Chiapas Support Committee
Home of the Compañero Manuel blog on zapatistas & mexico
Joint CNI and EZLN-CG comuniqué on Ostula
Semeí Verdía is the self-defense leader of Ostula, currently under arrest after the military attack.
Joint CNI and EZLN-CG comuniqué about the attack of federal forces on the Indigenous community of Santa María Ostula
To the Nahua Indigenous Community of Santa María Ostula, Aquila, Michoacán:
To the National and International Sixth:
To the people of Mexico and the World:
July 21, 2015
Given the violent events perpetrated against the indigenous community of Santa María Ostula on July 19, 2015, by a large commando made up of members of the Federal Preventative Police, the Secretary of National Defense, and the Secretary of the Navy in which Ostula community police commander Cemeí Verdía Zepeda was detained, in which federal soldiers murdered, WITH A BULLET TO THE FACE, THE 12-YEAR-OLD CHILD EDILBERTO REYES GARCÍA, and in which the following people were injured: the child Yeimi Nataly Pineda Reyes, 6-years-old; Edith Balbino Vera; Delfino Antonio Alejo Ramos, 17-years-old; Horacio Valladares Manuel, 32-years-old; José Nicodemos Macías Zambrano, 21-years-old; and Melesio Cristino Dirzio, 60-years-old…
WE DENOUNCE:
The criminal behavior of the above listed military and police bodies and their complicity with organized crime, in this case the Knights Templar, enacted in order to escalate the war of conquest that has been waged for years now against the Nahua indigenous community of Santa María Ostula. The goal of this war of conquest is to occupy the community’s territories in favor of mining and transnational tourist interests, and to punish this community for having dared to take back the land from which they had been displaced and for having defended themselves—by putting into practice their right to live—from organized crime, which today serves as the paramilitary branch of the Mexican State.
The motive for these criminal acts is none other than to advance of the war of capitalist conquest against Ostula and against the originary peoples and indigenous and non-indigenous communities in this country.
Given this, WE DEMAND:
- THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL FREEDOM OF COMMANDER CEMEÍ VERDÍA ZEPEDA, AND THAT ALL CHARGES AGAINST HIM BE DROPPED.
- THE PUNISHMENT OF THE AUTHORITIES AND MEMBERS OF MILITARY AND POLICE BODIES WHO MURDERED THE CHILD EDILBERTO REYES GARCÍA AND BEAT AND INJURED VARIOUS OTHER COMMUNITY MEMBERS OF OSTULA.
- Respect for Santa María Ostula’s community lands which foreign mining companies like Ternium—with the support of the bad government in collusion with organized crime—intend to take over, dispossessing the community.
- The reappearance, alive and well, of the 6 disappeared community members, and the punishment of the intellectual and material authors of the murders of the 33 Ostula community members who have been killed over the last four years in their struggle to defend their land and freedoms.
- Respect for and guarantee of the continued functioning of the community police of the indigenous community of Santa María Ostula.
Finally, we call upon the international community and the brothers and sisters of the national and international Sixth to stay alert to any happenings that may occur in the territory of the Indigenous Community of Santa María Ostula, joining in solidarity with their struggle and their demands.
Attentively,
July 2015
Never Again a Mexico Without Us
National Indigenous Congress
Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee—General Command of the EZLN.
Mexican Army Kills 3 and arrests Cemeí Verdía in Ostula
Last night, we received 3 emails from the team in solidarity with Santa Maria Ostula. Two of them (Bulletins 1 and 2) described the armed attacks and deaths. This is all over the Mexican press this morning. The third contained a petition that the Network of human rights organizations in Mexico is asking people to sign. Please consider signing the petition: http://redtdt.org.mx/?p=3567
BULLETIN No 2
Attack of federal, state and municipal forces on the Indigenous Community of Santa María Ostula, Municipality of Aquila Michoacán. Two minors and one adult man were murdered, as well as several injured. (July 19, 2015, 11 PM.)
TO: CIVIL SOCIETY
TO: HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS
TO: THE HONEST COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA
As we denounced in Bulletin No. 1, today federal, state and municipal forces attacked the indigenous community of Santa María Ostula, Municipality of Aquila Michoacán in a joint operation that the “Michoacán Coordination Group” deployed. Two minors and one adult man were murdered as a result of the attacks and several comuneros are gravely injured.
Also, members of the Army arrested the comunero Refugio Serrano. As of this time his whereabouts are unknown.
Parallel to the arrest of Cemeí [1] Verdía Zepeda (First Commander of the Santa María Ostula Community Police and the General Coordinator of the Autodefensas of Aquila, Coahuayana and Chinicuila municipalities) members of the Michoacán Coordination Group attempted to detain the Treasurer of the Communal Wealth Commission of Santa María Ostula. In said action, for the purpose of passing through the comuneros and provoking the community into a confrontation with the Army, they stole radios for communication that the community uses to guard its communal territory. The Vigilance Council’s seal was also stolen.
After Cemeí Verdía Zepeda’s arrest, the community established different checkpoints in each Encargatura [2] for the purpose of avoiding the arrest of more community members. Nevertheless, at approximately 5:00 PM, federal and state forces attacked the checkpoints that members of the community placed in the Encargaturas of Xayacalan and El Duin which are located on Highway 200, from Lázaro Cárdenas to Manzanillo. At these points the federal forces used their vehicles to impact the Community Police checkpoints and they burned several pickup trucks and trailers that were there. They also used tear gas to attack the comuneros.
Next, the federal forces shot indiscriminately at members of the community that were in the Encargatura of Ixtapilla, also located on Highway 200, from Lázaro Cárdenas to Manzanillo. As a result, the 12-year old boy Herilberto Reyes García, the 6-year old girl Neymi Natali Pineda Reyes and Melesio Cristiano, 60, were murdered. Horacio Valladares, 32, and Antonio Alejo Ramos, 17, were injured.
Added to the above, inside of this operation the municipal capital of Aquila was surrounded by members of the federal forces impeding the exit of Aquila’s self-defense group, which is in solidarity with the Community of Santa María Ostula against attacks of which it is the object.
Cemeí Verdía Zepeda was moved in a helicopter to the city of Morelia, where he is accused of: “probable violation of the Firearms and Explosives Law and his probable participation in crimes related to the destruction of electoral material.”
The foregoing deals with a violation of the agreements that had been signed between the community and the government, federal as well as state, wherein it is established the commitment to respect the Community Police of the indigenous community of Santa María Ostula.
It’s appropriate to add that none of the local organized crime bosses, belonging to the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) “Cartel” that operates in the region have been arrested.
At this time the community experiences a climate of extreme tension.
While Cemeí Verdía is detained, the community has named the comunero Germán Ramírez as First Commander of the Santa María Ostula Community Police and has asked for guaranties for his life, as well as for the rest of the community, after the attacks that federal and state forces have perpetrated against the community.
Once again, we call on you to be attentive and alert to the grave situation that the community of Ostula and the Costa-Sierra region are experiencing.
Sincerely,
Team of support and solidarity with the indigenous community of Santa María Ostula
July 19, 2015
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[1] This compañero’s name is also spelled as Semeí in the media.
[2] An Encargatura would be a governmental subdivision within the municipality (county) of Santa Maria Ostula; in other words, a small village within the county.
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Published in Spanish by Pozol Colectivo
Monday, July 20, 2015
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
http://www.pozol.org/?p=10988/
For background on Santa Maria Ostula and Xayakalan, see: https://compamanuel.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/ostula-autonomy-self-defense-natural-resources-and-narcos/
Para noticias en español y fotos: http://michoacantrespuntocero.com/ejercito-abre-fuego-contra-indigenas-de-ostula-hay-varios-heridos-y-un-nino-muerto/
And please read the article we posted below this one by Gilberto López y Rivas on the reasons that the Mexican government represses the autonomous municipalities.
https://compamanuel.wordpress.com/2015/07/20/obstacles-to-indigenous-autonomy/
Obstacles to Indigenous Autonomy
OBSTACLES TO THE AUTONOMIES OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
In memory of the 43 disappeared
By: Gilberto López y Rivas
The autonomic processes that the indigenous peoples champion confront arduous obstacles and challenges, essential among them, the neoliberal capitalist State’s lack of will to open spaces for effective recognition, even inside of the limited rights formally recognized in the Constitution, principally in Article 2, and of those established within international legal frameworks, like Convention 169 of the la International Labor Organization (ILO) and the Universal Declaration on Indigenous Rights of the United Nations Organization.
The constitutional reform on the matter of indigenous rights, which was enacted in 2001, was not satisfactory to anyone within the ambit of the native organizations independent of the State, so that the indigenous peoples undertook the path of constructing autonomy by means of deeds, de facto autonomy, the most consistent case being that of the indigenous Zapatistas-Mayas in Chiapas, which vindicates not having any relationship with the state and federal governments, although in the daily life of the territories, the municipal authorities of partisan origin frequently go to the Zapatista Good Government Juntas to resolve all kinds of problems.
For its part, the Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities-Community Police (CRAC-PC, its initials in Spanish), in Guerrero, the Purépecha municipality of Cherán, Michoacán, and other peoples and organizations that resist silently, maintain a relationship with the State. The CRAC-PC is permanently conflictive, and Cherán is equally confronted but legalized due to the victory obtained in their complaint before the State Electoral Institute, which recognized the ability of its residents to name their authorities and to govern themselves according to their own organizational structures. This is a notable difference with respect to the Zapatistas and the CRAC-PC, and also in relation to other experiences of municipal capitals that remain dominated by mestizos, as among the Wixáritari (Huicholes) of the state of Jalisco, where in several of them, a majority of the indigenous population is socially and geographically segregated and is also subordinated to this sort of mestizo domination on the political level.
Thus, de facto autonomies predominate in the indigenous self-governments with different gradations with respect to their relationship to the State, although always conflictive, contradictory and ambiguous, carrying the weight of a discriminatory perspective towards the indigenous world and a permanent policy of co-optation of processes underway, or if possible, of their eradication. These autonomies, for example among the Zapatista Mayas, are developed within the context of a counterinsurgency strategy or a war of exhaustion on the part of the Army (the anvil), and the para-militarization (the hammer) that characterizes it, permanent aggressions taking place from groups that come from various political organizations. They are paramilitaries and they do violence to the autonomous municipalities by means of invading the former finca (estate) lands recuperated by the indigenous Zapatistas in 1994.
So, all the autonomies, as much those protected in Constitutional Article 2 as the de facto ones, and also those that developed under more consistent local constitutional precepts, like in Oaxaca, live in a situation of permanent siege, of confrontation, whose origin is the State, the local oligarchic groups, the police and the Army, besides the corporations of capitalist extractivism in their frenetic search for resources and territorial dispossession.
Thus, the autonomies are enclosed by behind the scenes powers protected by the heavy hand of the State in different ways. In the last decade we must also add the repressive power that the State exercises through drug trafficking, and organized crime in general, which represents one more sector of the capitalist economy, and also, together with the “war against drug trafficking,” form multiple facets of the State’s strategy (and that of its United States mentors) to beat up on the indigenous and campesino world, and the group of regional and national oppositions. The Iguala Massacre and the enforced disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa teachers college students constitute the macabre culmination of this strategy of a criminal State.
Like the capitalist corporations of timber, mining, tourism, etcetera that seek to take possession of indigenous peoples’ resources, what is at the center of the “drug trafficking problem” is the effort to dispossess them of their territoriality, the material basis of their reproduction and the strategic space of their struggles. Their purpose is to expropriate from the indigenous peoples their lands-resources-labor, and the armed forces and police are accomplices of this subtraction beginning with their repressive and counterinsurgency actions carried out with the support of the paramilitary groups that operate like the clandestine arm of the dirty war. The militarization supposedly for “fighting crime” doesn’t bring a decrease of illegal activities, as the extensive zones of the Mexican Republic under virtual military occupation prove.
Organized crime is nothing more than the clandestine face of the neoliberal capitalist system, with its inherent unrestrained violence, psychopathic and without social and political mediation to control it. It is highly profitable economically; besides, starting with the fact that the United States is the principal provider of weapons for the drug trafficking groups. The Independent announced in 2004 that: “drug trafficking is now third globally in generating cash, after oil and arms trafficking” (February 29).
The only possibility of an effective defense in the face of this phenomenon in the indigenous world –as the Zapatista Good Government Juntas; Cherán, in Michoacán; the Community Police of Guerrero, or the Nasa in the Cauca of Colombian geography demonstrate– is the strengthening of the autonomies, starting with those that have achieved controlling –not without difficulties– the presence of organized crime in indigenous territories.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Friday, July 17, 2015
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/07/17/opinion/021a2pol
SupGaleano: Chiapas, Mexico, the World
Chiapas, Mexico, the World. (Passage from the text “A World War,” May-June 2015, by SupGaleano, in “Our View of the Hydra,” part II of volume I of “Critical Thought Versus the Capitalist Hydra”)
SupGaleano consulting his notes at the Seminar on Critical Thought versus the Capitalist Hydra
The first thing that got our attention was the protests and disagreement on social media. Then came the articles that managed to get a place on the pages of the paid independent media. So, a team of Tercios Compas [Zapatista Media] was sent to confirm or dismiss the reports.
If you pick up your camera and photograph a series of “onsite” images of one of the principal cities of the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, you will see the disorder, abandonment, and chaos that reign there.
But if, over time, you zoom out to a broader view, you will begin to notice a particular logic and order to this chaos.
Now, if you combine a panoramic view over time and space, you will have a fairly accurate image of reality. Not of the image represented there, but rather the genealogy of that image. That is, you will see the before, during, and after of that image.
Take for example the capital of Chiapas, the city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Originally founded by Zoques, later conquered by Mexicas, it was named by the latter “Tochtlán,” meaning “place or home of the rabbits,” or “where rabbits abound.” Later it became “Tuchtlán.” The Spanish conquest converted the word into “Tuxtla.” Then it would take on the last name of General Joaquín Miguel Gutiérrez Canales. For a time the city would fight San Cristóbal de las Casas for the dubious honor of being the state capital.
In the image you capture, you can find everything except coherence: supposed urban construction projects, carried out without official announcement, traffic signals, or alternative routes; streets that only exist in name on a street sign; large spectacles where that “famous blonde” Manuel Velasco Coello, or one of his accomplices, reiterate that they do in fact honor their word, while the principal transportation routes in the city were or are destroyed.
If you take the time to travel the city streets, you will note this irrationality and begin to think that one would indeed have to be an imbecile to carry out construction projects in this manner. You might even think that those who govern Chiapas are nothing but a bunch of immature adolescents and idiots playing—badly—Simcity on the streets of Tuxtla, San Cristóbal and Comitán. And for that you would lack neither evidence nor argument.
These “urbanization projects” have thrown dozens of small and medium-sized businesses into bankruptcy; they have thrown thousands of Chiapans out of work; they have caused fatal accidents, and they are responsible for more than one tragedy in a Chiapan home due to the delay in transport time for ambulances. The “non-quantifiable” damages with regard to vehicles and time are great.
What’s more, the only small businesses that have survived this urban war are the tire companies, muffler distributors, and mechanic shops. The road projects that have been finished are flanked by “for sale” and “for rent” signs, as well as by abandoned old buildings and shiny new ones.
It would be comical if it weren’t tragic.
If you talk to any former owner of a small or medium-sized business and that person gives you the history of how they—egged on by the municipal and state governments—opposed the mobilizations by the democratic teachers’ movement, they will tell you:
“We carried out the ridiculous. We were complaining that the teachers’ marches and blockades were lowering our sales, and it turns out that it was the government’s construction projects that bankrupted us. Look, this whole circuit here was made up of small and medium-sized businesses and all of them went out of business. Now there are foreign businesses and tons of chain stores. The city literally shut down, as if it was under siege, but it wasn’t the teachers or the Zapatistas who did it, it was the government. Sure, the teachers maintained their blockades for a few hours, a day, a week. But the government shut off transit throughout the city for almost a year and in some places you still can’t get through. Tell me, what business or company can withstand that for such a long time? Only the big ones, those that have the capital to survive the drop in sales. Or those who went so deeply into debt that now they are working to pay the bank back for the loan it gave them so that they could work. Yes, it’s absurd. Now they work to pay the bank that loaned them the money so they could work in order to pay it back. We had to close up shop, fire our workers, and sell the business. Look, that place where there is now a franchise, that belonged to my family for decades. They always told us we should fear those who rebelled, and the teachers, then the Zapatistas, then the teachers again, always the teachers. That all those people wanted to take what was ours, break things, loot our businesses, ruin us—that’s what they told us. And it turns out that the ones who ended up robbing us, breaking us (the speaker gestures to the broken-up street, worse than a dirt road), looting us, and ruining us were the governments themselves. It doesn’t even matter which party. Around here they have said they’re from the PRI, the PAN, the PRD, the Green Ecology Party, whatever they feel like being. But it’s always the same people: the Sabines, the Velascos, the Albores, the Orantes. One day they’re one color and the next day another color. And we like fools were putting up our signs saying: “We insist that the “Rule of Law” be applied so that the government could exercise repression while alleging that we had demanded it. And it was that damned “Rule of Law” that ended up screwing us over! And if we were to denounce that? Where would we do so? Where, if the local media are totally bought off and the national media also get their part of the payoff? Yes, here and there there’s a local outlet that takes a risk and publishes something on this, but they can do little to nothing against the big media, which aren’t really that big and are merely the spokespeople for the government currently in office: before they were Alboristas, later Mendeguchiistas, then Sabinistas, and now they are Velasquistas, and tomorrow whatever but they are and always will be shameless. No, no problem at all, what does it matter to me if you say that I am from the CANACO, if the real problem I have now is how to pay the debts I have to the bank. I sold everything and it still isn’t enough, and there isn’t anything left to draw from. We were so afraid of the poor and it was the rich and the government that screwed us over.
Go ahead, take a look anywhere. You’ll see I’m not lying. There are signs declaring that the government paved this or that street but they didn’t even fill the potholes. It’s a fraud, a total fraud. Here we were so afraid of those below, and those from the aboves of elsewhere came to conquer us. Employment with the new companies? A lie. Those companies come with their manager, administrator, accountant, and supervisor already assigned. At most they’ll contract somebody to attend the parking garage. They don’t even hire for cleaning services; cleaning and security companies also come in from elsewhere. This city isn’t what it was anymore, and it won’t be that again. It’s worse. Less and less Chiapan all the time.
In effect, the capital city changed its face: instead of the original businesses that were here, now wherever you look there are franchise brands and large companies. In the commercial centers, the small businesses with a small storefront close almost immediately and are replaced by others. At every intersection there is an army of windshield-washers and sidewalk vendors of everything imaginable, taking turns knocking on the passing vehicles asking for something, even just a coin. This image is repeated across other Chiapan cities… and across the rest of the urban scene of the country.
Are those who govern this chaos clumsy idiots?
Yes, they are.
But the urban and neighborhood disorder isn’t due to their collective stupidity, with its changing colors and initials.
What has happened and what is currently happening is a purposeful destruction. The plan doesn’t emerge from the very limited intellectual quotient of those who say they govern (or aspire to do so), from their unlimited ambition for stealing or their ancestral corruption. It comes from further above. Those who govern are mere administrators that get to take a piece of the loot for administering the destruction, and then the reconstruction. The large real estate companies and the usurers, where the names of the local political class also appear, wait for the urban construction projects—purposefully slow and without any rational logic—to drive the fragile local economy into despair and obligate the local “decent people” to sell. Then they wait for the construction projects to conclude at their leisure. And boom: what they bought for ten is now worth a thousand. Of course, they have to give a little something to the authority, the one who holds office and the one who aspires to it. Where else will the advertising and vote-buying money come from? What has been carried out here is a true conquest, and the resulting impoverishment no longer only corresponds to indigenous people, but also to workers and people in the neighborhood. Now a slimmed down middle class has to choose between governmental or political party bureaucracy, badly paid work, or exile.
But this isn’t only in Chiapas.
In Mexico the analysts from above are pulling out their well-groomed hair seeing that the reforms they so applauded have done nothing but create more disorder in the chaotic national economy.
They complain, for example, that energy reform hasn’t brought the immediate ‘milk and honey’ that was promised. But the objective of the reforms was precisely this: to disorder and destroy.
Energy reform, for example, is but the bugle call for the launch of a mad dash toward dispossession. And we’re not talking here only about those territories under the care of the original peoples. We are also referring to pension funds, that is, the pensions of the working class.
All in all, we see that above there are still those who believe that Mexico’s salvation lies with these reforms. Or that it is merely the selling off of the national patrimony.
But down below it should be clear that the objective of the reforms is to finish the destruction of the little that is still standing… in order to reconstruct and repopulate.
The target of the urban war that has modified the “face” of the cities is not only land plots and buildings. Services make up the main course. The provisioning of potable water is managed with calculating perversity: scarcity feeds the emergence of water pipe companies that displace the traditional companies and gradually monopolize the market. And just as with water, so it goes with transportation, communications, security, and even trash collection.
A note here: the false argument that tends to “support” the necessity for the privatization of these services is that privatization will improve service; it will be cheaper and of better quality.
There is not a single case that supports this claim. All privatized utilities are more expensive, of poorer quality, and terrible service.
Accustomed to a world where poverty and misfortune always afflict another geography or calendar, the poorly-named middle class begins to find itself more and more often among the victims and not among the spectators (and never in the position of executioner, although it longs to be so).
The process of urbanization, which would be slow if it were rational, is now madness. It is as if a war were underway, and instead of armored vehicles, it is the construction machinery that, paradoxically, destroys. If a logical reasoning would be to create adequate services and then urbanize, the reality is the contrary: urbanize and later see about services.
Here you have an option: to attribute this chaos to lack of skill, corruption, and government blunders; or attribute it to an administered chaos with the goal of later reordering.
The first option implies that the majority of the population look for changes in [the governing] colors, with the hope that having someone in government who is less stupid, less thieving, and less clumsy will lead the cities to recover their idyllic image of the past, to a yesterday where problems happened outside of one’s immediate environment and one’s home wasn’t just an extension of the nightmare.
In this option, the same names of the political class appear, claiming experience and maturity, but under different initials. And since the decisions to be made are over colors and promises, well then if red failed, let’s try blue, or green, or brown, or orange, or whatever old pattern now appears dressed as the new.
In this schema, the problem is an administrative one. And in this case, social problems are not systemic but an issue of an administration that is poor, corrupt, or clumsy, or in Mexico, all three.
For this option as survival plan, there are calendars: each calendar period you can try to change colors; maybe this time it will work. But life continues its course and one’s basic needs don’t subordinate themselves to the electoral calendar. So you follow whoever offers to resolve things most immediately, even though this means the destruction of your future.
You understand that the majority of people will react in that fashion. Or you don’t understand that and you think those people are ignorant, or lacking dignity, conscience, and shame.
So you decide to participate, or not. With passion alight, you make one color yours as if it were a sports team. You join the game, yelling and shouting your head off. The game ends with its winners and losers, and life goes on. Until the next game.
This isn’t about judging, but about understanding. And here is a problem that requires critical thought, now not only an effort at scientific thought but rather one aimed at defining a strategy of resistance, of survival, of life.
Are social problems due to a lack of administrative capacity, of political purpose, of integrity, of State vision? Or are they the unavoidable consequence of a social system?
That is, do the fundamental decisions, those that set the path of national society let’s say, still belong to the state sphere, the government, the public administration?
Even palliatives and short-term remedies, are they possible?
A good part of the world thinks this problem has been located in public administration. And the almost unanimous diagnosis is that it is an issue of corruption within the governmental apparatus.
But here the issue is that there is no politically defined flag to combat corruption. The right, the left, and the “independent” political sphere are all against administrative corruption. All are eager to offer integrity and honesty… and all end up caught up in some scandal.
And here then is a fundamental question, according to we Zapatistas: the nation-state, that is, the state as we know it, has it remained untouched in the system’s war?
Or are we faced with a hologram, an image of what it once was, a cardboard figure into which various people put their face for the photo of the season?
Or perhaps neither one thing nor the other; rather that the nation-state is no longer what it was, but it maintains some resistance against supranational powers?
When the representatives of some European state, let’s say Greece, sit down to talk to Madam Angela Merkel, are they talking to the Bundestag or to the International Monetary Fund… or with the European Central Bank… or with the European Commission… or with all four… or with none of the above?
In order to know the answer, according to our thinking, we need to reconstruct the genealogy of the nation-state and compare our conclusion to the current reality. Then we can ask: what were the foundations of the state, and which of these have been maintained, which have been disappeared, and which have mutated?
What were its functions, its place, its sphere of influence or its areas of interest?
At first glance it appears evident that some of its principle characteristics lie as victims of the ongoing war. It is more and more difficult to talk of sovereignty, territory, authority, the monopoly on violence, of juridical domination, of independence.
Of course, one has to be careful about the evidence, but clarifying what the State is, is necessary and urgent.
Oh yes, I’m sorry, but this thing of “the State” is much more complicated than the twisted lines in Game of Thrones.
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(Prequels and sequels in volume I of “Critical Thought Versus the Capitalist Hydra”) [1]
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*[1] The Words of the Zapatistas at the Seminar on Critical Thought versus the Capitalist Hydra has been published.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Enlace Zapatista
July 14, 2015
Zibechi: Latin America in the new world order
Pope Francisco in Ecuador with Indigenous children and President Rafael Correa
By: Raúl Zibechi
The nation or region that does not have a strategic project, and holds on firmly to the steering wheel in the worst geopolitical storms is destined to get dragged along by the dominant winds. Latin America is letting the opportunity to break with its subordinate role as the empire’s backyard pass by, precisely because of lacking two conditions: a project and political stability.
South America, the region that is in the best condition to break with the mold that the United States imposes, finds itself divided and the countries that could focus on new directions are paralyzed. As a group, they have lost weight in the international arena and in the principal forums.
The document 2015 United States National Military Strategy, recently published and focused on the contention of China and Russia, mentions all the regions of the planet in various passages, but barely makes side references to Latin America and the Caribbean. What it doesn’t means is that the Pentagon has no policy towards the region, but rather that it does not perceive bigger problems in its backyard, where it only worries about “the transnational criminal organizations.”
Two meetings are happening at this time in Ufa, in the southern Urals: the summits of the BRICS countries and of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). For the Chinese newspaper Global Times, the double meeting –in reality its about the convergence of interests– reflects “a profound change in the Euro-Asiatic situation” with the ability to influence all of the world, through powerful mechanisms like the BRICS Development Bank, the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (Global Times, July 8, 2015). In both summits the role of the Latin American region is also marginal.
Latin America is not present in the international conjuncture, nor do the big global powers, the traditional ones or the emerging ones, take it into account as a global actor. It is certain that the region never had a global presence, although Brazil played a certain role years ago in various scenarios and in institutions like the BRICS, but what’s noteworthy is the regression, in particular of South America, as an independent actor. There are seven reasons that explain this step backwards.
The first and most important is the paralysis of Brazil, a fruit of a combination of economic crisis and political crisis. The powerful offensive of the financial sector, the right and the middle classes against the PT and the government of Dilma Rousseff, added to the corruption in the state-owned Petrobras, placed them on the defensive and it’s not easy for them to retake the initiative.
Brazil was the country that has been able to design a national and regional strategy, which includes the development of an autonomous military-industrial complex and an independent foreign policy. The prison of some noteworthy directors of the big construction companies, like Marcelo Odebrecht, president of the key corporation in the construction of conventional and nuclear submarines, puts all of the Brazilian strategy at risk. The role that Brazil had as a regional leader with strong infrastructure investment tends to be substituted with the growing presence of China.
The second is the Venezuelan crisis, in particular the economic, followed by the crisis of leadership, which impedes continuing being a referent in the region. The December parliamentary elections can aggravate the crisis that crosses through the country.
The third is the end of the Kirchner cycle in Argentina, whose succession can be resolved favorably in the next presidential election on October 25, but even so it will be difficult to recover the vigor that it showed until now, in particular in international relations.
The strategic Brazil-Argentina-Venezuela alliance forms the critical mass capable of leading the entirety of the region in a direction more independent from Washington, transcending South America with projects like the Celac (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States).
In fourth place is the paralysis of the Mercosur, where the Brazilian crisis opens cracks in the trade agreements with Argentina and Venezuela. The change of the economic cycle with the drop in commodity prices places the Mercosur in need of moving towards another productive model, which as of now is not registering in any of them.
In fifth place is the approach of Paraguay and Uruguay to the policies promoted by Washington. The first (Paraguay) is reviving an old alliance with a strong military imprint, while the second wants to join the Pacific Alliance. A sharp negative turn is registered in both cases with respect to the Mercosur and regional integration.
The sixth question is related to the difficulties that travel across the Unasur, which impedes playing an active role in the resolution of conflicts, as well as in the development of some processes of integration that appear paralyzed. The Bank of the South, infrastructure works and projects of the South American Defense Council are stalled or advance with too much slowness in relation to the geopolitical acceleration that the world experiences.
Finally, it’s appropriate to emphasize the lack of strategic debates in the region, which affects the specialized institutes, the academies, the progressive parties and parties of the left, and also the social movements. The urgencies of the moment have relegated the essential themes, which include from the insertion of each country and the region in a world that changes, to the different national projects. A decade has been lost, in large measure because of the “ease” of following behind the high prices of raw materials, which acted like narcotics paralyzing the will for structural transformations.
The movements are part of the problem. Social forums disappeared as spaces for meeting and debate; the Vatican is filling that space. Nothing good can come from a lack of strategic projects.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Friday, July 10, 2015
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/07/10/opinion/024a2pol
Gilly: the financial unification of the world
The seminar on Critical thought versus the capitalist hydra at Cideci.
By: Adolfo Gilly
Oventic, Chiapas, May 2, 2015
Compañeras and compañeros of the EZLN, relatives of Luis Villoro and of the Zapatista teacher Galeano, fathers and mothers of Ayotzinapa present here:
Before everything I want to thank you for the invitation to participate in the opening of this seminar “Critical thought versus the capitalist hydra,” in the midst of big spaces, houses and trees of Oventic, under this sky that changes without stopping between sun, clouds and the winters that pass and come and go while the land always remains.
I also want to thank you for the warm reception that this organized town gave those of us that arrived recently. We were only able to see the eyes of many of you, but surely you know that’s where the soul becomes visible. Then…
What I bring to say to you today comes from some very recent lines: the opening words from “The time of dispossession” (El tiempo del despojo), a small book about these adverse times that, by means of the editor, should not delay appearing in Mexico. [1]
*
In the world and in Mexico, we have entered a new epoch of capitalism or, in other words, of the domination of capital over work and nature. This domination totally encompasses the current unequal and interwoven global civilization that defines the mode of existence of human societies in this 21st Century.
We cannot address its description, its investigation and its laws of movement as if we were dealing with implantation, over pre-existing social relations, of a new economic model, as they usually say, or of a group of public policies named neoliberalism, in the same sense in which in the middle of the last century (the XX) one could talk about policies and laws on legal and contractual regulation of the relations between capital, labor and the land –then called Keynesian– inside the framework of existing relations within the States and capitalist societies.
We don’t forget either that that regulation had as an undercurrent the cruel exploitation of a colonial world now transfigured into politically independent nations, although economically and politically subordinate; a new world where the relationship of domination between human beings and between nations has been modified, although it is far from having disappeared.
*
If we take the metaphor that you propose to us for describing capitalism –the Hydra, a mythological monster with multiple heads which, if one is cut, two or more sprout up in its place–, we could say that the socialist and colonial revolutions that shook the 20th Century: Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, India, Cuba and so many others, were cutting many of those heads of capital. But from this, over time, were born or reborn others in the same place as the old ones: the world of the new capitalists and the new rich in those nations, now owners of the money, the properties, the modes and the power.
However, let’s not go astray or deceive. It’s certain, there is no more Soviet Union, there is no more socialist China, there is no more socialist Vietnam. New rich, very rich, new capitalist and dominant classes emerged in those countries and they make up the present world. But also the old empires with their colonial dominions disappeared: in the still recent past they were swallowed and destroyed by the tide of colonial and anti-imperialist revolutions that swept the entire planet.
The peoples that made the revolution remain. The experience remains, the pride remains. The old humiliation that was overthrown remains, the history and the memory of vindicated and recuperated dignity remains. With this humanity, new in life and old in experience, you have the new rich that make their accounts and try to impose new forms of rule on thousands of millions of new salaried workers, on those dispossessed of their lands and homes, on migrants and those unprotected by all of the powers.
It is the unheard and unprecedented turbulence of the world of these times, where workers of the cities and fields are learning and inventing new forms of organizing, while capital designs and puts to the test new exhaustive forms of domination over workers and of destructive exploitation of nature.
*
We are facing a new form of the domination and subordination relationship: the universal domination of the world and rule of finances –global financial capital– over societies and economies, however diverse their cultures may be, their forms and degrees of organization and development, their different property rights and products; their relationship to nature; their political, religious and state systems; the configurations inherited and current of our societies.
All other forms of existence and reproduction of capital –the capitalist hydra, as you call it– and other existing social relations of course do not disappear. They remain subordinate to the financial form and subsumed in its planetary domination still in expansion. This modifies and subordinates nations, societies and human lives; their internal and external relations; their ways of living, of hoping and of imagining; and their relationship to nature, the planet and the universe as a given, thinkable and attainable reality.
It’s a new world, turbulent and expansive, but not a happy world. Full of conflicts and subject to unprecedented threats about its very existence and full of unhappiness because of the destruction of ancient customs, solidarities, securities and routines, this world also presents itself as a promise, today denied, of enjoyment of its fantastic discoveries, inventions and possibilities of enjoyment already present.
At the same time and moment of such a vision and temptation, reachable in appearance, it rises up before the immense majority of the seven million human beings as the denial and deprivation of that fullness of life and enjoyment, an immense humanity that sees and lives the destruction or degradation of their living worlds, their material inheritance –lands, waters, air, roads, cities, towns, barrios, forests, vegetable and animal life– and their immaterial civilizing inheritance of human relations: solidarities, cultures, beliefs and affects.
We call this new grand transformation: the financial unification of the world: a single domination (itself fragmented) over all the other immediate and existing ones and, by necessity, mediated by them; a universal and abstract (thing-like, according to the terms of Bolívar Echeverría; bestial, according to the hydra’s image; not human in either case) over all other rulers; a ruler you can’t grasp onto, despotic and material over human societies; divided by tears and violent conflicts between those who detain it, the different factions –national and territorial– of finances and their armed bodies; and exercised by reduced power and money elites, owners of weapons that for the first time make thinkable and possible the destruction of the human species and of other multiple forms of life on the planet. One single domination, but divided by contrary and irreconcilable interests; and over a single humanity, but torn by beliefs and interests, nations and ethnicities, dispossessions and migrations.
*
In the middle of the 20th Century, in 1955, the publishing house Presence Africaine published a memorable writing of Aimé Césaire, “Discourse on colonialism.” It begins like this:
A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems that it creates is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a wounded civilization.
A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization. […]
We must study how colonization operates to de-civilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred and moral relativism.
At the end of this de-civilization, Aimé Césaire discovers its refined product: Nazism. It would reveal, he says, the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the 20th Century that carries a Hitler inside and ignores the fact that Hitler inhabits him. Even when it censures him for his own ignorance, Césaire adds, which at bottom that man does not forgive Nazism.
What he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime itself, the crime against the human being; it is not the humiliation of the human being as such. It’s the crime against the white man, it is the humiliation of the white man; it’s the fact that he applied to Europe the colonialist procedures that until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India and the blacks of Africa.
Colonization: bridgehead in a civilization of savagery from where, at any moment, the pure and simple negation of civilization can flow.
Upon reaching this extreme point of the elocution that, he says, installs us squarely in the middle of howling savagery, Aimé Césaire has touched the key word of all rebellions, that last resort that when it is committed to the extreme through the inhuman mode of a domination it cracks and makes everyone jump: the humiliation imposed, the humiliation lived and the humiliation suffered.
That surprise usually begins through low voices and small gestures: for example, the voice and gestures of a man whose son was murdered in Cuernavaca in these times, one among fifty thousand deaths, killed in these Mexican lands in the last five years, at the rate of 10,000 per year, and that day he said that we are fed up and he started to go around and join grievances and pains along Mexico’s roads. Or through the voices loaded with the pain and rage of the mothers and fathers in Guerrero whose 43 sons, all teachers college students, were disappeared in Ayotzinapa by the police, a body armed with state power; and those mothers and fathers confronted this power and began to go around throughout Mexico and the world saying and demanding: Alive you took them, alive we want them. Two of them, one mother and one father, are among us today and we have heard their demand and their voices.
*
In this process of financial unification of the world we also note the slowly obliged formation of a new historic subject in fields, mines, seas, skies and cities, the global worker:
The global worker in formation is acquiring and refining in hard struggles for his affirmation and his existence a new subtlety in the creation of unpublished forms of customs in common, shared knowledge, organization, solidarity, resistance and rebellion. The rebellion of women against male domination, with different features according to [different] societies and cultures, but with a similar profile as to the state of protest and insubordination against the dominant state of things, is part of this process and in specific cases or moments it is also the dominant feature.
The global worker as unified humanity is not a utopia. It is a secular process characteristic of this civilization, in formation in the large migrations and in scientific and technological marvels, while at the same time the planet borders on catastrophic war and ecological destruction. […] In order to perceive it, it’s enough to open the window, travel the highways and sharpen the gaze and the senses.
At the end of the initial writing of this volume we list:
Nothing was easy before and nothing will be easy tomorrow. We come from the great universal disaster at the end of the 20th Century, the one that consolidated and made more ferocious the new and old wealthy of the earth, the one that also engendered the new furies of the old and modern condemned of the earth.
Don’t come to us with it’s the time of hope. Now is the time of rage and fury. Hope invites waiting; rage invites organizing. There is a time for hope and a time for rage. This is the time of rage. After rage comes hope.
And these lines close the latest writing:
In today’s world, reasoning with lucidity and working for justice leads to indignation, fervor and rage, there where the spirits of revolt are nourished. Because the present state of the world is intolerable; and if history tells us anything it’s that, in due time, it will not be tolerated anymore.
So be it, it will be our hope.
—————————————————
- Adolfo Gilly y Rhina Roux, El tiempo del despojo – Poder, trabajo y territorio, Ediciones Itaca, México, 2015.
__________________________________________________________
Originally Published in Spanish by Pozol Colectivo
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Friday, June 5, 2015
En español: http://www.pozol.org/?p=10800
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/06/05/opinion/014a1pol
Armed commando murders a member of Las Abejas
Las Abejas
Last week, the Civil Society Las Abejas organization of Acteal (hereafter, Las Abejas) issued two public denunciations. The first described the murder of their compañero Manuel López Pérez, a member of Las Abejas, as well as fear for the lives of his wife and 11-year old son. The second denunciation expressed concern for the life of Antonio López Jiménez and his family, also members of Las Abejas. [1] Both families are residents of Pantelhó municipality, which is adjacent to Ch’enalvo’ (Chenalhó) municipality where Acteal is located. Included below each denunciation was a description of the problems both men have had with the Pantelhó municipal authorities.
Several facts stand out: the families of both men were displaced from their native San Joaquin community in Pantelhó; the current municipal president and municipal judge are also from San Joaquin community; and some of the paramilitaries that participated in the Acteal Massacre and were released by Supreme Court decisions live in Pantelhó, described as a violent municipality.The denunciations are below.
June 25, 2015
Chiapas: Armed commando murders Manuel López Pérez, a member of the Las Abejas de Acteal organization
On June 23, 2015, they murdered Manuel López Pérez, a member of the Civil Society Organization Las Abejas de Acteal. The organization reports that Manuel went to the municipal capital of Pantelhó and on the way back, in the company of his son Juan López Guzmán, 11, at the Sibaluk’um Bridge, almost one kilometer from the municipal capital of Pantelhó, 7 masked individuals dressed in military type clothing and with firearms, ambushed the public transport vehicle in which he was traveling, killing him with three shots, two in the head and one through the back.
The information that the organization of Los Altos of Chiapas has collected, is that the Pantelhó judge, Pedro Girón López, who displaced and threatened Manuel on previous dates and the comandante of the la municipal police, ordered his 11-year old son to state that his father was traveling in another car ahead of the one in which he was going, and that if he told the truth, it wasn’t just the killers that were going to prison, but also him. “This act evidences the complicity of the official authorities facing this assassination,” the Acteal Organization assures.
The Las Abejas authorities communicate that for security reasons they will not be able to go to Manuel’s burial in San Joaquin community, which will take place today June 25. “Various paramilitaries that participated in acts prior to the Acteal Massacre live in that zone, as well as some of the material authors of said massacre,” the Board of Directors shares and adds: “tomorrow we will publish another denunciation, about how the life of another family of the same community as Manuel is also at risk.”
The indigenous Tsotsiles assert that: “17 years from the Acteal Massacre and the impunity that the Mexican State has perpetuated, the bad government of the president of Pantelhó, of Manuel Velasco and of Peña Nieto, kills us again, attempting to destroy us. The bad government knows that, happen what may, we will not stop struggling against the neoliberal capitalist system…”
Civil Society Organization Las Abejas
Sacred Land of the los Martyrs of Acteal
Acteal, Ch’enalvo’, Chiapas, Mexico
June 26, 2015
We denounce more death threats against members of the Civil Society Las Abejas of Acteal in Pantelhó
Today we announce other death threats, vigilance, harassment, against Antonio López Jiménez and his family (hereafter Antonio and his family), members of the Civil Society Las Abejas, natives of the San Joaquin community, municipio of Pantelhó, Chiapas. They currently live in the municipal capital of Pantelhó and have lived there since 2007 when authorities of PRD affiliation, now Green Ecologist (PVEM) displaced them from San Joaquin. Their crime was and is not accepting projects from the bad government and being in resistance and constructing autonomy.
Antonio and his family just like our compañero Manuel, assassinated on June 23, entered our organization together. They are son members of the Civil Society Las Abejas of Acteal organization. After the crime against our compañero, we fear for the lives of Antonio and his family, since the Pantelhó municipal authorities as well as the [municipal] president and the Judge instead of respecting, guarantying and protecting the physical and psychological integrity of our compañeros and compañeras, are accomplices in a series of threats against Antonio and his family, besides the fact that the mentioned judge threatened Manuel with death and according to testimonies, told his son that he should prepare his weapon for killing him.
We are worried about the physical and psychological integrity, as well as the life of Antonio and his family. Since Pantelhó is known as a very violent municipio where the authorities permit murders and let them go unpunished, if they did not respect the life of our compañero Manuel, despite the fact that he was a member of our organization, with greater reason we fear that Antonio and his family can be attacked the same way, we place responsibility on state and federal authorities, as well as on the municipal authorities of Pantelhó.
We want to place in evidence before national and international civil society, that the authorities mentioned know what’s happening against the two families. Whatever thing happens to our compañero Antonio and his family, those responsible will be the authorities of Pantelhó: Miguel Entzín Cruz, municipal president, Pedro Girón López, Municipal Judge, [Governor] Manuel Velasco Coello and [President] Enríque Peña Nieto. The latter two have the obligation to respect, protect and guaranty life and human rights. And afterwards they are not going to say that they don’t know what happened, because that is the custom of the bad governments.
[1] Las Abejas is an adherent to the EZLN’s Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle
Sources in Spanish:
http://acteal.blogspot.mx/2015/06/asesinan-miembro-de-la-sociedad-civil.html?spref=fb
http://acteal.blogspot.mx/2015/06/denunciamos-mas-amenazas-de-muerte.html
Frayba on Armed attacks in La Garrucha
FRAYBA DEMANDS INVESTIGATING ARMED ATTACK ON ZAPATISTA BASES
Francisco Madero Autonomous (Primary) School in San Manuel.
It accuses groups from Pojcol and El Rosario of attempting to kill a little girl
By: Elio Henríquez, Correspondent
San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas
The Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba) expressed its “concern for the new aggressions and threats against support bases of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the communities of El Rosario and Nuevo Paraíso, situated in the autonomous Zapatista municipios (counties) of San Manuel and Francisco Villa, respectively.” [1]
At the same time, it demanded: “an urgent investigation into the acts of aggression and harassment perpetrated by armed groups from Pojcol and El Rosario, sanctioning those responsible and defining responsibilities in the attempted homicide of the 13 year old girl, which occurred on May 10.” On that occasion they shot towards where the adolescent was, but her father perceived what was happening and threw stones and injured the aggressor.
In a comunicado, the Frayba asserts that there is “an omission by the municipal and state governments in attending to the problem and defining responsibilities” in the acts that occurred in these two localities.
The organism, over which the Bishop of Saltillo, Raúl Vera López presides, reminds us that last May 10 the Good Government Junta Path of the Future, with its seat in La Garrucha, reported that: “a group of 28 individuals from the Pojcol Ejido, Chiquinival barrio (official municipality of Chilón), together with another group of 21 people from El Rosario harassed and attacked Zapatista bases of this autonomous community.”
It said that on that on that occasion, “Andrés López Vázquez fired four shots at a young 13 year old girl, the daughter of an indigenous Zapatista support base, and afterwards, three armed individuals from the same aggressor group arrived at Nuevo Paraíso village and tossed out a letter in which they blame the Zapatistas base for causing the problems.”
It point s out that faced with these facts, the Frayba “sent and official letter on May 14, in which it informs the Chiapas government about the armed aggressions that occurred. Carlos Leonel Solórzano Arcia, assistant secretary of government for the Lacandón Jungle Region XII answered the letter, recognizing the entry of armed individuals into El Rosario.” Nevertheless, “he does not mention any action for clarifying the facts and preventing repetitions that involves the punishment of those responsible; contrary to that, the DIF delivered supplies to the aggressor group,” besides the fact that: “in the writing no reference is made to investigating the attempted murder of a little girl.”
[1] Frayba Urgent Action: http://www.frayba.org.mx/archivo/acciones_urgentes/150630_au_02_baezln.pdf
—————————————————————
Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
Thursday, July 2, 2015
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2015/07/02/politica/014n1pol
New paramilitary attack in San Manuel, La Garrucha
New paramilitary Attack in the Caracol of Resistance Toward a New Dawn, La Garrucha
Homage to Compañero Galeano the teacher and to Compañero Luis Villoro. Milicianos (Army reserves) in the forefront.
ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY
MEXICO
June 25, 2015
To the National and International Sixth:
As we know, the bad governments are combining frauds with violence. Whether it’s one party or another isn’t important, the Ruler always seeks to keep himself above at the expense of those below. To him the denunciations aren’t worth anything, he becomes deaf, because he pays the media that sell out well so that they best talk nice about him.
Before it was Juan Sabines Guerrero, he that said he was of a very left party and even came to receive awards from progressive partisans, and the legitimate came to shout with a lot of pleasure: “Viva Juan Sabines!” That Juan Sabines Guerrero arranged everything so that it would remain a government of the “blonde category,” Manuel Velasco Coello, as both are from the same families that distributed, together with others, the [government] positions in Chiapas. Juan Sabines Guerrero stole, committed frauds and distributed violence.
Now Velasco does the same thing. Just a few days ago he made a big fraud for voting, violating the very same laws of those above, now he is preparing that the coming local elections will be with the blood of those below.
The governments of above are not content with just lying, they also want to repress, incarcerate and assassinate.
Now they are repressing the democratic teachers that are just saying that the mentioned education reform is a lie. That’s because it is the boss’ reform against the workers. It is not to improve education; it’s to make it worse. And those who make it don’t even know how the schools are, nor do they know how to teach. What the government doesn’t like is that the truth is told, because it lies. But as nothing from the government is believed, well then it represses.
Like they will be without shame that the one in charge of Education for the government is an alcoholic assassin that says one thing one day and another thing says the opposite. How is someone going to make an education reform that doesn’t even know how to talk? Emilio Chuayffet is called and is one of the assassins of Acteal; it is he that was throwing down his drinks to, already drunk, say foolishness. And he is the same now as he was before before.
Not only in Chiapas, but also in Oaxaca, Guerrero and in other states, the bad governments want put a lid on the truth with blows, gasses, shots and threats.
It is now seen clearly that if their “democratic” elections don’t have murders, beatings and incarcerations, well they don’t like it. And all the partisans fighting for their little bone, and they are not in agreement about who was killed, his name is Antonio Vivar Díaz and he was a teacher, nor about those beaten, or those incarcerated.
Antonio Vivar Díaz
The governments of above are sustained with deceit and repression.
But the blood of the teachers isn’t enough for Manuel Velasco in Chiapas. He also wants to drink indigenous blood of the communities.
Despite the fact that human rights organizations have already denounced it, Velasco continues to incite his paramilitaries so that they attack the Zapatistas support bases.
That’s what occurs in the municipio of Ocosingo, Chiapas, where three governments place themselves in agreement to provoke: Enrique Peña Nieto, Manuel Velasco and Octavio Albores. These governments are behind the paramilitaries from Pojkol.
It’s the same community where they already disavowed those paramilitaries, but they continue attacking. The same indigenous party members say that they don’t those paramilitaries, who receive their orders from the municipal president of Ocosingo and the state government in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. They receive their weapons, equipment, vehicles and the orders to attack support bases from there.
This just happened a few hours ago:
Caracol of Resistance Towards a New Dawn,
Path of the Future Good Government Junta
La Garrucha, Chiapas, México
June 24, 2015
Public Denunciation
To public opinion:
To the alternative, autonomous or whatever o you call them communications media:
To the national and international adherents to the Sixth:
To the honest human rights organisms:
Sisters and Brothers of the people of Mexico and the world:
We denounce once again what the paramilitary groups from the ejido Pojkol, Chiquinibal Barrio, Municipio de Chilón and the 21 persons from the same paramilitary group in Rosario, in the official municipio of Ocosingo, Chiapas are doing to us.
Facts:
Today, June 24, 2015 in the village of Rosario, San Manuel Autonomous Municipio [County], [1] where our EZLN support base compañeros live, 28 paramilitaries arrived from the Chiquinibal Barrio of the ejido Pojkol at 8:05 am this Wednesday. They were riding on 8 motorcycles and in a Nissan without license plates. Of the 28 paramilitaries, 8 of them were 22-caliber carrying firearms.
It’s the 21 paramilitaries that also live there in Rosario and the group of 28 paramilitaries from the ejido Pojkol in the Chiquinibal Barrio that are invading our recuperated land support them.
At 10:05 am a white RAM pickup without license plates arrives with two people aboard: an engineer and the rancher named Guadalupe Flores who lives in the city of Ocosingo Chiapas. He was owner of the land before 1994. The rancher and the engineer met with the 28 paramilitaries from Pojkol and the 21 paramilitaries [living in] Rosario. After that meeting they started to measure the land for constructing a temple and also measured sites for constructing houses, after that the rancher delivered some documents into the hands of the paramilitary group, supposedly the map of the recuperated part of the land.
At 1:26 pm they fired 10 shots behind the house of a support base [base de apoyo] compañero, intimidating the population.
At 1:27 pm, 8 paramilitaries from Pojkol entered into the house of a support base compañero but they didn’t find anyone there because the owner of the house had already withdrawn from his house to avoid clashes. 23 minutes later they arrived again at the house of another compañero. At 1:50 pm, they destroyed the house of a support base compañero, stealing all the belongings as well as the roof of the house that has 12 sheets of 3.5 metal, 2 hens, 4 pickaxe, 20 eggs, 2 hatchets, 2 solar cells, $2,000 pesos in cash, 2 hoes, a tape recorder, a 100-meter roll of water hose and 150 kilos of beans. They put all the support base compañero’s belongings into the alleged engineer’s pickup and that truck left in the direction of Pojkol, carrying all those stolen belongings to where the 28 people from Pojkol returned together.
Because of these acts we as authorities of the JBG [2] we see very clearly that those two persons pretending that one is an engineer and the other the ex owner of the ranch, are the advisors of those paramilitary groups.
We are also clear that the bad government is attacking us in many ways and forms. Various actions have happened and they are the same paramilitaries that have killed our breeding bull, where they destroyed houses, destroyed our collective store, stole our belongings, where they fumigated our pasture land with herbicides where San Manuel municipio’s cattle collective is located, where they shot off firearms and left letters on the ground that say: “Pojkol territory” and also spent shells in the month of August 2014.
A San Manuel cattle project.
They are the same paramilitaries that arrived on May 10 of this year 2015 where one of them with the name of Andrés shot at a little support base girl.
It is our third denunciation. There are also the first and the second denunciations, which detailed the facts that happened.
These groups of people, prepared and financed by the bad federal, state and municipal governments have been provoking us various times with their counterinsurgency strategy, the bad governments thinking that we are going to fall into their traps and spot our hands in blood with our indigenous brothers that are sick in the head because they are paid and have the dirty conscience that the capitalist system dirtied.
We say clearly that we will not remain with crossed arms when our support bases are attacked by any kind or means that the bad government uses against us. We have said clearly that we will defend our lands because we were born on it, we live on it and we will die on it, cost what it may.
Sisters and brothers, we will continue denouncing what happens. We hope that you are pending and to so much of what can happen with our compañero and compañera support bases [bases de apoyo].
We place responsibility directly on the federal, state and municipal governments for anything that can happen. They are also directly responsible because it’s not the first time that we have denounced what this group of people are doing.
Sincerely,
Authorities of the Good Government Junta in rotation
Jacinto Gómez Pérez Colosio Pérez Lorenzo
Nely Núñez Sánchez Alex López Álvarez
Well that’s how it is, compañeras and compañeros of the Sixth:
According to what we see, we’re not dealing with the fact that the bad government isn’t paying attention because it is busy with its lies and announcements, but that the very same government is giving those orders. If not, how do they explain that they already have the names of the criminals and they walk around with weapons in front of the authority and nobody even bothers them? It’s because they [the paramilitaries] are their employees. And the paramilitaries tell it clearly just that way: that nobody can do anything because the Velasco government protects them and pays them.
Well that’s what we have to report now, compañer@s. Everything is the same: lies, blows, scorn and exploitation come from above.
Organization must come from below, for life, not for a bloodbath. That is what the overseers, majordomos and bosses of the system in which we live want, their masters, neoliberal capitalism, have ordered them to do that.
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast,
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés
Mexico, June 2015
1. San Manuel Autonomous Municipio is the Zapatista munici
pio with which the Chiapas Support Committee had a partnership for a long time.
2. JBG – The initials in Spanish for Junta de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Junta).
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Originally Published in Spanish by Enlace Zapatista
Translation: Chiapas Support Committee
June 26, 2015
Words of Comandanta Miriam
Words of Comandanta Miriam
Comandanta Miriam speaks at the seminar on “Critical Thought versus the Capitalist Hydra.”
Good evening compañeros and compañeras.
I also have the chance to talk to you a bit about what the situation was for women prior to 1994.
Women suffered through a very sad situation since the arrival of the conquistadors. They stole our land and took our language, our culture. This is how the domination of caciquismo [local despotism] and landowners came into being alongside a triple exploitation, humiliation, discrimination, marginalization, mistreatment, and inequality.
The fucking bosses had us as if they were our owners; they sent us to do all the work on the haciendas, without caring if we had children, husbands, or if we were sick. They never asked if we were sick; if we didn’t make it to work, they sent their servant or slave to leave the corn in front of the kitchen so that we would make tortillas for them.
Much time passed like this, with us working in the bosses’ house. We ground the salt because the salt then was not the same as it is now, now it comes finely ground. The salt we used before came in large balls, and we women had to grind it. Women also ground the salt for the livestock, and shelled coffee when it was coffee harvest time. If we started at 6 in the morning, we finished at 5 in the evening. Women had to keep preparing the bags of coffee throughout the whole day.
This is how the women worked. Women were mistreated in their work, carrying water and all of that and paid miserably; they were only given a little handful of salt or a handful of ground coffee; that was the payment given to the women.
Years passed and women suffered like this. And when our babies cried and we nursed them, we were yelled at, made fun of, insulted physically; they said that we didn’t know anything, that we were useless, that we were a bother to them. They didn’t respect us and they used us as if we were objects.
They did whatever they wanted to a woman; they chose the pretty women or the pretty girls as their lovers, and left children all over the place; they didn’t care that the women suffered, they treated them like animals, with their children growing up without a father.
They sold us as if we were commodities during the acasillamiento [similar to serfdom]; there was never rest for us women.
Acasillamiento refers to when people would go to live on the haciendas or ranches with their families and stay there and work for the boss. The men were the ones who did the work of planting coffee, cleaning the coffee fields, harvesting the coffee, clearing the pastures, planting the grass, all this work, taking care of the corn and bean fields. The men did this work for the boss.
Apart from this, there is another thing I could tell you about the acasillamiento, which is about the mozos or slaves there, men and women who are always going to live on the hacienda. Those men or women that are slaves or mozos, who live at the hacienda, are men and women that sometimes don’t have family. For example, a family comes just to work on the hacienda, and sometimes the dad and mom get sick and die and the children are orphaned. The boss takes these children and raises them on the hacienda. And what do these children do? Its not like the bosses adopt them as an adoptive child, but rather as a slave. Those children grow and this is the work they are given: if the boss has a pet, or pets, such as a dog, a monkey, or some kind of animal, the boss has the mozo take care of it, care for the animal. Wherever the monkey goes, that’s where the child is; they have to take care of it, bathe it, clean where it sleeps. That’s how it works.
Priests would come to the large haciendas of the bosses and baptize their children, or for a birthday, or to perform a marriage ceremony for his daughters. Afterwards they would have parties and tell the mozos to guard the door. They would have the mozo watch the door while they were celebrating with their colleagues and friends. The mozo guards the door, he can’t let even a dog come into where they are partying, and he has to be there all day, for as long as the boss’s party keeps going.
And the women slaves were the ones who made the food, washed the dishes, and took care of the boss’s son, or the children of the boss’s friends.
That is how the people on the haciendas lived, and they didn’t get to eat what was eaten at the gatherings; they had to drink pozol if there was pozol, eat beans if there were beans. That was all they ate, meanwhile the boss ate the good stuff, but with his friends.
Later, when the boss wanted to go to the city, from his hacienda to a city that is, say, a 6-day walk, the mozo would go along. If the boss had children—sometimes the children are disabled—the mozo had to carry the boss’s child to the city. And if the boss’s wife came to the hacienda, the mozo goes again and carries the child back again.
And when they harvested coffee, in any harvest on the hacienda, the mozo had to be tending to the mules. I don’t know if you know about horses, but the mozo had to saddle and unsaddle the boss’s horse, herd the cattle, and take the loads to the city where the boss lives. If he lives in Comitán the mozo had to go all the way to Comitán. He had to leave the hacienda and go as the mule-driver. This is how many enslaved men and women suffered during that time.
If there are fruit tree orchards inside the hacienda and one of them climbed up to pick some fruit, the bosses wouldn’t let them. They got them down by whipping them, I don’t know if you know how the lash works; they would hit them with it. They can’t pick fruit without the boss’s permission because the entire harvest was to be taken to the city. This is how the men and women suffered.
After so much suffering by women and the exploitation during the acasillamiento, the men started realizing how their women were being mistreated. Some thought it better to leave the hacienda. One by one they started leaving and taking refuge in the mountains because the plantation owners did not claim these high lands. So they took refuge there. They thought it better to leave so that the women would not continue to suffer on the hacienda.
After awhile in the mountains—and many spent a long time there—they realized that it was better to join together and form a community, and that’s how they came to live that way. They got together, talked, and formed a community where they could live. That is how they formed the community.
But again, once they were living in the communities, those ideas that came from the boss or the acasillado were brought in. It’s as if the men drug these bad ideas along with them and applied them inside the house. They acted like the little boss of the house. It’s not true that the women were liberated then, because the men became the little bosses of the house.
And once again the women stayed at home as if it was a jail. Women didn’t go out; they were shut in their houses once again.
When girls are born, we are not welcomed into the world because we are women; when a little girl was born, it is as if we were not loved. But if a boy was born, the men celebrated and were content because they are men. They brought this bad custom from the bosses. That’s how it was for a long time. When girls were born they acted as if women were useless, and if a boy was born, as if they could do all of the work.
But one good thing they did was that they did not lose the memory of how to form a community; they began to name community representatives and hold meetings and gatherings together. It was good that this idea was not lost, it wasn’t taken away and it came to life again. The bosses and the conquest wanted to make this culture disappear, but the bosses were wrong, because the people could still form their community.
Another thing is that the man gives the orders in the house and the women obey what he says. And if he tells you that you’re going to get married, you have get married. He’s not going to ask you if you want to get married to the man who came to ask for your hand; your father already accepted the liquor they offered, he drank it already and this obligates you to go with this man that you do not love.
This is how we came to suffer once again with our husbands because they told us that women are only useful in the kitchen, or to take care of their husbands, or to take care of the children. The men didn’t hold their children; they didn’t support the women. They only gave you the child, and then who cares how the child is raised. And—I’m going to talk about how it really was for years—we women often say that a baby was born every year, every year and a half, growing up like a little staircase, every year or year and a half there is another one. But the father didn’t care if his wife was suffering because she had to carry firewood, plant the cornfield, clean the house, sweep, take care of the animals, wash the clothes, take care of the children, change the diapers, and all of that. All of that was women’s work.
This is why we say that we suffered triple exploitation as women. Women had to be awake and in the kitchen at 3 or 4 in the morning, depending on how much time the men needed to get to their fields. The women had to get up early to make pozol, coffee, and breakfast for the men. The men go to work, and when they come back in the afternoon they want the water for their bath to have been carried up to the house already and be ready for them to bathe. The men bathe and then leave the house to walk around, to play, and the women are once again stuck at home the whole day, until the night—around this time right now—the women are still awake; they don’t go to sleep until 8.
So we were really suffering. The men didn’t care if you were sick, or how you felt, they didn’t ask—that’s just how it was. That is how women really lived; we’re not lying because that is how we lived.
When you would go to church or a ceremonial center for a festival, and women did go sometimes, you had to lower your head. You couldn’t raise your head; you had to walk with your head bowed, without turning to the sides, and covering your head with the rebozo [shawl] like this, so that just your face shows.
A lot of time went by like this, during which men dragged along these bad ideas, this bad learning. That is how it happened, compañeros. As if we were nothing. As if only the men could be authorities, only the men could go into the street and participate.
There was no school. Later on in some communities there was school, but we didn’t go because we were women; they didn’t let us go to school because if we went they’d say that we only went to school to find a husband. And that it was better to learn to work in the kitchen because if we were indeed going to have a husband, we needed to learn how to take care of him.
And when our husband hit us, when he insulted us, we couldn’t complain. If we asked for help from the other institutions of the bad government they were much worse because they defended the men, and said the men are right; and so we remained silent, humiliated, and embarrassed at being women.
We didn’t have the right to come to meetings to participate, and they said that we were stupid, useless, and that we weren’t worth anything. They left us at home. We did not have freedom.
There was no health care. Even where there were clinics and hospitals that belonged to the bad government, they wouldn’t see us because we didn’t know how to speak Spanish. And sometimes we had to return to our homes, and many women and children died of curable diseases; we weren’t worth anything to them, and they discriminated against us because we were indigenous. They said that we were just dirty barefoot Indians, and we couldn’t enter the clinics or hospitals. They wouldn’t let us; they only took care of people with money.
All this we suffered in our own flesh. We never had the opportunity to say what we felt for many years because of the teachings of the conquistadores and the bad governments.
That is all, compañeros. Another compa will continue.
Chiapas Support Committee 