The Dominion - Zapatistas

Book Review: Zapatismo Beyond Borders

david parker — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:54:47 +0000

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For artists, songwriters, storytellers, and dreamers that are reading this, you are in luck. Creativity has won out against the darkness and monotony of neoliberalism. Imagination is revolutionary. The world has good reason to hope. The affirmative and liberatory project of the Zapatistas has spread its message around the globe: un otro mundo es posible. This credo can guide our imaginations onto new terrains, but the work of building and constructing worlds remains in front of us, daunting and formidable. How do we move forward, and what weapons will our creativity arm us with? Alex Khasnabish gives us some guidance in his book, but choices remain to be taken, and we will measure our success only from the viewpoint of the end of a lifetime of imaginative struggle.

Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility (Alex Khasnabish, University of Toronto Press, 2008) explores the transnational resonance of Zapatismo - the guiding principles, tactics and beliefs of the Zapatistas - that has invigorated and inspired social activism and anti-capitalist struggles in North America. Khasnabish is a professor of sociology and anthropology at Mount St. Vincent University and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The book comes on the heels of his recent papers “A Tear in the Fabric of the Present” in the Journal for the Study of Radicalism (2009) and “Insurgent Imaginations” in Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization (2007), among other essays. Khasnabish's style reads like an academic thesis: rigorously documented, lengthy citations, and careful argumentation. Most accessible to academics, readers may find themselves wishing for a more palatable and digestible read.

Potable Politics

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 22:30:55 +0000

Will water put the <em>Zapatismo</em> into Mexico's big city politics?

Mexicans protest against the privatization of water and the 4th World Water Forum photo: IndyMedia Mexico

The 4th World Water Forum has drawn to a close in Mexico City, but the debate over who will provide clean drinking water in regions throughout the country has only just begun. In Guadalajara, Mexico's second most populous city, drinking water is a private business. The local water company was sold to multi-national corporations in 1998, since then the price of water has doubled, causing public uproar.

The Jalisco state government and the federal government devised a plan--called Arcediano--to build an elaborate water diversion scheme costing nearly $US 1 billion.

Mexican President Vincente Fox is expected to visit Guadalajara in April to finalize the deal that will divert water from Rio Santiago. However, Jalisco's state water authority and non-governmental organizations have warned that Arcediano is doomed to fail; their studies show the river is highly contaminated with heavy metals. The project is also expected to flood a large section of forestland that is already threatened by poorly planned urban sprawl.

¨We're in a difficult position here,¨ says a Guadalajara taxi driver. ¨Nobody wants to privatize water but nobody trusts the government to manage the water.¨ Scientists say there are other, cleaner, and more affordable ways to bring potable water to the city, leading citizens to demand an alternative plan.

Guadalajana is not alone in its struggle for clean water. With a population of over 100 million, Mexico has fewer than five million citizens who live in cities with a high availability of water. According to Mexico's Secretary of Social Development (SEDESOL), 26 million Mexicans live in cities where water availability is "extremely low."

A column in Guadalajara's Público newspaper argues that Mexico needs a broader approach to its commitment to clean water, tying in the scientific and technological components, with the legislative and the educational components. Despite the hype of the forum and the vocal concern of citizens in Mexico's cities, however, political candidates at the local, state and federal level have been largely silent on the issue.

La otra campaña could offer a response to the politicians' silence and give citizens a voice. Over the past four months, la otra campaña ("the other campaign") led by Subcomandante Marcos (also known as Delegado Zero) has been travelling across Mexico. The aim of the campaign, leading up to the July 2nd presidential election, is to gain a better understanding of citizens' concerns in different parts of the country.

Denouncing all political candidates in favour of direct action to protect local self-dermination, Marcos has tapped into widespread political cynicism and is building support for reducing the plight of Mexico's indigenous people.

According to University of Guadalajara sociology professor Dr. Jorge Regalado, citizens across the country are looking for the kind of resistance the Zapatistas have developed in their home state of Chiapas.

¨The people from the government ignore us. We are interested in water, not money, because we can't drink money,¨ says a campesino woman in Querétaro in central Mexico.

When la otra campaña visited Querétaro in central Mexico, Marcos proposed that followers form brigades to stop the drilling of 14 industrial wells in El Batán, which threaten to disrupt the area's most important aquifier.

Such calls to action are not uncommon in rural areas where the Zapatistas have advanced local self-determination in autonomous communities they call Caracoles. However, residents of Guadalajara have difficulty seeing the relevance of a peasant-based movement in a cosmopolitan city of eight million people.

Perhaps the biggest question facing la otra campaña is how to inspire Mexican solidarity along the principles of an open social movement. According to Regalado, one of the major drawbacks to the Zapatista movement is the fact that the Sixth Declaration of the Lacondon, the Zapatistas' constitution from below and to the left, excludes a significant portion of Mexican society.

¨People are tired of political corruption and feel the economy is not fair to the average person, but the Zapatistas´ are limiting their message to an indigenous struggle and excluding the rest of us,¨ says a student in Guanajuato.

Dr. Jorge Regalado says one of Marcos' central objectives should be creating the "urban Zapatista."

The potential is here, says Regalado. He notes that despite its traditionally conservative voting record, the citizens of Guadalajara have demonstrated the power and potential of citizen-based movements before. After organizing a massive movement of "the indebted" following the peso crisis in the mid 1990s, Regalado says Guadalajara and the state of Jalisco have the ability to pull together a diverse crowd around common goals.

There are strong indications that adherents to la otra campaña may achieve some of the results they seek by showing the applicability of the Zapatistas' "other way" to Mexico's big city problems. With water accessibility becoming a major concern throughout the country, it has the potential to become the focal point of a broader social movement, linking rural and urban
communities around the progressive changes Mexicans demand.

Van Ferrier wonders if water will be the issue that puts the Zapatismo into Mexico's big city politics.

"The Other" Way

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 17:37:58 +0000

The Zapatistas' New Direction

Subcomandante Marcos, now called Delegate Zero, on the first day of the Other Campaign. photo credit: Chiapas IndyMedia

After a few years of relative quiet, relegated to their misty mountain strongholds in southern Mexico, Zapatista rebels have recently re-asserted their presence on the international stage. Their new initiative – called 'the Other Campaign' - continues a unique military strategy based more on words than weapons.

What began as a "scandalously Indian" uprising in 1994 in Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, is metamorphosing into a "national campaign for building another way of doing politics, for a program of national struggle of the left, and for a new Constitution," according to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacondon, issued by the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee (CCRIG), the military commanders of the Zapatistas' armed wing.

After a series of September meetings in the Zapatista strong hold of la Garrucha with 91 social organizations from throughout Mexico, 36 political organizations, 129 groups, collectives and NGO's, and 26 indigenous organizations, it was decided that a national tour should begin in January to hear from different sectors of Mexican society.

Subcommandante Marcos, the rebels' iconic mestizo pipe-smoking former spokesman (he's stepping down as spokesperson for the EZLN to work on the campaign) will be traveling across Mexico, consulting and listening, to help build a non-parliamentary leftist movement.

It won't be the first time the Zapatistas have taken their show on the road. In 2001 the commandantes toured through Mexico, rallying for constitutional changes to guarantee indigenous rights to land and self-determination. The march was hugely popular, cumulating with a rally of 400 000 in Mexico City, but failed to gain the constitutional changes the rebels demanded. This time around the tour will have a broader audience: the politics from the Other Campaign belong "to everyone who embraces them", according to Marcos.

Politically, the timing for a national grassroots movement couldn't be better. When the Zapatistas first called NAFTA a "death sentence" in 1994, they were at odds with the majority of the Mexican population; 68 percent of Mexicans supported the agreement. Ten years later, less than 45 percent support NAFTA, according to polls published in Business Week. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes that by 2004, 1.3 million farm jobs had disappeared in Mexico, as heavily subsidized corn, pork, poultry, and other foodstuffs from the U.S. competed with products from rural communities.

Despite this evidence, the Other Campaign will still have to combat the line toed by Vincent Fox's government: the Zapatistas are a revolution that couldn't deliver.

"People in Chiapas were very poor and forgotten but the Zapatistas didn't change anything and most people have moved on. The revolution couldn't deliver," said Luis Alvarez, the Mexican government's chief negotiator for Chiapas, during a 2003 lecture at Trent University.

In some cases, Alvarez is correct. "Truthfully the situation is still the same," said the representative from San Andres (Zapatista supporters almost never give their names in interviews).

Economically, the Zapatistas are facing a dilemma, how do you get something from nothing?

"At present [in 1997, but little has changed since then] some 6,000 cattle ranching families hold more than three million hectares, which is almost one half the area of the state," notes a report by CONPAZ, the Coordination of Non-Governmental Organizations for Peace. Unless an unlikely constitutional break-thorough is reached, the Zapatistas can't move onto any more productive ranch land without re-starting the war. Small farmers are forced to grow corn on steeped elevations eking a precarious existence from rocky soil.

And unlike other regions striving for 'development', it's unlikely the Zapatistas will get a bank loan for new capital. A 1994 memo from the Chase Manhattan Bank urging the Mexican army to "eliminate the Zapatistas" exemplifies how global capital evaluates those who seek alternatives. With no access to capital and no new land, the Zapatista's are in a difficult economic spot.

Activists, especially youth who were first involved in planning the insurgency or grew up with it, are taking on the tasks of economic development, teaching in autonomous schools with radical pedagogy, and creating a viable health-care system.

"Before, people in the bases of support had to pay for their own medicines, now they are free," said one Zapatista supporter after getting a check-up at the rebel-run clinic in Ovenitc Caracole, a Zapatista stronghold two hours outside the colonial tourist city of San Cristobal de las Casas.

The clinic is a thriving example of the kinds of "high quality public services" the Zapatistas are trying to create. It prominently displays a picture of campesinos washing vegetables in river water with a large X though it. People are advised to boil water and leave limejuice and ash in their latrines to prevent dysentery and other all-too-common curable diseases. Young "promoters of health" receive medical training from Mexico City-based doctors, and have been traveling to tiny, distant communities to convey life-saving messages.

"Communities give food-beans, tortillas, and fruit-to the workers of the clinic, so the clinic decided they couldn't charge them," says Anastasio, a health promoter, community organizer, and well-known basketball player who never attended primary school.

In Anastasio's home region of Los Altos, a rebel stronghold divided into seven administrative regions, the Zapatistas run eight micro-clinics along with the major facility in Oventic, which boasts a small operating room, dentistry equipment, herbal remedies, and an admittedly sparse pharmacy. "It isn't only the Zapatistas who don't have medicine; the government hospitals don't either," notes Anastasio.

The Zapatistas are also working to create local economic development through cooperatives. "Women want work and markets for their art-crafts. They are being exploited by coyotes [middlemen] and need a just price for their products," explains a representative from the Municipality 16 de Febrero community. Mujures por la Dignidad is one of the largest co-ops and is comprised entirely of women who produce shirts, blankets, hammocks, and other weavings.

"When there are meetings for the co-op, we leave our homes, our children, and our husbands. We also walk many hours and some of us on the board [of directors] live far from our homes," explains an elected board member from Mujures Por la Dignidad between forkfuls of rice and beans.

Coffee workers are also organizing themselves into fair trade co-operatives, or what farmers in Mutz Vitz, the largest Zapatista coffee operation, call "fairer trade," - they are still working long days and living in poverty. Coffee farmers are among the most radical elements of the Zapatista movement, representing a large portion of those who were armed on New Year's Day 1994.

Throughout the 1970s, the federal government and the IMF used marketing boards, training incentives, and loan guarantees to entice subsistence corn farmers to grow coffee for export. When Vietnam entered coffee production under IMF dictums, causing a massive devaluation of world coffee prices, coffee growers became among the most angry and desperate of a population already facing "acute marginalization", as defined by the Mexican government.

The failures of neoliberalism in Mexico have helped push Mexico City's left leaning former Mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (or AMLO in the Mexican press), to lead the polls for July's Presidential election. The Zapatista's have condemned AMLO as a crude populist and are using the Other Campaign to build support for a grassroots progressive movement across the country.

The success of the campaign and will determine what kind of role the Zapatistas will play as a political movement outside their Chiapenco strongholds. But it is the schools, clinics, co-operatives, workshops, "high quality public services" and community organizing that rebut the rhetoric of "a revolution that couldn't deliver"-and prove another world really may be possible in the Zapatistas' Chiapas.

Give 'em the Boot!

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 19:40:57 +0000

Zapatistas and solidarity activists are taking 'non-sweat' apparel to a new level.

All profits from the boots go back to the Zapatista community. photo: Students Taking Action in Chiapas

It's been almost twelve years since the Zapatistas of southern Mexico said ya basta ("enough") to neo-liberalism and initiated a struggle for "a world where many worlds fit."

Today, the Zapatistas are creating a variety of participatory economic institutions to meet community needs: women's artisan co-ops, amber producers' co-ops, fair-trade coffee cooperatives and a non-sweatshop boot co-operative.

On a sunny July day, myself and a delegation of foreign solidarity activists tramped the muddy hills around Oventic Caracole, in the Los Altos region, to visit the First of January Boot Co-op. Rafael Hedez, a leading activist with the co-op, and several other compañeros welcomed us with cokes and bowls of snow-tire-tough beef soup stewed on an open fire.

Inside the workshop (basically a barn with corrugated iron roof, one of the higher-end buildings in a region of thatched farm cuts), a dozen or so men were busy cutting leather, tracing patterns, and heating branding irons. Large blue flames erupted as glue was melted to attach the soles.

After showing us around, Hedez proudly explained the ownership structure of the workshop to us. "We have no owner. Here we are all equals," he said.

"When something is needed, or when problems arise - all jobs have problems - then we have a meeting or a general discussion. If we want to do something without consulting the rest, we can't do that. We must present the job on behalf of everyone," said Hedez.

The co-op began on Jan 1, 1998, when two activists traveled from Chiapas to Mexico City to spend six months learning the trade. The independent workshop that trained Hedez and others has since shut down, due to a huge influx of low-cost footwear from China - but the First of January Co-op survives.

Its first priority is to provide high-quality, low-cost footwear for the surrounding communities. "We sell to the indigenous for 150-220 pesos (approx 25 USD), just enough to recuperate the cost of the materials," said one co-op member. "Here in San Andres there are shoes for 100 pesos, but they will only last for a season."

With significant national and international interest in zapatismo (a fluid political movement that strives to create change without seizing power), the cooperative decided they could use sales to non-indigenous supporters to help finance the development of the workshop. "We sell high boots to foreigners for 350 pesos and medium for 300. This is the price for those who are in solidarity with us, who," stresses Hedez, "are also Zapatistas."

Before ending his presentation, Hedez stressed the democratic essence of the organization. "This is the factory for everyone. We are all the owners. We are the coordinators who manage the workshop."

Democratic values notwithstanding, the factory has many practical problems: the machinery is very outdated, significantly reducing productivity, and component parts that can't be made on site, such as soles and laces, must be bought from a middle-person in San Cristobal de Las Casas at inflated prices.

Enter the Black Star Boot Collective - a Canadian youth-run organization dedicated to finding international markets for Zapatista boots and, more importantly, raising money to improve the workshop. They sell boots over the Internet and facilitate workshops to raise awareness about alternative models of production and social organization. "We try to organize ourselves along the same principals as the First of January Co-op," said Amanda Smith, an anthropology student in Halifax and a member of the Black Star Boot Cooperative.

"Organizing co-operatively," admits Smith, "is certainly trying. None of us have experience working with boots. It's a little disorganized, frustrating and often inefficient, but the project came directly from the Zapatistas, and at this point, it seems like the most useful thing we can be doing."

"It's less about selling boots than it is about the example we are trying to set: economic interaction based on international solidarity and workers producing quality goods without bosses," Smith added.

Since the uproar against sweatshop abuses in the early 1990s, major textile corporations have spent millions on public relations to showcase "good corporate citizenship" - as if such a concept were possible.

Some positive examples of non-sweat apparel production have sprung up in the last couple years: Sweat X was paying high wages to US workers (until it shut down), and American Apparel, who just recently opened a store in Toronto, pays workers in Los Angeles decent wages to produce un-branded high quality t-shirts and other clothing.

Commendable as these examples may be, their praxis is fundamentally flawed. They seek a half-hearted return to the post-war "New Deal," naively hoping decent paying nine-to-five factory jobs can thrive again in the era of neo-liberalism. And although workers have more say over their lives at the American Apparel factory than in a Nike or Adidas outsourcing operation, the non-sweat factories still operate within a centrally planned hierarchy.

In a sense, the Zapatistas - basically an agrarian movement - have leap-frogged the entire wage system with their forays into industry. Co-op members receive no salary for their labour; all profits are invested back into entire community, mostly to pay for public services, specifically health promotion.

"We have a difficult situation," admits Hedez, who is married with several children. "We sustain ourselves through what little we can grow in our milpas (fields). We have two days a week for working in the fields. We also buy various things, but very little."

At first glance, working roughly 40 hours a week as a volunteer seems over-zealous, if not downright exploitative. But factory activists have realized they can't pull themselves out of poverty individually, one by one. Key pillars of zapatismo like health, education, and work with dignity demand collective action, cooperation and mutual aide.

The First of January Boot Workshop is not a perfect model of economic democracy. The component parts for the boots - soles, laces, etc. - are bought from coyotes (middlemen) in San Cristobal de las Casas, and are presumably imported from sweatshops in China.

And, in the Chiapas highlands, the "glory" of worker-self-management exists alongside deplorable poverty that the Mexican government characterizes as "acute marginalization." Many of the workshop activists can't afford proper shoes for their own children.

Poverty is ubiquitous in Chiapas (and indeed, in much of the world), stifling opportunities for alternative economic arrangements - for however clearly you articulate your vision of a participatory economy, you can't make something from nothing. The workshop wants to expand production, but it's unlikely they'll get a bank loan for new capital; a 1994 memo from the Chase Manhattan Bank urging the Mexican army to "eliminate the Zapatistas" demonstrates how global capital deals with those who seek alternatives.

Still, the workshop's production is based on a key principle of zapatismo: "Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves."

"Those of us with the privilege of a Canadian passport, who are 'also Zapatistas' by Rafael's definition, have a responsibility to help build participatory structures in re-developing areas," said Black Star organizer Dennis Hale. And not just because we're nice guilty liberals, but because we need them more than they need us."

Chris Arsenault travels to Chiapas to investigate a Zapatista owned and run boot cooperative that takes 'no-sweat' apparel to a new level.

Photo Essay: Zapatistas

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:54:03 +0000

Reflecting on Ten Years of Resistance in Chiapas

On New Year's Day 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, 3,000 poorly armed indigenous peasants seized 6 towns in Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state. The Zapatistas demanded work, land, housing, food, healthcare, education, autonomy, freedom, democracy, justice and peace. Their rebellion wasn't an attempt to seize state power; the Zapatistas' stated goal was to draw attention to brutal poverty and ill-effects of NAFTA, which they called a "death sentence". NAFTA allowed heavily-subsidized US crops to flood the Mexican market, eliminating market access for millions of small farmers. As a precondition to the agreement, the Mexican government removed Article 27 from the constitution, an amendment dating to the first Mexican revolution which guaranteed communal land access for small farmers. The Zapatistas' uprising received worldwide attention, and drew much of its support from tens of thousands, particularly in North America and Europe. In the days following the insurgency, the army counter-attacked. Their capacity to destroy the Zapatistas was undisputed, but there was too much popular support behind the rebels; 100,000 rallied in Mexico City, chanting "we are all Zapatistas", and support demonstrations erupted at Mexican embassies and consulates around the world. Twelve days after fighting began, the army agreed to a ceasefire. After a series of fruitless negotiations with the government for indigenous rights and autonomy, three federal administrations, and a 2001 march on the capital drawing hundreds of thousands of supporters and the attention of the world media, the Zapatistas say they are coming to grips with the old maxim, "if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself." Unable to compel the government to negotiate in good faith, they are creating their own political structures, schools, health clinics and economic cooperatives. This photo essay looks back at eleven years of zapatismo, and provides a window onto the future of what the New York Times called "the first post-modern Latin American revolution."

Zapatista activists in Oventic Caracole.

The rebellion itself consisted of 3000 or so Zapatistas taking over 5 towns, including the tourist Mecca San Cristobal de las Casas. Prior to New Year's Day 1994, people in Chiapas used all the classic protests: sit-ins, road blocks and demonstrations, but no one listened. According to human rights groups, the Zapatistas never violated the Geneva Convention, both during and after the armed phase of the rebellion. The same cannot be said for the Mexican Army.

A child in the Zapatista refugee camp of San Pedro Polho.

After the 1997 Acteal Massacre where paramilitaries killed 45 unarmed indigenous men, women and children as they prayed in their church, thousands of Zapatista supporters fled their homes and ended up in this overcrowded camp.

According to the Mexican Government, 80 percent of Chiapas' municipalities are facing "acute marginalization". Chiapenco children, like this boy in San Pedro Polho, have a one in five chance of dying before age five.

The sun slips through the clouds in the Los Altos (the highlands) region. Geographically, Chiapas is one of Mexico's most diverse and beautiful areas.

70 percent of Chiapas's dwellings are overcrowded, 51 percent have earthen floors and more than 35 percent lack drainage or electricity, even though Chiapas produces 60 percent of the hydro electric power used in Mexico City. These objective realities, along with 500 years of cultural destruction and humiliation for Mexico's (and Canada's) indigenous, created the conditions for rebellion.

Military patrol outside the Zapatista community of Francisco Gomez in the Ocosingo region, 1999. At the height of tensions, observers estimate that 60 000 troops or one-third of the Mexican federal Army was stationed in Chiapas. There are deep seated economic and political interests in Chiapas, a state rich in oil, uranium, timber and other resources. In 1994, Chase Manhattan Bank sent a memo to high-ups in the Mexican Army urging them to "eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate effective control of the national territory."

Military base in the Los Altos region, 2004.

Vicente Fox of the rightist National Action Party was elected president in 2000, ending 71 years of one party rule in Mexico. During the campaign, he promised to end the conflict in Chiapas in "fifteen minutes". Although he removed some troops, there are around 18,000 in Chiapas today. The occupation continues.

Members of the Junta of Buen Goberino for Los Altos region stand in their office, Oventic Caracole, 2004.

In 2003, the armed wing of the Zapatistas passed the power of governance off to a civilian political authority; the Juntas of Buen Goberino (good government boards). This shift represents a key development for the movement- cemented autonomy. The Zapatistas say they need to create their own structures, functioning outside the hegemony of state political power or "free-market" domination.

A member of Mujures por la dignidad (women for dignity) a 1,000 member Zapatista cooperative, weaving art-crafts. photo: James Daria

Zapatista women are empowering themselves economically as well as socially. Several women-run cooperatives have sprouted up, producing blankets, crafts, hammocks, etc.

Mural for women's education and dignity in Oventic. Photo: James Daria

It is safe to say that indigenous women in Chiapas are at the bottom of the world's socio-economic hierarchy. According to Commandante Ramona, the martriarch of the Zapatistas, "Women have been the most exploited... We get up at three in the morning to prepare corn for our husband's breakfast and we don't rest until late at night. If there is not enough food we give it to our children and our husbands first. So the women now have decided to take up arms and become Zapatistas."

Women comprise fifty percent of EZLN (the Zapatista armed wing)'s leadership. One third of those fighting on New Year's Day 1994 were women.

A farmer tests his corn for genetic contamination.

Genetic Modification has become a global consumer issue; in Chiapas it is a question of identity. The Mayans consider themselves, "the people of the corn"; when you change the corn, you're changing them. These farmers walked for eight hours to bring samples from families in their area to be tested for contamination. All the tests came out negative, but they say that could change any day.

Activists putting the finishing touches on boots at a Zapatista run workshop.

Even key Zapatista activists still can't afford proper footwear. In response to this need, the movement started the 1st of January boot cooperative, which sells high quality boots at cost to local communities. The factory is a thriving example of worker self-management. According to one of the volunteer employees: "We have no owner. Here we are all equals. When there is something necessary, or when problems arise, all jobs have problems, then we have a meeting or a discussion in general. If we want to make something without consulting the rest, we can't do that. We must present that job on behalf of everyone."

Students crowd the classroom at the autonomus Zapatista school in Francisco Gomez.

Education is a key demand of the Zapatistas. In many regions, government schools simply don't exist. Government schools neglect indigenous history and are inaccessible to many communities. The Zapatistas have opened dozens of their own schools, with volunteer teachers giving free classes in local languages (tzotzil in this community), Spanish, math, humanities and natural sciences.

Chris Arsenault is a Halifax based freelance writer. He has covered the situation in Chiapas for CBC radio, the Halifax Herald and Z Magazine. Chris has also worked with Students Taking Action in Chiapas and the Black Star Boot Cooperative, grassroots organizations working on the ground in Chiapas.

For further reading, visit Global Exchange, Chiapas Independent Media Centre, and Z Magazine.

11 years after what the New York Times called the first "post modern revolution", Chris Arsenault brings back words and images from Chiapas, Mexico.

Zapatistas and Supporters Celebrate 10 Years of Colourful Resistance

Tue, 03 Feb 2004 19:22:35 +0000

OVENTIC, Chiapas--On a damp, foggy night in the tiny town of Oventic, way, way up in the mountains of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, about 1,500 people gathered to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 1994 Zapatista uprising.

A colourful mural in a Zapatista village. The text reads 'rebellion for humanity'. photo: Simon Helweg-Larsen

It was, coincidentally, New Year's Eve, and the diverse, multinational crowd enjoyed live music, dancing, theatre, games, fireworks, and revolutionary speeches in Spanish and Tzotzil, the local indigenous language. Celebrations went on all night and continued the following day.

The Zapatistas are the indigenous rebel group in Chiapas, Mexico, that shocked their country when they occupied several Chiapan towns on January 1, 1994, demanding autonomy, dignity, and basic necessities. Initially as surprised as everyone else, the Mexican army soon recovered and violently quelled the rebellion. But by the time the rebels retreated to the highlands, it was clear they had captured the imagination of sympathizers around the world. Public shows of support came from all over Mexico, as well as from labour and civil society groups from Nebraska to Rome.

photo: Simon Helweg-Larsen

Zapatista supporters came to the autonomously-run community of Oventic from all over Mexico, North America, and Europe this year, accounting for about 40 per cent of attendees. The rest were local indigenous Mayans, on average almost a foot shorter than their Northern visitors, and almost always covering their faces with bandanas or balaclavas. The men's plain jeans and T-shirts contrasted sharply with the colourful, traditional dress of the women.

"It's like a folk festival here" said Canadian writer Simon Helweg-Larsen. "A surreal, radical, political, Zapatista folk fest." Indeed, but for the masks worn by the local people, the festive atmosphere made it easy to forget that we were in a low-intensity war zone. Bright murals decorated outside walls everywhere, mostly full of slogans and symbols of life and hope. Outside Oventic, however, in several surrounding communities, conflict continues to rage. The Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Centre reported threats of "displacement" against residents of nine Zapatista communities shortly before the anniversary celebrations. This past week, Mexico City's La Jornada reported 23 homes burned in the town of Nuevo San Rafael.

photo: Simon Helweg-Larsen

Such intimidation tactics have been the norm in Chiapas for the past 10 years. Many come from paramilitary groups with ties to the PRI, or Institutionalized Revolutionary Party, who hold power in Chiapas's state government. Towns have been raided in this time, homes destroyed, Zapatistas and their sympathizers kidnapped or tortured. The worst single incident was the December 22, 1997 Acteal massacre, where 45 Christian pacifists, including pregnant women and children, were killed while hiding in a church.

As well, observers say that poverty and standards of living have worsened in Chiapas in the last 10 years. The Zapatista uprising was timed to coincide with enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and everything they said about NAFTA is proving to be true, said Peter Brown of Schools for Chiapas, a San Diego-based nonprofit organization. "There's more hunger. There's more people being forced off the land," he continued. With millions of tons of cheap, subsidized, American corn flooding the Mexican market and forcing down prices, smaller growers can't afford to keep farming.

Links:

Chiapas Indymedia

Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Centre

Schools for Chiapas

International Service for Peace, Chiapas

ChiapasLink

Students Taking Action in Chiapas, Montreal

The Zapatistas do seem to have gained one important thing through their rebellion: dignity. "Before, indigenous people walked around with their heads down," said Heike Kammer of SIPAZ, a peace organization based in San Cristobal de las Casas. "Now...they've taken on protagonist roles in social struggles." The word "dignity" indeed appeared perhaps more than any other in the slogans painted on the walls in Oventic.

It's anyone's guess as to what to expect in the future. The rebels have already voiced their opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the hemisphere-wide extension of NAFTA, and Plan Puebla Panama, a massive infrastructure project that would cut through thousands of acres of indigenous lands. Just before the anniversary, La Jornada published a speech by Zapatista Comandante David, entitled "The Time Has Come to Act." In it the commander urged indigenous people in Mexico to unite and claim their rights, because "it is clear that no government will give us the right and the liberty to live with dignity."

Ben Sichel visits Chiapas, Mexico for the tenth anniversary of the Zapatista uprising.