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EZLN: Progress on “The Zapatistas and ConSciences for Humanity”
PROGRESS ON THE ENCOUNTER “THE ZAPATISTAS and THE CONSCIENCES FOR HUMANITY”
ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY
MEXICO
March 2016
Compas and non-compas:
Now we are going to let you know how plans are going for the Encounter “The Zapatistas and the ConSciences for Humanity”:
As of March 14, we have received 50 applications for the event.
There are applications from Norway, Brazil, Chile, France, the USA, Japan, and Mexico.
Scientific disciplines: So far invitations are being considered for scientists of Astronomy, Biology, Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry, Medicine, Genetics, Pediatric Pathology and Nephrology, and Microbiology. We will continue to keep you informed of further developments with the invitations.
The scientists invited to the encounter “The Zapatistas and the ConSciences for Humanity” can offer a critical reflection on their scientific theory or practice, or an explanation of the general elements of their specialty given in an accessible manner (that is, an educational talk).
The email address where you can register to attend the encounter “The Zapatistas and the ConSciences for Humanity” is: conCIENCIAS@ezln.org.mx.
Date and location for the ConSciences Encounter: December 25, 2016 to January 4 2017, with an ‘intermission’ on December 31 and January 1. It will be held at CIDECI in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
Only the invited scientists with their exhibitions and the selected Zapatista youth with their questions will be given the floor at the festival.
There is no cost for registration but the Zapatistas cannot pay for travel, lodging, or food.
Boys and girls may attend as videntes [viewers] and escuchas [listeners], but must be accompanied by a responsible adult.
The production, consumption and sale of drugs and alcohol are strictly forbidden.
That is all for now.
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés. Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano.
Mexico, March 2016.
From the diaries of the cat-dog:
Echoes of March 8i
March 8, 2016. Place: EZLN Headquarters. Document obtained from the diary of someone calling himself “supgaleano,” thanks to the Trojan malware called “finders keepers, losers weepers” version 6.9.
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés and the present writer were here discussing the upcoming CompArte festival and how the Zapatista communities are organizing to participate. While we were talking a compañera insurgenta came in and said simply: “there is going to be a soccer game. We women were challenged to a game.” I knew the motivation behind this, because it was not the first time that it had happened. Let me tell you that in this barracks, the insurgent women [insurgentas] outnumbered the insurgent men [insurgentes] two to one. To explain this difference in numbers, there are two different stories: the official version is that it is because the majority of the insurgentes are doing highly specialized work which only men can carry out with panache and grace; the real version is that there are in fact more compañeras than compañeros. Publishing the real version is of course prohibited, so only the official version has been distributed to the Tercios Compas.
Despite this reality, obvious from a simple glance, it occurred to one of the insurgentes to say as he finished breakfast: “since today is March 8, we men challenge the women to a game of soccer.” The commanding officer realized the error almost immediately, but the deed had been done. A female official from the insurgent health service responded: “it’s on.” The men crowded around the naïve challenger to scold him. Realizing the reason for the frustration that was spreading through the masculine ranks, the insurgente tried to clarify, “but with an equal number of players on each team.” “No way,” said the women, “you said that the men challenged the women, and so it is all of the insurgentes against all of the insurgentas.”
Clouds began forming in the sky and a strong wind foreshadowed misfortune.
After lunch (the menu was tamale shakes and coffee with chili pepper), an insurgenta came by to let us know that the game was about to start and asked if we were going. Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés couldn’t go because he had to review the registration list for the festival. I abstained, intuiting that the environment would not be a propitious one for gender inequity. So neither of us went.
The horizon was already darkening when they returned. On earth and in the sky the storm is lady and mistress of everything.
The insurgenta arrived to report in. I asked her how the game had gone and she responded, “we tied.” “How many to how many?” I asked. “I don’t remember” she said, “but we won a game and then we changed sides on the field and they won, so we tied: one each.” She said it with such self-confidence that she seemed like the president of the National Electoral Institute reporting the official results of any election.
Something smelled fishy to me, and so I went to see the commanding officer and asked about the results: “We won 7 to 3” he responded tersely. “But the Health insurgenta said that you tied because they won one game and you all the other?” I asked. The official smiled and clarified: “no sup, we only played one game; what happened was that in the first half they were winning 3 to 2, and in the second half, after switching sides on the field, we made 5 goals. The result: insurgentes – 7, insurgentas – 3.” Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, spokesperson of the eezeeelen, in the name of all of the Zapatista men, women, children and elders exclaimed: “We men won!” Another insurgenta who was walking by admonished “what is this about ‘we men won,’ ha! you two didn’t even go.” “It doesn’t matter,” said the official spokesperson of the eezeeelen, “we men won.” The storm appeared to diminish and the wind and water settled down. But the horizon was far from clear.
Later that night, when as we toasted masculine supremacy with our coffee, Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés explained to me: “Look, what happened is that among the men, only two of them really know how to play soccer and both of them were on guard duty, so in the first half the insurgentes were down two players and the insurgentas, well, there’s already more of them. In the second half, those two guys finished their shift and they were incorporated into the game and well, the men won.”
I asked if the insurgentas knew how to play soccer: “they do,” he said, “but they also have one player who is young and runs up and down the field and everywhere; she is the team’s real strategist and tactician because when she gets tired of running she just yells, “ball, ball” and all of the insurgentas run and surround the guy who has the ball and they all kick and since there is only one ball, well, a whole lot of kicks get the compañero.”
We raise our cold cups of coffee and toast the new triumph of gender even in adverse conditions.
In the mountains, the wind and rain had already drunk of the nocturnal force. It was not yet morning when they subsided, with even more force if that is possible.
But (there’s always a “but”), the next day at breakfast one of the men, with ill intentions, asked how the soccer game had gone, “We tied,” an insurgenta rushed to say before the little machos managed to respond, and she turned to the other women around her: “Right compañeras?” “Yeessss!” they all shouted and, well, since they are the majority, well…anyway, the risks of democracy.
That is how the insurgentas converted a sports defeat into a triumph and won…with a tie. Final score: insurgentes – 1, insurgentas – 2.
But the machos didn’t give up so quickly, they asked for a re-match. “Sure” said the compañeras “but next year.”
Desperate, the insurgentes looked to the person who best encapsulates the highest values of machismo-Zapatismo, which is to say, me. They asked me when “men’s day” was.
“What?” I asked them.
“Yes,” they said, “if there is a woman’s day, then there must also be a man’s day.”
“Ah” I agreed, understanding: ”yes indeed there is one.” And I showed them what, with concise wisdom, one tiger had tweeted: “Men’s day” (when you celebrate the slavery of the woman to the work of rearing children) already exists. It is May 10.”
I think that they didn’t understand what you might call my sarcastic tone because they went away saying, “Ah, ok well then it’s still a little while off.”
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Reading comprehension questions:
- – Is the health insurgenta who subverted the semantics in FIFA’s rules a feminazi, a lesbo-terrorist, or someone who does away with the rules, destroying imposed [gender] roles and damaging masculine sensibility?
- – Is the person who summarized with such grace what happened on this fateful March 8, 2016, in a Zapatista barracks: hetero-patriarchal, Eurocentric, species-ist, ableist, classist and etceterist, one more victim of the system (well look at that, it sounds like the name of a music group), or does he not celebrate May 10 because he lacks the above listed attributes?
- – As the women that we are, should we give a rematch to those damned men who, well, you know, you give them an inch and they want a mile?
Send your responses to the concierge of the Little School. Note: all not-so-nice comments will be returned to sender.
I testify under gender oath/protest:
SupGaleano
March 8, 2016
i_ March 8 is known around the world as International Women’s Day.
ii_ The original is “mentadas que no sean de menta.” “Mentada” is like a telling-off or insult. Menta is mint. Literally this would be unminty insults.
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Nestora Salgado: I will fight to free political prisoners
Family members, friends and activists received Nestora Salgado upon leaving the Tepepan women’s prison in Mexico City. Photo: Yazmín Ortega Cortés.
By: Georgina Saldierna and Josefina Quintero
Yesterday, the leader of the Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities-Community Police (CRAC-PC), Nestora Salgado García, committed to continue fighting for the liberation of the 500 political prisoners that there are in the country, among them nine of their compañeros, after attaining her release after almost three years of prison accused of kidnapping.
She added that she went free because she is innocent and rejected that they had permitted her to leave prison on the condition that she abandon the country. “Those are stories that are told… I don’t have any reason to flee. I can hold my head up very high because I am not ashamed of anything,” she emphasized.
At 9:49 in the morning, the community police commander of Olinalá, Guerrero, abandoned the Tepepan women’s prison, where family members, friends and community colleagues were waiting for her. Once she greeted and hugged her allies, Salgado García headed to the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Centro to offer a press conference that at times derived into a political meeting.
The place was insufficient for the dozens of members of social organizations that sought to express their support, so that many of them had to remain outside the building. Among the attendees that achieved entering, the priests Alejandro Solalinde and Miguel Concha stood out, as well as Ayotzinapa activists and leaders from the Peoples Front for the Defense of Land, like Ignacio del Valle.
Nestora Salgado made use of the word after family members of political prisoners that are also members of the CRAC-PC criticized the detention of people that have fought for the good of their people and that the criminals remain free. It was the participation of Grisel Rodríguez, Nestora’s daughter, who at the point of tears lamented the three years of life that her mother lost in prison that no one is going to return.
In a 25-minute discourse, the commander said that she would continue fighting for the liberation of political prisoners and if it is necessary to be crucified in order to obtain it, that’s what she’s going to do. “If I have to end up in front of the United Nations building, I’m going to do it,” she emphasized.
She made a call to add on to this campaign and, in particular, she asked the governor of Guerrero, Héctor Astudillo Flores, for the prompt release of her political fellows, because they are not criminals, added.
She assured that she was detained for denouncing the corrupt municipal president of Olinalá, Eusebio González; the town prosecutor Patrón Jiménez and the ex governor of Guerrero Ángel Aguirre Rivero. “Thanks to him I was passing horrible times,” she accused.
She also considered that staying in prison without having committed a crime provokes horrible psychological damage. “It feels like being buried alive,” she added, and next added that for 20 months she was incommunicado and isolated for a crime that she didn’t commit.
Salgado García said that with that they delight in causing the greatest harm and pain possible to those who are defenseless and that it’s difficult to fight against the government, when there is a countersign. Later she judged that Isabel Miranda de Wallace, of the Stop the Kidnapping organization, didn’t have the heart to accuse her, but “I already forgave her.”
Similarly, she said she isn’t afraid of reprisals and reported that she would travel to the United States to take care of a health problem. Upon returning from that trip, she insisted, she will continue fighting. But she asked that they not come to offer anything, because she would not occupy any political position.
To the question about what message she sent to President Enrique Peña Nieto, the commander asked him to respect the indigenous peoples and the community police.
In the press conference as well as upon leaving the Tepepan prison she thanked those who promoted her freedom for their support. She demanded the same support for the parents of the disappeared Ayotzinapa students and that justice is done. She added that she distanced herself from any political party and clarified that she is not campaigning, because her principal motive is the people’s defense.
On the esplanade of the re-adaptation center, one by one the members of the community police greeted her and put themselves at her orders, because they said that for them she continues being the commander in chief.
After the reception and the symbolic breaking of the handcuffs that tied her hands, Nestora emphasized that her freedom is due to everyone.
The community leader was detained on August 21, 2013 accused of committing 50 kidnappings.
In the evening, Nestora Salgado met with students and members of social organizations at the Autonomous University of Mexico City, Del Valle building, she remembered the situation of injustice that is experienced in the peoples; consequently, now “that the doors of other countries are being opened to us, I will go and talk about the injustices.” She affirmed that she would do everything within her power to help people.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
En español: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/03/19/politica/003n1pol
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Re-published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
About CompArte: a few questions, a few answers
ABOUT CompArte: A FEW QUESTIONS, A FEW ANSWERS
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés. Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano
Zapatista National Liberation Army
Mexico
March 14, 2016
Compas and non-compas:
We write to tell you a little about how plans are going for the activities in July, October, and December of 2016. We have received a few questions, so here are a few answers, but only regarding the festival “CompArte for Humanity.”
“How is the registration for the art festival looking?”
As of March 12, 2016, we had registered:
21 attendees from Mexico and 5 from other countries; and,
99 participants from Mexico and 30 from other countries (Chile, Argentina, Greece, Canada, United States, Spanish State, New Zealand, Trinidad and Tobago, Guatemala, Colombia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Peru, Cross-border or Without Borders, Uruguay, France, and the Sufi Community with Islamic music).
“What kinds of activities or artistic works are registered so far?
According to those who have registered so far, there is: rap, poetry, visual arts, contemporary dance, painting, engraving, literature and stories, theater, puppets, embroidery, iron work, silk-screening, photography, documentaries, cinema, sculpture, ceramics, short films, illustration, reggae, rock, graffiti, gastronomy, aerial dance, murals, music, music, and more music.
“What is this about “alternate sites” for the CompArte Festival?”
We are hoping that the compas of the Sixth in Mexico and in the world understand what you might call the subliminal message of the convocation and organize activities—in their own geographies and in accordance with their own calendars—either before, during, or after the festivals/gatherings convoked by the Zapatistas. That is, we hope that whether at local, regional, zone, or national levels, the Sixth organizes festivals and gatherings to give space for and echo to artistic activities. And of course, also to celebrate the National Indigenous Congress’ 20 years of rebellion and resistance, as well as a space where scientists will find attentive ears and critical thought.
“Is it necessary to register to attend, without participating in, the ‘CompArte’ festival?”
Yes, just clarify that you are registering as an attendee.
“Is necessary to register to attend and participate in the “CompArte” festival?”
Yes, and we ask you to specify the form your participation will take.
“What is the email where one can register for the ‘CompArte for Humanity festival’?”
The email is comArte@ezln.org.mx
“Can you tell me again the dates and locations for the ‘CompArte for Humanity’ festival?”
No, those are already in the communiqué from February 29…. Okay, okay okay, here they are:
Dates: July 17-30, 2016
Location:
July 17-22 in the Caracol of Oventik. Only Zapatista bases of support will participate in this part. Attendance is open for escuchas [listeners] and videntes [viewers], but requires registration.
July 23-30, 2016 in CIDECI, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. All registered artists can participate. Attendance is open for listeners and viewers, but requires registration.
“Is there a registration fee, either for attendees or participants?
No.
“Are you (Zapatistas) going to pay for travel expenses, food, and lodging?”
No.
“According to Zapatismo, is gastronomy an art?”
Everyone can categorize their practice as they see fit. In the case of the difficult culinary arts, the insurgentas, as an echo of March 8, will contribute a menu that is…hmm… how can I put it… disconcerting: “tamale shakes and coffee with chili pepper” (note: for the tamale shake they don’t use a blender or any other machine, only the cooking fire and their “wisdom”). I already suffered… I mean, tasted it and it is… disconcerting.
“Can children participate?”
Yes, children can register to participate or attend. Except for the girls, because what a shame, the deadline has passed, it was March 8, so oh well…eh? But it’s that… ay! Okay, okay okay: the girls can register too. Note: all minors should be accompanied by a mother or father or tutor, tutora, or tutoroa.
“Is anything banned from these events?”
Yes, the production, consumption, or sale of drugs and alcohol is strictly forbidden. If you aren’t capable of making or enjoying art without taking something before or during, well your method is mistaken.
“There still isn’t a report back on the Little School?”
No. The questions sent by students are currently being reviewed. When something is ready, we’ll let those interested know.
That’s all for now.
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés. Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano.
Mexico, March 2016.
From the diaries of the cat-dog:
The time of the police (part one):
One: In Mexico, a Latin American country that suffers the global crisis like they all do, but which is fueled by the solid triad of corruption-clumsiness-ignorance made into a government, the official in charge of public education, Aurelio Nuño Mayer, cannot hide his passion for the policing profession. Encouraged by his accomplices, Mr. Nuño believes that he can win the presidential candidacy for his party, the PRI, if he functions more as paid thug than as promoter of Mexican education. Fond of making threats, running his own repressive squads, and operating like any boss in the early stages of savage capitalism, Mr. Nuño finds special pleasure in converting the teaching profession into a destination not for better schools, training, and salaries, but for arbitrary injustices, beatings, and firings. Playing the role of prosecutor, judge, and jury; of Labor Minister (decreeing firings without severance); of Minister of the Interior (using the police and the army at his whim); of clumsy media spokesperson, dismal builder of “spontaneous” support, and twitterer in permanent slow motion, Mr. Nuño’s only resumé merit is having sheltered himself within that group of criminals who engage in criminal activity with total immunity. Despite his suits and ties, his heavily made up and photo-shopped media image, Mr. Nuño cannot hide what he has always been: a sad and mediocre policeman who gets pleasure from and money for repressing and humiliating others. Mr. Nuño has always longed to be a good policeman, but… when the den of thieves is insufficient to accommodate so many, when his secret protector falls, Mr. Nuño will also show he is a good runner… when fleeing becomes the order of the day.
Another one: In this country known in the realm of the world cups (although no further than the quarterfinals) as “Mexico,” in the so-called “highest place of study,” the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), Mr. Enrique Graue Wiechers has reached the highest bureaucratic position (and ladder to governmental post): the title of rector [like chancellor or dean]. In addition to the fact that his academic and professional career has been located within the bureaucracy of academia and carefully guided by the Zedillo Ponce de León family’s psychiatrist, Mr. Graue did his graduate work in a North American university know for having invented the energy drink self-named “Gatorade,” which should give you an idea of how advanced he is in his specialty field of ophthalmology. A few days ago, Mr. Graue declared he was “outraged” because of the insufficient quantity of drugs police planted on one of the activists from the Che Guevara Auditorium (which the university authorities are futilely trying to call the Justo Sierra Auditorium). Mr. Graue was not enraged that the federal budgeting for higher education would not be sufficient to cover hundreds of thousands of young people; nor was he enraged by the mercantilist conditions that academic faculty and staff are subjected to; nor was he enraged because the UNAM has become a nest of undesirables, that is, of bureaucratic functionaries who don’t even know how to write the name of their overseer (that is, the rector); nor was he enraged by the lack of security endured by faculty, staff, and students on the UNAM campuses (assaults, rapes, and murders); and he was not enraged because an anti-democratic gangsterism had placed, in the highest post of the “highest place of study,” a mediocre bureaucrat.
No, Mr. Graue was enraged because the police didn’t do a good job of setting someone up to be framed. And this outrages Mr. Graue because all his life he has endeavored to be a good police agent. With his indignant police discourse (seconded by people who don’t even know where the Justo Sierra Auditorium is, much less the Che Guevara), Mr. Graue gives a lecture: “the problem with higher education in Mexico lies with a vegetarian cafeteria, a screen printing workshop, and a bakery training space, among other things. These subversive activities are promoted by a group of anarchists, that is, dirty, ugly, and bad people who contrast sharply with the neatness and style of the university bureaucracy. They don’t even sell Gatorade, but rather water and juices of unknown origin. They are drug addicts (the high, medium, and low-ranking officials hide cocaine, crystal meth, ecstasy, and even crack and an occasional roach in their desk drawers —even within bureaucracy there are classes, my friend), they’re anarchic-anarchists, not part of the university community (various officials swallow hard) and that auditorium… the auditorium, what’s that auditorium… secretary quick, what’s the name of that auditorium that we want to liberate.. ah yes, the Justo Sierra Auditorium in the School of Medicine… eh? …It’s not in the School of Medicine?.. huh?… you’re recording? Give notice!… okay… in the School of Philosophy and Letters of Acatlán… no?… is it in Ciudad Universitaria?…Oh isn’t CU where the Pumas play?…So there are academic departments there too?… I’m only familiar with the rector’s suite… well anyway, wherever it is, it should be “liberated” by the police, and by police who know how to plant the evidence properly, not those scatter-brains that don’t even know how to place a bit of “spearmint” in a backpack. That’s why an elite group of my officials are going to start a degree program on how to place drugs in briefcases. Yes yes I know that’s not the same, but we don’t carry backpacks, we carry briefcases. As I have said… what, no applause? Turn on the recorder man! No, not that one, you’ll ruin my cabinet career ambitions. The other one! Yes that one! Thank you, thank you to the authentic university community members who know that the university serves to domesticate, not to teach nor investigate! Thank you, thank you, thank you! How was that? What? I said turn that recorder off! No not the one with the cheering, the other one, the one that’s recording!
Mr. Graue is furious, he was just trying to be a good police agent.
I testify: woof-meow.
Cat-dog.
Copyleft 2016. Permission from the Good Government Council under conditions of “we’ll be back tomorrow to see if its ready, who knows, maybe it will be a new Council rotation by then, but in the meantime let me tell you the history of Zapatista autonomy. You already know it? Well then we should review it, as they say, until it truly sticks in your head. Did you bring your notebook? Write in “resistance and rebellion” or “rebellion and resistance,” it’s the same thing, because the order of the “r’s” doesn’t’ affect our autonomy. Haven’t you studied mathematics? Just songs? Well look, you need arts and sciences, there’s no way around it.”
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Originally Published in Spanish by Enlace Zapatista
El Cambalache presents: Inter-Change Value
APRIL 1, 2016 7:00 – 9:00 PM
OMNI COMMONS, 4799 SHATTUCK AVE., OAKLAND, CA
The capitalist economic system has provoked a social rupture and loss of community values, such as mutual aid and bartering or exchanging. This rupture foments a sense that people and things are discardable. In El Cambalache (The Swap in English) in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, by using exchange and inter-actions we work to generate change from the personal out to those around us and use things that appear to no longer have value. We seek to mend the rupture that we see in our worlds.
The Cambalache, with its nucleus-generating group of six women involves people through their visits to exchange day by day. The idea is that we re-enforce the development of the Cambalache precisely through constructing networks with people and organizations that have similar goals. In this way we share the construction of an inclusive community through workshops where economy members gather participants to take part in/of the knowledge, abilities and services that are offered. We walk hand in hand with these and other social and political processes. El Cambalache is an economy built in feminism and decoloniality. As women, Mexicans, Americans, and Indigenous people we can create an economy in our own visions that is liberating from the weight and exploitation that comes with capitalism. For more information: (510) 654-9587.
Sponsored by the Chiapas Support Committee
C0-Sponsored by: Global Women’s Strike/Omni Collective
Zibechi: The social bases of the new rights
Last Sunday, millions of people demonstrated against the government of Dilma Rousseff. Photo: Afp.
By: Raúl Zibechi
A new right is emerging in the world and also in Latin America, a region that presents its own profiles and a new social base. It’s necessary to become familiar with it in order to combat it, to avoid simplistic judgments and to understand the differences with the old rights.
Mauricio Macri is very different from Carlos Menem. He introduced neoliberalism, but was a son of the old political class, to the point that he respected some legal norms institutional times. Macri is the son of the neoliberal model and behaves according to the extractive model, making dispossession his principal argument. His pulse doesn’t tremble at the time of stepping over the values of democracy and the procedures that characterize it.
Something similar can be said about the Venezuelan right. It’s about attaining objectives regardless of the means. The modus operandi of the new Brazilian right even differs from the privatizing government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Today the referents are characters like Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi, or the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a militarist and warrior, who don’t respect either the Kurdish people or the legal opposition, whose offices and meetings are systematically attacked.
These new rights relate to Washington, but it’s of little use to think that they act mechanically, following orders emanating from an imperial center. The regional rights, above all those of the big countries, have a certain amount of autonomy in defense of their own interests, above all those that are supported in a more or less developed local business group.
But what’s really novel is the broad support they get from the masses. As has been said, the Argentine right had never before reached the Casa Rosada through the electoral path. This novelty merits some explanation that cannot be exhausted in this short space. Nor does it seem adequate to attribute all the advances of the right to the media. What reasons are there for maintaining that voters on the right are manipulated and those of the left are conscious and lucid votes?
There are two questions that would need to be cleared away before entering a broader analysis. The first is the manner of doing things, the non-stop authoritarianism almost without argument. The second is the reason for the support of the masses, which includes not only the middle classes, but also a part of the popular sectors.
About Macri’s authoritarian decisions, the writer Martín Rodríguez maintains: “Macrismo acts like an Islamic State: his occupation of power signifies a sort of irreverence for the sacred Kirchner temples” (Panamarevista.com, 28/01/16). Mass firings are supported on the firm belief of the middle classes that the state workers are “privileged” and collect paychecks without working. The political cost of those tremendous decisions has been very low as of now.
The comparison to the methods of the Islamic State sounds exaggerated, but has a point of contact with reality: the new rights come in cleaning house, sweeping away everything that gets in their way, from workers rights to institutional rules of the game. For them, being democratic is just counting the pieces of paper in the ballot boxes every four or five years.
The second question is to comprehend the mass support attained. The anthropologist Andrés Ruggeri, a researcher in recovered companies, emphasizes that the right was able to “construct a reactionary social base capable of mobilizing itself, based in the most backward sectors of the middle class, sectors that always existed and that supported the dictatorship in the 1970s” (Diagonal, 13/02/15). That social base is anchored in a voter-consumer “that acquires a vote like a supermarket product.”
He considers that the big error of the Cristina Fernandez government consisted of, instead of fomenting an organized popular subject, in promoting “a dismembered social group, individualistic and consumerist, which also thought that the conquests of the fight in 2001 and the social benefits attained in those 12 years were acquired rights that were not at risk. Convincing them of the latter was a great achievement of the rightwing campaign, the key to its triumph” (Diagonal, 13/02/16).
The middle classes are very different from those of the 60s. They no longer are referenced in the layers of professionals that are formally trained in state universities, who read books and continued studying when ending their careers, aspired to work for mid-level paychecks in state divisions and socialized in public spaces where they come together with the popular sectors. The new middle classes revere the rich, aspire to live in private neighborhoods far away from the popular classes and the urban framework, are deeply consumerist and distrust free thought.
If a decade ago part of those middle classes banged on casseroles against the “economic closures” of the Economic Minister, Domingo Cavallo, and on occasion came together with the unemployed (“picket and casserole, is just one fight,” [1] was the slogan of 2001), now they just worry about property and security, and think that freedom consists of buying dollars and vacationing in five star hotels.
These middle classes (and a part of the popular sectors) are culturally modeled by extractivism [2]: by consumer values that financial capital promotes, so distant from the values of work and effort that an industrial society promoted barely four decades ago.
The defenders of the neoliberal model attain a level of support at around 35-40 percent of the electorate, as all of the processes in the region show. We often don’t know how to confront this new right. It’s not agitating against imperialism like we will overthrow it, but rather demonstrating that one can enjoy life without falling into consumerism, debt and individualism.
[1] It rhymes in Spanish: “piquete y cacerola, la lucha es una sola.”
[2] Extractivism – Zibechi’s use of this term is similar to David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession. It implies corporations taking a resource or possession away from people in order to create profits.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, February 19, 2016
Re-published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Gustavo Castro’s stay in Honduras is risky
Oscar Castro, Gustavo’s brother, during the press conference held in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where he denounced that: “the crime scene was altered.” To his right are Berta Cáceres’ daughters. Photo: Afp
By: Blanche Petrich
Mexico’s ambassador in Honduras, Dolores Jiménez, affirmed that the risk that Gustavo Castro Soto runs by remaining in Honduras as a victim and the only surviving witness to a high-impact crime –the murder of Lenca [1] leader Berta Cáceres, last March 3– “is an objective fact,” and therefore the Chancellery has put its effort into achieving that the environmentalist can return to the country as soon as possible.
In a telephone interview with La Jornada, the diplomat emphasized: “what’s notable in Castro Soto’s case is that despite his vulnerability he it very willing to contribute in whatever may be required for the full clarification of the crime.”
Dolores Jiménez expressed that there are “high expectations” that the Honduran government will respond “as soon as possible” to the request that the Chancellery officially sent this Thursday so that Gustavo Soto, director of the organization Otros Mundos, with its headquarters in Chiapas, is permitted to return to Mexico before the 30-day time period expires that a judge set in La Esperanza, where the attack was committed. As of now, the judge’s prohibition on leaving Honduras does not expire for 26 days.
She assured that bilateral agreements between Mexico and Honduras are in effect for cooperation in judicial investigations, like this one, so that Castro would be able to continue amplifying his statements at a distance, from Mexico, by means of the Honduran Embassy. “It’s something very common and is practiced all over the world.”
The environmentalist leader is sheltered in Casa México, a building bordering the offices of the Mexican Embassy and that forms part of the official residence of Mexico in Tegucigalpa. The consul Pedro Barragán accompanies him all the time.
The ambassador pointed out that as of this moment the Honduran government has not responded in writing to Mexico’s request, delivered the day before yesterday (Thursday). She indicated that a communiqué from the Honduran government details the efforts that have been carried out with the Mexican in the process of investigating the murder of the Lenca leaders Berta Cáceres, “and it permits us to have good expectations” that he can return before the time that the judge set expires.”
Nevertheless, this communiqué, published by the Secretariat of Foreign Relations and International Cooperation and directed “to public opinion,” does not make any allusion to the case of Gustavo Castro. It only indicates that: “all lines of investigation are open” and are the object of “active and systematic efforts.” It reports that the agencies involved in the process are the attorney general’s office, the criminal investigations agency and the national police.
Yesterday, in a press conference, human rights organizations, Berta Cáceres’ daughters and a brother of Gustavo, Óscar Castro Soto, asked that, in the face of irregularities committed by the first judge of La Esperanza, in the southwestern department of Intibucá, the murder case record be assigned to another court.
Ambassador Jiménez declined to comment in that regard. “It’s not my business,” she said.
She explained that the Embassy of Mexico has offered the only witness to the crime consular protection from the first moment, “and it will continue offering all that he requires.”
She added that she would insist he be permitted to continue cooperating from Mexico through the Honduras representation. “It’s a very common practice all over the world. Honduras law permits it. There is a bilateral agreement in effect between the two countries for facilitating judicial cooperation in criminal matters.” She also emphasized that the protection that the Mexican government is offering is with full respect to Honduras law.
–Have you received an answer to the official communication from the Mexican Chancellery?
–No, as of now there is no written response. We hope that we will have a prompt and positive answer as soon as possible.
We observe that the State has expressed its commitment to an in-depth investigation and full clarification and punishment of those responsible. That is important. But above all is the protection of the witness’ life, if it should be at risk. One is not incompatible with the other.
–Does the government of Honduras recognize Gustavo as a victim?
–Of course. His legal situation here is that of a protected witness, as a victim and as a human rights defender with protective measures.
The ambassador specified that the witness is not able to stay in La Esperanza, where the case is followed, “because that’s where he would run the most risk. Although the judge ordered him to appear there to give his statements, the consul transported him to Tegucigalpa afterwards. The consul is with him at every moment.”
After emphasizing that: “nothing is superfluous in matters of security,” the diplomat explained the mechanisms that have been activated for the Mexican activist’s protection: a security operation of the Honduras government for his movements, the same security from the Mexican government and the precautionary measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
–Why did the Honduran police intercept Castro Soto’s departure in the international airport when he was going to travel to Mexico? Why were the facts presented that way?
–There is a lot of clamor and at times a lack of immediate communication. The day that he was leaving for Mexico, after the prosecutor released him from his responsibility to make a statement, he thanked him and told him that he could leave. He returned to the airport with the consul after getting a plane ticket. But at the last minute a requirement arrived from the attorney general’s office that he had to continue making statements. We knew that a notification could arrive, but it didn’t happen and we decided to take him to the airport. The consul and I went with him. He was there when they delivered the notification. Then we took him back to the Mexican residence in the official car in which we had taken him. We made contact immediately with the authorities to confirm that in effect he was willing to continue giving statements in La Esperanza.
We were organizing a security operation all day Sunday and on Monday, March 7, it was activated at the first hour to take him to La Esperanza with all guaranties.
–Where does the process stand at this time?
–There has already been a bunch of formalities in which he participated in La Esperanza and therefore he is proposing to the Honduras government that he can leave the country and continue collaborating from Mexico in any amplification that is required. The conditions are appropriate for doing it now.
[1] Lenca – Indigenous people in southwestern Honduras and eastern El Salvador.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Saturday, March 12, 2016
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2016/03/12/politica/003n1pol
Re-published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Ayotzinapa: example of apparent State-crime collusion
National Indigenous Congress banner in support of Ayotzinapa.
By: David Brooks, Correspondent
New York, March 2, 2016
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) affirmed in an annual report on Mexico that the disappearance of the 43 Aytozinapa students is “an emblematic example of apparent collusion between State agents and members of organized crime,” and emphasizes that it is an example of the “grave deficiencies” of investigations into these kinds of cases, such as the “structural and almost absolute impunity” in the grave crimes that occur in the country.
“Mexico is going through a grave crisis of violence and security since several years ago,” in large measure because of the “war against drug trafficking” impelled by ex president Felipe Calderón, and by increasing the role of the armed forces in tasks of public security “even greater violence has been let loose, as well as grave human rights violations in which one observes a lack of accountability in accordance with international standards,” points out the extensive annual report entitled The situation of human rights in Mexico, which the IACHR issued today.
Without “substantial changes”
In a summary of the human rights violations and impunity, the report emphasizes that “substantial changes” in security policies are not offered under the current regime, while disappearances, extrajudicial executions and torture continue, as well as women’s insecurity, migrants, human rights defenders and journalists.
Although it recognizes the measures that the government of Enrique Peña Nieto has taken, among them some constitutional reforms and protocols for the investigation of certain human rights abuses, it indicates that: “the State response faces deficiencies, insufficiencies and obstacles in their implementation. The IACHR established a profound breech between the legislative and judicial scaffolding and the daily reality that millions of people in the country experience in their access to justice, prevention of crime and other government initiatives. Time after time, throughout the country, the IACHR heard from victims that the procurement of justice is a simulation.’’
In fact, it emphasizes that despite the change of government at the end of 2012, “there would not be substantial changes in relation to security policies and the levels of violence,” and it’s clear about all the denunciations of disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture and citizen insecurity, but especially of women, migrants, human rights defenders and journalists.
It affirms that: “Mexico is also considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world for exercising journalism, excepting those that are at war.” It quotes the United Nations High Commissioner on the number of 151,233 homicides from 2006 to August 2015. It also points out that on September 30, 2015 the Mexican State reported 26,798 persons “not located” or disappeared on a national scale.
Around the disappearances, “not a new phenomenon,” the IACHR considers the information “grave” about “the existence of a practice of enforced disappearances at the hands of State agents,” or with their participation and an almost total impunity.
It criticizes the failures in the investigations about the disappearances and emphasized that: “the current crisis of grave human rights violations that pierces Mexico is in part a consequence of the impunity that persists since the guerra sucia (dirty war) and that has championed its repetition until today.” Moreover, it affirms that relatives of the victims have reluctance of going to the authorities, as much because of suspicions of complicity as because of lack of attention.
“The relatives’ finding of graves with dozens of cadavers set forth clearly that they are the ones that faced with the State’s lack of action have assumed the search for loved ones, while the authorities don’t fulfill their duty to investigate, find, identify and deliver the victims with due diligence, as they should.”
In this context, the report broaches the enforced disappearance of the 43 normalistas in Ayotzinapa, which ‘‘constitutes a grave tragedy in Mexico, as well as a call for national and international attention about the disappearances in that country.” The case, it adds, “is a sample of the grave deficiencies that investigations about these acts suffer and the structural and almost absolute impunity in which these grave crimes usually remain. It’s also an emblematic example of the apparent collusion between State agents and members of organized crime.”
At the same time, the IACHR manifests its “gratitude” for the “opening” of the Mexican State to international scrutiny and the work of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI, the group’s initials in Spanish) around the facts of Iguala.
The report also focuses on the use of violence by agents of the State, including the cases of Tlatlaya, in the state of Mexico in 2014; the Apatzingán case, and the confrontation at the border between Tanhuato and Ecuandureo, Michoacán in 2015, making clear the necessity of measures for authorities to render accounts.
“The practice of torture in Mexico is alarming and is also generalized,” the report states. According to official numbers, the Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) has, as of the month of April 2015, 2,420 investigations in process about torture, but only 15 judicial sentences exist for that crime on the federal level. It adds that in the investigation into the facts in Iguala –even with its high profile– 77 percent of the individuals investigated showed bodily injuries.
In its diagnostic, the Inter-American Commission points out that: “the lack of access to justice has created a situation of impunity of a structural character that has the effect of perpetuating and in certain cases impelling the repetition of grave human rights violations. The threats, harassment, murders and disappearances of persons that seek truth and justice have generated an intimidation in Mexican society.”
Therefore, it concludes: “In actuality, the challenge for the Mexican State is to close the existing gap between its legal framework and its unlimited support for human rights with the reality that a large number of inhabitants experience when they seek prompt and effective justice. The State’s big challenge lies in breaking the cycle of reining impunity for the purpose of attaining an effective prevention, investigation, processing and sanction of those responsible for human rights violations.”
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Honduran government is preventing Gustavo Castro from leaving |Sign petition
Gustavo Castro Soto
[Please sign the Petition at bottom of post demanding Gustavo’s safety!]
By: Hermann Bellinghausen
Mexico City
Today, the environmental organization Otros Mundos A.C./ Friends of the Earth Mexico reported that Honduras authorities impeded Gustavo Castro Soto from leaving the country. Castro Soto is the Mexican that was injured in the assassination of Honduran activist Berta Cáceres.
This Sunday at 5 o’clock in the morning, Honduran authorities intercepted Castro at the immigration bridge of the International Airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, when he was attempting to board the plane that would take him back to Mexico, the organization said in a communiqué.
“We communicate that Gustavo Castro Soto, coordinator of Otros Mundos A.C./Friends of the Earth Mexico continues in Honduras and his personal security continues to be at risk,” the statement added.
The group reported that Mexican diplomats had to protect Castro in the official car to take him back to the Embassy.
“We continue without knowing clearly what his status is or on what basis the Honduran authorities continue to hold him and what proceedings will follow,” the communiqué said.
Unknown subjects murdered Cáceres, a 43-year old prestigious Honduran indigenous and environmental leader, last Thursday, March 3 in her home, the authorities said.
A teacher by profession, Berta Cáceres was known for her fight to stop hydroelectric and mining projects on the lands of the ethnic groups.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Sunday, March 6, 2016
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Click on the English link below to urge Gustavo Castro Soto’s immediate protection
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Chiapas activist witnessed Berta Cáceres murder
The Mexican activist Gustavo Castro Soto. Foto: Moviac
By: Isaín Mandujano
San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas (apro) –
Mexican activist Gustavo Castro Soto [1] witnessed the murder this morning of the indigenous environmentalist Berta Cáceres, an attack perpetrated in her house located in the El Líbano neighborhood of La Esperanza, in Intibucá, Honduras.
Castro Soto, a sociologist by profession, was injured during the attack on the Lenca leader and coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (Copinh).
The police confirmed that Soto is a protected witness and could contribute elements that will permit clarifying Cáceres murder, Honduran newspaper La Prensa emphasized this afternoon.
Human rights defenders and members of the organization Otros Mundos, AC protested this afternoon in this Chiapas city because of the murder of Berta Cáceres and they also demanded assurances of security and protection for the Chiapas activist and environmentalist Gustavo Castro, who was imparting capacity-building workshops in Honduras.
Members of the organization Otros Mundos AC, founded by Castro Soto, demonstrated publicly together with other activists to express their anger over the murder of Berta Cáceres, and at the same time said that they are worried about the status of the Chiapas activist’s physical condition.
The protesters confirmed that: “this morning armed individuals violently entered the house and murdered Berta Cáceres, an attach in which Gustavo Castro was injured. He survived the attack and thus became an actor key to the investigations that will clarify the environmentalist’s murder.
“Berta as well as Gustavo are two people recognized for social and environmental struggle on an international level, which shows the coherence of their lives dedicated to the defense of the rights of indigenous and campesino peoples, who they have accompanied in their resistance processes so that in a peaceful and organized manner, they might avoid the neoliberal project of the regional governments that appropriate Mesoamerican territory through their deadly extractive projects,” friends and compañeros of both activists pointed out in Chiapas.
Therefore, they asked the Honduras government for its prompt attention, intervention and follow up “to this lamentable and most grave event in the life of the Honduran people. We ask you to provide all possible legal and political measures to guaranty immediate protection to our compañero Gustavo Castro so that, once he has given his statement to the Honduran State, he can return to Mexico without problems.”
They also indicated that at this time it’s fundamental to guaranty protection and the life of Gustavo Castro because of the relevant role he acquired in this lamentable murder.
At the same time, they demanded that the security of all the members of the General Coordinator of the Copinh be guaranteed.
Members of the Mesoamerican Movement against the Extractive Mining Model (M4), the Mexican Network of those Affected by Mining (Rema) and Otros Mundos Chiapas organizations participated in the protest.
[The article continues with a list of other Latin American organizations that added their names to the demand.]
[1] Gustavo was formerly one of the founders of Ciepac (the Center for Economic and Political Investigations for Community Action) in Chiapas, an NGO that gave talks to Chiapas Support Committee delegations to Chiapas. The Ciepac went out of business about 5 years ago. The Chiapas Support Committee sponsored Gustavo Castro when he spoke at La Peña in 2005.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Proceso.com.mx
Friday, March 3, 2016
En español:
http://www.proceso.com.mx/432289/defensor-mexicano-presencio-asesinato-activista-hondurena
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
EZLN: The arts, sciences, original peoples and the basements of the world
THE ARTS, SCIENCES, ORIGINAL PEOPLES and THE BASEMENTS of the WORLD
ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY
Mexico
Sup Galeano in La Realidad
February 2016
To: Juan Villoro Ruiz
Brother:
I’m happy to hear that the rest of your family bajo protesta [i] are well, and I appreciate your serving as messenger to send them our greetings and gifts (although I continue to think that ties, ashtrays, and vases would have been a better choice).
As I picked up my pen to continue this conversation with you, I remembered your text “Speech on the rain” (Almadía Press, 2013), written, I believe, for the stage, which I read imagining, clumsily I’m sure, the set and the gestures and movements of the actor delivering the monologue, feeling the intervention more than witnessing it. The beginning, for example, is a summary of my life: the laconic “I lost my papers!” of the first line would make for an encyclopedia if I anchor it in the calendars and geographies of this continual lapse and relapse that I have been.
Because inevitably, after the opening line in an epistle, I lose my point (the “tonelada” (ton), as the compas say when referring to the “tone” of a song). That is, I depart from the concrete objective of the letter. It’s true that clarifying who will receive the letter could help, but often the recipient is a brotherly ear for whom the idea is to provoke not necessarily an answer, but always a thought, a doubt, a questioning, not of the kind that paralyzes but the kind that motivates more thoughts, doubts, questions, etceteras.
So perhaps, as for the librarian-lecturer who is the protagonist in your piece, words come that weren’t purposefully sought out, but rather were just there, lying in wait, pending a moment of inattention, a crack in the everyday in order to accost the paper, the screen, or that wrinkled sheet of “where-the-hell-did-I-leave-oh-here-it-is-when-did-i-write-this-nonsense?” The words then cease to be shield and barricade, lance and sword, and become, very much to our chagrin, a mirror in which one is revealed and kept awake at night [devela y desvela].
Of course, the librarian can turn to their aisles flanked with bookshelves, with their alphabetical and numerical order, their calendars and geographies drawing a map of literary treasures. They can look for the “o” in “oblivion” and see if there they can find what was lost. But here, in this continual moving around, the idea of a library, even a minimal and mobile one, is a chimera. Don’t think I didn’t look with unfounded hope upon the idea of electronic books (on a “USB” or “pen drive” or “external memory” one could load if not Borges’ library than at least a small one: Cervantes, Neruda, Tomás Segovia, Le Carré, Conan Doyle, Miguel Hernández, Shakespeare, Rulfo, Joyce, Malú Huacuja, Edurado Galeano, Alcira Élida Soust Scaffo, Alighieri, Eluard, León Portilla and the magician of words: García Lorca, among others). But no, like the librarian loses papers, I lose USB drives and who knows where they end up.
But believe me, we all have our embarrassing fantasies. In the USBs of electronic books there was usually a miscellaneous selection of authors, perhaps under the assumption that the drive would be lost and the authors would be together and, maybe, I don’t know, after all, literature is a genre of the impossible concretized in words, they could have a “sharing exchange” among themselves.
“Literature is a place where it rains,” you have the protagonist say, having fallen into misfortune and been obliged to strip down, without the clothing of his writing, to show himself for what he is: vulnerable.
So imagine a USB with these or other artists of the word. Imagine it begins to rain. Imagine what they talk about among themselves as they try to make sure a raindrop doesn’t ruin the binary code in which they live and thus begin the misunderstandings: 0-1-0 –stain-1-smudge-0-0-smudge-1 or whatever, and from there emerges the “how dare you!” and then the back and forth of “fuck you” and “I’ll beat the shit out of you,” “go to hell,” “vous êtes fou”, “va’ fa’ ta culo,” while Alcira hands out mimeographed copies of his “Poesia en Armas” [Poetry in Arms], something I think won’t do anything to calm the belligerent attitudes. In sum, all of the happy expectations ruined… because of the rain.
Of course, mutatis mutando,[ii] in your letters it is a cat who provides the meager public for the speaker, and here it is a cat-dog with a little light who may be disconcerted by what I write, as if a cat-that-is-a-dog-that-is-a-cat-that-is-dog with a little light curled up in the shadows wasn’t disconcerting enough.
Do I digress? That seems most likely. After all, this impossible exchange on a USB that trusts that the rain will not ruin its colloquium is just a fantasy.
But if for the speaker the subject at hand is the rain, in this missive the subject is… the storm. Allow me then to take advantage of these lines to continue our exchange of reflections on the complex crisis that approaches, according to some, or that is already here, according to others.
Someone has said that our vision (captured now in the typography of the book “Critical Thought Versus the Capitalist Hydra: Contributions from the Sixth Commission of the EZLN”) is apocalyptic and closer to Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead” (the comic and the television series it inspired or didn’t) than to Milton and Rose Friedman and their “Freedom to Choose” (the book as well as the economic policies that make it their alibi). They have said that we are mistaken because we are not sufficiently orthodox, or mistaken for being too orthodox. That nothing is going to happen, that upon arising each morning whatever one wants for breakfast will be available, that the neighbor’s dog will continue barking at the trash truck, that upon opening the tap what will come out is water and not the sound of the hereafter. That we are just big ugly birds of ill omen, who in any case don’t have media or academic impact (two things that are increasingly the same).
In sum, that the machine functions and that everyone is where they are supposed to be. The jolts are sporadic and they are only that, jolts, and the turbulence is passing and can be chalked up to the fact that somebody is resisting being where they should be. That it’s just like when a watch breaks because a gear or spring has come out of place, and the State is the “watchmaker” that gets rid of the broken piece and substitutes it with another.
The Apocalypse (everything included)? A universal flood? Humanity imprisoned on the apparently eternal or immortal train from Snowpiercer (the film by the South Korean Bong Joon-ho, titled “Rompenieves” on the “alternative production” DVD that was sent to me—and which I now can’t find) and reproducing within itself the same inhumanity that, wanting to solve global warming, induced the cooling of the planet?
Nothing could be further from our thinking. We Zapatistas don’t believe the world is going to end. We do think that the world we currently know is going to collapse, and that its implosion will give rise to a thousand human and natural tragedies.
If this implosion is already in process or is yet to come is still something that has to be debated, argued, investigated, affirmed, or denied. But as far as we know, there is no one who dares to deny it. Everybody up above accepts that the machine is failing, and they trot out a thousand and one solutions, always within the same logic of the machine. But there are those who want to break with that logic and assert: humanity is possible without the machine.
In any case, given what we are, we are not so worried about the storm. After all, the original peoples and the dispossessed of Mexico and of the world have lived through centuries worth of storm. If there is anything one learns below, it is how to live in adverse conditions.
Life then, and in a few cases death, is a continual struggle, a battle fought in every corner of the calendars and geographies. And I’m not talking here about global battles, but about personal ones.
As one can conclude from a careful read of our words that our message is one that goes beyond the storm and its pains.
It is our belief that the possibility of a better world (not a perfect nor a finished one, we’ll leave that for religious and political dogmas) is one without the machine, and this possibility rests on a tripod. More accurately, it rests on the interrelation between three columns that have endured and persevered, with their ups and downs, their small victories and great defeats, throughout the brief history of the world: the arts (with the exception of literature), the sciences, and the original peoples along with the basements of humanity all over the world.
Perhaps you ask yourselves, in part out of curiosity and in (large) part out of direct interpellation, why I have put literature in an exclusive category. I will get to that a little further on.
You will note that, abandoning the classics, I haven’t included politics among the paths to salvation. Knowing us a bit (despite the fact that we now don’t appear even buried in the interior pages of the press, we do have our own abundant bibliography for anyone who has honest interest in knowing what Zapatismo is about), it is clear that we are referring to a classical politics, politics “from above.”
Listen, Juan, brother, I know that this is all heading toward not another letter but really a whole library, since that is what we’ve been talking about, so allow me to leave that point pending. Not because it is less important or transcendent in the storm, but because “I’m on a roll” as the compas say and if I follow whatever tangent that words tempt me with, there is a serious risk that this letter will never get to you, not because of the rain but because it will never be finished.
I have used “the arts” because it is the arts (and not politics) that delve most deeply into the human being and rescue its essence. It is as if the world continued to be the same, but that through art we could find the human possibility among so many gears, screws, and springs humorlessly grinding away. In contrast to politics, art doesn’t try to readjust or repair the machine. Rather, it does something more subversive and disconcerting: it shows the possibility of another world.
I put “the sciences” (and I refer here especially to the so-called “formal sciences” and “natural sciences,” considering that the social sciences have a few things yet to define—note that this doesn’t imply a demand or exigency) because they hold the possibility to reconstruct something atop the catastrophe that “operates” across the entire world territory. And I am not talking about “reconstruction” in the sense of taking what has fallen and putting it back together in the image or semblance of its version before the tragedy. I am talking about “remaking,” that is, “to make anew.” And scientific knowledge can reorient the desperation and imbibe it with its real meaning, that is, “cease to hope.” And anyone who ceases to hope can begin to act.
Politics, the economy, and religion divide, parcel up, split apart. The sciences and the arts unite, connect, convert borders into ridiculous cartographic points.
But, its true, none are exempt from the fierce division of classes and they must choose: they either contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of the machine, or they contribute to the demonstration of its necessary abolition.
It is as if instead of re-labeling the machine, prettying or tuning it up, art and science put out, upon the superficial chrome surface of the system, a laconic and definitive sign: “EXPIRED,” “Time’s up,” “to continue watching, deposit another world.”
Imagine (your generation must have heard some John Lennon; mine is more about sones and huapangos), imagine that everything that gets spent on politics (for example, elections by way of the vote and elections by way of war, equally antidemocratic—“politics and the economy are the continuation of war by other means” Clausewitz would have said had he started from social science) went instead to the sciences and the arts. Imagine if instead of electoral and military campaigns there were laboratories, centers for research and dissemination, concerts, expositions, festivals, bookstores, libraries, theaters, cinemas, and countryside and cities where what reigned were the sciences and the arts rather than the machines.
Of course, we Zapatistas are convinced that this is only possible outside of the machine. And that the machine must be destroyed. Not readjusted, not shined up, not made “more human.” No, destroyed. If something of its remains are useful, it will be as a reminder not to repeat the nightmare, like a landmark one can see in the rearview mirror as that path is left behind.
But we don’t doubt that there are those who think or believe that a readjustment is plausible without altering its functioning, by changing the engineer or assuring that the most luxurious train cars redistribute their riches so that something (not much though, no need to exaggerate) gets to the cars at the tail end. Of course, this is always accompanied by the emphasis that everyone is exactly where they belong. But candidness, brother, tends to be one disguise for perversity.
I have mentioned the original peoples and the basements of the world, yes, as they are the ones with the greatest capacity to survive the storm and the only ones with the capacity to create “something else.” Someone will have to respond tomorrow to the question, “Is there anyone on Earth?” And here the word presents, not without provocative flirtation, another detour that, for the good of this missive, I will avoid with my renowned restraint.
I commented before, in a sarcastic and argumentative tone, on “the arts except for literature.” Well, that’s because I think (and this is an individual opinion) that literature must create ties between the three legs of the tripod, and make clear, happily or not, their interrelation. Literature must be, “The Witness.” But, most likely I am mistaken and it’s just that, in this hand of cards, I have uncovered the “Joker” in order to ask “Why so serious?”
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What do we want? The key to understanding the subterranean message of Zapatismo is in the small stories that, in the form of the little indigenous girl who calls herself “Zapatista Defense,” appear in the book “Critical Thought Versus the Capitalist Hydra.”
Imagine what, because it is necessary and urgent, seems to be impossible: a woman who grows up without fear.
Of course every geography and calendar adds its own chains: indigenous, migrant, worker, orphan, displaced, illegal, disappeared, subtly or explicitly abused, raped, murdered, forever condemned to add burden and sentence to the condition of being a woman.
What world would be birthed by a woman who could be born and grow up without fear of violence, harassment, persecution, disrespect, exploitation?
Wouldn’t that world be terrible and marvelous?
So if at some point they ask me, a ghostly shadow with an impertinent nose, to define Zapatismo’s objective, I would say: to make a world where a woman can be born and grow up without fear.”
Note: I’m not saying that in this world those kinds of violence wouldn’t be lying in wait for her (most of all because the planet could end several times over and still not be rid of the worst of our condition of being men).
I’m also not saying that there aren’t women without fear already. Their rebellious determination has won them that victory in daily battle, and they know that battles can be won, but not the war. No, not until any woman in any corner of the world’s geographies and calendars can grow up without fear.
I am talking about a tendency. Could we affirm that the majority of women are born and grow up without fear? I don’t think so, and probably I’m mistaken, and I’m sure there are figures, statistics, and examples that show I’m mistaken.
But, within our limited horizon, we perceive fear, fear because one is small, fear because one is big, fear because one is slim, fear because one is fat, fear because one is pretty, fear because one is ugly, fear because one is pregnant, fear because one is not pregnant, fear because one is a little girl, fear because one is a young woman, fear because one is a mature woman, fear because one is an elderly woman.
Is it worth it to put effort into that step, into life and death in such a chimera?
We Zapatistas say yes, it is worth it.
And to that task we give our lives, which may be little, but it is all we have.
_*_
Yes, you are right that there will be no lack of those who call us “naïve” (in the best of cases, because in all languages there are cruder synonyms). I like this word processor, with its free and open source software, because every time I want to write “case” or “cases” the spellcheck proposes “chaos.” I think the free software knows more about devastating storms than I do.
In sum, what was I saying? Oh! The lost words, their shipwreck in papers or bytes, the original peoples and the basements of humanity converted in Noah’s Ark, the sciences and the arts as life-saving islands, a fearless little girl as compass and port…
Eh? Yes, I agree with you that the result of all of this has more chaos than case, but this is only a letter that will be, as all letters should be, converted into a paper airplane with the intimidating insignia of the “Zapatista Air Force” drawn on one side, and there it goes looking for its destination. Who knows where you are Juan, brother bajo protesta. [iii] Like grandmothers used to say (I don’t know if they still do), “calm down son,” and get into a jacket or an embrace because it’s cold and “the topic at hand, you know, is the rain.”
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast,
Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano.
Mexico
February 2016
Translator’s Notes:
[i] “Bajo protesta” can mean both reluctance/protest and “under oath.” As used here, it would seem to indicate a reluctance.
[ii] The Spanish uses “mutandis mutando,” a riff on the Latin Mutatis mutandis (meaning “the necessary changes having been made” or “once the necessary changes have been made”) using the verb “mutar,” to mutate.
[iii] Here again “bajo protesta” can mean both reluctance/protest and “under oath.” Again, it would seem to indicate reluctance.
Chiapas Support Committee 