Chiapas Support Committee
Home of the Compañero Manuel blog on zapatistas & mexico
It’s not the decision of one person
For the racists:
Well, we’ve been reading and listening to everything you’ve been saying and writing.
We’ve seen all of your mockery, your scorn and racism that you can no longer hide.
I believe that the compañeros and especially the compañeras of the National Indigenous Congress [CNI] are also reading and listening to what you say.
It’s clear that the CNI was right about what they thought and what they told us, that there is a lot of racism in society.
I imagine you amuse and applaud each other over what a good joke you made with your leftist mockery about the EZLN’s “candigata.”[1]
You celebrate your machismo making fun of indigenous women.
You say that we ‘fucking Indians’ let ourselves be manipulated, are unable to think for ourselves, and go like sheep wherever the shepherd points.
But I think when you say this you are actually looking in the mirror.
That’s what you turned out to be: shameless macho racists.
You all talk so much about the racism of the exploitive class and don’t realize you have taken on that racism in body and soul, in your form of thinking, your way of talking, your perspective on life.
Your individualism and egoism doesn’t let you see anything else or any other way, as if you could save yourselves by yourselves, or as if you yourselves could save any other living being.
You don’t realize that you are stuck in your individualism, closed off in your own lives, unable to see that the little that is left is almost gone.
We tell you first to learn to read, then read carefully and then learn to understand what you have read because those who have written in newspapers and social networks are pathetic.
Supposedly some of you have doctorates or honorary doctorates or whatever you call it but it turns out that you don’t know how to read or write; you haven’t understood anything.
Or perhaps you do understand, but you like to create a lie, make it grow, dress it as the truth, repeat it and shout it and spread it around so people don’t realize it’s a lie; or maybe you just don’t know how to read or write.
Thus you mock the decision of the National Indigenous Congress which has gone out to consult the thousands of people in their communities, tribes, nations, and barrios that will decide if they are or are not in agreement [with the proposal].
You make fun of the fact that the National Indigenous Congress functions like that, consulting before making a decision, because you all just do whatever your shepherd tells you, even if it is stupid nonsense.
You claim to be thinkers, critical ones, but you remain silent when your shepherd comes out with his idiocies, because you are just as racist and disparaging as he is.
The National Indigenous Congress is consulting on whether their people will name an Indigenous Governing Council to govern our country of Mexico, a Council to be represented by an indigenous woman, delegate of the CNI, who would be candidate for the presidency of Mexico in the 2018 elections.
This is what was announced the morning of October 14, 2016.
That is what was written in the text; it is clear and it is in Spanish so that you all can understand it.
The text does not say that the EZLN is going to consult its bases of support as to whether they want to run an independent candidate for the EZLN, an indigenous woman who is a Zapatista base of support, and that they will also consult the National Indigenous Congress about whether they agree with this proposal.
It says nothing of the sort, but you all are lazy and ignorant and don’t want to read or pay attention, so you just swallow what is sold by the paid media.
You purport to be so studious, with so much advanced technology, and you don’t even bother to read. You just grab something from what the paid media puts out and then write about it.
You don’t read the text from its original site, nor what it actually says, but rather become a bunch of gossips that don’t even know how to say “National Indigenous Congress,” substituting instead “National Indigenist Congress” or “National Indigenous Council.”
What a shame that professional writers get paid to be ignorant.
How can you ask that people read or listen to you if you don’t read or listen yourselves?
Or is that you quite simply can’t be bothered to read it?
How can you ask to be respected when you don’t know how to show respect?
How can you expect to be understood if you don’t even understand how we make decisions communally? The results of this decision aren’t even in yet and already you have begun with your insults, lack of respect, mockery, and racism.
What a shame that you are so full of yourselves as lawyers, professionals, university professors, and researchers with awards and titles.
What a shame, because you say you are all these things but you don’t know how to read or write.
And it isn’t that you don’t have the means, because you are well stocked with cellphones, tablets, computers, and everything else, but apparently you have these things for mere fashion and not for their usefulness. You have them only to show off who has the newest modern models.
But one thing is for sure, you do use these things to publish every racist and disparaging stupidity that occurs to you.
You mock us because there are only a few of us; there’s no need to concern oneself with the Zapatistas, you say.
You say that we Zapatistas are off in our mountains and don’t know anything about the world, that we are ignorant and backward, that we don’t know how politics works, professional politics, things that only educated people from the city know about.
It’s true; there are only a few of us. Just some thousands of organized people, true.
We are only 23 years old and haven’t gotten far, just a few Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities in Rebellion where we have told the bad government to fuck off like true teachers of disobedience to the bad system and the bad government.
A few Autonomous Municipalities with health care services where one can access free surgery thanks to the support of conscientious doctor comrades who lend a hand.
With a few autonomous schools where one can truly learn to read and write.
With a few radio broadcasters, a few laboratory specialists, a few compañeras who operate the ultrasound equipment, a few dentists.
Where the people rule and the government obeys.
Ah, and one thing for sure: a few hundred thousand rages against the capitalist system in which we live and die.
There’s that, as well as everything we still plan to do, because we have no plans to stop.
Now then, could you tell us what you have done over the last 23 years?
And not that business of sniffing around for some crumbs or for somebody to throw you a bone, that is, a job or a title.
Because what we are doing here is a true demonstration of how to destroy the bad system, what must be destroyed and what must be created, a decision made by thousands and not just a handful of people in an office or on the order of one individual.
While you all in many cases have spent years talking and arguing without even creating a mirror so that you can see what it is that you are constructing.
Because what counts is when you can actually see what you have been talking about, not just hear empty words. What counts is not what just person one has decided, but what has been the decision of thousands.
-*-
How should one behave as a writer?
As a commentator or journalist?
Or as a seeker of a cabinet position or job appointment?
I think the answer would be not to criticize when you don’t know the actual situation, because you don’t live with those you are talking about.
It would be to inform yourselves honestly, scientifically, not repeat robotically what you have heard, or poorly read, or what the paid media have said.
It would be to not make fun of the people you are talking about and then later refuse to acknowledge what you said, or insist that wasn’t what you meant and that you have been misunderstood. When you do that it is clear that in addition to being ignorant, you are cowardly.
The answer would be not to assume you know everything if you do not live with the people you are talking about, nor study, nor read carefully, nor experience any of the things they experience.
What’s more, how can you be so smug if you have nothing to show for it?
You can’t even see your own shadow.
You have nothing to show for yourselves that is visible and tangible.
Because a slew of words is not the same as a visible deed, a practice composed of thousands of visions and thoughts.
So why do you mock and scorn?
-*-
Ladies and gentlemen, to those who think so highly of themselves for having some organizational leadership position or who are so boastful of their degrees, we want to say:
As indigenous people of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, we feel pity, sadness, and rage because you mock and disrespect us as indigenous people.
But despite this, we will struggle and fight for you too, for this Mexico in which we live.
We have more than 500 years of experience with the poor lives that the rich have inflicted on us, and for more than 500 years we have known how we want a good life to be.
And you?
How many five hundreds of years do you have that you can come mock and scorn us?
We have decided, along with our compañeras and compañeros of the National Indigenous Congress, to consult our communities as to if they are in agreement or not with creating an Indigenous Governing Council that governs all of Mexico, not just the indigenous, and that this Council participates in the 2018 elections through an indigenous woman delegate of the CNI as its representative.
We still don’t have the final decision as to yes or no.
We don’t even know what the decision will be, and look how much the Native peoples, especially Native women, have been mocked and disparaged.
That means that those who attack us are not just those who exploit us. Rather, those who have tried to step on and over us with their critiques include the political parties, even the ones who claim to be on the left, the supposedly great intellectuals, professionals, researchers, commentators, writers, journalists, and university professors.
Who is missing?
Whoever else feels interpolated can add themselves to this list of frauds.
Now even those smug people who treated us like children want to order us around. Let’s hope that someday their work is seen and put up for comparison. Let’s hope someday they tell the truth about why they left.
Let’s see, derisive and disdainful ladies and gentlemen: how many autonomous municipalities have you organized?
In how many of the places where you live do the people rule and the government obeys?
Where in your world are women, children, and the elderly respected?
Where is help given to those who have nothing?
Where do you have freedom, freedom according to you, to go out into the street or countryside without fear that you will be kidnapped, disappeared, raped, murdered?
Where do you have a government that isn’t full of criminals and prisons that aren’t full of innocents?
Did you do the math?
Now respond: why do you turn against the indigenous and treat them as if they have no brains and don’t know what they are doing?
Why, if we aren’t even messing with you?
We don’t even mention you and yet you accuse us of getting paid by the bad government to fuck you over, you accuse us of working for capitalism.
Nobody pays us to be what we are and we don’t work for anybody.
Because no one rules over us.
Perhaps that is why you attack us and disrespect us, because you are in fact ruled over and told what to think, say, and do.
You don’t like freedom because you like to be a slave.
As Zapatistas, we may do things well or we may do them badly, but we do them ourselves.
We don’t do what others, outside of us, tell us to do.
You should study and learn that what’s fucking you over is called “capitalism” and not “the indigenous.”
It is fruitless for you to attack and mock us, because one day we will see each other, we will have to.
Who will obligate us to do so?
The system.
Learn this and stop throwing tantrums and fits because to struggle for the world is not a game.
-*-
Ladies and Gentlemen who are intellectuals:
How is it that you don’t realize that the capitalists change their ways of thinking, exploiting, stealing, repressing, and disrespecting?
You are supposed to be profound thinkers but you are more like dry old trees that won’t bear any more fruit no matter how long you wait.
Now the land even where you live is contaminated, which is what capitalism is doing to it, and you continue to see and think the same things as if your heads had become deformed in the same process and there was no other way to exercise thought.
Leave your rooms, get up out of your chair, walk, lift your heads, looks for your eyeglasses so that you can see further and better.
Now imagine all of the possibilities of the combinations of what you have seen, and you’ll see that you get new ideas, not the same ones repeating over and over.
And if you didn’t manage to see anything, well then your eyes must be done for.
-*-
So now it seems that you want to tell us what SupGaleano should or shouldn’t do.
SupGaleano, just like the rest of the insurgent troops, does what I tell him.
And I do what the people tell me.
In that regard, it is up to me to tell SupGaleano to do what I say because I do what our people say.
If I tell him not to respond [to something someone has said or written], he doesn’t respond, because it isn’t worth the time.
And if I tell him to respond, he has to even if he doesn’t want to, and he has to respond clearly because he must help others understand.
If I tell him to give interviews, he has to give them, even if he doesn’t want to. I can tell him to give everyone an interview or only some people, and he has to do as I say. If I tell him only with the free media, that’s what he does. If I say the paid media also, that’s what he does.
For those who don’t want to understand this, what they will have to do is very simple:
First they will need to be subjected to death, destruction, and humiliation for more than 500 years.
Then they must organize for 10 years, preparing themselves to rise up as we did January 1, 1994.
Then they will have to resist for many years, without selling out, without giving up, without giving in. Who knows if they can do it, because it’s one thing to write and another thing to do, that’s why we say theory is one thing and practice is another. This is what teaches you and gives you another vision without losing sight of your principles.
But we’ll see if we don’t get bored waiting for them.
We’ll see if we’re even alive then because what the capitalist beast will do in the meantime is so fucked.
Either they realize their lack of or limited vision or it will lead them down the system’s path toward death, and then there really is no remedy, and no one will even remember the tragic history that they played out.
So can it all be blamed on SupGaleano, who manipulates us and takes us down the wrong path? It’s laughable how now you say “Galeano/Marcos.”
You were so in love with SupMarcos that you came to take photos with him and get his autograph; I know because I was there off to the side.
Also off to the side was the maestro Galeano, whose name you did not even ask.
Then later you so hated SupMarcos because he didn’t obey you, but rather obeyed us.
Well he’s dead now.
Stop acting like his abandoned widows.
He’s dead; get over it!
Now there is a Sup Galeano because that’s what we decided. And we put him out there so that you would attack and criticize him and thus reveal who you really are. It doesn’t matter what you say, not even the death threats. It doesn’t matter because that is what we trained him for, that is what we prepared him for and that is his work. And he can take it, not like you all who, after any little thing somebody says to you, cry that the world doesn’t understand you.
If we decide that he dies again, then he dies again.
And if you don’t like the way we do things, oh well. As if we were here to make you happy.
We are here for the people below and to the left, those who struggle, who think, who organize, and who resist and rebel.
We respect those people and they respect us because they know we are equals.
And we are with these people not only in Mexico, but also all over the world.
So stop fooling the people in the schools where you give classes. You know nothing.
And the reason that you don’t know anything is because you lack both humility and honesty. You lost both among all of those papers and desks and medals and honors and other bullshit.
If in the end you understand and organize, well then we’ll see if you find yourselves another Subcomandante Insurgente Pedro, or another SupMarcos, because we haven’t found another yet.
But perhaps you will have better luck in finding them.
-*-
In the meantime, shut up and listen, read, and learn from the organized peoples, tribes, nations, and barrios of the National Indigenous Congress.
They are our families, and it is their turn to teach us, to show us the way.
It is our job as Zapatistas to learn from them.
Hopefully we all manage to do this, and the world will be more just, more democratic, and freer.
The cadaver of the capitalist Hydra lies beneath the bare feet of the Native peoples.
Not injured, but dead.
Thus we will have to make everything anew, but this time right, without an above or a below, without disrespect, without exploitation, without repression, without displacement.
That world will also be for you, you who are racist and disdainful of what you do not understand.
Because you do not yet understand that you don’t understand.
You don’t understand that you know nothing.
What is going to come out of this is not the decision of one person, but of a collective.
-*-
Later we are going to tell the Sixth what happened.
We didn’t tell them before because the National Indigenous Congress asked us to wait until they arrived safely to their communities and began the consultation. They asked us to be their guardian and wait and take the critique and scorn that would have been aimed at them.
So we waited and took it, and now all those we expected have popped up.
The National Indigenous Congress has heard them and read them; they know.
They know where the scorn and the racism comes from.
They know what the professional politicians think.
They know what the Ruler thinks.
They know what those who think they are saviors think.
The CNI’s skin is healthy.
Ours is wounded, but we are used to it and we scar over quickly.
-*-
The CNI is clear in its thinking.
Now we must wait for their decision and support it.
We know that the path that they choose for all of us Native peoples, tribes, nations, and barrios will be born of pain and rage.
It will be born of resistance and rebellion.
It will come not from an individual, not from a person.
It will be born of the collective, as indeed those of us who are what we are, are born.
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés
Mexico, November 2016
[1] Candigato Morris is a cat that several residents of Veracruz ran for mayor of Xalapa, the state’s capital, to give voters a chance to protest alleged corruption going on at the polls. Candigato Morris became a popular character and even has a Facebook page. As used above, “candigata” is simply the feminine form of the word.
En español: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2016/11/11/no-es-decision-de-una-persona/
Latin America and the triumph of Trump
California protests over Donald Trump’s election. Photo: AP
By: Raúl Zibechi
For those who had any doubts that a new right has been born, Donald Trump’s triumph should convince them of the contrary. The new right has wide popular support, especially among workers and the middle classes beaten by the 2008 crisis and the effects of globalization, as already happened in England with the Brexit vote. We are facing a new world where this macho and racist right collects the rage of the millions that the system harmed. A right that’s nostalgic for a past that won’t come back, in a period of imperial decadence and the capitalist world-system.
What the United States elections revealed is the internal fracture that society experiences, the impoverishment of the majority and the obscene enrichment of the 1%. But the elections also revealed the shameful role of the communications media, starting with the “respectable” New York Times and Wall Street Journal that had no scruples in headlining that Trump was the candidate of Vladimir Putin. Robert Parry (the investigative journalist that uncovered the Iran-Contra scandal) asserts that the formerly respectable Times “has lost its journalistic way, becoming a propaganda and apologetic platform for the powerful.”
The campaign also revealed the fracture of institutions as vital to the 1% as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), which was internally broken by pressures from Hillary Clinton so that it would not investigate her emails. Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the international architecture the United States forged since 1945 and the 1% lost with Trump; they bet strongly on Clinton. Now they surround the winner to condition him, something that’s not going to cost them much because they belong to the same class and defend the same interests.
It’s probable that Blacks and Latinos suffer most with a Trump government. But, are they doing well now? Under the Barack Obama administrations African American deaths at the hands of the police increased exponentially, the income gap among Latinos and African Americans as compared to whites grew as a consequence of the 2008 crisis.
In 2013 white income was 13 times greater that that of African Americans and 10 times that of Latinos, while in 2004 it was seven times higher than the former and nine times higher than the latter. (El País)
The situation of immigrants will improve if they strengthen their organizations, extend them and mobilize against the 1%, but not because of what the White House decides. The Democrats’ policy consisted of coopting small elites from the racial minorities to use against the Black and Latino majorities, and to exhibit them as electoral trophies. They did the same thing with respect to women: feminism for white women from the high middle classes.
But it’s not the racism or the machismo that irritated the 1%, but rather Trump’s proposals regarding the financial sector and international policy. He proposed to increase taxes on high-risk fund managers, the new rich submissive to Wall Street. He defends an alliance with Russia to fight the Islamic State and sponsor negotiated exits in the Middle East. In the face of brazen interventionism, he proposes to concentrate on domestic problems. Another thing is if they’ll let him, since the 1% can collapse without a war.
From Latin America, Trump’s win can be understood as a moment of uncertainty in imperial politics towards the region. We must not venture a prognosis. Remember when Bergoglio was anointed Francisco I (Pope Francis), and many assured that he would make a reactionary pope? Under the Obama administration (initiated in 2009) there were State coups in Honduras and Paraguay, the illegitimate removal of Dilma Rouseff in Brazil, the right-wing insurrection in Venezuela, and the deepening of the drug war in Mexico, initiated by his predecessor George W. Bush. What’s worse is he couldn’t leave us with a “progressive” in the White House.
For the Latin America of those below things can change, in several senses.
In the first place, Trump’s macho and racist discourse can encourage the new rights and facilitate the deepening of femicides and the genocide of the Indian and Black peoples. Violence against the peoples, the principal characteristic of the Fourth World War/Accumulation by Dispossession, can encounter fewer institutional obstacles (even less!), greater social legitimation and the silence of the monopoly media. It’s not a new tendency, but rather more of the same, which in and of itself is grave. It will be more difficult to count on institutional umbrellas for protection and, for the same reason, the repressors will see themselves with freer hands to beat up on us.
The second tendency is that the system loses legitimacy when tendencies like those that Trump embodies are discharged. This process is already being profiled, but now a leap forward is produced with the loss of popular credibility in State institutions, which is one of the questions that the elites of the world most fear.
The third question is the division between the dominant classes, a global tendency that must be analyzed in greater depth, but that has destabilizing effects for the system and, thus, for domination. Basically, there are those who gamble everything on the war against the peoples and others that think that it’s better to cede something so as to not lose everything. It’s good news that those above are divided, because the domination will be unstable.
Finally, those below are going to have it worse. Instability and chaos are structural and not time-related tendencies in this period. It’s painful, but it’s the condition necessary to be able to change the world. We will suffer more repression; we will be in danger of being incarcerated, disappeared or murdered. A lot of suffering is seen on the horizon. Capitalism falls apart and the shambles can bury us. The other side is that many will stop believing that the only way to change the world is to vote every four or six years.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, November 11, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/11/11/opinion/020a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
And it trembled repeatedly…!
PHOTO /BERNARDO DE NIZ
By: Gilberto López y Rivas
With the date of October 14 of this year, the National Indigenous Congress [CNI] and the Zapatista National Liberation Army [EZLN] made public an historic document with the prophetic title of: “May the earth tremble repeatedly at its core” upon concluding the 5th National Indigenous Congress, which took place at the Cideci-Unitierra, Chiapas. The text is not the product of the occurrence of one person or minority group, but rather the result of six days of extenuating and prolonged work sessions, carried out based on the well-known method of the pueblos original peoples of debating until achieving consensus.
They celebrated life in the meeting, at the same time that the worsening of the dispossession and repression was denounced “that they have not stopped in 524 years in which the powerful started a war that has as it’s purpose exterminating those of the land that we are and that as their children have not permitted its destruction and death to benefit the capitalist ambition that knows no end, other than self destruction. Resistance for continuing to construct life now becomes word, learning and agreements.”
It was emphasized that the peoples are constructing every day in the resistances versus capitalism’s offensive that becomes more aggressive all the time, which has been converted –as was reiterated in the 2015 seminar Critical thought versus the capitalist hydra– into a civilizational threat, “not only for indigenous peoples and campesinos, but rather for the peoples of the cities that must also create dignified and rebellious ways for not being murdered, dispossessed, contaminated, sickened, kidnapped or disappeared. From our community assemblies we have decided, exercised and constructed our destiny since time immemorial, because of which maintaining our forms of organization and defense of our collective life is possible only from rebellion in the face of the bad governments, their corporations and their organized crime.”
It’s not about a so-called ethnocentrism, self-centered on indigenous peoples, but rather, to the contrary, it’s about an exhortation that, starting with a secular form of struggle, rooted in big historic events with a strong indigenous presence –like the wars for Independence and Reform, the fight against foreign invasions, the Revolution against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz–, calls upon all of us to organize collectively in rebellion against the bad government that has delivered the homeland to the corporations and crime.
It denounces –in detail and with multiple testimonies and documented evidence– the process of re-colonization that the different Native peoples, nations and tribes represented at the 5th Congress are suffering in a particularly aggravated way: invasion of forests, sacred communal lands and territories; imposition of highway and super-highway mega-projects, pipelines, aqueducts and thermo-electric dams, an interurban train, airports and shopping centers; the plunder and privatization of natural springs and other natural resources; affectation of lands and territories because of mining, tourist projects, planting of transgenic soy and African palm, besides livestock brokers; commercialization of ancestral knowledge; contamination of rivers through fracking and imposition of bills for environmental services, carbon capture and ecotourism; all of that, accompanied de la criminalization of struggle and resistance, assassination, incarceration and the forced disappearance of activists; buying consciences, fragmentation of communities, disintegration of the community fabric and contriving of communal assemblies, that “engineering of conflicts” that corporations know well; relentless pursuit from drug trafficking with the complicity of all the government bodies, armed forces and security apparatuses; murders of youth and women and rapes of women; aerial fumigations that produce illnesses; attacks from paramilitary groups and harassment of community authorities. Faced with this storm provoked by new forms of capitalist globalization, participants in the 5th Congress recognize that confronting it is only possible collectively, from anti-capitalism and from decision-making bodies constructed from below: “That is the power from below that has kept us alive, and it is why commemorating resistance and rebellion is also ratifying our decision to continue alive constructing hope for a future possible only over the ruins of capitalism.”
For these considerations that, as is observed, are transcendent and profound, the fifth National Indigenous Congress “decided to initiate a consultation in every one of our towns to dismantle from below the power that those above impose on us and that offers us a panorama of death, violence, dispossession and destruction […] we declare ourselves to be in permanent assembly and we will consult in each one of our geographies, territories and directions about the agreement of this 5th CNI to name an indigenous government council whose word an indigenous woman will materialized, a delegate from the CNI, as an independent candidate that will contend in the name of the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista National Liberation Army in the 2018 electoral process for the Presidency of this country.”
And, effectively, as was foreseeable, the political class trembled repeatedly… and they didn’t expect the marked reactions of secular racism from those creole-mestizo mentalities that couldn’t conceive of the indigenous thinking for themselves, as well as the ideological-political monologue of a “partyocracy” that considers “unity on the left” with arguments like the “least bad,” or “democratic alternating,” the monopoly of “national and popular representation,” and that has not issued any pronouncement against the real, open and shadow powers that have led Mexico to a humanitarian emergency and, above all, that is not capable of respecting the collective decisions, now in consultation, of the country’s most exploited, discriminated and oppressed sectors.
Welcome to this initiative that makes you think, act and even polemicize, beyond singular thoughts, personalities and preconceived ideas.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, November 4, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/11/04/opinion/018a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Joint CNI-EZLN communiqué on Santa María Ostula
JOINT COMUNICADO OF THE CNI AND THE EZLN IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY OF SANTA MARÍA OSTULA, MICHOACÁN
Don’t shoot! We’re children!
November 4, 2016
To the Nahua community of de Santa María Ostula, Michoacán:
To the peoples of the world:
To National and International Civil Society:
To the free communications media:
The peoples, nations and tribes that are the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista National Liberation Army demonstrate our profound repudiation of the actions that the bad governments and the criminal gangs carry out in unison against the indigenous Nahua community of Santa María Ostula, municipio of Aquila, Michoacán, to try to kill their dignified and historic struggle.
The governments were not only accomplices of the May 25, 2015 attack on Cemeí Verdía, but it also freed the guilty Juan Hernández Ramírez (then Aquila’s municipal president) and José Antioco Calvillo. It incarcerated Cemeí Verdía with invented charges and murdered the child Hidelberto Reyes García.
The bad governments now seek to arrest Comandante Germán Ramírez, fabricating crimes and guilt to those who fight and defend the land and their families. Meanwhile, at the same time, members of the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) Cartel regroup and are now re-organized and strongly armed to the east of the municipio of Aquila.
The crime of the comuneros, community police of Ostula and the self- defense groups of the coastal sierra of Michoacán, has been not accepting the death and terror that the bad governments and the organized crime in the region offer as the only option. On the other hand, with its resistance and rebellion Ostula has not only has taught us the dignity of an organized people, but it has also demonstrated to the world that it’s possible to construct peace and justice in the midst of the destruction in which the capitalists have submerged this country.
We denounce this new attack on the indigenous community of Ostula and we place responsibility for this aggression in the hands of bad governments, Enrique Peña Nieto and Silvano Aureoles, accomplices of the Templario leaders El Tena, El Tuco, Chuy Playas and on Federico González (Lico), who the community has pointed out on numerous occasions as the one responsible for the assassination of 34 comuneros and the disappearance of 6. We place responsibility on them for the blood that they want to see run in order to protect their capitalist businesses, for protecting instead of looking for and arresting the Templario leaders, for guarantying impunity to the military killers of Hidelberto, and little boy, for seeking at all cost to dispossess communal lands and natural resources, for seeking to kill that hope for this country that is named Santa María Ostula.
We express our respect and solidarity with the mobilizations of the community to which we say that in the collective heart of the National Indigenous Congress shines an intense light fed by the dignity of Ostula and we call to the Native peoples and civil society of Mexico and the world, to the national and international Sixth, and to the honest communications media to be attentive and in solidarity.
November 2016
For the Holistic Reconstitution of Our Peoples
Never More a Mexico Without Us
National Indigenous Congress
Zapatista National Liberation Army
Originally Published in Spanish by Enlace Zapatista
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
CNI, all flying together
“Our fight is not for power, our fight is for saving Mexico.”
By: Luis Hernández Navarro
Wine consumption in Mexico has increased in the last 10 years. Its consumers have increased significantly. Wine has stopped being a beverage for executives with high acquisitive power, and more women and young people ingest it all the time.
But behind some of the glasses of wine that are tasted in the country there is a bitter history of dispossession. Around 30 percent of the national production comes from Baja California. And there, LA Cetto winery, one of the country’s most important, dispossessed and invaded lands belonging to the Kiliwa people and seeks to appropriate national lands that are not theirs.
The Kiliwas are one of the five original peoples of what is now Baja California. The LA Cetto Company seeks to be awarded national lands in possession of the indigenous. The winegrowers count on the complicity of the Agrarian Prosecutor’s office, which on two occasions has lost the records that give rights to the Native residents.
According to what the Kiliwa chief Elías Espinoza Álvarez denounced, “it’s the agrarian authorities that exercise pressure on the indigenous to give in to the impresarios and accept unjust and inequitable conditions in contracts.”
As if that were not enough, the National Water Commission (Conagua) offers that company preferential treatment, because it granted authorization to perforate a well of water for human consumption, while it denied authorization to the indigenous. Even more, LA Cetto closed the right of way that residents have always used.
Something similar happens with fruits and vegetables for export cultivated with indigenous manual labor in Michoacán, Sinaloa and Baja California. A long memorial of offenses is hidden behind the strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, arugula, radicchio, escarole and endive, as well as the different varieties of tomato that are used as ingredients for elaborating succulent plates.
The names of the companies and impresarios that harvest the wealth from those delicacies are well known. That is the case of the Secretary of Rural Development of Guanajuato (until a little while ago), Javier Usabiaga, nicknamed the Garlic King (Rey del ajo). It’s also the case with the transnational Driscolls, intermittently in check because of the boycotts that are called against it.
The indigenous day laborers that plant these gastronomic riches suffer a kindred exploitation to what their ancestors experienced in the Porfiriato. Starvation wages and interminable workdays are the rule. They lack paid vacations, social security and days of rest. Instead of going to school, their little children work the fields with them. They are usually housed in barracks or in modest houses that lack basic services. Safe drinking water is a luxury.
But the savage exploitation that those Indians suffer passes unnoticed in Mexican society. It’s normal. Occasionally, as happened with the strike of the San Quintín agricultural workers, the world enters their existence. From time to time it is announced that the Rarámuris or the Mixtecos live in conditions of slavery on ranches of Jalisco, Colima or Ensenada. Nevertheless, they are usually as imperceptible as Garabombo, the famous Manuel Escorza character.
Just as happens with the wine or with the blackberries, it’s not unusual that behind a cup of coffee is found a history of dispossession against the original peoples. Seventy percent of coffee growers in Mexico are indigenous, the majority of which have small pieces of land no more than two hectares (about 5 acres). Coffee growing is their way of life and the spinal column of their subsistence. But the transnational companies, colluded with the government, want these producers to abandon their activity or plant very low-quality varieties of coffee.
Recently, Cirilo Elotlán and Fernando Celis, of the National Coordinator of Coffee Growing Organizations, denounced that besides little support to the coffee growers, the government and the corporations want the producers to become discouraged and to stop growing, with the intention that the companies monopolize all of the production and market.
“We have had –they advised– an infinity of threats from the big traders, because what they demand first now is to increase production, sacrificing the labor of the producers, ours fields and biodiversity, at the expense of the interests of transnational corporations.”
The combined action of blight and corporate voracity are leveling the old coffee fields. Until a short time ago coffee plantations were protected by the shade of chalahuites and citrus trees, ixpepeles and banana trees, gourds and jinicuiles. Today, they are barely ghosts of what they were.
Among others, those big companies are basically two: Nestlé and Coca-Cola. More that coffee, Nestlé sells artificial flavorings and it promotes the substitution of Arabica with robust, a low quality variety that it needs for its mixes. Coca-Cola, through the brand name Andatti that it sells in 10,000 Oxxo stores, has flooded the market with junk coffee.
In the 3rd Forum of the original peoples of the Sierra Tarahumara in defense of their territories, Rarámuris and Odamis recognized that their basic problems are the dispossession of their territories, the exploitation of their natural reserves and the intervention of local and transnational companies. They agreed that it’s necessary “to all fly together (all the indigenous peoples) to have greater strength.” Their conclusions are similar to those the Kiliwas have reached, or the agricultural workers, or the small coffee producers or hundreds of communities throughout the country.
Made invisible by the power, the organized original peoples with the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the EZLN now discuss whether they will promote the candidacy of an indigenous woman for the Presidency in 2018; a candidacy that obliges Mexican society to turn around to look at them; a candidacy that will talk not only about poverty and inequality, but also about exploitation, dispossession and discrimination; and a candidacy that permits them to all fly together in order to have more power.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/11/01/opinion/016a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Calendar for the 5th Congress of the CNI and the Gathering Zapatistas and ConSciences for Humanity
Indigenous Zapatista Women!
ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY
MEXICO
October 26, 2016.
To the invited and attending Scientists of the Gathering “Zapatistas and ConSciences for Humanity”:
To the compañeras, compañeros, compañeroas of the National and International Sixth:
Brothers and sisters:
We send you greetings. We write to inform you of the following:
First: Per instructions from the National Indigenous Congress, which at the moment is consulting with the original peoples, barrios, tribes, and nations throughout Mexico on the proposal made during the first phase of the Fifth Congress, we inform you that the permanent assembly of the CNI will be reinstated December 29, 2016, at CIDECI-UNITIERRA in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas.
There the CNI will hold roundtable sessions on December 30 and 31 of this year. During these sessions, or before then if the CNI so chooses, the results of the consultation will be made known. On January 1, 2017, the plenary assembly will take place in Oventik, Chiapas, Mexico, and any agreements necessary will be made there.
The compañeras and compañeros of the original peoples, barrios, tribes, and nations who make up the National Indigenous Congress inform us that they have financial difficulties that impede their travel to this meeting, and so they request solidarity donations from the national and international Sixth, as well as from any honest people who want to support them in this way. To offer this support, the compas of the CNI ask that people communicate directly with them at the following email: info@congresonacionalindigena.org. From there they will explain where and how to send support.
Of course, if you think that by meeting, thinking, and deciding collectively on their path and destiny the compas of the CNI are playing into the hands of the right and endangering the u-n-s-t-o-p-p-a-b-l-e advance of the institutional left, you can make your support conditional on their obeying you, or add a note to your contribution saying something like, “I’m going to give you these 2 pesos, but don’t let yourselves be fooled and manipulated by that sockhead.”
Or you can just make your donation and try, like the rest of us, to learn from them. Second: We also take this opportunity to confirm that the Gathering “Zapatistas and ConSciences for Humanity” will be celebrated at the times and places originally announced:
From December 25, 2016 to January 4, 2017 at the facilities of CIDECI-UNITIERRA in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, with an intermission on December 31, 2016 and January 1, 2017. If you are interested in attending as a listener or observer, you can register to attend at this email: conCIENCIAS@ezln.org.mx Thus the presentations about the exact and natural Sciences and the work sessions of the National Indigenous Congress will take place simultaneously.
That’s all for now.
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés.
Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano.
Mexico, October 2016.
From the Notebook of the Cat-Dog, section titled “neither stories nor legends”:
What Doctor John H. Watson will not tell.
Mountains of the Mexican southeast. It is raining a lot. You can just barely make out the shouts of those who continue working to make holes in the wall, giving each other instructions. There are some who have poorly protected themselves from the downpour with plastic ponchos, but most are just wearing soaked shirts, blouses, skirts and pants, raining once again over the earth.
The wall extends as far as the eye can reach. Despite its apparent strength, every so often there is a crease along its long curtain. It is said that those who inhabit these lands claim that the wall is capable of regenerating itself, and so they must not cease their efforts to keep a crack open. After consulting histories and legends that circulate among the inhabitants, it is concluded that the purpose of the wall is not just to keep them from seeing or crossing to the other side; it also convinces those who encounter it that there is nothing beyond it, that the world ends there, at the feet of its solid base and in the face of the infinite expanse, in length and height, of its surface. Outside one of the huts near the wall, a little girl watches with her chin resting on one of her hands. Her eyes aren’t focused on the arrogant wall, but rather on the feet of those who strike and scratch at the wall. Or really, she is looking at the ground covered in mud and puddles.
A little behind her, a strange being, similar to a dog, or to a cat, shelters itself in the threshold of the hut. The little girl turns to look at it and says: “Hey you, cat-dog, what, you scared of the rain? Not me. They don’t call me ‘Defensa Zapatista’ for nothing. You think that if we’re in the middle of a game and it starts raining we’re going to say, “oh no, I better get off the field or I’ll get wet?” No way. You can just fix your hair with your hand, and since it’s wet it stays smooth and forget about the rest. But it’s not like I fix it like that so I can go around flirting with fucking men. It’s so I can see when the ball comes and goes. If I don’t fix it, I can’t see. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in the hut, even if you’re a cat or a dog, you’re still going to get wet. Look, I just got an idea.”
The little girl enters the hut and then comes out with some pots, buckets, and empty tin cans. She starts placing them beneath the little streams of water dripping from the edges of the tin roof. It would seem as if she was positioning them randomly, but no. Every little bit she changes their location. The being whom the little girl calls the “cat-dog” barks and meows. The little girl looks at it and says: “Just wait, you’ll see what I’m doing.”
The little girl keeps changing the location of the pots and cans and, with each change, she mutes the sound of the raindrops hitting their surface. The little girl listens for a moment and then goes back to changing the places and sounds of this strange symphony.
She is immersed in this task when a couple of men arrive. One is tall and gangly; the other is shorter in stature, of average build. Both carry fine umbrellas and the taller one wears an elegant coat, some type of cap, and a curved pipe between his lips. They say nothing; they just watch the little girl come and go. At some point, the gangly one with the elegant overcoat coughs and says: “Excuse me miss, will you allow me to shelter you with my umbrella? That way you won’t get wet while you…while you do whatever it is you’re doing.” The little girl stares at him with hostility and responds, “My name isn’t ‘miss,’ it’s ‘Defensa Zapatista’ (the little girl puts on her best “get away from my pots and cans or you die” face). “And what I’m doing is making a song.” The man comments as if to himself: “hmm, a song, how interesting my dear Watson, how interesting.” The other man just affirms with a nod while he shelters himself in the doorframe, eyeing the dog suspiciously…well, the cat…well, whatever it is that’s next to him in the threshold.
The man with the strange cap observes attentively the coming and going of the little girl. All of a sudden his face lights up and he exclaims, “Of course! Elementary. A song. It couldn’t be any other way.”
And, turning to the person who now shares the small space out of the rain with the cat-dog, he says, “Pay attention, Watson, here you have something which could never be found in one of those vulgar popularizations of the detective’s science with which you torment your few readers, that is, if you have any at all. Observe carefully. What the young miss…cough…cough…I meant to say, what ‘Defensa Zapatista’ is doing is combining the principles of mathematics, physics, biology, anatomy and neurology. By changing the positions of these strange metal receptacles and placing them beneath different rivulets of water, she obtains different individual sounds that together produce distinct combinations of notes which, I infer, will become a melody. Then, changing the rhythms, she will have music and from there, elementary my dear Watson, a song. Bravo!” The man has passed his umbrella to the other man under the doorframe and applauds with enthusiasm.
The little girl has left her work for a moment and stopped to listen to the man. After the applause, the little girl asks, “you mean a ton [ii] right?”
“A ton?” repeats the man, and then after thinking about it a bit exclaims: “Of course! Ton, tune. Yes, miss, a tune and not a ton, although it’s true that there are some tunes that are very heavy.” The little girl furrows her brow and clarifies, “I already told you my name is not ‘miss,’ my name is ‘Defensa Zapatista.’ And what’s your name?
The man responds, “You are right, what bad manners that I have not introduced myself,” and, with a brief bow, introduces himself, “My name is Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective. And my companion, who is currently shivering from the rain and the cold, is Doctor John H. Watson, a debaser of science.” Extending his hand toward the little girl, he adds “And you are…yes, of course, you told me before, “Defensa Zapatista.” Strange name for a little girl. Well, it seems everything is strange in these lands.”
The little girl ignores the extended hand, but appears interested. “Consulting detective…what’s that?” she asks.
“I combat crime, miss, I investigate by observing, analyzing and applying science,” responds the man with poorly feigned modesty.
“Ah, like Elías Contreras, the Zapatista investigation commission,” interrupts the little girl. The man tries to clarify, but the little girl continues:
“Well, look, I already talked to Elías so he would join our team, but it turns out he’s already dead and tending to the bad and the evil, that is, he’s investigating the fucking capitalist system. I told him he can still join the team, even though he’s deceased, but he says that Supmarcos sends him off on investigations and so he wouldn’t make it to practice. The funny thing is that Supmarcos is dead too. I think that’s why they understand each other. Of course, right now we can’t really practice that much because the field is all muddy and the ball doesn’t roll, it just gets stuck and no matter how much it gets kicked it doesn’t move, or it moves just a little and then gets lazy again. So you get all muddy for nothing and later your moms comes with her ‘you have to wash up’ and then off to the river. Do you like to bathe? I don’t like it. Only if there’s a dance, then I like it, because you can’t be all muddy when they start playing the song “la del moño colorado” [the girl with the colorful bow]. Do you know that one, “la del moño colorado”? That’s a good song because you dance to it like this (the little girl hums while balancing lightly on one foot and then the other). You don’t just jump around like the young people these days who like that music and end up muddier than if they hadn’t bathed at all. But you know mothers, what do they care if there’s no dance? Nothing, you still have to bathe and if you don’t, there’ll be hell to pay. Do you have a mom? Well, look, just think about whether moms know or not. They definitely know. I still don’t know how it is that they know, but they know. You should investigate how it is that they know. I told Elías to investigate it, but he just laughed, the jerk. And SupMoy is even worse, you think he helps? If he’s around and your mom gives the order to bathe, you think he’ll defend you? Forget it, you have to obey your mom, he says. I complained to him one day about why it’s like that, if the struggle says to rule by obeying, it should be that the little girls rule and the moms obey. But he just laughed, the jerk. Well, look, pay attention because I’m going to explain something to you: it turns out we haven’t filled up the team. Why not? Well, because there’s no discipline, that is, they don’t understand the organization of the struggle. One minute they tell you they’re in and the next, they’re out, they took off on another path, for one reason or another. They’re all just excuses. Or if not, they say it’s because of the work of the struggle. As if playing wasn’t part of the work of the struggle? The deceased Supmarcos would say children’s work is to play. Well, he would also say it’s to study, but don’t publish that, eh? So given that, we can’t complete the team, there’s no seriousness, as someone says. But don’t you worry, don’t despair because the team didn’t fill up quickly. We know it takes time, but one day there will be more of us. Since we can’t practice right now and they don’t let me join the work of making holes in the wall because it’s raining and I’ll get wet… can you believe they say that? As if I wasn’t going to get wet bathing anyway. The other day I wanted to give my moms a political lecture and I told her it’s not good for me to bathe because I’ll get wet, and in the autonomous school they say it’s not good for little girls to get wet because what if they get sick with a cough, right?
But my moms just laughed, I think she didn’t understand the political lesson because she was just like, get yourself down to the river and make sure to wash behind your ears and this, that, and the other. Well, don’t you get distracted, whatever your name is. It turns out that, since I can’t practice and I can’t make holes in the wall, I started thinking and thinking. And now I just keep thinking and thinking. Not about silly things though, but rather about the struggle. So I thought that we need music for when we win the game. Because if there’s no music, we won’t be happy that we won, you understand? What are you going to understand, if you’re just standing there staring? Okay, I’ll explain. Look, the moms know, we don’t know how they do it, but they know. If you have a difficult question, you go to your moms and boom, they know the answer. Well, so it turns out that my moms told me something like a story the other day. She said that the deceased one said that the struggle needs science and art. I don’t know what science and art are, so then my moms explained it to me. I think I’ll explain it to you because you definitely don’t know. Look, science and art aren’t just that you do things however you want, half-assed, but rather that first you imagine how what you want to make will turn out, then you study how you’re going to do it, and then you go and do it. But not just any old way; rather you make it happy, with lots of colors and lots of music, you understand? Well, so I thought and imagined what our music should be when we win the game. Yes of course really happy music but not like for dancing, because it’s serious to win a game, even more so since my team is full of lumps, like the cat-dog here who barely obeys, it just runs and runs, and since its paws are a little twisted well, it tends to veer off to the side. So the song has to be cheerful but serious. It should be enjoyable and make your heart happy. Well so I was sitting here thinking about the music, I mean the ton of the song, and then my idea came. I was listening to the sound the rain makes when it falls, and I saw that it sounds different in each little puddle. So I took out my mom’s pots and some cans and buckets from our women’s collective and now I’m here listening to how each one sounds and how they sound in collective. Because it’s not the same as an individual as in a collective, you see. In a collective it’s happier, it sounds good. But each individually, it’s all the same, even if you change the bucket. Now if you put them together, it’s something else. Of course, the issue is how you put them together so that they sound good. You understand? I mean that’s where you bring in science and art and it comes out just right. Not like Pedrito who thinks he knows how to sing, but all he knows are Pedro Infante songs. You think he knows any about love? No, all songs about horses and drunks. And for nothing, because Pedrito twice over doesn’t drink, that is, he doesn’t drink because he’s a little boy, and he doesn’t drink because he’s a Zapatista. You think you’re going to find a wife if you sing to her about horses? No, never, never ever. And even worse if you sing to her about drunkards. If somebody sang to me about horses, it’d be for nothing because I already have one, it’s just that he’s one-eyed, which means that he sees out one eye but not the other. Well, the truth is that the horse isn’t mine, because he doesn’t have an owner. No one knows where he came from, he just appeared all of a sudden in the pasture. I quickly recruited him, as they say, for the team and made him goalie, but since he doesn’t see well I had to put myself on defense. But if somebody sings to me about drunkards, well yeah then, that calls for some smacks and to hell with them. My moms say that alcohol is no good, that it makes men dumb. Well okay, dumber than usual. And then they beat the women. Of course, now it’s different because we defend ourselves as the women that we are. I, as Zapatista defense, also train so that men don’t bother me when I grow up, that is when I grow into a young single woman. But don’t get distracted, write down what I explained to you in your notebook, write that science and art are really important…”
At that, the cat-dog begins to bark and meow. The little girl turns around to look at him and asks, “Now?” The cat-dog purrs and growls. The little girl hurriedly enters the house, just as the rain lifts its wet skirt and the sky clears.
It’s no longer raining when the little girl runs out of the house with a ball in her hands. The cat-dog runs out behind her.
As she gets further away, the little girl manages to shout: “When you finish writing your notes, come. Don’t worry if the team isn’t full yet. It might take a while, but there will be more of us.” The man who is called “Doctor Watson” closes his umbrella and reaches his hand out to make sure that, in fact, it has stopped raining.
The man with the absurd cap keeps watching the little girl as she moves away. Then he takes a magnifying glass from his raincoat and stops to analyze each of the containers, now mute, without rain to make them sing.
“Interesting, my dear Watson, very interesting. I believe it would be worth spending some time in these parts. The atmosphere is clean and the fog keeps reminding me of the London of Baker Street,” says the tall thin man as he stretches out his arms to better breathe in the air of the mountains of the Mexican southeast.
“Spend some time, Holmes? Why?” asks the other man while he shakes off some lingering raindrops. “I don’t think we’d be much help, although this little girl seems to suffer from verbal diarrhea, a tranquilizer would help…whoever has to listen to her.”
“No, Watson, we’re not going to help anyone. I only came to find an old acquaintance. But I think it will be difficult to find him…at least alive,” says the man as he puts away the magnifying glass and begins walking.
The other man rushes to catch up to him, asking, “Then what are we going to do here, Holmes?” “Learn, my dear Watson, learn,” says the man as he takes out the magnifying glass again and stops to look at an insect.
As the two figures fade into the fog, once can hear in the distance barks, meows, and a child’s laughter, a laugh like a song.
Then, although nearly imperceptibly, the wall shudders…
I testify.
Woof-Meow. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: From Baker Street to the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnaorWzg7aQ&feature=youtu.be
Music: “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, with Raphael Ravenscroft on saxophone. 1978. Photographs of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson from the British television series “Sherlock” made by the BBC, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch (as Sherlock Holmes) and Martin Freeman (as Doctor Watson). Coproduced by Hartswood Films and WGBH, the series was created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Accompanied by embroidery (first outlined and then finished) made by Zapatista insurgents for the CompArte Festival, 2016, with the theme “Defensa Zapatista and the Hydra.” The image of the little doll on the foosball table was taken in 2013 by a 9-year-old boy who attended the Zapatista Little School. He saw the foosball table and put the little doll there just as you see it. The illustrations at the end of the video are by the CVI support team, “Tercios Compas” section. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Embroidery and drawings by EZLN insurgents for the CompArte Festival
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koo0Tw5MHMQ
Embroidery and drawings made by Zapatista insurgents for the CompArte Festival. Music: “Resistencia,” from the album LDA V The Lunatics, Los de Abajo.
Talking to each other
The CNI and the EZLN have been talking to each other a lot.
By: Gustavo Esteva
In the midst of war, as part of the general campaign of dispossession, they have also taken the word away from us, words. And that’s how they want to bury Tlataya or Ayotzinapa or make the No win in Colombia.
Words are doors and windows of our perception; the words that we use depend on our experience in the world. And it’s that which is immediately threatened and it affects our ability to speak… and to know what happens. Instead of being an autonomous form of relationship, language is being converted into a dispositive of isolation and an instrument of manipulation and control.
The field of language is as rich and varied as nature… but the war that is unleashed against it makes linguistic diversity decline. Government and the market completely destroy languages, eliminate them and annul the vernacular and creativity of language; they are the promoters of the global unification projected by capital, which organizes the current war and can condemn us to blindness and silence. Some 5,000 languages still exist in the world. One hundred of them are distributed in 95 percent of the global population, the rest, la immense majority, in the other 5 percent. Of the living languages, 30 percent are spoken in Asia and Africa, 20 percent in the Pacific Region, 16 percent on the American continent; only one percent is spoken in Europe, 67 languages. One of those living languages dies every week; a civilization dies with it, a way of being and thinking.
Amoeba-words have invaded us. But maybe we shouldn’t associate this innocent transparent little animal with fuzzy contours, with the verbal monstrosities that we suffer. The term “plastic words” is preferable, as the German linguist Uwe Porksen proposes. He has listed and characterized them with rigor. According to him, they are “the master key of daily life;” easily accessible, “ they infiltrate entire fields of reality and reorder their own likeness.” They are words like identity, development, communication, information, solution, energy, or resource. They have an aura. Their definition has been lost or is entirely imprecise, but they are full connotations, generally positive. They are often born in the common language, emigrate to scientific dominion and are returned to their place of origin with enormous colonizing … and destructive force.
“Development” is one of those words. It means almost anything, from building skyscrapers to installing latrines, the same as drilling oil wells that look for water. It’s a concept with monumental emptiness… that has dominated public discussion for more than half a century. In these years it has been used systematically for packing all the works and actions that dispossess the peoples of their lands, their waters, their territories, and for disqualifying those who resist them: they are retrogrades, opponents of development and progress.
“Energy” is the same. It’s seldom used with its vernacular meaning, which still appears in dictionaries, when one says that someone is very energetic for alluding to a vigorous and active person. The word is used daily for referring to themes like the cost of gasoline or renewable energy. If anyone asks us what energy is we’ll vacillate a little and confess technical ignorance, confident that the specialists will be able to give a good definition. When they inform us that it’s the mass by the square of speed we are perplexed; we’re not talking about that. Helmholtz and others used its vernacular meaning for their investigations and when the word returned to daily language it produced a vacuum. We tell each other nothing by using them, but operate as signs of a sect.
This is not an academic issue. We habitually suffer the consequences of this destruction of language that makes political discourse an faithful expression Orwell’s neo-language. In his dystopia, peace is war, as Big Brother incessantly repeated. Like Goebbels did for Hitler. Procedure is an indispensable ingredient of the authoritarian exercise: it is its condition of existence. One cannot govern with bayonets; one can govern with words.
In recent days, the promoters of the No in Colombia revealed in the refined propaganda techniques that they used to get their proposition. In certain zones they encouraged indignation; in others, the need for subsidies. In each one they were seeking to induce abstention or rejection. And they attained it.
Procedure has ruled among us for a long time. Tomorrow the Senate is voting on an initiative that destroys the right to strike, but it is called labor justice. An authoritarian dispositive that has nothing to do with education is even named an education reform. Or an enormous lie is presented as “historic truth,” with which they attempt to cover up the Ayotzinapa crimes.
The uses of neo-language in Colombia, for influencing the plebiscite, or what surrounds what’s relative to Ayotzinapa, for uncovering the guilty and those responsible in the government and in the Army illustrate well what this operation is about. Against what and who we are fighting… and how language is also territory that we must defend faced with fulfilled threats of dispossession.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Monday, October 10, 20126
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/10/10/opinion/020a2pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
CNI-EZLN support Yaqui resistance
JOINT COMMUNIQUE FROM THE CNI AND THE EZLN SUPPORTING THE DIGNIFIED RESISTANCE OF THE YAQUI TRIBE
Photo of the conflict in Bácum, in which at least 12 vehicles were burned, taken by Cristina Gómez Lina, author of the article below the joint communiqué.
October 2016
To the Yaqui Tribe,
To the peoples and governments of the world,
As the original peoples who make up the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista communities, we send our simple words in solidarity with the Yaqui Tribe, its traditional government, and its troops. We are with you in these difficult moments after the confrontations this past October 21 in Lomas de Bácum.
We condemn the conflict and discord that are planted and promoted in the communities by the bad governments and their overseers, national and international corporations, who want to take control over the gas, water, and minerals of Yaqui territory. To this end, the powerful sow division as a tool to impose death and destruction in our territories. For them, we are merely a path to more power and more money.
As the peoples, nations, and tribes of the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista peoples, we salute the Yaqui Tribe’s defense of their territory. We call for unity in the face of a common enemy that aims to take everything that we as peoples have and that makes possible our collective organization, our history, our language, and our life.
In the various geographies of resistance of the original peoples of this country, the bad governments are using our own people to generate violence among us in order to guarantee their ability to impose extractive death projects, structural reforms, the destruction of communitarian organization, and terror among those who struggle. For those who struggle, in contrast to the capitalists, the life and future of the people is everything.
We call on national and international civil society, on the original peoples, on the national and international Sixth, and on the free media to be attentive and demand the respect deserved by the indigenous peoples in their autonomous organization and self-determination.
October 2016
For the Full Reconstitution of Our Peoples
Never Again a Mexico Without Us
National Indigenous Congress
Zapatista National Liberation Army
..__..
One dead and 8 injured in a fight between residents of Sonora
By: Cristina Gómez Lima, correspondent
Hermosillo, Sonora. One dead, eight injured and twelve vehicles burned was the result of a confrontation between residents of the Lomas de Bácum and Lomas de Guamúchil communities, who disagree over construction of the Northwest gas pipeline, which is projected to cross territory that the Yaqui tribe inhabits in southern Sonora.
The Secretary of state Public Security, Adolfo García Morales reported that municipal, state and federal agents cordoned off the zone of the confrontations, as well as members of the Secretariat of National Defense, who activated the code red in the southern community of Sonora.
“Armored vehicles entered conflict zone and through loudspeakers they ordered them to put down their weapons, we are going to be very alert in order to avoid new confrontations now that the security bodies are there, as well as the Mexican Army and the Federal Police,” García Morales stated.
For their part, leaders of the Lomas de Bácum Tribe assured that there were two confrontations, one after the arrival of members of the Army; in their numbers they count 7 indigenous Yaquis dead, 30 injured and their governor José Bacaumea and their secretary Martín Valencia disappeared.
The TransCanada Corporation is in charge of the project.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, October 21, 2016
The EZLN, the CNI and the elections
Amado Avendaño (holding pen and paper) with Marcos back in the day.
By: Luis Hernández Navarro
The EZLN and the CNI agreed to consult, with peoples and communities, about the postulation of an indigenous woman as a candidate to the Presidency of the Republic in the 2018 elections. The decision has raised an enormous polemic. Some see in the decision a 180-degree turn in their line of action; others see their entry into politics. Some others see a maneuver in the formation of an anti-Andrés Manuel López Obrador coalition.
These three opinions are, besides being wrong, bigoted. They are based on disinformation and on an analytical scheme that has as its point of departure: whoever is not with me, is against me. These points of view are ignorant of the history and the political trajectory, of the EZLN as well as the indigenous organizations that make up part of the CNI.
Ever since the EZLN emerged in public life it has not been a force for abstention. It has not called for abstention or electoral boycott, but rather for organizing and struggling. And, at least in one occasion, promoted the vote for a candidate.
In the presidential elections of August 21, 1994, it called to vote against the PRI, as part of its struggle contra the State party system and presidentialism. Moreover, on May 15 of that year, in Guadalupe Tepeyac, the Zapatista bases and Subcomandante Marcos received the PRD’s candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and his retinue. The rebels greeted them and recognized that the then candidate had listened to them with attention and respect. In passing, they criticized the sol Azteca (the PRD’s symbol).
A few days later, through the Second Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, they convoked “a Democratic National Convention from which emanates a provisional or transition government, be it by means of the federal Executive’s resignation or through the electoral path.” This process –they pointed out then– would have to flow into the writing of a new Magna Carta and in the realization of new elections.
A little while later, the EZLN added themselves to the postulation of the journalist Amado Avendaño as the candidate of civil society to the governorship of Chiapas. And, following the electoral fraud that aborted his triumph, it recognized him as “governor in rebellion” and treated him as such.
At the end of 2005 the Zapatistas called for organizing a big national movement to transform social relations, to elaborate a national program of struggle and to create a new political constitution. Within this framework, they impelled the other campaign, an initiative of popular politics from below and to the left, independent of the political parties with registry, of an anticapitalist cut.
Although The Other Campaign never called to abstain or boycott the elections, it harshly criticized the candidates of the three principal political parties, including Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Close now to the elections of July 2, 2006, the repression happened in San Salvador Atenco (May 3 and 4 of that year) that changed the dynamic of this political initiative, in an event at the Revolution Cinema of Mexico City, Subcomandante Marcos personally opposed questioning those who were thinking about voting. “He that wants to vote, then vote,” he said there.
They want to blame the Zapatistas for the final result of the 2006 elections and even for the fraud that snatched victory at the ballot box from Andrés Manuel López Obrador. A few days ago, the leader of Morena denounced that in those days, the EZLN and the progressive Church were oriented to not voting for him (a thing that never happened), indirectly helping to steal the elections. Since then, the debate has been bitter and intense. It has not stopped being so despite more than 10 years having passed.
For years, the Zapatistas’ did not vary, as Subcomandante Moisés said in the comunicado titled “About elections: organize,” dated April 2015. He warns: “In these days, as each time that there is that thing they call the ‘electoral process,’ we hear and see that they come out saying that the EZLN calls for abstention, in other words that the EZLN says not to vote. They say that and other stupidities.”
Further ahead he clarifies the rebel posture on that year’s electoral conjuncture: “As the Zapatistas that we are we don’t call to vote or not vote. As the Zapatistas that we are what we do, each one that can, is to tell the people to organize themselves to resist, to fight, in order to have what one needs.”
The recent joint document of the EZLN and the CNI, “May the earth tremble violently at its core,” represents a change of position for the rebels, but not a 180-degree change, because they have never been abstentionists.
There (in the joint comunicado) they call for entering into a new form of action, which has as its central axis direct participation in the electoral conjuncture as a form of resistance, organization and struggle. It’s about placing the Indigenous and their problems at the center of the national political agenda, about making the aggressions against the original peoples visible.
On constructing the power of those below. The decision doesn’t mean the EZLN’s entry into the political fight. The Zapatistas have always been there. They have never stopped making politics since they irrupted into public life rising up in arms in 1994. One may or may not be in agreement with the politics they have made, but reducing political participation to electoral action in a conjuncture is foolishness.
The same can be said of the organizations that make up the CNI. The mobilization of the Purépechas of Cherán (a key experience in the new course of the indigenous struggle) for the recognition of their self-government and autonomy is essentially political; as is the experience of the Nahua self-defense of Ostula, or the Otomí Xochicuautla community’s defense of its territory and natural resources.
Nobody has the monopoly on political representation of the Mexican left. That representation is earned in day-by-day struggle. Accusing the Zapatistas and the CNI of pandering to the government because they seek to participate electorally in 2018, on the margin of the political parties, is an example of dominance and intolerance. At the end of the day, it will be Mexican society in general and the Indian peoples in particular, that will decide if this path is useful for transforming the country or not.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/10/18/opinion/017a2pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Questions without answers, answers without questions
Galeano at the Fifth National Indigenous Congress
QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS, ANSWERS WITHOUT QUESTIONS, COUNCILS and COUNSEL. (Pages from the Notebook of the Cat-Dog)
October 20, 2016
To Whom It May Concern:
Questions without answers:
—So what about the women murdered for the grave crime of being women? Will the fact that they have demanded that the attacks stop and, with their blood, raised the topic not just on the national agenda but the global one, make them the object of mockery, disdain, and accusations that they are playing to the right? Because they aren’t dying, they are being killed. What if they refuse to accept that this is a problem that can be solved by addressing corruption? And if they dare to say that the origin of this murderous hate is located in the system itself? What if they come up with the crazy idea to sideline men with regard to the most vital decisions (yes, as in questions of life of death)? And what if they decide to take their destiny into their own hands? Would any part of that, or all of it, be a governmental maneuver to avoid… etcetera?
—What about the others (loas otroas)? Must they wait for the political class to turn its haughty gaze on one of the most vilified peoples below? Must they resign themselves to be knocked off until the murder rate finally gets high enough to attract attention? And what if they organize themselves and demand respect, if they decide they’ve had enough of the fact that being disrespected means being killed? Would they be told that their problems are not a priority, that their position is not generally politically correct and is in fact counterproductive with regard to the electoral race, and that their demands should unite and not detract?
—The parish priests, nuns, and laypeople of the progressive church see and feel firsthand, without intermediaries, the pain, angst, and desperation of migrants, the families of the disappeared, and entire peoples under attack, as well as the rage concerning impunity and the frustration of suffering injustice which has been made law with pomp and circumstance. Are they trying to use this pain to their own benefit? What would they gain by making those cries theirs, by identifying themselves with that rage? And if from that perspective, formed not just in the face of threats of all kinds but at the risk of their own earthly lives, they claim openly and reflectively that the solutions offered on the horizon are not sufficient, are they thus opposed—being who they are and accountable to what they are—to a real change?
—If the mere possibility of an indigenous woman existing as a citizen (with all of its rights and obligations) has the effect of causing “the earth to tremble at its core,” what would happen if her ear and her word traveled through all of Mexico below?
—You who are reading this: would you be bothered by watching and listening to a debate between la Calderona [i] from above, with her “traditional” luxury brand clothing, and a woman below, of indigenous blood, culture, language, and history? Would you be more interested in hearing what la Calderona promises or what the indigenous woman proposes? Wouldn’t you want to see this clash of two worlds? Imagine, on the one side, a woman from above, born and raised with every luxury, educated to feel superior in race and color, complicit and promised heiress of a psychopathic enthusiast of alcohol and blood, [ii] representative of an elite that is steering the Nation toward total destruction, and chosen by the Ruler [the US government] to be its spokesperson. Imagine on the other hand a woman who, like many, made her way working and struggling every day, every hour, and everywhere, not only against a system that oppresses her as indigenous, as poor, and as a worker, but also as a woman who has faced a system reproduced in the image and likeness of the brains of men, and not just a few women. Wouldn’t she, with everything against her, today, without yet knowing it, have to now aspire to represent not only herself, her collective, or her original people, tribe, nation, or barrio, but also millions of women who are distinct in their language, color, and race but equal in their pain and rage? Would this not be a situation in which on one side would appear a white criolla woman, the symbol of oppression, mockery, scorn, impunity, and shamelessness, and on the other a woman who would have to lift her indigenous spirit above the racism that permeates every level of social strata? Isn’t it true that, almost without knowing it, you would cease to be a spectator and desire, from the deepest part of you, that the victor of this debate, after a good battle, would be the one who had everything against her? Would you not applaud that, in the name of this indigenous woman, it was truth that won and not the power of money?
—Are you worried that the indigenous woman won’t speak Spanish well, but not worried that the current head of the federal executive branch doesn’t know how to speak at all?
—How solid can the Mexican political system be, and how well-founded and reliable the tactics and strategies of the political parties, if, when someone says publicly that they are thinking about something, that they are going to ask their peers what they think of what they are thinking, the entire political party system becomes hysterical?
—To what degree does the proposal that an indigenous governing council (concejo with a “c”); [iii] that is, a collective and not an individual, be in charge of the federal executive bolster-presidential-rule-become-complicit-in-the-electoral-farce-contribute-to-reinforcing-bourgeois-democracy-play-to-the-oligarchy-and-to-Yankee-Chinese-Russian-Judeoislamic-millenarian -imperialism-in-addition-to-betraying-the-highest-principles-of-the-global-proletarian-revolution?
—Should we follow the inertia of the political class, “thinking” heads and acrobats of all kinds, and respond to the unfounded criticism—as well as well-founded critiques that challenge us and provoke thought—with dismissals that, in addition to being lazy, are boring (like peñabots, paniaguados, pejezombis, perderistas, [iv] and etceterists)?
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—A million-dollar idea (or an effort to raise money to collect signatures and for the campaign—oh, oh, looks like they’re serious): an application that self-censors on twitter when one writes something stupid. Handy, because the screen shots are unforgiving. What? That’s already occurred to you? Well, get to it, because when the CNI authorizes us to explain, erasing those tweets will be useless.
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Rankings for the first week:
Finalist for the best meme: El Deforma [v] (not really much of a prize for them, because El Deforma is like the Barcelona F.C. of memes).
Finalist for the best tweet on a well-founded suspicion: “What seems most suspicious to me is that the #EZLN always becomes fashionable in the winter and then the fucking skimasks get really expensive.”
Finalist for the best series of tweets on the topic: “Hey listen, with regard to all this, do the Zapatistas even use Twitter?/ I’m asking because we’re here scolding them, mocking them, ridiculing them, telling them, ordering them what they should and shouldn’t do/ and if they aren’t even paying attention/ if they aren’t hearing us, then it’s like/ masturbating while watching, aroused, a box of cereal, you know/ heads up, don’t forget to erase this series of tweets/. Warning! Your Twitter account has suffered an attack by a screen shot.
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Listen, a bit of well-intentioned counsel (consejo with an ‘s’): a lesson in reading comprehension wouldn’t hurt you. And speaking of letters, a composition lesson wouldn’t be a bad idea either… providing it is one with a limited horizon of the 140 characters.
—A non-Confucian maxim: “although it may seem unbelievable, it seems there is not just one but many worlds outside of social networks.”
Defensa Zapatista, Chicharito Hernández, and Lionel Messi.
I don’t know how the hell the ball ended up in my tent, but the thing is that behind it came a little girl about… how old? I estimate between 8 and 10; in the communities that could be years or decades. It’s not the first time that the irreverent and happy tone of Zapatista childhood erupts in the solitary room where I at times stay, so I didn’t pay too much attention and continued reviewing and reading the storm across social networks and free and paid media. I wouldn’t even have noticed the little girl’s presence if she hadn’t said, in a knowing voice, “it’s like the thing with Chicharito and Messi.” I realized that the little girl was looking over my shoulder at the screen of my laptop. Remembering that old maxim that the best offense is defense, I asked her: “And you, who are you? I don’t know you.” The little girl responded, “my name is Defensa Zapatista,” as if stating the obvious, as if she had said “energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.” Pointing to the screen she added, “Chicharito doesn’t play for Barcelona and Messi doesn’t play for the Chiapas Jaguars.” I turned back around to see if I had switched hashtags without realizing it, but no, the header still read #ezln. What occurs in the head of a little Zapatista girl is not so much a world but rather a Big Bang in continual expansion. Nevertheless, I asked her, “And what the hell does that have to do with anything.” The little girl answered with a face that says, “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
“It’s like they’re criticizing Chicharito for not scoring goals for Barcelona and Messi for not doing anything to help the Jaguars. Some say that Chicharito is going to recover; others say he’s done. Some say that Messi is sad because his home country doesn’t support him; others say it’s that his shoe is too tight and if he changes it he’s going to shoot well again.
But the thing is Chicharito doesn’t play for Barcelona, nor Messi for the Jaguars. Meaning, they’re getting all worked up over nothing.”
I was evaluating the change in paradigm underlying Defensa Zapatista’s line of reasoning when she started in again: “Hey Sup, why don’t we organize a soccer game for when those who are like us show up here? Well, we haven’t actually finished putting together our team and sometimes Pedrito, the little jerk, thinks he’s really tough, and the cat-dog barely obeys orders, and the one-eyed horse falls asleep a lot, and the other players, well sometimes they come and sometimes they go. But look, I already thought about what song we should play we win the final. Do you know the tune? What would you know, you’re the sup!” I advise you to study the sciences and the arts, so that you can see clearly that the problem is that Chicharito doesn’t play for Barcelona, and Messi doesn’t play for the Jaguars, and so you shouldn’t worry, to hell with the lot of them. I have to go now because the team isn’t complete yet and what if we’re up to play for, like they say, the inauguration.”
Already at the door, the little girl turned around and said: “Hey Sup, if my moms comes and asks if you saw me, you just tell her clearly that Chicharito doesn’t play for Barcelona and Messi doesn’t play for the Jaguars. I mean don’t tell lies, because mothers always know when you’re lying. So what you have to do is change the game, pretend you’re headed one way, but really you’re going in another. I can explain that to you later, but study first, because if you are going to go to the autonomous school they are going to make fun of you, and Pedrito will be the worst, because the little jerk is bragging that he finished grade school. But he’ll see that I’m going to finish too and then get outta here, to hell with him. About the team, don’t worry, there will be more of us. Sometimes it takes a while, but there will be more of us.” The little girl left.
SubMoy showed up and asked me, “Do you have the text with the explanation ready?”
“No, but Chicharito doesn’t play for Barcelona, nor Messi for the Jaguars,” I answered, following Defensa Zapatista’s advice.
SubMoy looked at me and took out his radio, giving the order, “send someone from the health commission with an injection.”
I ran, what else could I do?
Woof-Meow
SupGaleano
[i] A reference to Margarita Zavala, the wife of ex-president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and likely PAN candidate for the presidency in 2018.
[ii] A reference to her husband, ex-president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012).
[iii] Concejo with a “c” means council, often referring to some level of governing council. Consejo with an “s” means advice or counsel, or is used to refer to an entity like a board of directors.
[iv] Derogatory terms used to discredit supporters of the various institutional political parties.
[v] A reference to the Mexican national newspaper Reforma.
Chiapas Support Committee 