Chiapas Support Committee

By: Gloria Muñoz Ramírez

While throughout Mexican territory candidates of the different political parties are smashed to pieces in every possible way, inside a tent that excludes society and includes the juggling of electoral authorities, other ways of doing politics are being constructed and encounters are made possible among equals who don’t have the search for power –call it a bone– in the middle.

Last April 10, a group of Zapatista women and men got together in a space called the Comandanta Ramona Seedbed. They make up part of the first group that will leave for Europe in the context of a tour of the five continents that the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) announced in January of this year. The objective: “To look and listen to the other,” then, they explained, “knowing what’s different is also part of our struggle and of our endeavor, of our humanity.”

The French autonomous movement known as the “yellow vests” that rose up two years ago in France against the neoliberal reforms of Emmanuel Macron, will be one of the hosts of the Zapatista delegation, which will also have the participation of representatives from the National Indigenous Congress and the Peoples Front in Defense of Land and Water of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala.

In a letter made public by the “vests,” they assure that with respect to their movement “they have not said the last word,” and that the Zapatistas’

arrival will be an opportunity to exchange with them what they have learned. The meeting with the Mexican delegation: “will be a way to send a message of hope and freedom,” and to call on the peoples who struggle to “recuperate control of their lives” all over the world.

In France and in thirty European countries the collectives in struggle are already preparing tents, rooms or barns for receiving the invited delegation, part of which is already in quarantine. The virus has stopped the lives of millions of people around the world, but not that of capitalism, nor that of those who resist it. The ship sails.

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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada on Saturday, April 17, 2021 and re-published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee

By: Raúl Zibechi

In a way, on one hand there are the platforms, the social networks, and the “masses” piled up; on the other the formation of collectives that embody the most diverse oppressions in the most distant geographies.

If there is something Zapatismo cannot be accused of, it is not being coherent. For a long time now they have designed a politics of alliance among those from below, which they will now deploy during the tour on European soils that begins in June.

The Second Declaration of La Realidad for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, released in August 1996, says it with clarity and transparency when it states: “We will make a collective network of all of our particular struggles and resistances. An intercontinental network of resistance against neoliberalism, an intercontinental web of resistance for humanity.”

The objective of this network is for the resistances of the world to find one another, to support one another mutually. And they clarify that the network is “not an organizational structure, it has no guiding or decision-making center, nor a central command nor hierarchies. The network is all of us who resist.

I believe that this declaration, that is now more than a quarter century old, illuminates what the Zapatistas want to do wherever they go. First they did it in Mexico, and went about weaving resistances of the indigenous peoples that gave life to the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), formed in 1996, and later to the Indigenous Governing Council (CIG), which was created in 2016.

The CNI adopted the 7 principles that the EZLN defined as the way to do politics; serve and not serve oneself; construct and not destroy, lead by obeying and not command, propose and not impose, convince and not conquer, to work from below, not seek to rise, and to represent and not replace.

The CIG is made up of 523 communities from 25 states of the country and 43 indigenous peoples. They affirm that “our struggle is not for power,” but to “strengthen ourselves in our resistances and rebellions, which is to say in the defense of every person, every family, collective, community or neighborhood.” (https://bit.ly/3rLJeWl).

The bearing of the EZLN, the CNI and the CIG is the construction of autonomies that collectively self-govern, based on another way of doing politics according to the above-mentioned principles.

It is important to point out that when they go on tour, as they always do, they are going to find the collectives that struggle, without importance to how many are involved, whether they appear in the mainstream media, or if they have more or less of an audience. It’s not about great acts with an illuminated platform for well-known people to go up and speak for the audience to listen, but rather to open spaces to talk amongst equals, to listen and learn, to say how each one is resisting, not to set a course for anyone.

Zapatismo embodies new forms of doing politics, below and to the left, ways that don’t have precedent in the anti-systemic movements of the 20th century. María de Jesus Patricio, Marichuy, spokeswoman for the CIG always says that, “when we are together, we are an assembly, and when we are apart, we are a web.”

In a gathering of women in February of 2018, Marichuy explained the campaign for the collection of signatures that they were conducting, as an excuse to dialogue with the people. “It was necessary to create a space, not so much an organization, so that there wasn’t someone leading and another obeying, but that we all felt we were part of this house.” The objective always consists of organizing from below, because in this way, “we can achieve the dismantling of power for those who hold power and money, those from the bad governments.” (https://bit.ly/3ulJk8R).

While traditional politics, as much on the right as on the left, directs itself to the great “masses” (a terrible word), to isolated individuals, the politics of the Zapatistas seeks to nest in organized collectives that resist the system.

While the dominant forms of doing politics, focused on elections, tend to dis-organize existing collectives, or at least weaken them, the EZLN, CNI and CIG seek the complete opposite: to motivate people to organize themselves, as a way of collectively confronting the evils of the system.

It is a politics that looks from below, not from above, but rather horizontally, below with below, among equals, to share, learn, and chart courses, respecting the ways and rhythms of each.

In traditional politics, big hierarchical organizations are created, in which a small group commands and the rest obey. Pyramids on whose summits are generally installed men trained in academia who speak but don’t listen, who make decisions without consulting, who claim to speak in the name of people that they don’t even know.

In Zapatista politics, each collective speaks with its own voice, no one interprets nor represents it. The women and men who participate listen, ask, and try to learn.

In a way, on one hand there are the platforms, the social networks, and the huddled “masses”; on the other the formation of collectives that embody the most diverse oppressions in the most distant geographies. Media visibility, that does not move the system a single hair, as opposed to the patient and slow organization from below, that bets on containing the oppressions in order to dismantle them in an undetermined period, which in fact, has already begun.

In history, as capitalism was implanted in all of the pores of society, the political culture from below (which always existed, as the Paris Commune demonstrates) was cornered, but it emerges again with strength each time the people stand up.

I am speaking of the territorial assemblies of Chile; of the Ecuadorian indigenous and popular parliament; of the Mapuche organizations and communities; of the Nasa and Misak councils in the south of Colombia; of the guards of self-defense that begin to populate our geographies in the Andes and the Amazon; of the hundreds of popular schools, of the community kitchens and health posts born during the pandemic.

These are the collectives that inspire us and from which we learn. The Zapatistas propose that we connect up and listen to one another to face the system together.

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Originally Published in Spanish by Naiz on April 5, 2021 and Re-Published by the Chiapas Support Committee with English interpretation by Schools for Chiapas

Profits and sections of the Maya Train will go to the military

• The almost 1,500 kilometers of railroad will become the patrimony of the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA) and the money obtained from the project will go to the Army.

The Maya Train, [supposedly] a project to improve the quality of people’s lives, care for the environment and detonate sustainable development, will run a distance of around 1,500 kilometers (km) and will pass through the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo.

However, the environmental impact of phase 1, which will go from Palenque, Chiapas to Izamal, Yucatán, points to the loss of vegetation cover of 800.95 hectares, “affecting the forest mass that will contribute to the emission of carbon, considered one of the causes of climate change.”

Added to that, “right of way” became the words most feared for the residents who are settled along the 232 kilometers of what is known as the First Section of the Maya Train.

Said context is added to the fact that the military will own totality of the Maya Train. The military will obtain profits for the transportation of passengers and cargo to feed the pension funds that depended on the Secretariat of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP, its initials in Spanish).

In an interview with El Financiero, Rogelio Jiménez Pons, director general of the National Fund for the Promotion of Tourism (Fonatur, its Spanish acronym) detailed that all the resources, including profits related to the railroad’s operation in the southeast, will benefit the military.

Specifically, the profits will be for the military, not for the treasury. Pensions and other things will no longer depend on the treasury. The ownership is going to remain; we are going to concede all the sections to the Army, remarked the general director of Fonatur.

Jiménez Pons said that the entry of the armed forces as owners of the megaproject would prevent the railroad from being privatized like other projects in previous governments.

It’s perfect that it’s an award to the armed forces. If we have a long-term nationalist vision of heritage, which this business is, but the State’s, we’re going to try to make this a business for the benefit of the greatest number of Mexicans, who better than the Army to be in charge of this business, to guaranty us many things and especially to guaranty us that it is not privatized, Jiménez Pons added.

He said that the Maya Train has a “national security” aspect because there are conflict zones in the country’s southeast, where there are [drug] cartels, human trafficking groups and the illegal sale of livestock.

Because of that, the military’s participation would diminish the impact that said activities would have on the project.

When you insert an institution with certain values, with certain discipline, with rigor and knowledge that it will never be privatized, because it will belong to the Army, well going forward with that, then you create a solid institution that can see the project long-term. And we already see separate merchandizing, the Fonatur already sees that, Jiménez Pons said.

The Maya Train stumbles

The Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) affirmed that no deforestation is authorized to make way for the construction of the Maya Train.

It’s of importance to point out that the Highest Auditor of the Federation (ASF) released a report on the Maya Train work, in which it questions the profitability, lack of feasibility studies, of consultation with residents and environmental impact, among others.

The ASF made public the federal government’s 2019 report of the Public Account, in which it points out that the project presents risks of not being profitable, was not consulted in a way owed to the indigenous population, has little interest in environmental protection and isn’t very transparent in the award of public contracts.

In the rubric of profitability, the audit numbered 1384-DE highlighted that the project’s operator, Fonatur, used assumptions that “were not reasonable,” in relation to the use of cargo and of passengers that it could operate between 2023 y 2053.

In other words, it made projections that are “a risk to the financial viability of the project, since the overestimation in demand could have repercussions in significant variations with respect to the estimated profitability of the project in the pre-investment stage.”

The ASF also reported that Fonatur paid cost overruns, awarded contracts directly in an unjustified way, did not have “an administrative structure for carrying out the project” or have completed studies; among them social feasibility, “like a diagnosis in which it foresees the possible effects and social risks its construction and operation would cause,” the audit explains.

The irregularity that the ASF most encountered refers to the environmental impact and points to: “the destruction of natural habitats; soil characteristics; damages to local wildlife; damages to species of flora, and the existence of critical ecosystems and damage to biological corridors,” according to audit 1386-DE.

Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo on March 16, 2021 and re-published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee.