-Caveat Lector-
[radtimes] # 181
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
"We're living in rad times!"
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Send $$ to RadTimes!! --> (See ** at end.)
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Contents:
--Who owns the US Government?
--Trading in rifles for schoolbooks
--The unknown icon (Marcos/Zapatistas)
--EZLN: words of the rebel women
===================================================================
Who owns the US Government?
Below are "Contributions From Selected Industries to Federal Candidates
and Parties, 1990-2000" in the U.S.
$117,711,747 - Oil and Gas
$ 58,426,889 - Automotive
$ 51,070,027 - Electric Utilities
$ 35,242,032 - Chemical and Related Manufacturing
$ 24,756,971 - Forestry and Forestry Products
$ 17,945,784 - Mining
$ 6,950,843 - Total Environmental Contributions
Source: Center for Responsive Politics
as printed in Sierra Club Magazine, March/April 2001 issue, page 19.
===================================================================
Trading in rifles for schoolbooks
By Andres Cala
THE GAZETTE [Montreal]
Thursday, 8 March 2001
URIBE, Colombia -- Seventeen-year- old Juan Triana walks the gravel roads
of Uribe, one of the five counties demilitarized by the government for
peace negotiations with FARC rebels, carrying his notebook on the way to
school - instead of the AK-47 he strapped on his shoulder for almost three
years.
With a weak boy's body, the scars of an adult's face and a stoic deep
speech he uses to surround his listeners, Juan tells of how he stopped
hiking across the southern part of Colombia, carrying his weapon and
campaign equipment with the 40th front of FARC, which is the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia. His unit was on the move every day, hiding on
this side of enemy lines, and training for the eventful battle with the
paramilitary or soldiers that surround the peace zone.
Now, he walks an "easy" kilometre to school, along with 61 other children
who have been released by the FARC since December by the 18,000 well-armed
Marxist-Leninist army, which has been fighting the government for 36
years.
Juan shares a 14-square-metre boarding room with 11 other ex-guerrillas,
sleeping in bunkbeds, improvised into a farm near the airstrip where many
of their provisions have to be flown in since the nearest city is
separated by more than 12 hours of gravel road. In the winter, floods can
even double that time.
For the 62 child soldiers, whose ages range between 12 and 17, the war is
over, although they live in fear of one day being killed by paramilitary
forces who accuse them of being guerrilla supporters.
They no longer belong to the population of 6,000 minors still fighting in
the ranks of either paramilitary or guerrilla forces in Colombia, lured by
adventure, money, power and, of course, boredom, in an ongoing war in
which 4,000 people are killed every year.
'I am Juan Triana'
"I joined the FARC when I was 15 because I was bored. There was not enough
space in school, no connection to the outside world, no computers and no
books. My destiny was to farm, harvest, drink, get married, have children
and never leave. Education was never a possibility because we had no
resources," Juan said recently.
"But the guerrilla life offered adventure. They had weapons; girls liked
them; they traveled; they had power and even education. For me, and many
of the other boys in town, it seemed like a good idea to join the 40th
front of the FARC.
"During almost three years we trained a lot and moved around the
distention zone making sure the 'paracos' (a pejorative word used to refer
to paramilitaries) and military would not penetrate the (demilitarized)
zone.
"At first it was exciting, but then I realized military life took away my
liberty to do many things. In general I had to obey orders and I could not
make my own decisions. I also got tired of walking so much and not getting
any action.
"Although we were sometimes fired at, we never actually fought anybody. We
would go into town sometimes to make sure everything was safe, but that's
all.
"Finally I got bored of that, too. I realized the only way I was going to
fulfill all my dreams was through education. I went up to 'Lucas,'
(commander of the 40th front) and told him I wanted to go back home.
"Rumours were told of the willingness of the Secretariat (the executive
command of the FARC composed by the seven top commanders, including
'Manuel Marulanda,' the maximum leader) to release guerrillas younger than
18.
"Lucas told me he would consult with his superiors, and finally on
Dec. 1, he said I was free to go.
"I was the first one to arrive, but others have followed."
The Newcomers
The FARC decision to release some child soldiers was apparently adopted as
a new policy after the latest meeting, early February, between president
Andres Pastrana and Marulanda, which relaunched the peace process with the
guerrilla group.
The top military commander of the FARC, "Mono Jojoy," said, in an
interview to the Spanish television channel TVE that underage drafting had
to stop. A home video released on the second week of February, showing
Jojoy instructing his men to consult with the secretariat before releasing
the child soldiers, confirmed the version.
In this particular case, in which the minors did not surrender their
weapons to the government, but were released by the FARC to return to
their families, something had to be done to encourage additional releases
of child soldiers from the guerrilla ranks.
That included not separating the newcomers from their families and finding
the necessary installations to attract more war children.
Colombian legislation establishes that child soldiers should be returned
to their families or relatives as the first option or to government
institutions if that is not possible, followed by permanent psychological
assistance to reincorporate them into society.
In the case of the 62 children from Uribe, they were accommodated in two
boarding houses, the boys in the farm and the girls in the Saleciana
Sisters' house, to facilitate their top priority: education.
Given the three- or four-hour walks that most of the children would have
to endure to go to school if they lived with their families plus the lack
of facilities in the area, they were all organized in the same town, which
also helps their readaptation processes.
In fact, some of the children said they were released by Lucas under the
condition they would go back to school. In any case, authorities and the
children's own initiative have guaranteed their education, for now.
Gloria Quiseno, who presides over the Direction for Reinsertion, invited
the international community, religious authorities and the municipality to
make sure more children would return home and to summon the necessary
resources for future releases.
At this point, the boarding houses are being maintained by the Uribe
municipality and the Catholic Church.
On Feb. 14, Franceso Vincenti, head of the UN mission in Colombia, Carel
de Rooy, director of Unicef and Marianne Da Costa, Austria's ambassador,
in representation of the European Union, flew to Uribe to meet the
ex-soldiers.
After listening to ex-guerrillas' parents, local authorities and even
"Rubiel," a guerrilla commander who "happened to be in town," the
international delegates promised to seek support to build a new boarding
house, two more rooms for the local school and to supply the youngsters
with other educational and leisure supplies.
Ramiro Trujillo, Uribe's mayor, said the local school needs, without
taking into account the 62 child soldiers and those who will follow, space
for 150 more students. They have a computer room that lacks computers, an
agricultural-technical school whose most high-tech machine is a lawnmower,
and three teachers to satisfy the educational needs of 300 students of all
ages.
Nonetheless, the international community has promised to return to Uribe
to organize the necessary package for the newcomers, and although an
official announcement of when that trip might take place has not been
made, Quiseno assures that in less than two months Juan will have a new
home and many additional possibilities to have "a better life."
===================================================================
The unknown icon
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4145255,00.html
Next week, rebels will march on Mexico City demanding rights for the
country's indigenous people. But they will not fire a single shot, for
this is a new kind of revolution. Naomi Klein describes the appeal of
the Zapatistas and their 'voice' Marcos
by Naomi Klein
Saturday March 3, 2001
The Guardian (London)
I've never been to Chiapas. I've never made the pilgrimage to the
Lacandon jungle. I've never sat in the mud and the mist in La
Realidad. I've never begged, pleaded or posed to get an audience with
Subcomandante Marcos, the masked man, the faceless face of Mexico's
Zapatista National Liberation Army. I know people who have. Lots of
them. In 1994, the summer after the Zapatista rebellion, caravans to
Chiapas were all the rage in north American activist circles: friends
got together and raised money for secondhand vans, filled them with
supplies, then drove south to San Cristobal de las Casas and left the
vans behind. I didn't pay much attention at the time. Back then,
Zapatista-mania looked suspiciously like just another cause for guilty
lefties with a Latin American fetish: another Marxist rebel army,
another macho leader, another chance to go south and buy colourful
textiles. Hadn't we heard this story before? Hadn't it ended badly?
Last week, there was another caravan in Chiapas. But this was
different. First, it didn't end in San Cristobal de las Casas; it
started there, and is now criss-crossing the Mexican countryside
before the planned grand entrance into Mexico City on March 11. The
caravan, nicknamed the "Zapatour" by the Mexican press, is being led
by the council of 24 Zapatista commanders, in full uniform and masks
(though no weapons), including Subcomandante Marcos himself. Because
it is unheard of for the Zapatista command to travel outside Chiapas
(and there are vigilantes threatening deadly duels with Marcos all
along the way), the Zapatour needs tight security. The Red Cross
turned down the job, so protection is being provided by several
hundred anarchists from Italy who call themselves Ya Basta! (meaning
"Enough is enough!"), after the defiant phrase used in the Zapatistas'
declaration of war. Hundreds of students, small farmers and activists
have joined the roadshow, and thousands greet them along the way.
Unlike those early visitors to Chiapas, these travellers say they are
there not because they are "in solidarity" with the Zapatistas, but
because they are Zapatistas. Some even claim to be Subcomandante
Marcos himself - they say we are all Marcos.
Perhaps only a man who never takes off his mask, who hides his real
name, could lead this caravan of renegades, rebels, loners and
anarchists on this two-week trek. These are people who have learned to
steer clear of charismatic leaders with one-size-fits-all ideologies.
These aren't party loyalists; these are members of groups that pride
themselves on their autonomy and lack of hierarchy. Marcos - with his
black wool mask, two eyes and pipe - seems to be an anti-leader
tailor-made for this suspicious, critical lot. Not only does he refuse
to show his face, undercutting (and simultaneously augmenting) his own
celebrity, but Marcos's story is of a man who came to his leadership,
not through swaggering certainty, but by coming to terms with
political uncertainty, by learning to follow.
Though there is no confirmation of Marcos's real identity, the most
repeated legend that surrounds him goes like this: an urban Marxist
intellectual and activist, Marcos was wanted by the state and was no
longer safe in the cities. He fled to the mountains of Chiapas in
southeast Mexico filled with revolutionary rhetoric and certainty,
there to convert the poor indigenous masses to the cause of armed
proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie. He said the workers of
the world must unite, and the Mayans just stared at him. They said
they weren't workers and, besides, land wasn't property but the heart
of their community. Having failed as a Marxist missionary, Marcos
immersed himself in Mayan culture. The more he learned, the less he
knew. Out of this process, a new kind of army emerged, the EZLN, the
Zapatista National Liberation Army, which was not controlled by an
elite of guerrilla commanders but by the communities themselves,
through clandestine councils and open assemblies. "Our army," says
Marcos, "became scandalously Indian." That meant that he wasn't a
commander barking orders, but a subcomandante, a conduit for the will
of the councils. His first words said in the new persona were:
"Through me speaks the will of the Zapatista National Liberation
Army." Further subjugating himself, Marcos says that he is not a
leader to those who seek him out, but that his black mask is a mirror,
reflecting each of their own struggles; that a Zapatista is anyone
anywhere fighting injustice, that "We are you". He once said, "Marcos
is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a
Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel,
a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a
Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single
woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in
the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a
Zapatista in the mountains."
"This non-self," writes Juana Ponce de Leon who has collected and
edited Marcos's writings in Our Word Is Our Weapon (see extracts on
pages 14-16), "makes it possible for Marcos to become the spokesperson
for indigenous communities. He is transparent, and he is
iconographic." Yet the paradox of Marcos and the Zapatistas is that,
despite the masks, the non-selves, the mystery, their struggle is
about the opposite of anonymity - it is about the right to be seen.
When the Zapatistas took up arms and said Ya Basta! in 1994, it was a
revolt against their invisibility. Like so many others left behind by
globalisation, the Mayans of Chiapas had fallen off the economic map:
"Below in the cities," the EZLN command stated, "we did not exist. Our
lives were worth less than those of machines or animals. We were like
stones, like weeds in the road. We were silenced. We were faceless."
By arming and masking themselves, the Zapatistas explain, they weren't
joining some Star Trek-like Borg universe of people without identities
fighting in common cause: they were forcing the world to stop ignoring
their plight, to see their long neglected faces. The Zapatistas are
"the voice that arms itself to be heard. The face that hides itself to
be seen."
Meanwhile, Marcos himself - the supposed non-self, the conduit, the
mirror - writes in a tone so personal and poetic, so completely and
unmistakably his own, that he is constantly undercutting and
subverting the anonymity that comes from his mask and pseudonym. It is
often said that the Zapatistas' best weapon was the internet, but
their true secret weapon was their language. In Our Word Is Our
Weapon, we read manifestos and war cries that are also poems, legends
and riffs. A character emerges behind the mask, a personality. Marcos
is a revolutionary who writes long meditative letters to Uruguayan
poet Eduardo Galeano about the meaning of silence; who describes
colonialism as a series of "bad jokes badly told", who quotes Lewis
Carroll, Shakespeare and Borges. Who writes that resistance takes
place "any time any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off
the clothes resignation has woven for them and cynicism has dyed
grey". And who then sends whimsical mock telegrams to all of "civil
society": "THE GRAYS HOPE TO WIN. STOP. RAINBOW NEEDED URGENTLY."
Marcos seems keenly aware of himself as an irresistible romantic hero.
He's an Isabelle Allende character in reverse - not the poor peasant
who becomes a Marxist rebel, but a Marxist intellectual who becomes a
poor peasant. He plays with this character, flirts with it, saying
that he can't reveal his real identity for fear of disappointing his
female fans. Perhaps wary that this game was getting a little out of
hand, Marcos chose the eve of Valentine's Day this year to break the
bad news: he is married, and deeply in love, and her name is La Mar
("the Sea" - what else would it be?)
This is a movement keenly aware of the power of words and symbols.
Rumour has it that when the 24-strong Zapatista command arrive in
Mexico City, they hope to ride downtown on horseback, like indigenous
conquistadors. There will be a massive rally, and concerts, and they
will ask to address the Congress. There, they will demand that
legislators pass an Indigenous Bill of Rights, a law that came out of
the Zapatistas' failed peace negotiations with president, Ernesto
Zedillo, who was defeated in recent elections. Vincente Fox, his
successor who famously bragged during the campaign that he could solve
the Zapatista problem "in 15 minutes", has asked for a meeting with
Marcos, but has so far been refused - not until the bill is passed,
says Marcos, not until more army troops are withdrawn from Zapatista
territory, not until all Zapatista political prisoners are freed.
Marcos has been betrayed before, and accuses Fox of staging a
"simulation of peace" before the peace negotiations have even
restarted. What is clear in all this jostling for position is that
something radical has changed in the balance of power in Mexico. The
Zapatistas are calling the shots now - which is significant, because
they have lost the habit of firing shots. What started as a small,
armed insurrection has in the past seven years turned into what now
looks more like a peaceful, and mass movement. It has helped topple
the corrupt 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party,
and has placed indigenous rights at the centre of the Mexican
political agenda.
Which is why Marcos gets angry when he is looked on as just another
guy with a gun: "What other guerrilla force has convened a national
democratic movement, civic and peaceful, so that armed struggle
becomes useless?" he asks. "What other guerrilla force asks its bases
of support about what it should do before doing it? What other
guerrilla force has struggled to achieve a democratic space and not
take power? What other guerrilla force has relied more on words than
on bullets?"
The Zapatistas chose January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free
Trade Agreement (Nafta) came into force, to "declare war" on the
Mexican army, launching an insurrection and briefly taking control of
the city of San Cristobal de las Casas and five Chiapas towns. They
sent out a communiqué explaining that Nafta, which banned subsidies to
indigenous farm co-operatives, would be a "summary execution" for four
million indigenous Mexicans in Chiapas, the country's poorest
province.
Nearly 100 years had passed since the Mexican revolution promised to
return indigenous land through agrarian reform; after all these broken
promises, Nafta was simply the last straw. "We are the product of 500
years of struggle . . . but today we say Ya Basta! Enough is enough."
The rebels called themselves Zapatistas, taking their name from
Emiliano Zapata, the slain hero of the 1910 revolution who, along with
a rag-tag peasant army, fought for lands held by large landowners to
be returned to indigenous and peasant farmers.
In the seven years since, the Zapatistas have come to represent two
forces at once: first, rebels struggling against grinding poverty and
humiliation in the mountains of Chiapas and, on top of this, theorists
of a new movement, another way to think about power, resistance and
globalisation. This theory - Zapatismo - not only turns classic
guerrilla tactics inside out, but much of leftwing politics on its
head.
I may never have made the pilgrimage to Chiapas, but I have watched
the Zapatistas' ideas spread through activist circles, passed along
second- and thirdhand: a phrase, a way to run a meeting, a metaphor
that twists your brain around. Unlike classic revolutionaries, who
preach through bullhorns and from pulpits, Marcos has spread the
Zapatista word through riddles. Revolutionaries who don't want power.
People who must hide their faces to be seen. A world with many worlds
in it.
A movement of one "no" and many "yesses".
These phrases seem simple at first, but don't be fooled. They have a
way of burrowing into the consciousness, cropping up in strange
places, being repeated until they take on this quality of truth - but
not absolute truth: a truth, as the Zapatistas might say, with many
truths in it. In Canada, where I'm from, indigenous uprising is always
symbolised by a blockade: a physical barrier to stop the golf course
from being built on a native burial site, to block the construction of
a hydroelectric dam or to keep an old growth forest from being logged.
The Zapatista uprising was a new way to protect land and culture:
rather than locking out the world, the Zapatistas flung open the doors
and invited the world inside. Chiapas was transformed, despite its
poverty, despite being under constant military siege, into a global
gathering place for activists, intellectuals, and indigenous groups.
>From the first communiqué, the Zapatistas invited the international
community "to watch over and regulate our battles". The summer after
the uprising, they hosted a National Democratic Convention in the
jungle; 6,000 people attended, most from Mexico. In 1996, they hosted
the first Encuentro (or meeting) For Humanity And Against
Neo-Liberalism. Some 3,000 activists travelled to Chiapas to meet with
others from around the world.
Marcos himself is a one-man-web: he is a compulsive communicator,
constantly reaching out, drawing connections between different issues
and struggles. His communiqués are filled with lists of groups that he
imagines are Zapatista allies, small shopkeepers, retired people and
the disabled, as well as workers and campesinos. He writes to
political prisoners Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier. He is
pen-pals with some of Latin America's best-known novelists. He writes
letters addressed "to the people of world".
When the uprising began, the government attempted to play down the
incident as a "local" problem, an ethnic dispute easily contained. The
strategic victory of the Zapatistas was to change the terms: to insist
that what was going on in Chiapas could not be written off as a narrow
"ethnic" struggle, and that it was universal. They did this by clearly
naming their enemy not only as the Mexican state but as the set of
economic policies known as "neo-liberalism". Marcos insisted that the
poverty and desperation in Chiapas was simply a more advanced version
of something happening all around the world. He pointed to the huge
numbers of people who were being left behind by prosperity, whose
land, and work, made that prosperity possible. "The new distribution
of the world excludes 'minorities'," Marcos has said. "The indigenous,
youth, women, homosexuals, lesbians, people of colour, immigrants,
workers, peasants; the majority who make up the world basements are
presented, for power, as disposable. The distribution of the world
excludes the majorities."
The Zapatistas staged an open insurrection, one that anyone could
join, as long as they thought of themselves as outsiders. By
conservative estimates, there are now 45,000 Zapatista-related
websites, based in 26 countries. Marcos's communiqués are available in
at least 14 languages. And then there is the Zapatista cottage
industry: black T-shirts with red five-pointed stars, white T-shirts
with EZLN printed in black. There are baseball hats, black EZLN ski
masks, Mayan-made dolls and trucks. There are posters, including one
of Comandante Ramona, the much loved EZLN matriarch, as the Mona Lisa.
It looked like fun, but it was also influential. Many who attended the
first "encuentros" went on to play key roles in the protests against
the World Trade Organisation in Seattle and the World Bank and IMF in
Washington DC, arriving with a new taste for direct action, for
collective decision-making and decentralised organising. When the
insurrection began, the Mexican military was convinced it would be
able to squash the Zapa- tistas' jungle uprising like a bug. It sent
in heavy artillery, conducted air raids, mobilised thousands of
soldiers. Only, instead of standing on a squashed bug, the government
found itself surrounded by a swarm of international activists, buzzing
around Chiapas. In a study commissioned by the US military from the
Rand Corporation, the EZLN is studied as "a new mode of conflict -
'netwar' - in which the protagonists depend on using network forms of
organisation, doctrine, strategy and technology." This is dangerous,
according to Rand, because what starts as "a war of the flea" can
quickly turn into "a war of the swarm".
The ring around the rebels has not protected the Zapatistas entirely.
In December 1997, there was the brutal Acteal massacre in which 45
Zapatista supporters were killed, most of them women and children. And
the situation in Chiapas is still desperate, with thousands displaced
from their homes. But it is also true that the situation would
probably have been much worse, potentially with far greater
intervention from the US military, had it not been for this
international swarm. The Rand Corporation study states that the global
activist attention arrived "during a period when the United States may
have been tacitly interested in seeing a forceful crackdown on the
rebels".
So it's worth asking: what are the ideas that proved so powerful that
thousands have taken it upon themselves to disseminate them around the
world? A few years ago, the idea of the rebels travelling to Mexico
City to address the congress would have been impossible to imagine.
The prospect of masked guerrillas (even masked guerrillas who have
left their arms at home) entering a hall of political power signals
one thing: revolution. But Zapatistas aren't interested in
overthrowing the state or naming their leader, Marcos, as president.
If anything, they want less state power over their lives. And,
besides, Marcos says that as soon as peace has been negotiated he will
take off his mask and disappear.
What does it mean to be a revolutionary who is not trying to stage a
revolution? This is one of the key Zapatista paradoxes. In one of his
many communiqués, Marcos writes that "it is not necessary to conquer
the world. It is sufficient to make it new". He adds: "Us. Today."
What sets the Zapatistas apart from your average Marxist guerrilla
insurgents is that their goal is not to win control, but to seize and
build autonomous spaces where "democracy, liberty and justice" can
thrive.
Although the Zapatistas have articulated certain key goals of their
resistance (control over land, direct political representation, and
the right to protect their language and culture), they insist they are
not interested in "the Revolution", but rather in "a revolution that
makes revolution possible".
Marcos believes that what he has learned in Chiapas about
non-hierarchical decision-making, decentralised organising and deep
community democracy holds answers for the non-indigenous world as well
- if only it were willing to listen. This is a kind of organising that
doesn't compartmentalise the community into workers, warriors, farmers
and students, but instead seeks to organise commu- nities as a whole,
across sectors and across generations, creating "social movements".
For the Zapatistas, these autonomous zones aren't about isolationism
or dropping out, 60s-style. Quite the opposite: Marcos is convinced
that these free spaces, born of reclaimed land, communal agriculture,
resistance to privatisation, will eventually create counter-powers to
the state simply by existing as alternatives.
This is the essence of Zapatismo, and explains much of its appeal: a
global call to revolution that tells you not to wait for the
revolution, only to stand where you stand, to fight with your own
weapon. It could be a video camera, words, ideas, "hope" - all of
these, Marcos has written, "are also weapons". It's a revolution in
miniature that says, "Yes, you can try this at home." This organising
model has spread throughout Latin America, and the world. You can see
it in the anarchist squats of Italy (called "social centres") and in
the Landless Peasants' Movement of Brazil, which seizes tracts of
unused farmland and uses them for sustainable agriculture, markets and
schools under the slogan "Ocupar, Resistir, Producir" (Occupy, Resist,
Produce). These same ideas were forcefully expressed by the students
of the National Autonomous University of Mexico during last year's
long and militant occupation of their campus. Zapata once said the
land belongs to those who work it, their banners blared, WE SAY THAT
THE UNIVERSITY BELONGS TO THOSE WHO STUDY IN IT.
Zapatismo, according to Marcos, is not a doctrine but "an intuition".
And he is consciously trying to appeal to something that exists
outside the intellect, something uncynical in us, that he found in
himself in the mountains of Chiapas: wonder, a suspension of
disbelief, myth and magic. So, instead of issuing manifestos, he tries
to riff his way into this place, with long meditations, flights of
fancy, dreaming out loud. This is, in a way, a kind of intellectual
guerrilla warfare: Marcos won't meet his opponents head on, but
instead surrounds them from all directions.
A month ago, I got an email from Greg Ruggiero, the publisher of
Marcos's collected writings. He wrote that when Marcos enters Mexico
City next week, it will be "the equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr's
March on Washington". I stared at the sentence for a long time. I have
seen the clip of King's "I have a dream" speech maybe 10,000 times,
though usually through adverts sellingmutual funds, cable news or
computers and the like. Having grown up after history ended, it never
occurred to me that I might see a capital-H history moment to match
it.
Next thing I knew, I was on the phone talking to airlines, cancelling
engagements, making crazy excuses, mumbling about Zapatistas and
Martin Luther King. Who cares that I dropped my introduction to
Spanish course? Or that I've never been to Mexico City, let alone
Chiapas? Marcos says I am a Zapatista and I am suddenly thinking,
"Yes, yes, I am. I have to be in Mexico City on March 11. It's like
Martin Luther King Jr's March on Washington." Only now, as March 11
approaches, it occurs to me that it's not like that at all. History is
being made in Mexico City this week, but it's a smaller, lower-case,
humbler kind of history than you see in those news-clips. A history
that says ,"I can't make your history for you. But I can tell you that
history is yours to make."
It also occurs to me that Marcos isn't Martin Luther King; he is
King's very modern progeny, born of a bittersweet marriage of vision
and necessity. This masked man who calls himself Marcos is the
descendant of King, Che Guevara, Malcom X, Emiliano Zapata and all the
other heroes who preached from pulpits only to be shot down one by
one, leaving bodies of followers wandering around blind and
disoriented because they lost their heads.
In their place, the world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens
more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader
who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And
in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a
dreaming revolution. "This is our dream," writes Marcos, "the
Zapatista paradox - one that takes away sleep. The only dream that is
dreamed awake, sleepless. The history that is born and nurtured from
below."
===================================================================
EZLN: words of the rebel women
Originally published in Spanish by the EZLN
March 8
International Day of the Rebel Woman
Today, March 8, 2001, the international day of rebel women, zapatista
women, through three of their Comandantas who are members of the
Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee - and who are all part of
the Zapatista Army of National Liberation delegation which is reaching the
gates of Mexico City today - say their word:
Comandanta Esther
"To women throughout the country, we are saying let us fight together. We
have to fight more because as indigenous we are triply looked down upon: as
indigenous women, as women and as poor women. But women who are not
indigenous also suffer. That is why we are inviting all of them to fight,
so that we will not continue suffering. It's not true that women don't
know, that they're not good for anything except being in the home. That
doesn't happen only in the indigenous communities, but also in the cities.
When I was a little girl I was hungry and sick. Even though we didn't eat
well, here we are. We go on.
I didn't know how to speak in Spanish. I went to school, but I didn't
learn anything there. But when I entered the organization (EZLN) I learned
to write and to speak Spanish, the little bit that I know, I'm engaged in
the struggle.
Once I grew up I began to see that we didn't have adequate food, that
others did, and we didn't. Why didn't we? I saw that I had 4 or 5 little
brothers and sisters who had died, that's when I realized, why were my
little brothers and sisters dying? I saw that it was necessary to fight,
because if I didn't do anything, other brothers would keep on dying, and I
decided. And not only me, there are women who decided to be soldiers, and
those women now have the insurgent rank of captain, of major, of
lieutenant. That's how we saw that women can indeed be strong.
In the beginning, I had to pay a price for the truth. The men didn't
understand, even though I always explained to them that it was necessary to
fight so that we wouldn't always be dying of hunger. The men didn't like
the idea. According to them, women were only good for having children, and
they should take care of them...
And there are also some women who have that idea in their heads. Then I
didn't like them. Some men said it wasn't good, that women didn't have the
right to participate, that women are stupid. Some compa~eras said "I'm
stupid." I always confronted that. I explained to them that it wasn't
true, that we are women, but we can do other work. Little by little the
men began to understand, and the women also. That's why women are fighting
now. That's why you know that in our fight it's not just the men who are
fighting here, we're fighting together.
Since the war began, the bad government has been putting the armies in, but
the ones who have had to confront that problem are the women. The
militarization has been very hard, but the women haven't been
afraid. They've gone out to run the soldiers off. And so we've seen that
women do have strength, not with weapons but with strength and with shouts,
we see that we can be strong as women.
The truth is we have resisted, even though it's been years since the war
began. Despite the suffering, we are still here. If we hadn't resisted,
we wouldn't still be here. Even though a lot has happened to us, in spite
of that, we haven't surrendered. We've been strong.
As zapatista women we've made a little progress. We saw that we didn't
have anything, and we ourselves asked ourselves: who's going to give us
anything if we don't do anything? We have to work ourselves, to help each
other in order to have the little we need. The women began working in
collectives then, in bakeries, vegetable gardens, and other things.
Before, women didn't participate in meetings, in the assembly, since their
husbands wouldn't let them. The men understand now, women can go to
meetings, and men can stay at home taking care of the animals. Now if men
see that there's a lot of work in the kitchen, they help their wives or
their compa~eras. They didn't do it before, now they do. There's a change.
We ourselves explain to the boys and girls that there should be respect,
that we are equal. The girls and boys go to school. And not just them,
but the older women as well, because they learn well there. The men go
also. Because we ourselves are organizing ourselves now, and we're not in
the government schools anymore, but in our own autonomous educational
system. We all go there.
I believe we're going to achieve the change we want, if it's going to be
achieved, because I see many women organizing themselves. We invite them
also, and that way we'll have more strength. We're going to achieve it,
with all of us.
We want the San Andre's Accords to be recognized. For us, as indigenous,
they are very important, because, as long as we are not recognized, we'll
continue to be ignored. They don't recognize us, they don't take us into
account. We want our method of speaking to be recognized, of dressing, of
organizing ourselves. But we aren't going to continue the bad things.
We don't say that Fox is here now and Mexico has changed now. No. Change
itself isn't made by them. Just because the PRI was brought down doesn't
mean that there's going to be change, no matter who wins. We've already
seen that. It's the people of Mexico who have to build the change they want.
We see that the Fox government doesn't want to carry out the three signals
that we've asked for in order to engage in dialogue. That 7 of the 259
positions where the armies are be withdrawn. That the zapatista prisoners
are released. And that the San Andre's Accords are recognized. They say
he's already carried them out, but we see he hasn't."
Comandanta Yolanda
"We want the COCOPA law to be approved because it protects women. It says
that 'the Indian towns can choose their authorities and exercise their
forms of internal government with autonomy, or in accordance with their
customs and culture, but always safeguarding the participation of women,
who are equal with men.' That means that the participation of indigenous
women will be in the Constitution.
The COCOPA law says quite clearly that 'the dignity and safety of women in
the resolution of any problems' must be respected. It's true that there
are customs which aren't good, drunkenness, for example. That's not good
culture, nor is forced marriage…What we are doing is fighting to change it
little by little, so that it improves. But in our culture's methods of
working, of making crafts and many other things, we have a culture that
cannot be lost. We don't want to be a country apart. We want to be
included in Mexican law.
Ever since I was little I've had a very hard life in my community and in my
family. We didn't have maize or anything to eat. But I hadn't understood
the situation. Even I believed that it was like that because the old ones
had told a story that suffering exists because God wants it like that, that
we must resign ourselves. When I was a bit bigger, I found the
organization's words. Then I realized that it wasn't useful to be
resigned, to die like that, in poverty. And that's when I also decided to
join the struggle. I began talking with the towns and to encourage other
women, until we had a broader understanding that we, as women, have a
double suffering. It woke us up quite a bit.
The men are struggling to totally understand what we are asking for as
women. We are asking to have rights and for the men to give us liberty,
and for them to understand that we have to fight for that along with them.
For them to learn to not take our participating here badly, because,
before, we never went to meetings and encuentros. Now there's just a few
of us who go, but the path is opening up in all ways. There's more
freedom. The men now take our words into consideration, and they
understand that we, as women, have a place where we can present everything
we feel and everything we are suffering.
We have been resisting for more than 7 years, ever since the declaration of
war. This has been quite difficult for us as women, with all the
armies. In addition, the armies have caused the appearance of
paramilitaries, who hide along the roads. We can't walk along the little
roads now. They're there, masked, hiding."
Comandanta Susana
"I've been working with women in the communities of Los Altos for many
years. I am Tzotzil. Since I'm illiterate, and don't even know how to
write, it's even more difficult to make the effort to talk. But we're
making progress in the towns...I'm not saying it's a lot, but there's
progress. As women, we suffer repression within the family, and an even
greater one, in that we don't have any right to complain about everything
we are suffering, everything we are feeling. There's still much work to be
done. I can't say that it's here and everything's fine. More compa~eras
need to participate.
We have suffered from the presence of the armies all these years. And the
ones who suffer the most are the women, because we can't walk, we can't go
out because we're afraid of the soldiers. We can't go out to bring in our
firewood, our water, because they're always in the roads. In addition,
they abuse the women sometimes. If we go along the road with our little
things, they always stop us and search us. They take up our time, they
threaten us. They really do make life hard for the women. We don't like
their being here. We don't need them, because we know how to take care of
ourselves.
We are all fighting together, all of Mexico, not just in Chiapas, not just
in these communities. We want national and international civil society to
help us. We are calling on everyone, because that's the most important thing.
We have hope that there's going to be a solution, that it's not going to be
like this all the time. That the armies will have to get out, return to
their barracks.
We've seen that Fox only makes promises, he just says his pretty words,
but he doesn't carry them out. He says he's going to get rid of all the
armies from the most important places, but he doesn't do it. The truth is
we don't trust Fox. He doesn't want to have dialogue for once and all, he
just announces it.
We want indigenous rights to be respected, because our language is the most
important thing. Because our language is very beautiful, our regional
clothing. Because there are a lot of people who aren't wearing the
clothing now, they say they don't want to put it on, that they're ashamed
to use it now. There are also people who are ashamed to speak in our own
language. I don't think that's right, because we are indigenous, and we
aren't going to be ashamed of being what we are, because everything we have
is our culture and it's real.
It's not true that we want to separate from Mexico. What we want is for
them to recognize us as Mexicans, as the indigenous we are, but also as
Mexicans, since we were born here, we live here."
===================================================================
"Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control."
-Jim Dodge
======================================================
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
-Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
======================================================
"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."
-J. Krishnamurti
======================================================
"The world is my country, all mankind my brethren,
and to do good is my religion."
-Thomas Paine
======================================================
" . . . it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate,
tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds . . . "
-Samuel Adams
======================================================
"You may never know what results come from your action.
But if you do nothing, there will be no results."
-Gandhi
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