Wild Resistance: On the Continued Centrality of the Zapatista Movement After 14 Years

by B26498

“It’s not just our duty and our hope in this country, but in the continent and the rest of the world. If in some way Zapatismo has achieved a synchrony of global sympathy, it’s not because we have made certain use of the word, or because of the unquestionable heroism of the indigenous communities, but because from this moment it was proposing an alternative, the seed of something else. And this is what the Other Campaign means to do: name the enemy, capital, and the ally of this enemy, the political class[….] we intend the defeat of this government and the destruction of capital. And then, like someone said once, we will have only just won the right to start over…but we will have to start where one always has to start, from below.“ —Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Zapatista Army for National Liberation

— by Feliz Año Cabrones

Introduction: Happy New Year

On January 1, 1994, Mexico was set to enter the “first world” with the implementation of NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement). Then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari had made multiple free trade deals, NAFTA being the most comprehensive and important. In order to enter NAFTA, Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution protecting ejidal or communally-held lands had been modified to allow for their possession as private property and thus their availability for sale or appropriation through debt collateral and investment strategies. As businessmen and politicians celebrated their new treaty, guaranteed to reap large profits for large agro-industrial and food distribution companies, the indigenous Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) was coming out of the jungle and down from the mountains, armed with weapons that would successfully enable them to take seven major municipalities in the state of Chiapas and words that would help catalyze not only a new politics in Mexico but a new global movement. When Mexico’s political and business elite woke from their hangovers on January 1, the world, with its eyes on the masked rebels in Mexico, was another.

Throughout their struggle, the Zapatistas have maintained a constant analysis of the trajectory of global capitalism and the strategies of resistance possible in that context. In 2005, after over a decade of resistance and construction, the Zapatistas released the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, announcing a new turn in the struggle. The capitalist system is destroying our communities, our people, and our environment, they stated, what we want we cannot win alone, nor is what we want only for us. The Sixth Declaration announced their desire and intent to organize with other sectors of national and international society, creating a united, explicitly anti-capitalist front of all those “below and to the left;” there would be no more dialogue with those “above,” with any political party or state official. Nationally this organizational process would be called the Other Campaign, launched with the journey of an EZLN commission through every state of the Mexican Republic to meet other people in struggle; internationally it would take the shape of what the Zapatistas call an “Intergalactic” network, beginning with a series of encounters between “Zapatista Peoples and Peoples of the World.” Thus, 12 years after declaring war on the Mexican government and federal army, the Zapatista commanders left the protection of guerrilla clandestine existence and walked out of the mountains, unarmed, to meet the rest of Mexican and international society.

Many, in the trajectory of the Other Campaign, have condemned the EZLN’s harsh criticism of the PRD (the “leftist” Democratic Revolutionary Party) and its current star, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. It could have been a strategic move, they have fretted, an alliance to gain more space for struggle, an institutional foothold. There are clear and obvious reasons for the EZLN’s criticism, including a rejection of the electoral system of representation in general, but also the insistence that they could not support a party that had treated them as the PRD had and maintain even a minimum of dignity, referring to PRD-sponsored deadly attacks on Zapatista bases of support in 2004, the betrayal of the San Andres Accords (a product of the EZLN-government peace dialogues) by PRD representatives in the national congress in 2001, and the current PRD candidacies of ex-state and federal officials, former members of the PRI and the intellectual authors of the most severe ambushes and attacks against the EZLN and their bases of support from 1994 through 1997.

At this moment, the Zapatista communities are under what may be the worst attack against them in the last decade. There have been multiple “official” evictions, sponsored by state (PRD) and federal (PAN, the right-wing National Action Party) agencies and security forces, including the violent removal of a community in the Montes Azules region of Chiapas (a government designated “Biosphere Reserve”) in August of 2007, where inhabitants were forced into helicopters by uniformed police and airlifted out of their community, the men thrown in jail and the women, some pregnant and with small children, stuck in an abandoned warehouse without food or water. The autonomous authorities of San Andres Larrainzar, a community in the Chiapas Highlands, received direct death threats in late September and October from PRI-(the traditional state Institutional Revolutionary Party) sponsored organizations in the region. Paramilitaries roaming openly with high-caliber weapons have threatened the violent invasion of multiple communities, in particular Bolon Ajaw, a Zapatista community in the Mountain Region, where several Zapatista bases of support have been severely beaten or wounded by bullets and machetes and where, at the time of writing (December 2007), paramilitary forces seem to be closing in. The community 24 de Diciembre, at the mouth of the Jungle, built on lands recovered in the 1994 uprising and currently surrounded by police and paramilitary forces, has lived with the implicit threat of violence and the explicit threat of eviction since mid-2007. The Zapatista Ecological Reserve of Huitepec, near San Cristobal de las Casas, which has suffered increasing military harassment is now imminently and publicly threatened by the campaign promise of the victorious PRI municipal president to evict the reserve on January 2, 2008. The escalation of threats, hostilities, and direct attacks is similar to what the region saw almost exactly 10 years ago, in the months leading up to the Acteal massacre December 22nd, 1997, in which 45 people, principally women and children, members of the indigenous pacifist organization Las Abejas and Zapatista sympathizers, were massacred while praying in their community church. The aggressors this time are a combination of PAN-directed federal police and military forces, PRD-directed state government agencies, state police, and indigenous organizations, and paramilitaries linked to both the PRI and PRD.

In the 1990’s, before the Zapatista uprising, it was said that there was no possibility for struggle, that left-led revolution was dead and the path of global capitalism was the only option. Today it has been said that the Zapatista struggle has faded away, its causes resolved or its militants resigned, or that any struggle that does not aim for or collaborate with state power is at best ineffective and worse, debilitating to the institutional left. But, as we will detail below, the political work and daily organization of the Zapatista communities, which, even under harsh attack have formed not only functioning autonomous systems across their territory but also a national organizational plan and a global network, is a project that remains central for all of us who are trying to build another world. And it is a project we must defend against the war now being waged against it, because in the end it is a war against all of us.

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