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Search Commission tours Pantelhó to find the 21 missing residents
El Machete Self-Defense Forces of Pantelhó Above Photo from La Jornada
By: Elio Henríquez, Correspondent
San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas
Supported by National Guard agents and members of the Mexican Army, officials from the National Search Commission for Missing Persons went to the municipality of Pantelhó to try to locate 21 residents last seen when they were detained on July 26 in the municipal seat.
Official sources reported that the inspection, in which personnel from the State’s Attorney General’s Office (FGE) participate, started Tuesday [Feb. 8], without any results having been reported as of yesterday [Feb. 10].
Pantelhó residents affirmed that members of the municipal council and of the El Machete self-defense forces, including their commander, received representatives of the National Search Commission for Missing Persons with whom they toured some areas for at least 5 hours.
They reported that the official itinerary includes a visit to El Progreso ranch, the Guadalupe Victoria community and La Pelona Hill, in addition to the municipal seat.
Relatives of some of the missing commented that they did not participate in the visit because the authorities told them that there are no conditions for that.
The 21 missing inhabitants were detained and exhibited in the central park last July 26, when more than 2,000 residents of the 83 indigenous communities (Tsotsils and Tseltals) and the 18 neighborhoods of Pantelhó took possession of the mayor’s office, looted stores and burned houses to “throw the sicarios (hit men) out of the town.”
The presence of criminal groups in the region led to the formation of self-defense groups that appeared in public on July 7, and later at the integration of a municipal council named in August through uses and customs, endorsed by the local Congress and presided over by Pedro Cortés López.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Friday, February 11, 2022 https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/02/11/estados/029n2est
Re=Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Neoindigenism and the 4T
By: Gilberto López y Rivas
In these times of the Fourth Transformation (4T), [1] in which the head of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI), Adelfo Regino, former advisor to the EZLN during the San Andres dialogue, criminalizes the Otomí community in Mexico City — who maintain an occupation of the institution’s offices and has converted them into the Samir Flores Soberanes house of the indigenous peoples and communities– it must be reiterated that there has been no substantial change in State policy since the founding of the National Indigenist Institute in 1948.
Today as in the past, and despite the fact that this director is Mixe, [2] the INPI, as a bureaucratic apparatus of the State, imposes indigenist policies on the peoples as an objectively oppressive, manipulative, and corrosive force and, now, carrying out counterinsurgency tasks and conflict management for the recolonization of the territories, in the name, once again, of progress and development.
In accordance with the Mexican experience, let us recall that the Latin American nation-states applied indigenist policies with the pretense of assimilating the Indian into the national culture, but in practice, they mediated their specific forms of political and cultural expression. Strictly speaking, the indigenism of yesterday and today seeks to erase cultural diversities from national societies and integrate indigenous peoples into the salaried sectors of the countryside and the city. The basis of this position is a kind of unilinear evolutionism in which ethnicity is the counterpart of historical development — the cultural burden that prevents Indians from passing from a caste situation with respect to the larger society, or with respect to complex or national societies, to a class situation — an idea expressed by the Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán.
As Ernest Gellner pointed out, the project of cultural homogenization based on the idea of one State, one nation and one culture, upon which the success of advancement of the capitalist system is based, propagates the idea that cultural homogeneity is a condition for the functioning and stability of governability. In this light, the dominant ideology has been well-served by the confusion created by these notions, that nation states sustained their policies of forced incorporation of the peoples, as well as through strategies of linguistic, religious, ideological, and educational standardization, against a prevailing reality that most nations are plurinational, multi-ethnic, and multilingual.
Despite the rhetoric that claims it’s trying to benefit the Indian, indigenism has been a contradiction in driving the independent paths of the peoples toward articulation with the equal and democratic national societies. Indigenism has operated from racial and cultural prejudices based on the supremacy of the European, the mestizo, and the national over the indigenous. It upholds a perspective which exacerbates the domination of a social group, which drives the governmental apparatus, and which attends to another social group that it assumes is incapable of fending for itself, and therefore, requires guidance. This cultural domination denies real access to decision-making in the political system and excludes from the government apparatus the indigenous people who practice autonomy as a form of resistance to recolonization.
Alongside the historical processes in which the legal framework and the political system were constructed, indigenous peoples have governed their lives and organized their communities through their own customs, even during the colonial period. As a form of resistance, the indigenous peoples fled from the reach of the conquerors and settled in territories that were often inhospitable, but at the same time inaccessible to the colonial yoke. It was not until the process of capitalist modernization that many of these peoples had new contact with the systems of political organization and institutions in effect in the metropolis. This contact meant a new confrontation. The expansion of the national, and of the legal framework that supported it, had to clash once again with the autonomy that was reproduced de facto within the communities. While in the past, forms of indigenous community organization such as the republicas de indios (Indian republics) [3] were maintained, in the context of the consolidation of the nation state, the indigenous communities and their ways of reproducing life were repressed by military means. The most tragic cases have been, without a doubt, the Caste War in the 19th century, [4] the bloody repression against the Yaqui nation and, in the 21st century, the renewed war against the peoples that today is being waged on the political and ideological fronts, but above all, repeatedly, on the military paramilitary front.
Notes:
[1] The 4T, short for the Fourth Transformation, refers to what Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) calls his administration. He says the first three transformations in Mexican history were: Mexico’s War of Independence (1810-1821), the Reform War (1858-1861) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917. AMLO’s calls his administration a transformation because he promised to do away with privileges that have plagued Mexico in recent decades.
[2] The Mixe are an indigenous people inhabiting the eastern highlands of Oaxaca.
[3] Under the legal structure of New Spain, the Indian republics were formally separate and until the mid-19th century had somewhat of a protected status, in which the Spanish crown protected Indigenous land holdings and the communities were a subordinate part of the Spanish legal system. The concentration of indigenous peoples and retention of their communities were operationalized for assimilation into the Catholic Church.
[4] The Caste War of Yucatán (1847-1901) began with a revolt of the Yucatan Maya against the Hispanic population, as a result of land consolidation and dispossession of campesino (peasant) populations caused by the sugar cane boom.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Friday, February 4, 2022
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/02/04/opinion/016a1pol
Translated by Schools for Chiapas and Re-Published by the Chiapas Support Committee
Farce and tragedy in the US
By: Miguel Tinker Salas* and Victor Silverman**
A year ago, we wrote an essay entitled “Coup d’ etat in the US” that analyzed the dramatic events of January 6 and the taking of the Capitol in Washington by followers of then president Donald Trump. One year later, we consider what has changed after the election of Joe Biden and what is anticipated in the US during 2022. Although we would like to be more optimistic, the situation that lies ahead doesn’t permit it. In the face of a Hollywood-style coup, which cost lives, the US lives between a farce and a tragedy.
At the end of a year, the iconic Q Anon Shaman is in prison (without his horns) and the demonstrators and right-wing paramilitaries who were waving flags of the confederate states have been dispersed. In the House of Representatives, a committee “investigates” the January 6 events, but after a year has not established guilt. The country’s Attorney General recently ordered the arrest of 11 people associated with the paramilitary groups, accusing them of sedition.
Today, a president of the Democratic Party occupies the White House and his “party” supposedly controls the House and the Senate, but the liberal agenda that Biden proposed has been paralyzed. In the country that for decades projected itself as the democratic model for the world, today its so-called democracy faces serious challenges. Biden has distinguished himself by his weakness. His administration has been incapable of mobilizing his own party or to ally with popular sectors to advance his agenda. Therefore, the progressive agenda that Biden promised, including an immigration reform that would benefit a million people, has remained stalled. If the polls are credible, the Republicans will most likely gain control of the lower chamber of Congress in the November 2022 mid-term elections and there will be a divided government in the US. That result opens the door for Trump, who could return as president in the 2024 elections. While recrimination predominates among the Democrats, the right, including the paramilitaries mobilize and gain political strength.
Biden is a faithful believer in the cult of consensus, the famous bi-partisanship between Republicans and Democrats that prevailed during the cold war. Biden and some Democrats don’t recognize that the United State has changed, bipartisanship has died, if it ever existed. The country is fractured, including class, racial, ethnic, regional, religious and cultural divisions; 74 percent of the Republicans still insist that Biden is an illegitimate president and that Trump won the election. In the states that they control, Republican governments have dismantled the electoral process trying to reduce the impact of the worker, Latino and Afro-descendent vote. A recent poll indicates that the percentage of people willing to resort to violence to achieve their political objectives has increased significantly. Historically, leaders of both political parties have manipulated these social fissures, but the context in which they operate has changed.
The crisis that US democracy faces is not a problem of personalities, it is rather a systemic condition. In the US, direct voting for president doesn’t exist, rather an electoral college created by slave-holding estate owners in the 18th Century prevails. This implies that changes in control of the Congress and the presidency depend on a small group of voters in some key districts and states. Consequently, although Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, if 43,000 more voters in just three states (Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin) would have participated, Trump would be president. The system of power in the Senate is anti-democratic and in practice is used to veto the rights of the great majority. Senators of relatively small states, like Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) refuse to support a social agenda, highlighting the limits of democracy in the United States.
Trump manipulated social unrest, the product of neoliberalism, which had made life worse for millions of people, to win the presidency. Like in other parts of the world, globalization only enriched an elite. Biden and his advisors understood that reality, introducing himself as a progressive candidate who won the popular vote, even if not overwhelmingly. Assuming the presidency, he proposed legislation that broke with some of the existing schemes among some sectors of Democrats, including a 1.9-trillion-dollar economic rescue plan, and a trillion-dollar infrastructure project. His social agenda has not materialized.
In the beginning, Biden prioritized the pandemic and the number of people vaccinated increased. Omicron showed that the government had no plan in the face of the new variant. Biden also underestimated the inflation that was gradually increasing while wages remained frozen. Social discontent has become palpable, especially among working sectors. This occurs when the Federal Reserve has indicated that it plans to increase interest rates multiple times during what will be an electoral year. If the Democrats don’t achieve any success in the coming months, they will lose the House and the Senate.
Biden has completed one year as president, but the impact of January 6 remains palpable. If in 2024 Trump should lose the presidential election it’s probable that he won’t accept the results like he did in 2021. He would mobilize his base again. The extreme right that participated in the 2021 insurrection has grown in power, and now controls a large part of the Republican Party. What happens in the US makes us think of the famous expression of Karl Marx, the great events of history appear twice, once as farce and the other as tragedy.
*@migueltinkersalas Department of History, Pomona College
**@victorsilverman, Fulbright/GarcíaRobles Professor of US Studies, ITAM
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/01/18/opinion/016a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
El Machete separates itself from the 21 missing residents
By: Elio Henriquez
San Cristóbal De Las Casas, Chiapas
The El Machete Self-Defense Forces of the People, an armed group, stated that it does not know the whereabouts of 21 residents detained 6 months ago in the municipal seat of Pantelhó, with the argument that they had ties to hit men (sicarios), a spokesperson for the group said.
According to their relatives, members of El Machete detained 21 inhabitants last July 26 and exhibited them in the central park of Pantelhó, and then took them to San José Tercero, the alleged bastion of the armed group.
But El Machete’s commander, who did not provide his name, said: “I can’t lie about where they are. The Search Commission is coming and who knows where they’re going to look for them. We don’t know where those 21 are. I can’t say anything until the Search Commission comes.”
He also reported that his compañeros arrested three residents on Wednesday who allegedly sold drugs in the municipal seat. “We put them in the can for one night, but today they are already going to the prosecutor’s office,” which “doesn’t do its job; that’s why we impose our own law. The government doesn’t watch over us.
“There are already several cantinas without authorization, but they sell drugs. We heard that months ago and yesterday (Wednesday) we clearly heard that there is a person in Pantelhó (who has) some 30 kilograms of cocaine and weapons.”
“We give the death sentence”
The spokesperson pointed out that: “if the prosecutor’s office doesn’t pay attention to us, I told them that I don’t know what is going to happen next because we give the death sentence. That is what happened yesterday, but we will only go where the bars are, where there are drugs; we entered a (cantina) and it came out positive: we found drugs, grams of crystal (meth) and images of Santa Muerte like the ones Los Herrera use, besides three or four ounces of cocaine.”
He maintained that El Machete members “don’t want rapists, murderers and drug traffickers, we want all of them to leave town. We don’t bother people. What they say, that an armed group entered again, is a lie, but we did not do anything violent yesterday; we went to see where there is evidence that they’re selling drugs.”
In addition to the 21 Pantelhó residents detained six months ago by El Machete, a group of sympathizers of the former mayor and cacique (political and economic boss), Roberto Pinto Kánter, has kidnapped [and held hostage] 27 indigenous people in Altamirano since last December 29.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, January 28, 2022
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/01/28/estados/025n3est
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Violence returns to Altamirano, 27 kidnapped
Above: Smoke from Altamirano’s municipal palace last September
After municipal offices were set on fire and ransacked, taxis were burned and people were kidnapped and held as hostages in the struggle to oust a former finquero family from municipal power last October, violence broke out again on December 29, 2021 in the Puerto Rico ejido, a community in Altamirano municipality, Chiapas, Mexico.
The Puerto Rico community was holding an assembly with Altamirano’s municipal council, when masked members of the Alliance of Social Organizations and Left Unions (ASSI) arrived carrying sticks, stones and guns. The ASSI members kidnapped 27 civilians and took them to a nearby community by the name of La Candelaria, also in Altamirano municipality, but apparently a community the ASSI members control, where they have held them as hostages since December 29. Two days later, another 12 were kidnapped; it’s unclear from news reports where the 12 were taken and whether they are still being held.
The response to the kidnappings was prompt and predictable. On the morning of Monday, January 3, 2022, thousands of Altamirano ejido owners blocked the three entrances to the town of Altamirano, which serves as the municipal seat, to demand that the state government intervene to obtain the release of the people being held and that the federal and state governments apply the rule of law in the municipality.
Road blocks were removed from all three entrances to Altamirano 2 days later, after a meeting with state government officials, who agreed to meet again with a commission of ejido owners and municipal authorities to find a way to liberate those being held hostage.
Ejido owners in the town of Altamirano have opposed the ASSI and its members for some time, alleging that it is a paramilitary group at the service of former municipal president Roberto Pinto Kanter. The October conflict was about preventing Pinto Kanter’s wife, Gabriele Roque Tipacamú, from succeeding him as municipal president. Those same ejido owners allege that Pinto Kanter finances and directs the ASSI, which they say is also responsible for kidnapping the child of an ejido owner and kidnapping and torturing ejido owners.
The ejido owners allege that Pinto Kanter used the ASSI to set fire to the municipal office building last September in order to destroy records he did not want an external body of auditors to see, but also so that he could blame the fire on the ejido owners. They also allege that the ASSI is involved in drug trafficking and organized crime.
State officials and the State Congress accepted the resignation of the Altamirano municipal president and her slate of municipal council authorities elected in the June 6, 2021 local elections, and in October 2021 the Congress appointed a new mayor and municipal council to stop the violence. With the December 29 kidnappings, however, it became apparent that the violence had not stopped.
As of January 9, the hostages had still not been released and a group of Tojolabal ejido members told a local reporter that they were no longer supporting the Altamirano ejido owners and the municipal council. They claimed that the new municipal council lacked the ability to govern and that Gabriel Montoya Oseguera had usurped authority.
Who is Gabriel Montoya Oseguera?
From writing about the Zapatista communities in the Lacandón Jungle of Chiapas, this writer recognized the name of Gabriel Montoya Oseguera. The first time that name popped up was back in 2006, a time when well-established indigenous communities located inside the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, including Viejo Velasco Suarez, were facing threats of eviction. Montoya Oseguera’s name appeared in a July 2006 report from the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba) published in Biodiversidadla, which described him as a government delegate offering money, beer and vehicles in order to entice folks to peacefully abandon their land and communities.
The Viejo Velasco Massacre took place in November 2006. All residents of that community were either murdered, disappeared or displaced. Viejo Velasco community members belonged to the indigenous Chol organization Xi’ Nich (The Ants), an organization sympathetic to the Zapatistas. The XI’ Nich believes that Montoya Oseguera, who became an advisor to the Lacandón Community Zone (LCZ), orchestrated the Viejo Velasco Massacre. In other words, Xi’ Nich is accusing Montoya Oseguera of being the intellectual author of the Viejo Velasco Massacre. [1]
On May 15, 2014, when a Mexican scientist, Julia Carabias, reported her own two-day kidnapping, the Chiapas government arrested and jailed Montoya Oseguera. His arrest caused large protests by members of the LCZ and the ARIC-ID that paralyzed the city of Ocosingo. Montoya Oseguera was released several months later without being formally charged and, to date, we know of no one who has been charged and prosecuted in regard to the alleged kidnapping of Carabias.
Nor do we know of Montoya Oseguera’s whereabouts between his 2014 release from prison and his candidacy for municipal president of Altamirano in the Spring of 2021.
Importance of Altamirano
The town of Altamirano is the municipal seat of Altamirano municipality. The town is located a few miles up the road from the Zapatista Caracol of Morelia, a large ejido where two Zapatista Women’s Gatherings were held. It is one of the municipalities the EZLN took over during the 1994 Zapatista Uprising and is one of the entryways into the Lacandón Jungle. The road out of the town that leads to Morelia and other indigenous communities gradually slopes downward towards the deep Jungle and the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. Altamirano municipality also played an important role in the EZLN’s internal clandestine organizing before the 1994 Uprising.
During the struggle to oust Pinto Kanter and his wife, one of the first documents the Altamirano ejido owners sent to the state government asking for help was also sent to the EZLN.
The ejido owners wrote that: for some time, after the January 1, 1994 Uprising, “the indigenous peoples of Altamirano, elected municipal governments through democracy, clean and transparent.” However, they warned: “the caciques took control again and ended democracy in the election of its rulers.”
In its first video, the Altamirano Self-Defense group said it would not make public its name out of respect for the “EZLN brothers.” And, in his excellent 2-part analysis of the deteriorating social situation in Chiapas, Hermann Bellinghausen writes: “The emergence of self-defense groups, in principle on the side of the peoples and against crime, can be the product of the example of Zapatista armed resistance and the effectiveness of their autonomies, and not only of the historical perversities of local chiefdoms (cacicazgos). That would be the case of El Machete of Pantelhó, and maybe the self-defense groups announced in Simojovel and Altamirano.”
A recent local report on the electoral violence referred to Altamirano as a “bastion” of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional); such a description is not uncommon. The actions of the ejido owners and the self-defense group evidence the strong Zapatista connection and influence.
The EZLN and Altamirano co-exist in the municipality. Violent conflict regarding Altamirano’s municipal council reverberates throughout the municipality’s communities, so it also affects the Zapatistas.
[1] Xi’ Nich – https://chiapas-support.org/2014/06/08/xi-nich-distances-itself-from-conflict-in-the-lacandon-community-zone/
By: Mary Ann Tenuto Sanchez 01-09-22
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Published by the Chiapas Support Committee
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
Communiqué of the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee-General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army
[Admin: Bishop Samuel Ruiz García died 10 years ago, on January 24, 2011. Below, we re-publish the EZLN’s communiqué issued upon his death with English interpretation.]
January 2011
To the people of Mexico:
The Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee-General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army expresses its sorrow for the death of the Bishop Emeritus Don Samuel Ruiz García.
In the EZLN, there are militants of different creeds and those without any religious beliefs, but the human stature of this man (and that of those, who like him walk on the side of the oppressed, the dispossessed, the repressed, the disdained), calls for our word.
Although the differences, disagreements and distances were neither few nor superficial, today we want to emphasize a commitment and a trajectory that are not only of an individual but of a whole current within the Catholic Church.
Don Samuel Ruiz García not only stood out in a Catholicism practiced in and with the dispossessed, with his team he also trained a whole generation of Christians committed to this practice within the Catholic religion. He not only worried about the grave situation of misery and marginalization of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, he also worked, together with a heroic pastoral team, to improve these shameful conditions of life and death.
What the governments purposely forgot in cultivating death, was made a memory of life in the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas.
Don Samuel Ruiz García and his team not only strove to achieve peace with justice and dignity for the indigenous people of Chiapas, they also risked and still risk their lives, liberty and property on that road truncated by the arrogance of political power.
Even long before our 1994 Uprising, the Diocese of San Cristóbal suffered harassment, attacks and slander from the Federal Army and the state governments in office.
At least since Juan Sabines Gutiérrez (remembered for the massacre in Wolonchan in 1980), and up through General Absalón Castellanos Domínguez, Patrocinio González Garrido, Elmar Setzer M., Eduardo Robledo Rincón, Julio César Ruiz Ferro (one of the authors of the massacre of Acteal in 1997), and Roberto Albores Guillén (better known as “el croquetas” or “dog biscuits”), the governors of Chiapas harassed those in the Dioceses that opposed their massacres and the management of the State as if it were a Porfirian [1] hacienda.
Since 1994, during his work in the National Commission of Mediation (CONAI), in the company of men and women that made up the peace entity, Don Samuel received pressures, harassment, and threats, including attempts on his life by the paramilitary group called “Paz y Justicia” (Peace and Justice).
And as president of the CONAI, in February of 1995, Don Samuel also suffered the threat of imprisonment.
Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, as part of a diversionary strategy (as it is done today) to hide the serious economic crisis to which he and Carlos Salinas de Gortari have subjected the country, reactivated the war against the indigenous Zapatista communities.
At the same time that he launched the great military offensive against the EZLN (the same one that failed), Zedillo attacked the National Intermediation Commission.
Obsessed with the idea of finishing off Don Samuel, the then-president of Mexico, now employed by transnational corporations, took advantage of the alliance which, under the tutelage of Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Diego Fernández de Cevallos, had been forged between the PRI and the PAN.
In those days, in a meeting with the Catholic ecclesiastical leadership, the then Attorney General of the Republic, member of the PAN and fanatic of spiritualism and witchcraft, Antonio Lozano Gracia, brandished a document to Don Samuel Ruiz Garcia with a warrant for his arrest.
And they say that the Attorney General, a graduate of the Occult Sciences, was confronted by the rest of the bishops, among them Norberto Rivera, who came out in defense of the head of the Diocese of San Cristóbal.
The PRI-PAN alliance (later joined by the PRD and PT) against the progressive Catholic Church, did not stop there. Both federal and state governments sponsored attacks, slander and attempts against the members of the Diocese.
The Federal Army was not left behind. At the same time that it financed, trained and equipped paramilitary groups, it promoted the idea that the Diocese was sowing violence.
The thesis at the time (and which today is repeated by idiots on the left) was that the Diocese had trained the EZLN’s rank and file and leadership cadres.
A button of the broad sampling of these ridiculous allegations was given when a general showed a book as proof of the connection of the Diocese with the “transgressors of the law.”
The title of the incriminating book is “The Gospel according to Saint Marcos.”
Above: Bishop Ruiz with Subcomandante Marcos
Still today these attacks have not ceased.
The “Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas” Human Rights Center (Frayba) continuously receives threats and harassment.
In addition to being founded by Don Samuel Ruiz García and having a Christian inspiration, the “Frayba” has as “aggravating crimes” a belief in the Integrity and Indivisibility of Human Rights, respect for cultural diversity and the right to Self-Determination, holistic justice as a requirement for peace, and the development of a culture of dialogue, tolerance and reconciliation, with respect for cultural and religious plurality.
[There is] Nothing more annoying than these principles.
And this annoyance goes all the way to the Vatican where there are maneuvers to split the Diocese of San Cristóbal in two, as a way to dilute the option of in, for and with the poor, into something more accommodating that washes conscience in money. Taking advantage of the death of Don Samuel, that project of control and division is being revived.
Because up there, they understand that the option for the poor doesn’t die with Don Samuel. It lives and moves throughout that sector of the Catholic Church that decided to practice what was preached.
Meanwhile, the pastoral team, and especially the deacons, ministers and catechists (Catholic indigenous people of the communities), suffer the defamation, insults and attacks of the neo- lovers of war. Power still longs for its days of lordship and it sees in the work of the Diocese an obstacle to reinstating its regime of gallows and knife.
The grotesque parade of characters of local and national political life in front of Don Samuel’s casket is not to honor him, but to verify, with relief, that he has died; and the local media pretends to mourn what in reality they are celebrating.
Beyond all those attacks and ecclesiastical conspiracies, Don Samuel Ruiz García and the Christians like him, had, have and will always have a special place in the dark heart of the indigenous Zapatista communities.
Now that it’s fashionable to condemn the entire Catholic Church for the crimes, excesses, commissions and omissions of some of its clergy…
Now that the self-styled “progressive” sector is so fond of mocking and deriding the Catholic Church in its entirety….
Now that it is encouraged to see in every priest a potential or active pede…
Now it would be good to turn and look down and find those that, like Don Samuel before them, distrusted and defied Power.
Because these Christians firmly believe that justice should reign in this world also.
And so it is that they live, and die, in thought, word, and deed…
Because while it is certain that there are Marciales and Onésimos in the Catholic church, there also were and are Roncos, Ernestos, Samueles, Arturos, Raúles, Sergios, Bartolomés, Joeles, Heribertos, Raymundos, Salvadores, Santiagos, Diegos, Estelas, Victorias, and thousands of religious and lay people who, being on the side of justice and freedom, are on the side of life.
In the EZLN, today, both Catholics and non-Catholics, believers and non-believers, we not only honor the memory of Don Samuel Ruiz García. We also, and especially, salute the consistent commitment of the Christians, and believers, in Chiapas, in Mexico and in the world, who do not remain in complicit silence in the face of injustice, nor paralyzed in the face of war.
Don Samuel is gone, but many remain, many others who, within and because of the Catholic Christian faith, struggle for an earthly world that is more just, a freer, and a more democratic, that is, a better world.
Cheers to them, for it is from their long nights that tomorrow will be born.
¡LIBERTY!
¡JUSTICE!
¡DEMOCRACY!
From the Mountains of Southeast Mexico
For the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee-General Command of the EZLN.
Lieutenant Colonel Insurgent Moisés
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
Mexico, January 2011
[1] Porfirian refers to the presidencies (or dictatorship) of Porfirio Diaz (1877-1880,1884-1910). This time, while a period of tremendous economic benefit for some, was a time of debt peonage and rising social ills among the rural and poor populations.
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English translation: Schools for Chiapas
Republished in English by the Chiapas Support Committee
What to do
By: Gustavo Esteva
And yes, it’s the old question. But the answers are entirely different.
As usual, Raúl Zibechi hits the nail on the head when describing the impotence of social movements or the so-called left faced with current predicaments. He rounds-off the tracks that he opened in two recent articles (La Jornada, 1/14/22 and 12/31/21).
What has been called the left has been losing its reason and meaning along the way. In the 1950s, it began to place development, instead of justice, as the reason and destiny for its existence. In order to “make the revolution,” whose form changes continuously, it remained attached to the obsession of “taking power,” which in practice simply meant assuming the reins of government.
Organized groups still exist that aspire to the original purpose: establishing socialism, although the very idea of a socialist society was modified to increasingly resemble capitalism and even the model that defined development: the United States. The evolution of the Soviet Union was framed this way. Cuba has shown for decades its satisfaction of a duty fulfilled, by having education and health systems that surpass US systems in various ways.
In the last three decades what still calls itself the left has been in a permanent crisis of orientation and character. In general, it has accommodated to the dominant system and the democratic game. “Taking power,” to its militants, means winning elections and occupying public positions. They feel especially satisfied if the rhetoric of the interests they serve has a progressive tone, although it may never state that it opposes patriarchy or capitalism.
That left has played a decisive role in the dismantling and liquidation of social movements. When it cannot use them for its own purposes, it excludes them and limits them as much as it can and frequently manages to divide them, according to a pattern that has always characterized it.
For those and other reasons, as Zibechi rightly points out, in practice it’s impossible that social movements and those who are still active in something that claims to be “on the left” are able to unify and even coordinate their actions, in order to confront the dominant system and the waves of horror that it has unleashed today. To place them into a framework, Zibechi refers to the State of the World Forum that took place in San Francisco in 1995. There, a political orientation of the elites was defined in relation to a new social class, which the Zapatistas called “the disposables:” [1] people who no longer have use to them. They see them as “surplus population,” which they can do without but need to subject and control. In the face of challenges like these, relatively new, the Leninist answers to what to do, the ones that expect a group of intellectuals to guide “the masses,” have lost all meaning and sustenance.
The hope of a new world is no longer emerging from the “left” or from the social movements, but rather of well-organized common people who for mere survival or old ideals have set themselves in motion and are busy –once again Zibechi– constructing territorial autonomies and their own systems of self-government.
When the Zapatistas finish their internal evaluation, they will surely make public the results of their Journey through Europe. From what was known during its realization, the purpose of listening to a multitude of groups of all classes and conditions that came to receive them with enthusiasm and commitment and created the conditions for intense exchanges, was amply fulfilled.
Time and again the growing distance of the people from all forms of respect for what is still called the “State” and the disillusion with all governments, from the broadest ideological spectrum. Everywhere they are reporting the dangerous emergence of fascist-leaning groups, which link their threats to those posed by climate collapse and generalized crisis.
Time and again the voices of women were heard exercising new forms of leadership, taking radical initiatives of enormous value and very clearly contributing to the construction of autonomy that is spreading. A discussion about government begins. Should we continue using that word for forms of organization in which there are no longer rulers and ruled, because the people themselves direct their lives?
We are faced with radical uncertainty. The collapses underway and the criminal irresponsibility of the elites, who intensify their efforts to dispossess and destroy everywhere, put even the survival of the human species at risk.
In a very real sense, we must return from the future. Instead of continuing to imagine utopias, which inevitably are projections of perceptions of the dying world, we need to creatively transform the present. Instead of trusting in messiahs or in liberating cataclysms, we must trust in the capacity that all of us have when we put our hands to work. That’s where we are.
[1] Subcomandante Marcos used the term “disposables” in his 1997 essay: “7 loose pieces of the global jigsaw puzzle.”
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Monday, January 24, 2022
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/01/24/opinion/017a2pol
Re-Published with English translation by the Chiapas Support Committee
The 80 percent, without strategies and confused
By: Raúl Zibechi
One year after the Zapatista Uprising, during the State of the World Forum in San Francisco, in 1995, prominent members of the global elites commented on the strategies they have been designing.
As is known, because the subject has been published in books and in many media, Zbigniew Brzezinski (former National Security advisor in the government of US President Jimmy Carter and an ideologue of neoliberalism) presented his idea, the 20-80 Society, which has become the paradigm of the dominant classes, although they refuse to repeat it for more than obvious reasons.
He emphasizes that 20 percent of the global population is sufficient to sustain the economic system and that the remaining 80 percent will have no jobs, no opportunities, no future. The first sector is the one that participates in the system’s benefits: quality consumption, private health care and education, as well as jobs in high-tech companies.
Those at the bottom, that immense 80 percent, consume junk food, fill their bellies, but are not nourished, they are numb with entertainment that bewilders them and prevents them from understanding what’s happening around them. Those at the top read books and newspapers, attend universities, travel and have the ability to save. The rest just watch television, telenovelas (soap operas) and football games.
Bzrezisnki coined the term “tittytainment” (breasts plus entertainment, in the sense of the sleepiness of babies when they are breastfed), to account for how they treat the majorities of the world-system.
So far, a fairly well-known panorama of what’s happening in the world today, let’s say after the implosion of the Soviet Union. We can discuss the percentages (20-80 or 30-70), but it seems out of the question that the world is divided into these two sectors: those who sustain the system and those who are disposable.
The main problem is the one Carlos Fazio pointed out based on the analysis of the psychoanalyst Mattias Desmet (https://bit.ly/3K26qK6). I find that the so-called “dissident group” must be well below the 30 percent mentioned in the article. Hopefully, we are 10 percent, but it seems inappropriate to dwell on the question of percentages.
The central issue is whether there is a possibility of uniting, as Fazio points out, and what difficulties we face in doing so. I understand that there are various problems to overcome, structural as well as cultural.
The first difficulty has to do with the natural differences of the anti-systemic sector, highlighting the sexual and gender ones, the contradictions and disagreements between generations, people of color, geographies and cultures, which make it difficult to create an “us,” a collective identity or, instead, spaces of confluence between different and differences.
In second place, among those of us who define ourselves as anti-capitalists, we don’t have anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial consensus, which is why machismo and racism continue causing splits and ruptures. I know a few collectives that have broken up, literally, due to the macho attitude of some members.
The statist or state-centric political culture is the third difficulty to overcome. We cannot ignore the fact that adhesion to social policies –as an expression of statist culture– continues being majoritarian in the field of the 80 percent, among those below. To the contrary, the tendency in favor of autonomy and self-government is the minority one, even among movements that work in that direction.
Without naming names, we know important movements of peoples whose communities survive from cultivating drugs, which brutally contradicts the outlined objectives, since it converts them into hostages of drug trafficking and, therefore, of paramilitary groups and the State itself.
However, a major difficulty in acting together, which deeply divides movements and organizations, comes from the left. A central part of the bewildering entertainment is the political system, the electoral circus: bread and circus, said the Romans, which we can translate today as social policies and electoral campaigns.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, January 14, 2022
https://www.jornada.com.mx/notas/2022/01/14/politica/el-80-por-ciento-sin-estrategias-y-confundido/
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
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CNI-CIG obtains provisional suspension of presidential agreement on mega-projects
By: Isaín Mandujano
The National Indigenous Congress and the Indigenous Government Council (CNI-CIG) announced that a federal judge granted them a provisional suspension of the presidential agreement that declares the federal government’s public works and projects [matters] of public interest and national security.
At a press conference this Tuesday, they announced that the Second District Court in Matters of Civil, Administrative and Labor Suspension and Federal Trials in the State of Puebla granted the provisional suspension of the presidential agreement.
They pointed out that with this suspension: “the neoliberal Mexican government is provisionally prevented from executing the actions indicated in its illegal agreement, like declaring its projects [matters] of “Public Interest” and “National Security,” with which it reiterates: “with cynicism, its decision to trample on the rights of anyone, using its armed groups to do so.”
They argued that indigenous peoples and communities of Jalisco, Querétaro, Puebla, Morelos, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Yucatán and CDMX, participants in the National Indigenous Congress (CNI, Congreso Nacional Indígena) filed a total of 17 lawsuits against the agreement of the President of the Republic that declares the federal government’s works and projects [matters] of public interest and national security, with which the federal public administration agencies are instructed to grant provisional authorizations for their execution.
It’s an agreement that ignores requirements established in the Constitution and in international conventions and regulatory laws; and thus violates the rights of the peoples for the purpose of enabling the imposition of infrastructure works and large mega-projects like the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Maya Train, the New International Airport of Mexico City and the Morelos Integral Project. [1]
They said that megaprojects facilitate: “a greater dispossession of Native peoples through reordering of territories, borders and populations of Mexico and Central America in favor of the geopolitical interests of the United States and large multinational capitals.”
They indicated that with the agreement of the bad federal government, they will also have all the facilities to repress the peoples who are opposed to their neoliberal policies.
“Despite the profound legal aberration that the agreement represents, in most of these lawsuits for amparos (suspensions) the judges have declared themselves incompetent, have rejected them outright or have asked us for various endless clarifications; in contrast to this negligent and complicit attitude of many judges,” they mentioned.
They explained that with this presidential agreement, the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador will have the ability to protect its own business and also that of big capital that wants to continue dispossessing the territories of the Nation and its peoples.
Members of the Coordination and Follow-Up Commission of the National Indigenous Congress-Indigenous Government Council called on all the Native Peoples of Mexico: “to be attentive to the imposition of the megaprojects of death and the way in which the judicial power can act in the face of the decision of our peoples to defend their rights and their territories.”
[1] One legal obligation that the Mexican government is bypassing with what is termed its “agreement,” is the obligation it has to hold prior, informed, free and culturally appropriate consultations with indigenous peoples who are affected by proposed public works projects.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
They document attacks on a Zapatista community in the Lacandón Jungle
Zapatistas of Nuevo San Gregorio
By: Isaín Mandujano
Today, a network of organizations, collectives and networks, adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, denounced the constant aggressions that an indigenous Zapatista community settled in the Chiapas jungle has been suffering from a group of armed civilians called “The 40 Invaders.”
After members of a group of 12 civil organizations adhered to the AJMAQ Network of Resistances and Rebellions carried out a third caravan to that indigenous Zapatista community to verify what happens there every day, they pointed out that it lives under attack, under threats from a civilian armed group.
It’s the indigenous Zapatista community of Nuevo San Gregorio, belonging to Lucio Cabañas Autonomous Municipality, Caracol 10, Flowering the Rebel Seed, Good Government Junta: New Dawn in Resistance and Rebellion for Life and Humanity, in the Patria Nueva Zone, territory that the EZLN recuperated in 1994, where girls, boys, men, women, and old ones live under permanent siege from the group of “The 40 Invaders.”
To the individuals, families, collectives, organizations, networks and communications media we extend this REPORT so that during the month of January you can contribute to the Campaign of dissemination of this document and information.
We ask you to join from your geographies, according to your ways, times and creativity, for the purpose of denouncing and letting the Zapatista families know that they are not alone. Also, to show our organization/articulation in the face of this War against the life and autonomies of the Zapatista peoples.
It’s an armed group whose main leaders are: Nicolás Pérez Pérez (former member of the Huixtán municipal council), his sons Roberto Pérez Huet and Alejandro Pérez Huet, Nicolás Mosan Huet, Alonso Bolom Ara and Nicolás Gómez Pérez.
On January 8 and 9, 2022, a third Caravan was organized, called by the AJMAQ Network of Resistances and Rebellions, to follow up on what’s happening in Nuevo San Gregorio community, where they were before on October 28, 2020 with the First Solidarity Caravan and on January 12, 2021 when a second Solidarity and Documentation Caravan took place.
They pointed out that after the uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) on January 1, 1994, thousands of hectares of land “usurped by finqueros/estate owners, were recuperated by their legitimate owners: the Native peoples.”
Based on these events, the government and its paramilitary groups have persisted in designing and executing a War to once again dispossess and control the land and territory where the Zapatista peoples construct a collective and autonomous way of life.
A video from the Ajmaq Network’s visit can be found here. There are 3 versions of the video. The #2 video has English subtitles.
They pointed out that Nuevo San Gregorio autonomous community comprises 155 hectares of recuperated land. Since November 2019, the 40 invaders began to intimidate and provoke by enclosing (fencing) workplaces and the autonomous secondary (middle) school, which has fruit trees and medicinal plants.
On February 27, 2020, the Nuevo San Gregorio community as well as the Good Government Junta attempted to establish a dialogue with the invaders making 3 concrete proposals to them: one, that the land be worked collectively; or two, give them one hectare per person; or three, divide the 155 hectares in half.
However, the invaders rejected these proposals. And from then-on the only thing that group has done is to provoke, attack and threaten the Zapatista bases.
“A concrete fact that clearly demonstrates that they don’t want the land because they need it to live, nor for a business, (but to go against the EZLN organization) is that all the invaders have their own land in the 4 communities to which they belong,” the activists said.
During 2020 and 2021, the invaders started with the fencing of the water storage tank that distributes [water] to the town, the electrification pole where the line for pumping water and the region’s tractor impede its movement.
The theft of garden vegetables, medicinal plants and fruit trees, threats to the Zapatista women and harassment of the men surrounded by invaders carrying sticks, machetes, batons and slingshots. In addition to monitoring and intimidating them at a distance, taking photos and video in the direction of Zapatistas in order to harass-besiege the families on their own land.
To date, January 2022, of the 155 hectares of recuperated land, the invaders have reduced the space and way of life, movement and production of the Zapatista families to three and a half hectares. They left the population center on half a hectare, leaving three scattered and fragmented hectares. Families, are currently found fenced-in and kidnapped on their own land.
The organizations, collectives and activists that participate in this 3rd Caravan of Solidarity, convoked by the AJMAQ Network of Resistances and Rebellions, gave an account of the documentation starting with testimonies and evidence of concrete facts about the acts of harassment, threats, destruction and dispossession towards the families and the Zapatista community of Nuevo San Gregorio.
They denounced that: “the constant criminal action of the group of 40 invaders, is in invading, fencing, kidnapping and killing the land and territory with barbed wire, which represents violating the right to the use and enjoyment of the land and territory that legitimately and in full exercise of right the Zapatista families have to forms of autonomous organization.”
Among the civil organizations participating in this civilian observation mission are: México Gruppen, International Forum of Denmark, Adherents to the International Sixth (Argentina), Women and the Sixth (Mexico City), the Zapatista Mix Network (Mexico City), the Anti-capitalist University Network (Mexico City), Economic and Social Development of Indigenous Mexicans (DESMI, AC), the Space of Struggle Against Oblivion and Repression (ELCOR), the Space for Women adherents to the Sixth (Jovel Valley), the Community Defenders (Jovel Valley), the Families of Prisoners in Struggle Collective, individual Adherents to the Sixth (Jovel Valley) and Promedios, as well as the AJMAQ Network of Resistances and Rebellions.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo, January 9, 2022, https://www.chiapasparalelo.com/noticias/chiapas/2022/01/documentan-ataques-a-comunidad-zapatista-en-la-selva-lacandona/ Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 