle. They came with two decades of experience and the teachings that the hard blow of February 1974 taught them. The jungle, the mountains and the canyons gave them cover. Nevertheless, the social movements were the best coverings in the decade of the silent accumulation of forces. With intelligence, they moved under and among the fallen leaves of the social movements, and “they put a trigger to hope.” They had in their favor the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution and the wave of revolutionary wars in Guatemala and El Salvador. The FLN would resolve the challenges that various changes in the juncture imposed within the international ambit and their national and local impact, the differences between the groupings that opted for the mass movement and that of arms and the changes of direction among the pastoral agents and their bishop.
At the beginning of the 1980s, the federal government intervened decidedly in the peace processes in Central America: Contadora Group (1983), in the Mexico Accord prior to the de-mobilization of the Guatemalan guerrilla in (1991); In 1992, the El Salvador Peace Accords were signed in the Chapultepec Castle. Those peace processes fell upon the orientation of the San Cristóbal Diocese and fundamentally estranged it from accompanying the rebels that were preparing for war in the jungle and the mountains of Chiapas. The signs of the times had changed. For sure, the withdrawal from the communities was no minor thing.
Programs derived from the Social Policy continued systematically in the state. If with LEA (1970), the PRODESCH was the point of departure for the preventive programs and for social containment in Chiapas, López Portillo created the General Coordination of the National Plan for Depressed Zones and Marginalized Groups (COPLAMAR) (1976). With Miguel de la Madrid the price of a package of basic products was subsidized (1982); and Carlos Salinas designed the National Solidarity Program – PRONASOL (1988-1994).
On the way to the armed uprising
While the FLN’s guerrilla nucleus moved like fish in the water, we have to take into account that the waters were not quiet; they were turbulent. Other cases: 1984, ranchers and state police attacked Indigenous in Simojovel. Eight people were injured. In 1985, 2,000 police, 35 ranchers and police evicted housed peons from the Medellín and La Soledad fincas that were demanding lost wages. In 1986, Judicial police and Enrique Zardain’s bosses burn and level for the second time 50 houses in Muc’ulum Bachajón in the municipality of Chilón. In 1987, caciques and police burned the town of La Independencia in the municipality of Ocosingo. In 1988, the police kidnapped four campesinos from the CIOAC in Las Margaritas. In 1989, the rancher Roberto Zenteno murdered PMS local deputy and former leader of the CIOAC Sebastián Pérez Núñez. In 1989, Arturo Albores, the founder of the OCEZ was murdered. In 1990, the San Cristóbal Diocese denounced that in the absence of Joel Padrón, the parish priest of Simojovel, several unknown persons set fire to the Parish House. In 1991, ten police detained Father Joel Padrón. He was accused of rebellion, robbery, dispossession, conspiracy, carrying illegal weapons, criminal association, an apology for crimes, threats and gang activity… The priest’s arrest was directed at the Bishop. Patrocinio did that. In 1992, Ocosingo cattle ranchers founded the Union for Citizen Defense in order to defend against the “destabilization” that the pastoral agents promoted. In 1993, the commanders of the XXXI Military Zone reported that an Air Force captain and an Army lieutenant were murdered and later burned on lands of San Isidro el Ocotal in the municipality of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. In May of that year, the federal Army discovered a guerrilla training camp and clashed with a group of combatants in the Sierra de Corralchén.
In 1993, the presence of the guerrilla in Chiapas was no longer hidden. The aggressiveness of PRONASOL in the state was notable because of something. Patrocinio González Garrido had increased the budget for the indigenous municipios and hardened the escalation against the movements, social organizations and, above all, against the Diocese of Samuel Ruiz and the pastoral agents. Carlos Salinas dedicated a Day of Solidarity to Chiapas and inaugurated three hospitals; one of them in Guadalupe Tepeyac…
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Originally Published in Spanish by POZOL COLECTIVO
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Friday, October 16, 2015
Zibechi: New colonialisms and left values
NEW COLONIALISMS and the CRISIS OF LEFT VALUES
Mural by Diego Rivera, at the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.
By: Raúl Zibechi
When visibility is minimal because powerful storms cloud the perception of reality, it may be appropriate to enlarge one’s view, to climb slopes to look for broader observation points, in order to discern the context in which we move. In these times, when the world is crossing through multiple contradictions and interests, it’s urgent to stimulate the senses to gaze far and inside.
Times of confusion in which ethics are shipwrecked, basic points of reference disappear and something is installed like “anything goes,” which permits supporting any cause that goes against the bigger enemy, beyond all consideration of principles and values. Shortcuts lead to dead ends, like equating Putin with Lenin, to use a somewhat fashionable example.
The Russian intervention in Syria is a neocolonial act, which places Russia on the same side of history as the United States, France and England. Good, emancipating colonialisms don’t exist. As much as Russian intervention is justified with the argument of stopping the Islamic State and the imperial offensive in the region, it is nothing more than an action symmetric to one using identical methods and similar arguments that is condemned.
The question that I consider central is: Why are voices from the Latin American left raised in support of Putin? It’s evident that many have hung their hopes for a better world, on the intervention of the big powers like China and Russia, with the hope of stopping or overthrowing the still hegemonic powers. It’s understandable in view of the exploits that Washington commits in our region. But it’s a strategic error and an ethical deviation.
I would like to illuminate this especially critical juncture, appealing to a historic document: the letter to Maurice Thorez (secretary general of the French Communist Party), written in October 1956 by Aimé Césaire. The text was born in one of the corners of history, a little after the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where the crimes of Stalinism were denounced; the same month as the uprising of the Hungarian people against the pro-Russian bureaucratic regime (which resulted in thousands of deaths) and of the colonial attack Egypt for the nationalization of the Suez Canal.
Césaire renounced the party after a shameful congress in which the leadership was incapable of the least self-criticism before the revelation of crimes that, in fact, it was supporting. He was born in Martinique, like Frantz Fanon, where he was a secondary school teacher. He was a poet and the founder of the blackness movement in the 1930s. In 1950 he wrote Discourse on colonialism, with a big impact in black communities. His letter to Thorez was, in the words of Immanuel Wallerstein, “the document that best explained and expressed the distancing between the global communist movement and the different national liberation movements” (in Discurso sobre el colonialismo, Akal, p. 8).
I find three questions in his letter that illuminate the crisis of left values through which we travel.
The first is the lack of will to break with Stalinism. Césaire turns against the ethical relativism that seeks to exorcise the crimes of Stalinism with “some mechanical phrase.” It’s like that cracking of the whip that is repeated over and over, saying that Stalin “committed errors.” Murdering millions is not an error, even though it supposedly kills in the name of a just cause.
The largest part of the lefts do not make a serious and self-critical balance of the Stalinism that, as has been written in these pages, goes way beyond the figure of Stalin. What gave life to Stalinism is a model of society centered on the State and on the power of a bureaucracy that comes from a State bourgeoisie, which controls the means of production. It continues betting on a socialism that repeats that old and expired model of centralization of the means of production.
The second is that the struggles of the oppressed cannot be treated, Césaire says, “as part of a more important whole,” because a “singularity of our problems exists that cannot be reduced to any other problem.” The struggle against racism, he says, is “of a very different nature than the struggle of the French worker against French capitalism,” and cannot be considered “a fragment of this struggle.”
On this point, the anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal struggles touch the same fibers. “These forces would be faded into organizations that are not their own, made for them, made by them and adapted to objectives that only they can determine.” Even today there are those who don’t comprehend that women need their own spaces, like all oppressed peoples.
It’s about, affirms Césaire, “not confusing alliance and subordination,” something very frequent when parties of the left seek to “assimilate” the demands of the different groups below to a single cause, through the sacrosanct unity that does nothing more than homogenize differences, thereby installing new oppressions.
The third question that Césaire’s letter illuminates, highly topical, is related with universalism; in other words, with the construction of non-Eurocentric universals, in which the totality is not imposed on the diversities. “There are two ways of getting lost: by walled segregation in the particular or by dissolution into the ‘universal.’”
We are still far from constructing “a universal depository of all the particulars,” which supposes the “deepening and coexistence of all the particulars,” as Césaire wrote six decades ago.
Those who bet on powers symmetric with the existing, excluding and hegemonic ones, but of the left; those who oppose the bad bombs of the Yankees with the good bombs of the Russians, follow the path traced by Stalinism of making a clean sweep with the past and with differences, instead of working for something different, for “a world where many worlds fit.”
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Friday, October 16, 2015
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/10/16/opinion/020a2pol
Capitalism, War and Counterinsurgency in Chiapas II
Sup Marcos speaks during a storm in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo during the March of the Color of the Earth on February 28, 2001. Photo: La Jornada.
By: Gaspar Morquecho
Wars come from afar
Some 18 years ago, in June 1997 –when the Moño Colorado [1] was very popular and Zedillo was governing the country–, the Zapatista rebel chief presented us: “7 pieces to draw, color, cut out and try to arm, together with others, the global puzzle;” in other words, the 7 easy pieces of the global puzzle. The pieces are: 1) the concentration of wealth and the distribution of poverty; 2) the globalization of exploitation; 3) migration, the nomadic nightmare; 4) financial globalization and the globalization of corruption and crime; 5) the legitimate violence of an illegitimate power (?); 6) mega-politics and the dwarves; and 7) the pockets of resistance.
The essay is not misspent. It’s certain that when the guerrilla chief proposes and polishes it, putting pencil to paper, it comes out one of his best. Without a doubt, 7 pieces will have a special place once his selected works are published.
Before moving on to the construction of each of the 7 Pieces, the rebel Subcomandante warned: “Modern globalization, neoliberalism as a world system, should be understood as a new war of conquest of territories. (…) The end of the ‘Cold War’ brought with it a new framework of international relations in which the new fight for those new markets and territories produced a new world war, the Fourth. That obliged, as in all wars, a redefinition of the National States. (…) The global order returned to the old epochs of the conquests of America, Africa and Oceania. One wonders at this modernity that advances backwards, (…). In the world of the Cold Postwar vast territories, riches and, above all, qualified workforce, await a new master…”
To cement the concept of World War IV, the guerrilla, argued: “From the end of World War II to 1992, 149 wars have been unleashed in the world. The result of 23 million deaths leaves no room for doubt about the intensity of this World War III.” About that war “between Capitalism and Socialism,” the Zapatista emphasized its characteristics and to the winner: “World War III demonstrated the goodness of ‘total war’ (everywhere and in all forms) for the winner: capitalism.”
World War IV, the war for markets, arrived accompanied by an arsenal of “financial bombs” which, with their expansive waves, “reorganize and reorder that which attacks and remake it as a piece inside of the puzzle of economic globalization.” World War IV constructs a “megalopolis” in extensive geographies of the Earthly Globe: The European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Other “megalopolises” have emerged in North Africa, in South Africa, in the Near East, in the Black Sea, in the Asian Pacific; “financial bombs explode all over the planet and re-conquer territories.” In that process: “Neoliberalism operates as DESTRUCTION / DEPOBULATION on the one hand, and RECONSTRUCTION / RE-ORDERING on the other, of regions and of nations for opening new markets and modernizing the existing ones.”
If anyone learned the lesson of World War III, it was the leaders of China and Vietnam. They had been witnesses to the “political, economic and social breakup of Eastern Europe and the USSR.” The Asian Giant had inherited the social and productive organization of Mao’s China. That country with enormous territory, resources and labor force, opened its borders to receive the massive arrival of capital. Its economy had extraordinary growth and in different geographies we can read: Made in China. That country was profiled to become the world’s largest economy. For its part, Vietnam, a small socialist country with an historic conflict with China and vulnerable in the region, opted for alliance with the United States and its leaders changed the model of which Uncle Ho dreamed.
It can be important to emphasize that when the Zapatista guerrilla wrote 7 Pieces, “5 billion human beings inhabited Planet Earth.” On it, only 500 million people live with comforts while 4.5 billion suffer poverty and try to survive.” In 2015, more than 7 billion people live on Planet Earth. Capital and poverty continue being concentrated in opposite poles. World War IV continues its course. In order to reach the “re-conquest of territories (…) the financial centers bring forward a triple criminal and brutal strategy: they proliferate ‘regional wars’ and ‘internal conflicts,’ capital follows routes of atypical accumulation, and mobilizes large masses of workers.” (…) “World War IV, with its process of destruction / de-population and reconstruction / reordering, provokes the displacement of millions of people.” In 1995 the number of displaced persons was more than 27 million; in 2005 the number came to 38 million. In 2015, the number of displaced or persons or refugees in the word add up to 60 million. Of course, 99 out of every 100 have access to a mobile telephone.
And why all of the above?
It turns out that 18 years after the 7 Pieces from the Zapatista rebel, the United States, the first economic and military power, stirred the waters of the world markets and in the first days of October headed the creation of the largest trade agreement on the planet: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The Trade Ministers from 12 nations of the Pacific, Mexico among them, reached an agreement that “would reduce tariffs and establish common standards. With the TPP they propose stimulating trade between the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam.
Capitalism reiterated its strength and capacity for strategic planning. Its engineers worked at least 5 years on the design and construction of the TPP. The countries involved took two years so that their respective Congresses may approve it or not. It’ very likely that the impact of the recent financial bombs and the fall of oil prices that unhinged economies in the entire world in 2015, may have created the best of scenarios so that the TPP would come to fruition.
Mexico and Chiapas in the World War IV theatre of operations
The FTA was signed with Carlos Salinas. With Salinas-Peña Nieto, Mexico participates in the TPP. Chronologically, in 2014 Salinas-Peña Nieto strengthened the Pacific Alliance in which it participates with Peru and Chile. In September 2015, Peña Nieto announced the creation of Special Economic Zones that he later located in the port of Lázaro Cárdenas on the border of Michoacán and Guerrero; in Oaxaca, one of the states where the Inter-Oceanic Industrial Corridor is constructed; and in Puerto Madero, Chiapas. On October 5, in Atlanta, it was all consummated. A dozen ministers from the Pacific nations reached the trade agreement.
The president of the United States, Barack Obama, reacted immediately and expressed: “We won’t let countries like China write las rules of the global economy.” A message to the rest of its allies: Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa, in other words, to the BRICS trade block. In Mexico, Salinas-Peña Nieto celebrated the conclusion of the TPP negotiations, by classifying it as a “vanguard agreement” with which Mexico strengthens its trade integration with the world and reiterated the promise of the last three decades: “The Trans-Pacific Partnership will translate into greater opportunities for investment and well-paid employment for Mexicans.”
The other wars in Mexico and Chiapas
A little more than three decades have passed since the governments of Mexico have brought the national economy to navigate in the turbulent waters of World War IV. Independence and Sovereignty are what least remain. If the privatization process started with Miguel de la Madrid and Carlos Salinas, deregulation of the economy and the end of agrarian distribution with Zedillo, Fox and Calderón delivered part of the country to the mining companies. Obeying the Yankees, Calderón established the “drug war” that has left a result of more than 100,000 dead, more than 20,000 disappeared, thousands of orphans and very probably more than a million displaced. The war continues with Salinas-Peña Nieto; a war that covers at least 80% of the Mexican geography and that continues filling thousands of Mexican families with grief or in mourning clothes.
In Chiapas, the counterinsurgency war against the Zapatista peoples and communities followed the violent peace before 1994. The armed forces have occupied the territory. The federal government has responded to each one of their peaceful political and civilian initiatives with a provocation and maintains certain kinds of “internal conflicts:” agrarian policies in different regions of the state; with mining companies in the border zone; wind projects, environmental projects, because of discrimination and because of violations of human rights and of the rights of indigenous peoples.
In the course of the war, Salinas-Peña Nieto’s visits to Chiapas have been frequent: In February 2013, in Las Margaritas he launched the Crusade against Hunger. On February 13, 2014, he inaugurated the Palenque International Airport and re-launched the San Cristóbal-Palenque Superhighway project. The Zapatista Galeano was murdered in May. That crime postponed the EZLN’s programmed events for one year. On July 8, in Catazajá, he broached the theme of immigration. With Pérez Molina, president of Guatemala, he put into effect the Secure Pass program. On August 8, in San Juan Chamula, he affirmed that with the structural reforms Mexico would have a better platform to grow economically. On December 2 in Cintalapa, he celebrated the start of his third year of government and promised 1.8 billion pesos more to Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero.
On March 11, the Secretary of National Defense announced the construction of a new military barracks in Chicomuselo, Chiapas. On March 24, 2015, Salinas-Peña Nieto announced that they would begin actions in Chiapas for the development of Southern Mexico and put into effect a program to impel employment. On August 11, International Indigenous Peoples Day, he announces that communities of Chiapas will enter into the Special Economic Zones Program to create more jobs and generate productive investment in them. On August 29, the Chiapas government released two of the Tojolabal Indians implicated in the death of the Zapatista Galeano. On September 29, 2015, Salinas-Peña Nieto announced in Tapachula, Chiapas, the creation of Special Economic Zones in the indigenous communities of Chiapas with investment from private capital: “We must move from welfare, which has been insufficient and has only permitted us to mitigate poverty, to what we really seek, which is inclusive growth.” In that way, the capitalist plus is added to the expense for social control.
Without a doubt, the Salinas-Peña Nieto War is directed at the “recuperation of lost spaces.” The autonomy of the indigenous Zapatista peoples in Chiapas is another of their military-political objectives. It’s about crushing the “pockets of resistance.” Nevertheless, the plans for the War Front on the Southern Border are the greatest threat in the region.
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[1]. El Moño Colorado translates into English as The Red Topknot – It’s the name of a song that was very popular in the early days of the EZLN and played over and over again at the 1st Gathering Against Neoliberalism and For Humanity in 1996.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Pozol Colectivo
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Thursday, October 8, 2015
En español: http://www.pozol.org/?p=11372
The second level of the Escuelita Zapatista
Zapatista youth and women form much of the current EZLN support base. This photo is from La Realidad during the homage to fallen Compañero Galeano – killed in a paramilitary attack in La Realidad on May 2, 2014.
By: Gilberto López y Rivas/I
On October 3 the time period ended for sending in the six questions that each second level student of the Escuelita Zapatista (Little School) must send in order to be evaluated on their performance and, in case of being approved, passing to the next level until eventually completing six. For that, the students must study Chapter 1 of the book Critical thought versus the capitalist hydra, as well as watching a video of a little more than three hours long, in which the genealogy and current characteristics of the EZLN’s resistance and rebellion are shown, in the voice of around 30 of its local “responsables,” [1] men and women, coming from different autonomous municipalities within the five Caracoles where the Good Government Juntas are located: La Realidad, Oventic, La Garrucha, Morelia and Roberto Barrios.
From the study of Chapter 1 what stands out are the participations of the current EZLN spokesperson, Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, who in the theme of Political Economy is recapitulating how the communities lived 30 years ago, how those who are not organized as Zapatistas live and how the same Zapatistas live now. Before the arrival of the EZLN in 1983, the indigenous of Chiapas did not exist for the capitalist system; they were the abandoned by the governments and survived on Mother Earth. They resisted domination by the landowners, who unlawfully were retaining the best lands, protected by their armed forces, which were called guardias blancas. [2] There were no roads, clinics or hospitals, programs or grants then. With time, it wasn’t enough for them (the landowners) to have the best lands, now they wanted the mountains, nature’s riches and, as a consequence, they organized dispossessions and evictions, because of which they reformed constitutional Article 27, whose intent is to privatize the ejidos, selling or renting Mother Earth. When the uprising happens in 1994, a counterinsurgency policy begins in order to avoid the expansion of Zapatismo. Those communities that let their ejidos be privatized by selling their land are in the streets, because they no longer have anywhere to grow their corn and beans, also remaining at the mercy of this policy. The use of the term partidistas (party members) characterizes this social sector that has fallen into the government’s trap, distinguishing clearly the non-antagonistic contradiction of Zapatismo with those who are even considered brothers and sisters; about the paramilitaries: “those are some sons of bitches!”
The Zapatistas recuperated Mother Earth beginning by organizing collectively, combining different forms of agrarian work at the town, region and municipal level, and by recognizing failed attempts and errors. He warns that we must not idealize the Zapatistas, thinking that when they say clean, everything is clean. The trick is to be organized and to distinguish that it’s one thing to say it and another to do it. They discovered resistance in the various forms of doing collective work reacting to those who had been sent from the government to watch over them, like the teachers, who were expelled from the zone, or coming to the conclusion that they wouldn’t receive anything from the bad government, which, in turn, conditioned the start of a large quantity of tasks in different ambits of the land’s exploitation, production, trade, health and education that were giving sustainability to the autonomous Zapatista process versus dependency, loss of identity, drug addiction and subjection of the party members.In this way Sub Moisés synthesizes the resistance that must be nourished from generation to generation, if one doesn’t want the exploiters to come back: “One of the bases of what constitutes our Zapatista economic resistance, is Mother Earth. We don’t have those houses, cement blocks and all that stuff the bad government gives, but we do have education; and our practice is that the peoples are the ones that command and the governments obey… we don’t pay for electricity water, or land ownership, nothing. But we also receive nothing from the system… And that is our way of being and that’s how we are going to continue working, struggling, and we will die that way if it’s necessary, defending what we are now.”
The Zapatista economy responds to the needs of the resistance and to the counterinsurgency strategy. They handle money only occasionally, like when they have to pay for gasoline. Everything is done starting with political and ideological work, and with much explanation. Sub Moisés gives the example of education, where the teacher with collective work is working his milpa, his bean field, his pasture and that way he can have his little payment. The thing is that no one remains without working collectively for the struggle, for autonomy, and for that the towns, the regions, the autonomous municipalities and the zones are in agreement as to how they want to work. The Zapatista economy has its banks, whose profits also are going to the autonomy movement. Loans are made for emergencies and the funds are made up of contributions from the support bases. He clarified how there were non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that cloaked themselves in the Zapatista struggle and obtained funds to pay for their bureaucracy, in the words of Sub Moisés: “Then from the shoulders of those who are struggling because of injustice and inequality, and misery and everything else, they still hang others from there. How smart we are, right?”
Operations in the rebel clinics are paid for from the rebel economy, even for the partisans, at prices much lower than those of the hospital market. All that is watched over thoroughly, given that it’s the work and sweat of the people; therefore, they demand that their authorities render accounts. Collective work is not idealized and with a great sense of humor the EZLN’s spokesperson comments about those who are smoking their cigarette or smoothing their machete a lot, in order to pass time, in other words, to play tricks. But to these problems, the funny thing is that: “We didn’t stop. We are very stubborn; we are very foolish. We didn’t abandon it. We looked for a solution, counseling, giving clarifications, explanations, well, and that’s how we are going to continue.”
Translator’s Notes:
[1] “responsable” translates into “the one responsible” for something. One of the questions a Chiapas Support Committee member sent in before the October deadline was: for who/what are they responsible?
[2] “guardias blancas” translates as “white guards.” They were the landowners’ private security forces, often local police moonlighting.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Friday, October 9, 2015
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/10/09/opinion/022a1pol
Chiapas Support Committee 