Learning, Surviving: Marcos After the Rupture
Castellanos, Laura
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: mexico i
Learning, Surviving:
Marcos After the Rupture
By laura Castellanos L ast summer, reading a news article about the Gathering of the...
...Carlos Monsiváis, for example, wrote in Mexico: “I for one do not associate the indigenous rebellion in Chiapas with indefensible causes that use the language of intolerance, cheap jokes, and radical self-importance...
...He believes they have managed to not only inculcate the spirit of struggle among the young, but also to involve them in the responsibilities of government, health care, and education in their own towns, though he notes one remaining unmet goal: the total eradication of family violence...
...I ask him...
...The political-military groups generally train young guerrillas, people attracted to armed struggle, who see the military path as the only way to advance...
...Another ex-Zapatista adviser, the jACk kurtz / the imAge works NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: mexico i Marcos reads the leftist Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, during the peace talks with the Mexican government in 1994...
...And, after 11 years of retreat, a group most thought had disappeared, the Revolutionary Popular Army (EPR), burst onto the scene again with a series of bombings against the state oil company’s installations, demanding the return of captured militants...
...The media had largely stopped paying attention to the EZLN and its most prominent spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos—mostly because of his quarrels with progressive intellectuals and his falling-out with La Jornada, the leftist newspaper that for years was practically the bullhorn for the Zapatista cause...
...Sitting on a wooden bench, the subcommander talks to me about his worries...
...The PRD leadership has remained silent...
...It’s been 24 year since you arrived here...
...Has it been worth it...
...that it had chosen an artificial social conflict is created, grown as The woolen hood is used only to protect the if in a laboratory, and that’s then how the gov the wrong militants’ identities, but it fascinated so many ernment forces could enter: to keep the peace...
...If the latter hesitated, Marcos said, the father probably snapped: “Are you a senator of the EZLN or the PRD...
...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: mexico i Learning, Surviving: Marcos After the Rupture By laura Castellanos L ast summer, reading a news article about the Gathering of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, organized by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), I noticed that the event was to be held in Vicam, Sonora—a small desert town in the north of Mexico, three days by highway from the southern state of Chiapas, the Zapatistas’ home base...
...It had been 10 years since I had covered the EZLN, and like many others, I had lost track of fraud against President Felipe Calderón...
...In 2007, a year after the election, Mexico remained polarized by the accusations of electoral national and international attention...
...girls can go to Marcos most is school and play without having to the government’s become nannies...
...Ask whatever you like,” he says...
...After a police counter-attack, in which 217 people were detained, some tortured, and at least 23 women sexually assaulted, Marcos broke his silence and Zapatista sympathizers mobilized...
...López Obrador’s rise signified “great profits for the rich and more misery and pillaging for the dispossessed,” he said, later accusing the candidate’s campaign team of being “made up of pure salinistas, both shameless and shamefaced, along with a gang of vile and ruinous people...
...Delegations from all over the Americas, a third of which came from the North, shared stories of privatized lands and natural resources, of marginalization and violence...
...Thus, as the EZLN’s presence diminished in the West, it rose in faraway and impoverished countries...
...He says another achievement is that with solid support they have built clinics in marginalized areas where people die of curable diseases...
...Intellectuals who had previously been close to zapatismo but also supported López Obrador criticized Marcos, blaming him for dividing the left and thereby collaborating with the Calderón fraud...
...I went to interview Marcos and have a look at this Zapatista experience...
...In contrast to the non-Zapatista communities, which receive official support, in the autonomous towns there is a What disturbs perceived reduction in alcoholism and family violence...
...Marcos inaugurated the campaign by firing up an old motorcycle like the one the adolescent Che used on his South American excursion...
...In a telephone interview, Rodríguez Araujo further reproached Marcos for treating the intelligentsia that once supported him in a “foolish, condescending” way...
...insurgency activity in Zapatista municipalities obliged the EZLN to return to Chiapas...
...According to some researchers, the decrease in national and international support for the EZLN has hurt the autonomous towns’ finances...
...Our talk lasts more than four hours, in which he recounts the last 14 years of zapatismo...
...Ernesto Ledesma of a legally justified CAPISE maintains that the govmilitary incursion ernment’s plan to destroy the autonomist experience is rapidly ad in the near future...
...And last summer, the intercontinental Zapatista meeting brought supporters from India, Korea, and Pakistan...
...The Zapatistas thought the united front they had been promoting was maturing and broadening...
...Indeed, he opens up, at one point putting on the table the question that sometimes torments him: Was Marcos a mistake for zapatismo...
...There are PRD groups that have been resorting to dirty tricks...
...The EZLN could not reestablish its presence...
...Within the EZLN, he says, the armed path was proposed again for a moment, but they decided against it, concluding instead that they had chosen the wrong interlocutors and needed to break with the entire political class, the progressive intelligentsia, and some international supporters...
...Before the uprising, the communities of the Lacandón Jungle had the country’s highest mortality rate for infants and children under five years old...
...In this way their necks that was to be the EZLN’s symbol...
...Yes...
...I focus on his hands...
...In six months it toured the whole country, and Marcos again took up the indigenous practice learned AlinAri ArChives / the imAge works MAY/JUNE 2008 report: mexico i years ago during the EZLN’s formation: “Speak less and listen more...
...In October, the EZLN’s indigenous peoples’ gathering brought many of Mexico’s ethnic groups together in Vicam, groups that the EZLN had contacted during the Other Campaign...
...Yes...
...But his criticism extended in particular to the PRD’s presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whom he accused of continuing the neoliberal policies of the priísta ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari...
...To this day, she says, some of Rome’s neighborhood assemblies follow the Zapatista maxim to “rule by obeying” (mandar obedeciendo...
...The failure of the Zapatistas’ push for a constitutional amendment in 2001 and their subsequent withdrawal disconcerted them, and months later another blow came: the anti-G8 protests in Genoa, in which hundreds of activists were detained, many of them tortured and at least one killed...
...On the other, there are 24,700 acres appropriated by the EZLN that were abandoned by tenants and land owners after the uprising, and whose current tenants are now protected by the EZLN from being dislodged...
...They recognized that although Ya Basta is represented in 15 Italian cities, the days of massive mobilizations are long gone...
...There is a risk of violence in Chiapas...
...In a letter to La Jornada, he mused that as the vote was progressing, Cárdenas probably picked up the phone to call his son, Senator Lázaro Cárdenas, to instruct him to vote for the so-called counter-reform...
...Back in Mexico, the Zapatistas are working hard to create new grassroots networks and to strengthen existing ones...
...A few years ago, such a warning would have immediately captured structure among “the always forgotten: women, indigenous people, youth, and otros amores (gays and lesbians),” with the goal of sparking a “peaceful, civic, nationwide insurrection” that would push toward establishing a new Mexican constitution...
...I don’t want to be Marcos anymore...
...In 2005, the EZLN released the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, which stated the change in strategy and opened the struggle to the rest of the oppressed minorities of Mexico and the world...
...The conversation turns to one of the topics that most obsesses him: the caracoles...
...In May, the Other Campaign ended suddenly, days after the EZLN’s visit to the state of Atenco, where thousands of people rose up in 2002, machete in hand, against the government’s expropriation of land to build an airport...
...When they named who was dispossessing them of their MAY/JUNE 2008 report: mexico i Marcos marches at a demonstration at the Mexican presidential palace, los Pinos, in support of Atenco’s detained protesters...
...No longer...
...Their principal achievement, he says, is in having forged new generations of Zapatistas...
...According to the Center for Political Analysis and Social and Economic Research (CAP-ISE), which has been monitoring military activities in Zapatista territory for five years, the past year had seen paramilitary attacks, forced evictions of Zapatistas from their land, and the establishment of 56 permanent military bases near Zapatista territory...
...This, he told me, cost Marcos his principal forum: “He would go ‘achoo’ and they would cover it in La Jornada...
...Marcos, Camacho claims, hoped that a Calderón presidency would intensify the national crisis and give the EZLN an opportunity to revive, since “it is not the decisive force it was in 1994...
...vancing...
...In 2003, Marcos singled out the moral leader of the PRD, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, as the principal traitor...
...What disturbs him the most is the Mexican government’s counter-insurgency strategy, which he says could result in a legally justified military incursion in the near future...
...Nobody receives a salary...
...Marcos in fact wanted the right-wing Calderón to become and remain president, says Manuel Camacho Solís, a PRD politician who oversaw the López Obrador campaign’s grassroots organizing and who once brokered the peace talks between the Salinas de Gortari government and the EZLN...
...But he lashed out at the paper, so now it rarely covers him...
...He says that when they tion by handing over the EZLN’s appropriated EZln concluded rose up, it was the red bandana tied around lands to other indigenous groups...
...I sought out Sergio Rodriguez Lazcano, the EZLN’s civil society liaison, to find out what more to expect...
...My interview with Marcos took place in a wooden shack that serves as a guesthouse...
...says could result in But the shells of the caracoles are fragile...
...On October 12, 2002, after a year and a half of silence, Marcos tried without success to break his media isolation...
...Camacho Solís, however, acknowledges that the subject has been discussed...
...The media paid little attention to the gathering, in contrast to the beginning of the Other Campaign in January 2006, which grabbed headlines...
...political scientist Octavio Rodríguez Araujo, called Marcos a “bully...
...He says trusted sources have told him that “there are very sensitive things happening in Chiapas...
...what became of it...
...The discussion winding down, I hurriedly ask a few more questions, trying to unmask him...
...I had imagined him as arrogant, but instead found him buried in reflections...
...Now it’s different: “It’s like we’re in 1993, but in reverse,” he says...
...The second phase of the Other Campaign began in March 2007 and covered the north...
...I insist...
...The historian Juan Pedro Viqueira, reports that funds are drying up as people desert Zapatista bases...
...The plan proceeds through agrarian institutions that legally hand over these lands to local groups opposed to the Zapatistas, and in other cases Zapatista communities are violently evicted...
...During its withdrawal, it prepared its response to the system: It created five local regions, called caracoles (“snails”), bringing together 39 autonomous municipalities to form an independent government...
...political class and insist on confronting them...
...The pay is corn and beans from the community...
...Yes...
...We’re no longer fashionable,” he says laconically, lighting his pipe...
...Another historian, Marcos Estrada Saavedra, who studied communities in the Tojolabel region, says he found that the loss of support, together with the “authoritarianism of the EZLN leadership” and the break with the federal government, produced “an impoverishment of the Zapatista communities in comparison with the non-Zapatista ones,” which receive government assistance.1 Other researchers, like the anthropologist Mariana Romo, claim that Zapatistas are not so much deserting as joining a temporary labor migration flow to nearby Cancún and Playa del Carmen.2 It makes economic sense, Romo asserts, for them to work elsewhere for a while in construction and then buy their year’s supply of corn on the way home, rather than growing their own crop and risking it on bad weather...
...lands, they were the same names as the companies in Mexico: Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola, which were appropriating the springs, harvests, and lands...
...La Garrucha is itself one of the caracoles that Marcos thinks has the highest risk of being attacked, since it comprises thousands of appropriated acres of land...
...The road from La Garrucha, one of the five caracoles, now leads to a military base at San Quintín and has been paved for the army vehicles...
...Well taken care of, for a man who doesn’t have a permanent home and frequently has to move his encampment for security reasons...
...But we will not sit with our hands tied if we are attacked by anybody...
...What is happening...
...The paramilitaries have been sheltered in particular by the Chiapas governor, Juan Sabines, an ex–PRI militant turned PRD member...
...ngel morAles rizo...
...Visiting Rome, I spoke to the city’s remaining nucleus of Ya Basta, the Zapatista-inspired network of local Italian groups...
...Proposing that talks be held, he received the support of intellectuals like José Saramago and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, but the ETA rejected the insurgent’s intervention, and other intellectuals distanced themselves from him...
...He speaks of how in an early moment, he and the EZLN enjoyed the spotlight and the NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: mexico i support of civil society, which in 1994 filled the streets and stopped the EZLN’s war with the government 12 days after it began...
...Before leaving Vicam, the young secretary of the governor of the traditional Yaqui authority told Marcos: “The seed has taken hold in these parts, and it will continue growing...
...Marcos and the EZLN felt betrayed—particularly by the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD...
...It will be one of mobilization and agitation...
...After every interview...
...It overheats him or sticks to non-Zapatista communities, but sometimes with the entire his skin when it’s cold...
...Only recently have women begun to appear in the JBG, and the question of gender has begun to come up in the community budgeting process...
...Is it a burden...
...Is it a burden being Marcos...
...The indigenous gathering, held in October, was a stop on the nationwide tour that Marcos had begun a year and half earlier, known as the Other Campaign...
...This article was originally published in the December 2007 edition of Gatopardo magazine (www.gatopardo.com...
...Italy was once a key source of international support for the Zapatista cause...
...Geometry of Power in Mexico,” an extensive article in which he denounced the three major parties—the PRD, the PRI, and the PAN— for protecting the same economic interests...
...He says that although zapatismo’s change of tone began with the criticisms he made against López Obrador during the 2006 elections, the decision to break with former allies had been taken after the legislative failure of 2001...
...But it did not remain immobile...
...But he sees a gradual change in the quality of life for the indigenous, as well as growing women’s participation in government...
...Marcos canceled the Other Campaign tour in September 2006, explaining in a communiqué that he did not want to hinder the EPR’s efforts, and that growing counterLaura Castellanos is a freelance journalist based in Mexico...
...But Marcos and zapatismo had lost their ability to rally support months earlier, with the Other Campaign’s abrupt cancelation...
...Apart from having to carry my own backpack . . . ,” he says with one of his characteristic jokes...
...That’s why we tell the compañeros to take every precaution to avoid an aggression...
...They blockaded highways, marched, and handed out flyers, while international supporters protested at 15 Mexican embassies...
...I won’t take up arms opposing groups (particularly the PRDistas) wearing a ski mask again,” he says...
...The writer Elena Poniatowska, former adviser to the Zapatistas, then to López Obrador, told the press that Marcos “envied” López Obrador’s popular support...
...Then we prepared ourselves for the uprising without media attention and outside support...
...Paramilitary groups have also reappeared, and aggressions against Zapatistas have increased...
...In 2005, Marcos published “The (Impossible...
...I hadn’t been to the zapatista communities in 10 years...
...But Gianluca Peciola, a member of a municipal government in Rome, credits the EZLN with first proposing “the possibility of taking public office but exercising power from below...
...For Marcos, wearing it is needed to break willing to give out lands under its control to an inconvenience...
...In any case, the Zapatista bases are confronting a difficult new economic reality full of uncertainty...
...Caracoles, I had read, are governed by collective bodies called Juntas de Buen Gobierno (JBG), which are independent of the EZLN military structure and whose leadership is elected in assembly and rotates...
...and there are now clinics and schools strategy, which he where before there were none...
...Mostly when I go out on the Other Campaign...
...Reproduced with permission...
...That will prove, he says, that “it is a myth that the Mexican people will put up with anything, because at least every 100 years, they say no...
...They were later disappointed when, after so much effort, Congress unanimously passed MAY/JUNE 2008 report: mexico i a different law that did not recognize full indigenous autonomy...
...The militants who had made this a way of life felt an emptiness,” says Federico Mariani, a former Ya Basta president...
...However, Romo emphasizes notable social achievements...
...I ask him about the media’s inattention to “If there is an armed aggression, will you the progressive zapatismo and the EZLN’s falling-out with the respond in kind...
...Translated and redacted by NACLA...
...The EZLN went silent for two years...
...Ernesto Ledesma, head of CAPISE, tells me: “They’re preparing the biggest counter-attack in nine years...
...Vía Campesina, a global network with millions of affiliates, became close to the EZLN, and next December it will bring women from the five continents to meet in La Garrucha...
...This decline in the EZLN’s ability to rally support has been perceptible since the milestone of 2001, when thousands cheered Marcos and the Zapatistas as they rode unarmed into the capital city to speak before Congress in support of a constitutional amendment that would recognize indigenous self-determination...
...Night descends on La Garrucha, and it’s getting chilly...
...Once in a while, Marcos adjusts the ski and he talks at length...
...You’ve never thought, ‘Enough...
...maternal and incounter-insurgency fant mortality has decreased...
...I feel ill at ease because it’s not my territory, there’s no media, no compañeros, resources...
...We are now taking preventive measures and, in accord with what the EZLN is, we will not attack anyone, because we respect the truce...
...But after Atenco, the elections would arrive and public attention would focus on the PRD’s many demonstrations against electoral fraud...
...Sum it up in one word or sentence...
...If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing,” he replies, and then pauses...
...Marcos’s star has also declined in Italy, once one of his most important bases of international support...
...For the first time in its history the EZLN approached a number of small, isolated ethnic groups of northeastern Mexico: Kumiai, Kiliwas, Tohono, Odam, Pimas...
...While the mainstream political parties competed in the presidential election, the EZLN attempted to create a social infraThe media had largely stopped paying attention to Subcomandante Marcos—mostly because of his quarrels with progressive intellectuals and his falling-out with La Jornada, the leftist newspaper...
...She is the author of México armado: 1943–1981 (Ediciones Era, 2007...
...Survival against all odds...
...If I did think about changing something, it would be this: I wouldn’t have taken such a prominent role in the media...
...Marcos says the visitors confirmed for him that “neoliberalism has a virtue,” since despite the variety of languages, they all had the same enemies...
...He did so with a rare acid tone: In his “Letter From Sup-Marcos to Aguascalientes Madrid,” Marcos criticized Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón for engaging in state terrorism against the Basque nation...
...Defending indigenous territory was the pillar of discussions...
...It also broke with the political class, particularly its allies on the left...
...On the one hand, regular army troops have been replaced by special elite units...
...But he refuses to give in, even less when the historical moment is opportune: 2010 is only two years away, the bicentennial anniversary of the War of Independence and the centennial anniversary of the Mexican Revolution...
...people that it stuck as the movement’s most interlocutors and The EZLN, he points out, had until now been memorable emblem...
...Following this strategy, he explains, the governAfter 2001, the ment has intentionally escalated local polariza mask over his mouth...
...His serene tone doesn’t waver, intelligentsia...
...Yes, it’s a great burden because the idea is still prevalent that the EZLN’s mistakes are Marcos’s, and the good ideas come from the communities...
...I felt such responsibility and pain at having failed, of not having foreseen what happened...
...In January 2008, we entered a new phase of struggle,” he said...
...The Zapatista communities may not be rich, but there is no hunger...
...In his account of zapatismo, Marcos admits that if the Zapatista communities are living through precarious economic times, and there is a temporary labor migration to Cancún, nonetheless the extreme marginalization that existed before 1994 has been overcome...
...Now it is the government that is preparing the attack...
...Each caracol designs its own health and education programs and chooses their leaders...
...institutional left...
...Although we’ve often been lightning rods, among the compañeros this division of labor makes people worry, because they say: ‘In any case, if there’s an attack, it’ll be on you.’ ” “Do you ever feel vulnerable...
...The EZLN emerged out of its territory for the first time since the 2001 legislative failure, in what the press called “the second Zapatour...
...He held meetings with groups and communities he had never been in contact with, listening for hours to complaints and writing them down...
...Yes...
Vol. 41 • May 2008 • No. 3
