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The Fourth Transformation?
EZLN milicianos at the 25th Anniversary celebration
By: Gilberto López y Rivas
The arrival of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) to the Presidency of Mexico and the triumph of Morena as the first political force in the Congress of the Union, the governorships of four states, the leadership of the Mexico City Government, numerous city and municipal governments, demands reflecting, with critical thought, about the reaches and limitations of what’s called the Fourth Transformation. [1]
It’s necessary to characterize the current government, the economic and social projects it considers priorities, as well as the new correlation of political forces that it is forming, for the purpose of having tools that permit comprehending and responding adequately to the new hegemonic system of domination with which capitalism is reconfigured.
It’s necessary to analyze the bases that sustain the Fourth Transformation, which does not clearly reveal its programmatic or legislative strategy. The fight against corruption, without a rupture with the development model, doesn’t set the basis for a change in the historical dimensions of national Independence, the 1910 Reform and Revolution. Denying the validity of the class struggle in Mexico, situating itself as the supreme arbiter of social conflicts and seeking to mutate the State into a redistributive clientele apparatus, does not signify a “historical transition of the Republic,” much less a “change of epoch.”
At the same time, an enumeration of the priority economic projects: Special Economic Zones, the Maya Train, development of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the planting of fruit and timber trees on one million hectares, construction of 300 roads in rural territories, refineries, a system of airports in the Mexico City metropolitan area; free zones on the northern border and the Isthmus region, continuity of mining projects, the repeated affirmation of respecting contracts, the independence of the Bank of Mexico, the chief of staff’s perspective of “making Mexico an investment paradise” and the Morena initiative in Congress to abrogate the current Agrarian Law and expedite another one that reinforces the mechanisms for the privatization of ejido and communal land, and especially, the acceptance of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, confirm the continuity of economic policies within the logic of the capitalist system, of the neoliberalism that it claims to overcome.
Politically, the creation of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI, its initials in Spanish) is a return to the old “indigenismo” established by the PRI regime, patronizing and corporative, which was characterized as an authoritarian and manipulative State policy for the indigenous peoples, and whose funerals were celebrated in the San Andrés dialogues between the federal government and the EZLN. The fact of establishing 130 offices of the new INPI in Native peoples’ territories, with functionaries that speak the respective language, with governmental resources and projects, is a direct aggression against the autonomic processes and the movements in defense of the territories and against corporate invasion, especially in the territories where deeper autonomic processes are developed, related to armed conflicts, such as the Maya Zapatista region, or which defend indigenous campesino territoriality, the INPI runs the risk of performing counterinsurgency labors and of the “conflict engineering” that mining companies put into practice in order to overcome the resistances.
It is established in the metaphor of Subcomandante Moisés that: “the overseers and foremen change, but the owners of the finca (estate) continue being the same.” Rejection of these projects on the part of the national Indigenous Congress-Indigenous Governing Council (Congreso Nacional Indígena-Concejo Indígena de Gobierno), numerous independent indigenous and campesino organizations, specialists in different scientific disciplines, as well as criticism of the government consultas (votes) for not complying with the conditions established in the Constitution, in Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which mandate that consultations be prior, free, informed and binding, have not received the attention that they deserve and, to the contrary, were the object of contemptuous treatment on the President’s part.
In this sense, the climate of intolerance to criticism of the new government from the anti-capitalist Left stands out, claiming that “it plays the game of the right,” and “is a return to primitive communism,” or “a disparagement of the 30 million voters that elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador.”
Precisely because of the respect that all Mexicans who voted for a profound change deserve, the need is vindicated for a rigorous analysis of the nature and impact of the budding projects, of the directionality of the same, starting with the resistances below and to the Left, and with an intelligentsia committed to these struggles. The disjunctive continues being: with the prince or with the people.
Note:
[1] By calling his project the Fourth Transformation, AMLO is elevating his presidential project to the importance of: 1) the War of Independence from Spain, an armed conflict that ended 300 years of Spanish colonial domination and took place from 1810 to 1821; 2) the Reform, a war between liberals and conservatives from 1858 to 1861 that resulted in the Reform Laws, among which the separation of Church and State stands out; and 3) the Mexican Revolution, a war against the regime of Porfirio Díaz from 1910 to 1917, which resulted in the promulgation of the Mexican Constitution that, as amended, rules Mexico today.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, December 28, 2018
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2018/12/28/opinion/014a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Communiqué from the National Indigenous Congress and the Indigenous Governing Council for the 25th anniversary of the armed uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army
Commanders enter La Realidad for the 25th Anniversary celebration.
January 2, 2019
To the Zapatista National Liberation Army:
To the CIG Support Networks:
To the Resistance and Rebellion Networks:
To the people of Mexico:
To the peoples of the world:
To the communications media:
The peoples, nations and tribes that form the National Indigenous Congress and the Indigenous Governing Council, proudly greet the 25th anniversary of the armed uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, since on January 1, 1994 our word stopped asking for alms and demanded justice, and to recognizer the rights that we started to exercise since that day, not only in Chiapas, but in all indigenous corners of our country.
That day, a new chapter in our collective life began to be written. With heads held high, we walk picking up the footsteps of our ancestors and sowing those of coming generations, with the conviction of continuing to be peoples, nations and tribes.
With the war unleashed against us, we have seen ourselves reflected in the walk of the indigenous Zapatista communities, knowing that outside there are threats against us and that everything is in the name of wealth for only some. They offer us that we migrate, leaving our territories; they offer us mourning for our deaths in the face of violence, contamination, persecution and prison; they offer us fear and resignation.
The peoples that we in the CNI are know how the bad governments act in the name of those who have more and want everything. We have faced the formation of shock groups, of paramilitaries and now of narco-paramilitaries that the bad government disguises as internal divisions, to say in that way that some want and others do not want to deliver land and natural resources to the owners of money. We know the ways in which the bad government’s “indigenist” institutions deceive our people in order to generate the kind of division that costs the lives of our compañeros and compañeras that opt for dignity, resistance and rebellion.
The INPI and its alleged new “indigenist” policy is no more than the deepening of that offensive against life, with which they want to weaken the struggle for the autonomy of the original peoples who, with their struggle, stop the devastation that they impose from above. The CNI and our compañeros of the Indigenous Governing Council do not believe al overseer of capitalism who claims to govern Mexico, and we will not accept any false consultation like those with which they want to legitimize the robbery of indigenous and campesino territories, our extermination and the sharpening of the war against us. We will not accept our death although they may bring thousands or millions of votes that, according to them, decided it.
With us walk the profound steps, real and not renounceable, that the original peoples have taken in resonance with the walking of the EZLN and the indigenous Zapatista communities. We are communications media, cooperatives, community guards; we are primary, secondary and high schools; we are languages and ancient world views (cosmovisiones); we are betting on a future that those who are in power are not even capable of imagining; we are the ones who will face in every corner the destruction that they proclaim as if it were a “democratic” benefit.
Together with the deepening of the capitalist war we will also deepen our resistance and rebellion. The mining companies with which they contracted, the megaprojects on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the immoral Maya Train project, the devastation and privatization of sowing industrial forest plantations in the Lacandón Jungle and the territorial alienation (for the benefit of) big capital that the Special Economic Zones are will bump heads with the real power, the power of below, the one that doesn’t surrender, doesn’t sell out and doesn’t give up, because to do it is to know we are dead as peoples.
We respectfully greet and send a collective and fraternal embrace to the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee–General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, to the thousands of milicianos and milicianas and to the support base communities. We warn the bad governments that any aggression against them is also against the CNI- CIG, therefore we make a call to the support networks throughout the country and to the networks of resistance and rebellion in Mexico and in the world to be attentive and organized to act jointly and to construct a world in which we will all be able to live.
Attentively,
January 2019
For the Integral Reconstitution of Our Peoples
Never More A Mexico Without Us
Coordination and Follow-Up Commission of the National Indigenous Congress/Indigenous Government Council
The EZLN warns that it will not permit the Maya Train project to happen
Comandante Pablo Contreras (Pablo González Casanova) in the second Gathering of Networks of Resistance in support of the National Indigenous Congress and the Indigenous Governing Council. Photo: Mariana Gutiérrez
By: Elio Henríquez
San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas
The Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) said that it would not permit President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Maya Train project of death and dirty tricks to happen. It described López Obrador as “crazy” and “crafty,” and therefore, it said, it will defend what it has constructed in the past 25 years.
On Monday, López Obrador arrived in Villahermosa to attend the swearing-in of Adán Augusto López as governor of Tabasco. Upon asking him about the resistance announced by the EZLN to some of his projects, he answered: “They are within their rights, how good that they are going to do it, and many congratulations to everyone.”
In the voice of Subcomandante Moisés, during an event held in the community of La Realidad, municipality of Las Margaritas, in the Lacandón Jungle, the EZLN stated: “Think about how crazy it is that he says he is going to govern for rich and poor. Only a crazy person that is sick in the head can say that; his mind doesn’t work, he is braindead (…).
“He doesn’t know nor understand what he’s saying, and he doesn’t understand because his boss dictates to him what he has to say. It’s simple: you can’t support the exploited and the exploiter, you have to choose one of the two,” he said.
The EZLN criticized, without mentioning him by name, that Lopez Obrador “is very tricky, because (he says) that he is with the people of Mexico and continues deceiving the original peoples, demonstrating that he thrusts himself on the land asking for permission and saying that all the original peoples believe him, but we say that we don’t believe him.”
Upon referring to the ceremony held on December 1 in Mexico City’s Zócalo, where López Obrador received the staff of command from the indigenous peoples, the EZLN expressed: “Only because Mother Earth doesn’t speak, if she did she would say: fuck your mother; she would say: go to hell!”
In the context of the 25th anniversary of the January 1, 1994 Zapatista Uprising, he added: “We’re not going to allow them to come to destroy us,” and he warned: “We’re not afraid of their Nacional Guard, which changed their name in order to not say Army, but they are the same.”
He maintained that López Obrador “is going to destroy the people of Mexico, but principally the original peoples; they’re coming for us, especially for the EZLN.” He reiterated that they are not afraid of the new federal government. “We’re going to fight and we’re going to confront it.”
He remarked: “They’re coming for us, the original peoples. The consulta (vote) that they make is to manipulate the people. They are asking permission to attack us with votes. They are consulting so that they can come to confront us with that dirty trick of the Maya Train” (Tren Maya),” but “if they provoke us, we are going to defend ourselves. We’re not going to allow anyone to come to establish themselves in this territory in rebellion.”
He asserted that the so-called Fourth Transformation “is nothing of a fourth. Those of the third confronted him with facts. (López Obrador) says, for example, that he is going to forgive all the criminals. Like the one who says that he won’t do anything to the murderers of our Compañero Galeano,” murdered in the community of La Realidad in May 2014.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Wednesday, January 2, 2019
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2019/01/02/politica/004n1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Victories of the EZLN
HAPPY NEW YEAR | ¡FELIZ AÑO!
By: Hermann Bellinghausen
The three musketeers are not the same, the joke would say, 25 years later. Of course not! If they were, what would be the point of commemorating a quarter of a century of the armed uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN)? It’s pure action on New Years 1994, suicidal as it may seem, with a single shot (the formidable Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle) yielded multiple targets, more than expected. Within a few hours, a new historical cycle began on a regional and national level with global repercussions. Coming from the most forgotten corner of the country, a solitary shot seldom gave life to so many important things.
“It put Chiapas on the map,” they said. Rather, it put the world on the Chiapas map. It also placed a lot of things in doubt, from the relevance of the single Western clock to the economic folly that crowned the Free Trade Agreement with North America, which premiered that same morning. The Zapatista torpedo hit the waterline of the Mexican government, which in minutes lost the aura of invincibility and had to grapple with the revolt.
For the communities of the mountains of Chiapas it meant a step forward in their own history, the conquest of autonomy (not called so then), the dignifying of their internal democracy and the right to speak. Instead of dying, they danced. They recuperated lands in the jungle and cemented a solid future that 25 years later is a fait accompli. In spite of the fact that the reflectors keep it off the radar, the Zapatista experience, daily and real, takes place away from the spectacle and the current news. The rebel movement, clandestine in origin and internalized by the patience and experience of the peoples, materializes the rebirth intuited by Guillermo Bonfil in México profundo. It turned out to be “the Mexican alarm clock.”
If for Mexico it meant the resounding campesino rejection of the Salinas government’s agrarian betrayal formalized in 1992. For the world it embodied the first mobilization against the dictatorship of the markets, created a fresh discourse for a Left without compass and impregnated the imminent global resistances against the monopoly of globalized economic power. It was the first social movement to have at its disposal the weapons of the Internet and its networks, and to take advantage of them widely.
It imposed the “indigenous question” on the political table and the debate remains alive beyond 2018, as we observe daily. Time revealed that for the original peoples the alarm clock had sounded just in time, current and future generations would be conceived in another way, notably women; they found that with organization and a clean conscience it’s possible to achieve the deepest demands. Who wouldn’t subscribe to the 13 Zapatista demands? A quarter of a century later, despite the ideological and practical differences, there is not a single indigenous people of Mexico that isn’t in debt to the rebels.
For the original peoples it means the closest thing to their revolution that they have had on a political, mental and human level. To the Zapatista peoples, rebellion, far from killing them, guaranteed them a better life and the precious right to govern themselves. Years pass and we don’t stop seeing their youth flowing, incessant and renewed, a flow that is from an authentic river that joins waters upon descending from the mountain. Heraclitus would say that the river is never the same. But it’s always a river.
Zapatismo taught Mexicans that “president” is written with a small “p” and he can be disavowed with justice to declare war with legitimacy, denouncing his crimes with good reason. The State bared its moral smallness upon failing to recognize its signature on the San Andrés Accords, and the Zapatistas made them the law in their territories. The creation of the Good Government Juntas consolidated the only viable government alternative as of now in the country.
There are more victories but no more space. The challenges of the indigenous awakening will remain valid although the State says it is being transformed. The Nation’s historical debt to the Native peoples will not be paid by denying that indigenismo has died, that charity is an insult, that the State’s development megalomania inexorably passes for dispossession and that the peoples must be subjects of right.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Monday, December 31, 2018
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2018/12/31/opinion/a08a1cul
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
As the Zapatistas celebrate the 25th anniversary of their 1994 Uprising, please consider a donation to the La Garrucha Education Fund, a fund for building autonomous middle schools in the jungle region of La Garrucha. Thank you!
The expansion of the Mapuche movement
Thousands attended the funeral of Camilo Catrilanca.
By: Raúl Zibechi
Leaving Temuco, in the heart of Mapuche territory, extensive pine plantations surround villages and towns, like waves that hover over people of the earth, “natural” wire fences of a monstrous concentration camp. The highways and roads crowded with carabiñeros [1] in their green vans complement the circle of plantations with a relentless siege, tattooed in fire and shrapnel on dark bodies.
The vendors around the Temuco market are being displaced because of a municipal order, which the armed police execute with punctual arrogance. They continue coming, protected with a broad clientele that persists in buying from them despite the threat of fines. They hung a number of black balloons when they learned about the murder in the back of Camilo Catrillanca, on November 14, in the community of Temucuicui.
Whoever wants to know more details about the crime, the lies of power and about the political crisis that corners the government, can go to the page mapuexpress.org where there is no lack of information.
What follows is the result of exchanges with and listening to members of different organizations, urban and rural, with comuneros and academics, political prisoners and family members, students and feminists, collected in Santiago and Temuco during the first days of December.
The first point is to verify the territorial expansion of the Mapuche movement. In Araucanía or Wallmapu (Mapuche Territory) they don’t stop recuperating land, a question that strengthens the communities that were encircled and subjected to reductions. They remain in water up to their necks, but begin to breathe, and therefore the attacks from the power have not achieved stopping them in the last decade, let’s say between the murders of Matías Catrileo (2008) and Camilo Catrillanca (2018).
In some areas, such as the triangle between Ercilla (to the north of Temuco), the coast of Tirúa and Loncoche (to the south), the land recuperations are forming a spot of Mapuche community power. An example: on the 1200 hectares of the former Alaska farm, recuperated in 2002, two communities (Temucuicui Traditional and Temucuicui Autonomous) now live on lands that belonged to the Mininco Forestry of the Matte Group, which owns 700,000 hectares usurped from the communities.
The second thing is to verify the multiplication of organizations of all kinds, everywhere, in Wallmapu as well as in the big cities. The Coordinator of Organizations of Mapuche Students (COEM, its initials in Spanish), in Santiago, formed four years ago, unites groupings from almost all the universities and has created a school of indigenous women that defends Mapuche feminism. They define themselves as “anti-patriarchal but not feminist” because, as Angélica Valderrama of Mapuexpress points out: “we don’t want to think about our reality within the parameters of white feminism.”
The Mapuche History Community is part of this notable growth and diversification of the movement, which Simona Mayo defines as “the multi sectorial character of the Mapuche organization.” Various collectives that could be defined as human rights defenders integrate this diversity and, in some cases, consider themselves Mapuche because they have assumed that identity even having white skin.
The third, and the most surprising to this writer, is the creation of mixed spaces integrated by Mapuche and huincas (whites), as something natural and normalized, without hierarchies existing within the collectives. Both the COEM and the Mapuexpress information collective are Mapuche and white spaces, as well as various feminist, environmentalist and student groups.
They are constructing “heterogeneous subjects,” as the historian Claudio Alvarado Lincopi emphasized in a conversation, something that the Left isn’t able to do because: “in its inbreeding only its own traditions have value.” These “mixed” spaces as well as Mapuche feminism, were almost non-existent a decade ago, or they were very incipient, but now they are flourishing and multiplying exponentially.
The fourth point is the expansion of the Mapuche language, Mapudugun, in unsuspected places, like popular neighborhoods and those of the urban middle class. In the Olympic village, in the Ñuñoa commune, a middle class neighborhood of Santiago, the daughter of my host studies Mapudungun in her school, by her own choice. The same thing happens in three other schools in the district. There is consensus on the extraordinary expansion of the Mapuche language, much beyond the borders of Wallmapu.
The fifth point is the massive reaction of the Chilean population to Catrillanca’s murder. There were mobilizations in at least 30 cities throughout the country, including those in the far north. In Santiago, in the days following the murder, there were around 100 street closings, with barricades and bonfires, for hours, with hundreds of neighbors. Those who did not go out in the street beat pots and pans in entire neighborhoods, especially in the outskirts. In some zones the mobilizations lasted for 15 days.
That reveals that the Mapuche people have become a reference for an enormous portion of Chileans that harbor anti-systemic sentiments, in a country where half of the population never votes. The tenacious resistance of the Mapuche people and the mediocrity of the Lefts, located the Mapuches in that place, despite the campaigns against them.
Lastly, to emphasize the strategic importance of the Temucuicui Manifesto issued on December 1 to a crowd concentrated in the community where Camilo was murdered. It defends the “demilitarization of Wallmapu,” the right to ancestral territory with a call to the communities to “strengthen the exercise of recuperation and territorial control” and to form a “historical clarification commission” that recuperates the truth about how the Chilean State occupied their territory.
In the exercise of their free determination, all Mapuche currents finish with a call to disobedience as a way of making decolonization a reality.
[1] Carabiñeros are Chilean federal police.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, December 21, 2018
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2018/12/21/opinion/018a1pol/
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
EZLN: twenty-five years
By: Adolfo Gilly
One morning 25 years ago, January 1, 1994, we saw an unusual spectacle appear on television: an indigenous army, emerging from the shadows of that New Years night, was taking the city of San Cristóbal. They were many, looked very poor and were opening a new era in the history of this country and its peoples. Its name was and continues being Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional): EZLN.
They said then who they were and what they wanted and were proposing, and since then they have not stopped saying, from the first Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle to the presidential campaign of Marichuy and the Indigenous Government Council.
They then used a language that today, a quarter of a century later, is good to remember. On February 1, 1994, in a letter to the state of Guerrero’s 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Council, they explained their existence in what was actually a manifesto directed to the entire country. Its singular language appeared far from conventional political discourse:
There was so much pain in our heart, era our death and sorrow was so much that it no longer fit, brothers, in this world that our grandparents gave us to continue living and struggling. So great was the pain and the grief that it no longer fit in the heart of a few, and it was overflowing, and the pain and sorrow were filling other hearts, and they filled the hearts of the oldest and wisest of our peoples, and the hearts of young men and women were filled, all of them brave, and the hearts of the children, even the smallest, were filled.
The discourse was then directed to the past:
We talked to each other, we looked inside ourselves and we looked at our history, we saw our greatest parents suffer and struggle, we saw our grandparents struggle, we saw our parents with fury in their hands, we saw that not everything had been taken away from us, that we had the most valuable thing, which made us live, […] and dignity lived in our hearts again, and we were still new, and the dead, our dead, saw that we were still new and called on us, again, to dignity and struggle.
That voice continued speaking between religion and myth, history, grievance and pride, prayer and communion:
We leave behind our lands, our houses are far away, we leave everything, we take off our skin to dress for war and death, and we die in order to live. Nothing for us, for everyone everything, what is ours is our children’s. We all leave all of us.
Now they want to leave us alone, brothers, they want our death to be useless, they want our blood to be forgotten among the stones and dung, they want our voice to be extinguished and they want our step to become far away once again. […]
Don’t abandon us, don’t let us die alone and don’t leave our struggle in the vacuum of the great lords. Brothers, may our path be the same be the same for everyone: liberty, democracy, justice!
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The Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) celebrates in these days its 25 years of life. Besides its history, it has its social organization, its language and its politics.
Nothing can be done in Chiapas, in the vast world of the indigenous peoples and in the national indigenous movement, as long it isn’t old-style state indigenismo, without taking into account the EZLN’s presence, without dialoguing with the Zapatista National Liberation Army, its politics and its history, its proposals, its resistance and its existence.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Monday, December 24, 2018
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2018/12/24/politica/010a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Towards the 25th anniversary of the EZLN
EZLN Comandantes celebrate!
By: Magdalena Gómez
January 1, 2019 will be the 25 anniversary of the public emergence of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN). The challenge to the Mexican State, on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement begins formal operations, permeated our roots and mobilized the indigenous peoples of our country as never before, placing their agenda on the nation’s agenda. It also gave hope and meaning to many activists and movements in the world that were looking for how to orient the compass of the Left in neoliberal times.
While it’s impossible to reconstruct the EZLN’s trajectory and contribution in a few lines, suffice it to say that a first important step was the massive social demand for a ceasefire that it achieved from Salinas de Gortari on January 12, 1994, the unilateral ceasefire and the Zapatista respect for said decision. That factor being important, however, it cannot be ignored that the State has waged war against Zapatismo by many means, and not exactly peaceful.
A key moment was the February 9, 1995 betrayal, when then President of the Republic, Ernesto Zedillo, converted into the Public Prosecutor, broadcast on national television the alleged identities of the Zapatista leadership and the issuance of arrest warrants, while the Army was advancing in Chiapas against the territory its bases occupied. The stigma of Esteban Moctezuma derives from this. As the then Secretary of the Interior (secretario de Gobernación), he was received in Chiapas days before in a supposed and discrete dialogue plan.
The crisis unleashed on February 9 derived into the passage of the Law for Dialogue, Negotiation and Dignified Peace in Chiapas, which says in its first article: “This law has as an objective establishing the legal bases that will promote dialogue and conciliation for reaching, through an agreement of concordance and pacification, the just, dignified and lasting solution to the armed conflict initiated on January 1, 1994 in the state of Chiapas. For purposes of this law, the EZLN will be understood as the group of persons that are identified as an organization of Mexican citizens, mostly indigenous, who disagreed for various reasons and became involved in the conflict referred to in the preceding paragraph.”
Starting from that context, the route was defined for the dialogue, whose first negotiating table produced the San Andrés Accords on indigenous rights and culture, signed on February 16, 1996 and after a series of crises, now into the Fox presidency and with the Zapatista expression of conditions for sitting down again with the government, the indigenous counter-reform was promulgated in 2001 with which the EZLN considered that the State kicked over the board and ruined the possibility of resuming the dialogue that had been suspended since September 1996.
From 2001 to date, Zapatismo has constructed its autonomy in Chiapas, developing different areas of work through autonomous government bodies, as well as its own health and education systems through collective work, with everyone’s participation, women, men, young people and children. We’re talking about Good Government Juntas (Boards), an experience emblematic beyond national borders that they systematized and shared in the Escuelita Zapatista. They have also organized different seminars about the capitalist hydra, as well as the CompArtes and the ConSciencias, among others.
The most recent political experience was the accompaniment of the National Indigenous Congress (Congreso Nacional Indígena, CNI) in the decision to name an Indigenous Governing Council (Consejo Indígena de Gobierno, CIG) with men and women representatives from each one of the peoples, tribes and nations that comprise it, and this council proposes to govern this country. And it will have as its spokesperson an indigenous woman from the CNI, in other words, she will have indigenous blood and know her culture, and she would be an independent candidate to the Presidency of Mexico.
We know the result of this experience, faced with the State’s rules: Marichuy did not reach the required number of signatures, however her tour achieved the articulation of networks that are maintained around the anticapitalist option. They also gave an account of the deepening deterioration in the country and of the virtual war against the peoples promoted from the State. The EZLN has reiterated the statement about the transmutation of the rulers in the historical figure of the overseers: They are good defenders of the interests of their bosses to plunder the natural riches of our country and the world such as land, forests, mountains, water, rivers, lakes, lagoons, air and the mines that are guarded in the bosom of our Mother Earth, because the boss considers everything a commodity and thus they want to destroy us completely. The bosses are not present for the official part, not in the new government or its projects, both elements to suppose a change of direction in that trajectory that threatens the life of the peoples.
We can glimpse the Zapatista message with these elements this coming January 1.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Saturday, December 22, 2018
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2018/12/22/opinion/017a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
El dolor de Acteal (Acteal’s Pain)
Acteal survivors carry crosses with the names of those massacred.
By: Luis Hernández Navarro
A young woman carries in her hands the photograph of a little six-year old girl framed in wood. It’s a portrait of Silvia Pérez Luna. In the lower part can be seen the date of her birth and death: 1991-1997.
Silvia was one of the 45 people savagely murdered by paramilitaries in Acteal, Chiapas, on December 22, 1997. The victims, 7 men, 21 women and 15 children (one of them less than one-year old), were praying for peace in a small chapel. The murderers finished off the wounded and opened the wombs of the pregnant women.
The image of Silvia’s portrait of her family member is part of the protest in which relatives of the Acteal martyrs (themselves also victims) and family members belonging to the civil society organization Las Abejas (The Bees) participated last December 8. That day, in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Rutilio Escandón was sworn in as governor of Chiapas.
That day, as they have done for almost 21 years, they denounced that Acteal is a crime against humanity perpetrated by the Mexican State, in which justice has not been done, those responsible for the acts have not been punished and the truth has not been clarified.
They also remembered how, to the country’s shame, on August 12, 2009, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation considered it more important to point out a technicality than to defend justice and it ordered the release of 29 paramilitaries sentenced to prison.
Also coinciding with the 21st anniversary of the massacre, a timely and shocking book about it was just published: “El dolor de Acteal, Una revisión histórica,” (Acteal’s Pain, A historical review) 1997-2014, written by Mónica Uribe M, a specialist in religious issues.
Despite being a work that rigorously utilizes the tools of the sociology of religion, history, anthropology and political science, its reading provokes a strong emotional impact. The pain, indignation, rage, anguish and horror that it generates is summarized on its cover: a reproduction of the painting The Scream (El grito), from the painter Edvard Munch.
To analyze what happened in Acteal, Monica Uribe uses documentary sources that are almost unknown or only partially utilized. Among others, there is the civil complaint that a group of 11 victims filed (contrary to the opinion of Las Abejas) in United States court against former president Ernesto Zedillo. It accuses him of criminal association to execute the Acteal Massacre and for its subsequent cover-up.
The book delves into the pages of the balance sheet of the special prosecutor for crimes committed in the procurement and administration of justice in the state and for the town of Acteal. Therein is included the statement rendered by one of the tragedy’s principal actors, the then [federal] Secretary of Governance, Emilio Chuayffet. In his responses, the official makes it clear that Ernesto Zedillo knew, since one year before, about the imminent violence, through the government’s institutional channels, as well as through the national press, besides the fact that the actors in the Chiapas conflict approached him to report and warn him about the possible consequences of the situation.
In the balance sheet is included Chuayffet’s telephone conversation integrated into the case record in which, according to the document, the co-responsibility and scheming about the facts with Liébano Sáenz, President Zedillo’s private secretary is evident.
El dolor de Acteal includes an interview conducted a little more than a year ago with Alejandro Vázquez, who, at the time of the massacre, was a second archivist sergeant, belonging to the National Defense Staff, and who worked directly for the chief of the assistants to the Secretary of Defense, Enrique Cervantes Aguirre. According to his testimony, the general secretary worked on Sunday, December 21, 1997, which was unusual. That day, he was attentive to the communications from Chiapas and instructions from the Presidency, via the red telephone. He was the one responsible for picking up the phone and taking part of the call.
According to Lieutenant Vázquez, they were told that they should keep quiet and they also had to work the next day. In Acteal –he assures– “personnel from the Military Police Brigade participated, as well as logistic services personnel coming from different military zones, not from Chiapas, dressed as civilians and whose backgrounds inside the Army were negative.”
Beginning with copious documentation, El dolor de Acteal exposes the informative maneuvers of several intellectuals and of Hugo Eric Flores (the leader of Social Encounter) to elaborate an account of the facts that was convenient for the power, discards that the massacre had a religious matrix and concludes that “Ernesto Zedillo is the one ultimately responsible for the events in Acteal.”
The survivors of the massacre in Chenalhó demand that the new president listen to them, like he did to the families of the 43 that disappeared from Ayotzinapa. 21 years later, Acteal still awaits justice.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Tuesday, December 11, 2016
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2018/12/11/opinion/016a2pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Be the dream! Support Zapatista parents & children build schools
Join us in a solidarity action: Be the dream!
Support Zapatista parents & children build schools
Dear Friends & Supporters of the Chiapas Support Committee,
Our warmest wishes to you in this season of holidays filled with joyous struggles for justice and dignity.
And in the season’s spirit of generosity, solidarity and community, we invite you to join us in honoring the Zapatistas on the 25th anniversary of their uprising by making a donation to support Zapatista parents and children in Chiapas build schools.
Solidarity is not just a sentiment; solidarity is direct action: Join us in walking side by side with the just movements and struggles of our indigenous sister-brother communities in Mexico.
We are asking you to uplift and be part of the Zapatista dream by making solidarity today and click on the donate button to make a donation now to support the Zapatistas’ work to build an autonomous secondary school system.
Your donation will go directly to training secondary school teachers from the four autonomous Zapatista municipios (counties) that comprise the Caracol of La Garrucha. And your donations will also help fund the construction of four classrooms, one in each of the four middle schools to be constructed (in the municipality belonging to the Caracol of La Garrucha. Donate now by clicking here!
25 Years of Zapatista Work for Justice & Liberation
On January 1, 1994, the day the U.S. began implementing NAFTA, the tri-national “free” trade agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, the world woke up to the first rebellion saying NO to the global neoliberal capitalism led by the indigenous-led EZLN, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, from Mayan lands in Chiapas. The 1994 Zapatista uprising was a historic and organized NO from below to capitalism so that their deep YES to building communities of caring for the land and her peoples could thrive.
And ever since the Zapatista dream of justice and liberation has moved, united and connected many Indigenous and non-indigenous communities, organizations and movements in Mexico and across borders to dream and build the world where the exploited and oppressed, the excluded and the ignored have first voice, where all working and indigenous peoples live and are in control of their lives and communities. As the Zapatistas celebrate their landmark anniversary, they have been constructing a better future for their children.
The Chiapas Support Committee (CSC) is committed to supporting the construction of a better future and we’re asking you to join us in that commitment by making a generous donation to make dreams come true.
Zapatista Year 24: Coffee, Marichuy, Women’s Power
The year 2018 began with an important January visit from Mario Luna, International Representative of the National Indigenous Congress (Congreso Nacional Indígena, CNI in Spanish) and the Indigenous Council of Government (Consejo Indígena de Gobierno, CIG). Luna’s visit was part of the West Coast portion of a US tour sponsored by the Sexta Grietas, a US-based network of collectives and individuals who adhere to the EZLN’s Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle and support the CNI-CIG.
The CSC is a member collective of the Sexta. We arranged meetings with local organizations and media interviews. We also hosted a public gathering at the Omni Commons in Oakland, where art from the Zapatista communities was on display. This tour was successful and laid the groundwork for future cross-border organizing work with the CNI-CIG in the US.
The tour was inspiring and critical to the organizing work of the CNI-CIG, of which the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN or Zapatistas) is a member organization. The campaign of María de Jesús Patricio Martínez (Marichuy) as an independent pre-candidate to the presidency of Mexico organized indigenous peoples into the CIG, and non-indigenous people into collectives and groups in support of the CIG.
The Zapatistas took creative solidarity action to oppose the virulent attacks on migrant workers and communities in the U.S. They donated hundreds of pounds of Zapatista coffee and asked members of the Sexta to sell it and give the money raised to support migrant rights organization leading the struggles and movements for justice and against policing and deportations.
The Chiapas Support Committee took up the Zapatista solidarity proposal and sold Zapatista coffee at events and gatherings, donating all the money raised from Zapatista coffee sales to a local immigrant women’s organization. The CSC also co-sponsored the showing of “Dispatches from Resistant Mexico” at Film Night, at the Omni Commons and hosted Duamuxa for a musical canción nueva report back from a solidarity delegation to Palestine.
One of our Board Members worked with a group of Bay Area women to the “First International Gathering of Women that Struggle,” sponsored by the Zapatista women and held March 8-10 in the Caracol of Morelia, Chiapas. After everyone returned from Chiapas, we sponsored “Zapatista Women Inspire the World,” a May 18 report back from the Women’s Gathering with film shorts and a panel of women who attended that amazing event offering their perspectives. Some 8,000 women from all over the world attended the Zapatista Women’s Gathering. Then in August, we presented our 3rdannual CompArte cultural festival with a mix of poets, artists and musicians.
Waffles & Zapatismo
We continue to offer a free space for critical reflection and solidarity, open to the community, for learning and dialogue about Zapatismo. We call this space “Waffles & Zapatismo.” The W&Z classes enable us to connect with new people and learn what others are doing to build justice and community.
We ended the year of 2018 by celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Zapatista Uprising with a special end of year fundraiser that featured a film screening of “Corazón del Tiempo (Heart of Time),” a love story in times of Zapatista resistance. All the proceeds from this film gathering and your generous donations will be sent to the Zapatista Caracol of La Garrucha for the construction of four autonomous Zapatista middle schools (more on this later).
Marichuy: Women’s Power, Women Leadership
2018 was an incredible year of Zapatista organizing and resistance in Mexico that inspired and guided our work here, too. Throughout her campaign as an independent pre-candidate to the presidency of Mexico, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez (“Marichuy”), the spokesperson and representative, organized both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples into the Indigenous Governing Council (CIG, its initials in Spanish) and into collectives and support groups. The EZLN and CNI-CIG further solidified their work and invited all to organize against capitalism and for autonomous community. The Zapatistas also held several joint meetings in Chiapas this year, which included not only those of us in the national and international Sexta(Sixth), but also the new groups and collectives that formed in support of the CIG and Marichuy’s campaign.
After the Women’s Gathering, the Zapatistas held a seminar of critical thinking, the cultural festival of resistance, CompArte III, and the First Film Festival, which they announced would be an annual event. The CNI held an assembly in October to discuss organizing proposals and decided to send them to the communities for consultation.
The EZLN-CNI-CIG will end the year with a celebration for the 25th Anniversary of the Zapatista Uprising in La Realidad on New Years Eve as they prepare for more resistance, more solidarity and deep community.
Take Solidarity Action: Support the Zapatistas Secundarias!
The most exciting news we received came in October, when the Caracol of La Garrucha sent us a request for support of their project to construct four secondarias (middle schools), one in each of the four autonomous municipalities that comprise the Caracol. The La Garrucha region has never had a middle school in any of its municipalities and it has long been a dream of the parents to give their children an autonomous middle school education.
You can make that dream come true with a generous donation to the La Garrucha Education Fund. Details of the project are in the online fundraising appeal we initiated in October and can be found here.
You can mail your donation (see address below) or give a donation now by clicking here Solidarity Action Giving. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit and an all-volunteer collective, so every donation we receive is important to us and to the communities in La Garrucha.
In solidarity,
Carolina Dutton, Chair, on behalf of the Chiapas Support Committee Board
Alicia Bravo, Arnoldo Garcia, Roberto Martinez, Jose Plascencia, Laura Rivas-Andrade, Amanda Stephenson, Mary Ann Tenuto-Sánchez
Chiapas Support Committee
P.O. Box 3421
Oakland, CA 94609
The Maya Train will destroy the last lung of the Mexican Southeast
The Calakmul Pyramid.
By: Chiapas Paralelo and León Ávila
León Enrique Ávila, a professor at the Intercultural University of Chiapas (UNICH, its Spanish acronym) indicated that the “Tren Maya” {Maya Train) project that will run through 5 states of the country will imply a significant destruction of the jungles in Mexico.
Ávila, in his participation in the seminar organized by Otros Mundos A.C en San Cristóbal de las Casas, expressed that one of the 10 projects that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador designated as “priorities,” like the Maya Train, could have an important ecological consequence.
“We must recognize that from Palenque to Mérida and Valladolid there are already lines of the Maya Train that were created under the Porfiriato (the presidential regime of Porfirio Díaz). But between Cancún, Tulum, Sian Ka’an, Bacalar, Calakmul and Escárcega, it’s a totally new line, which implies a significant destruction of jungles in Mexico” he said.
The researcher warned that the proposal for the “Maya Train” to cross the Calakmul Reserve [1] right in the middle would have the consequence of breaking it in two. In addition to other problems in the nature reserves, he added: “the Lacandón Jungle has been deforested to plant corn. The other reserve in the region that will be affected is Sian Ka’an. [2] The train has to pass right through the middle of that reserve.” (See map below.)
“The impacts will be very strong. Simply by breaking the reserve apart from the highway with another train, the animals are going to have a problem of connectivity and of movement. If simply with the highway extension an emblematic place for bats that are now clueless around the highway was damaged, imagine the impact that a train is going to have!”
Ávila said that with this project the Selva Maya (Mayan Jungle) will be divided in two, imposing a dividing line and condemning it to extinction.
The 70% of the plant species in the world are now in danger [according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature – IUCN].
Then the worst thing that Mexico could do in the face of this conjuncture of collapse would be to support these kinds of proposals that lead to ecocide and the extermination of life.
“The problem is not only that the railroad’s routes imply cutting down thousands of trees. The other problem is the economic development associated with the railroad and it is what we don’t see. It’s a large real estate project that includes resorts, shopping centers, residential lots, large-scale hotels, and territorial rearrangements,” he said.
The academic affirmed that the work of the Nacional Fund for Tourism Promotion is directed towards the 15 million American tourists that visit Cancún every year, so it would be a lie to say that it’s Mexicans who would travel on the “Maya Train.” [3]
Translator’s Notes:
[1] From Wikipedia: The Calakmul Biosphere Reserve is located at the base of the Yucatán Peninsula in Calakmul Municipality in the state of Campeche, Mexico. It borders on the Guatemalan department of El Petén to the south and occupies 2,792 square miles and includes about 12% of the sub-perennial jungles of Mexico. Established in 1989, it is one of Mexico’s largest protected areas and covers more than 14% of the state. The important archaeological site of Calakmul one of the largest-known Maya sites, is located inside of this Biosphere Reserve.
[2] From Wikipedia: Sian Ka’an is a biosphere reserve in the municipality of Tulum, in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico. It was established in 1986 and became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987. The vast majority of the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve lies in the municipality of Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Part of the Sian Ka’an is on land and part is on the Caribbean Sea, including a section of coral reef. It is connected to protected areas to the north of it that protect coastal areas and archaeological sites.
[3] There is little doubt in this translator’s mind that the Maya Train is a key to opening up the Mundo Maya (Maya World) to mega-tourism, which will not only result in environmental damage, but also possible dispossession and displacement of Native and campesino peoples.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo
Sunday, December 2, 2018
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 