Celebration of Zapatismo

by Gustavo Esteva

EDICIONES BASTA! is an autonomous effort of individuals and organizations of the civil society. A slightly different version of the first section of this pamphlet was published by Multiversity and Citizens International in 2004, to celebrate the 10th and 20th anniversary of the Zapatistas. Translated by Raimundo Esteva. Reviewed by David Kast. Design and layout: Sergio Beltrn. Cover Photo: Kathy Orlinsky. 1st edition: November, 2005. 2nd edition: March, 2008. Reproduction by any means is strictly authorized. We hope that the source will be mentioned.

EDICIONES BASTA! Azucenas 610, Colonia Reforma, C.P. 68050, Oaxaca de Jurez, Oaxaca, Mxico. Phone and Fax: (951) 5133384. E-mail: unitierra@prodigy.net.mx 2

Celebration of Zapatismo
ZAPATISMO IS nowadays the most radical, and perhaps the most important, political initiative in the world. For ten years, the Zapatistas have been continuously exposed to the attention of the public and the media. In fact, as surprising as it may seem to those who insist on forgetting them and periodically burying them, no contemporary political or social movement has attracted public attention as Zapatismo has, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. None. The Zapatista rebellion, Wallerstein wrote, has been the most important social movement in the world, the barometer and alarm clock for other anti-system movements around the world (La Jornada, 19-07-05). News about the Zapatistas appear regularly in the mass media, which tries continually to forget them but is obligated to return them to the front page each time they start an important initiative. The production of texts is incredible. Books containing communiqus and other materials generated directly by the Zapatistas have been published in many languages and already fill many rows of shelves. Books published about the Zapatistas, in dozens of languages, already count in the thousands and could fill a mid-sized library. Articles or essays in magazines and newspapers count hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions. It has literally become impossible to follow all the lines of open debate that circle around Zapatismo. Zapatista communiqus are regularly and appropriately published in a dozen languages and appear the day that they are released on various websites. 3

Mr. Gurra, who acted as Secretary of Commerce in the times of Salinas, once said, in the frenzy of defamatory remarks that overwhelmed government functionaries beginning in 1994, that the Zapatistas were an Internet guerrilla. They were never a guerrilla group, as I will examine below. And it was not they who employed the Internet. The image of Subcomandante Marcos sending communiqus from the jungle by satellite cellphone was always a media invention cooked up with the same disqualifying purpose. A librarian from California began, a few days after the uprising, the tradition of translating the communiqus to circulate them in electronic networks. It was a personal and independent initiative. In a decentralized, autonomous style, wthat to this day characterizes the inner-workings of the web, initiatives of that kind continue to spread, be they personal or collective. The last formal recount that I have news of is from the 9th of March, 2002. Google reported 5,620 pages on the web associated with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. In addition to the pages are the references on the web, which are already beginning to number in the millions. Instead of decreasing, the number of people who maintain those pages increases, and those who consult them even more so. Neither the web nor the texts, however, precisely illustrate the importance and vitality of the movement. The mobilizations directly aroused by Zapatista initiatives, starting with a few thousand at the beginning of 1994, and reaching millions in the consulta of 1996 or the march of 2001, are living proof of the echo that Zapatismo finds among the people. Nor do they sufficiently illustrate its importance. The only way to appreciate it fully would be to arrive directly to the places where Zapatismo has a real existence, which is to say, the communities and neighborhoods, in Mexico and in the rest of the world. No matter how much academics and activists attempt to do so, it has become impossible. There is no longer a way to count. What is interesting is that in searching one always finds something: wherever one lands, even in the most unexpected of places, Zapatismo appears. No one has dared to attribute to the Zapatistas the articulation of the prodigious transnational solidarity networks and the mutual support that have emerged in the last ten years. 4

But only an intolerable blindness, which unfortunately large segments of our political classes seem to suffer, can negate the weight that they have had in their creation, and continue to have as a cause for inspiration. But the Zapatistas continue to be a mystery and a paradox. Can there be such a thing as a revolutionary group with no interest in seizing power? Revolutionary leaders who refuse to hold any public post, now or in the future? An army that fires words and civil disobedience, championing non-violence? An organization profoundly rooted in its local culture with a global scope? A group that is strongly affiliated with democratic principles, and yet is democracys most radical critic? People profoundly rooted in ancient Mayan traditions and yet immersed in contemporary ideas, problems, and technologies? Everything for everyone, nothing for us, a principle daily applied in their initiatives, includes power: they dont want power, even within their own communities, where the powers that be dont dare to interfere. What kind of movement is this? Is it possible to apply to them, to their ideas and practices, conventional or alternative notions of Power or power? Do they fit in the archetypal model of the Prince? The expression national liberation is included in the name they gave to their movement, but they seem to be radically different to the movements for national liberation of the post war era. How to deal with their ideas and practices expressing their radical freedom, their fascinating notion of liberty and liberation? One of the reasons why so many seem to want to forget zapatism, to send it to the past or to reduce it to a few municipalities in Chiapas, is the depth of their radicalism. The Zapatistas challenge in words and deeds every aspect of the contemporary society. In revealing the root cause of the current predicaments, they tear to tatters the framework of the economic society (capitalism), the nation-state, formal democracy and all modern institutions. They also render obsolete conventional ways and practices of social and political movements and initiatives. In reconstructing the world from the bottom up, they reveal the illusory or counterproductive nature of changes conceived or implemented from the top down. Their path encourages everywhere resistance to globalization and neoliberalism, and inspires struggles for liberation. They also contribute to articulate those struggles. 5

In my view, however, there is nothing about the Zapatistas more important their contribution to hope and imagination. The Mahabharata, the sacred book of India, captured a very ancient tradition by putting hope at the beginning of all time. Whence, however, does Hope arise?...Hope is the sheet-anchor of every man. When hope is destroyed, great grief follows which, forsooth, is almost equal to death itselfI think that Hope is bigger than a mountain with all its trees. Or, perhaps, it is bigger than the sky itself. Or perhaps, O King, it is really inmmeasurable. Hope, O Chief of kurus, is highly difficult of being understood and equally difficult of being conquered. Seeing this last attribute of Hope, I ask, what else is so unconquerable as this? (The Mahabharata, Vol. XII, p.186). When hope is destroyed, grief is like your own death Thirty years ago Ivan Illich wrote, towards the end of Deschooling society, the book that made him famous: The Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope. Survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force. (Illich 1996, 105). That is exactly what the Zapatistas have done. In March 1994, answering a child who wrote to them from Baja California, they acknowledged that they were professionals, but not of violence, as the government affirmed. We are professionals of hope, they said. Pan-Dora, the All-Giver, closed the lid of her amphora before Hope could escape. It is time to reclaim it, in the era in which the Promethean ethos threaten to destroy the world and the expectations it generated vanish one after the other. In liberating hope from their intellectual and political prison, the Zapatistas created the possibility of a renaissance, which is now emerging in the net of plural paths they discovered or is daily invented by the imagination they awakened and made brighter. They are still a source of inspiration for those walking along those paths. But they do not pretend to administer or control such a net, which has its own impulses, strength and orientation. We all are, or can be, Zapatistas. Behind our black mask, behind our armed voice, behind our unnamable name, behind what you see of us, behind this, we are 6

you. Behind this, we are the same simple and ordinary men and women who are repeated in all races, painted in all colors, speak in all languages, and live in all places. Behind this, we are the same forgotten men and women, the same excluded, the same intolerated, the same persecuted, the same as you. Behind this, we are you.1 Basta! Enough! At midnight of 1st January 1994, NAFTA the North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the US and Canada came into force. Barely two hours later, thousands of Indians armed with machetes, clubs and a few guns occupied four of the main towns in Chiapas, a Mexicos province bordering Guatemala, and declared war on the Mexican government. The rebels revealed that they were Indians of different ethnic groups calling themselves Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional (EZLN). They appealed for an end to 500 years of oppression and 50 years of development, and expressed the hope that a new political regime would allow them to reclaim their commons and to regenerate their own forms of governance and their art of living and dying. It was time to say Basta! Enough! For ten years, encircled by 50-60 000 troops, a third of the Mexican Army, the Zapatistas have peacefully resisted the war waged against them by the government, which it has tried to hide behind all kinds of peace declarations and behind the unbearable technical euphemism of a low intensity war. The mystery of their condition persists. The controversy about their character never become exhausted. And it becomes polemic, confrontation, when the point is to examine its prospects. At this point, it seems pretty evident what the Zapatistas are not: They are not a fundamentalist or messianic movement. Within their ranks, very different beliefs and religions, most of them
1

Welcoming words by the Comandancia General of EZLN, at the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity against Neoliberalism, spoken by the respected major Ana Mara, on 27th July, 1996. The Zapatistas 1998, 24.

well rooted in their traditions, harmoniously coexist. They are very open and ecumenical in religious matters. They are not an Indigenous or ethnic movement, even if most of them belong to an Indigenous people. They do not reduce the scope of their initiative to Indigenous peoples, to a minority or even less to themselves, to their own claims: Everything for everyone, nothing for us is not a slogan but a political attitude and practice. The Zapatistas are not a nationalist, separatist or autonomist movement. They show no desire for Chiapas to become a small nation-state, an Indigenous republic, or an autonomous administrative district, in line with the demands of minorities in some other countries. They actively resist the modern propensity to subsume local ways of being and cultural differences in the homogenizing treatment given to people classed as minorities in modern societies. Such procedure is usually another way of hiding the discrimination characterizing them and deepening the individualism in which they are based. The Zapatistas are not guerrillas. They are not a fish that swims in the sea of the people, as Che Guevara would define a guerrilla. They are not a revolutionary group looking for popular support to seize power. They were born as the collective decision of hundreds of communities not interested in seizing power. They are the sea, not the fish. This attitude is a continual source of confusion and debate, exposing them to a very intense controversy or rejection. I explore it later in this essay. It seems to be clear what the Zapatistas are not. But, what is what they really are? How to describe and characterize their radical political initiative? Listening while you walk The first fundamental act of the EZLN was to learn how to listen and to speak, say the Zapatistas.2 On the 17th November 1983 a group of six professional revolutionaries arrived in Chiapas to establish a guerrilla centre and
2

Unless indicated otherwise, all the quotations come from the zapatista communiqus of July and August 2003.

base. Their first task was to learn how to survive in the jungle by themselves. After one year, the person later represented as old Antonio discovered them and introduced them to the communities. Their marxist-leninist-guevarist ideology could not permeate their conversations. Your word is too harsh, people kept telling them. The guerrillas square ideas were thus not only dented but so severely damaged that they became unrecognizable. The first Zapatistas say that in this initial confrontation they lost they, those bearing that ideology and that political project, a would-be guerrilla in the Latin American tradition. But out of this intercultural dialogue Zapatismo was born and rooted itself in hundreds of communities. In the following years, these communities tried every legal tool at their disposal, every form of social, economic or political organization. They organized marches, sit-ins, everything. They even walked two thousand kilometers from Chiapas to the capital, Mexico City, in order to find someone to hear their call. No one listened. Not the society and not the government. They were dying like flies. They thus preferred a dignified death to the docile march of sheep to the slaughter. The mountain told us to take up arms so we would have a voice. It told us to cover our faces so we would have a face. It told us to forget our names so we could be named. It told us to protect our past so we would have a future. (The Zapatistas 1998, 22). All they had been left with was their dignity. They affirmed themselves in it, hoping that their sacrifice might awaken society; and that perhaps their children and grandchildren could live a better life. They were the weakest. Nobody was listening. But their uprising was echoed by the civil society, which urged them to try a peaceful and political way. They accepted such a mandate and they made themselves strong in it, changing the form of their struggle. Only 12 days after the armed uprising started, they became the champions of non violence. According to the Zapatistas, after the Dialogue of the Cathedral in March 1994 (frustrated after the assassination of the presidential candidate of the official party) and the elections of that year, they needed to create a different kind of space for dialogue: 9

We needed a space to learn to listen and to speak with this plurality that we call civil society. We agreed then to construct such space and to call it Aguascalientes, since it would be the headquarters of the National Democratic Convention, whose name alluded to the Convention of the Mexican revolutionary forces in the second decade of the 20th Century... On 8th August 1996 commander Tacho, in the name of the Revolutionary Indigenous Clandestine Committee of the EZLN inaugurated, before six thousand people from different parts of the world, the so called Aguascalientes and he delivered it to national and international civil society... But the idea of Aguascalientes was going ms all, beyond. We wanted a space for the dialogue with civil society. And dialogue means also to learn to listen to the other and learning how to speak to him or her. In February 1995, after the frustrated ambush to the Zapatista comandantes prepared by President Zedillo, the army destroyed the Aguascalientes of Guadalupe Tepeyac. A little later other Aguascalientes were born in different Zapatista communities. They served since then many purposes, especially for the relationship with civil society. In December 1995 autonomous municipalities started to be created in the Zapatista area. In them, in spite of the military encirclement and other external pressures, the Zapatistas practiced their autonomy, both within each of the communities constituting every municipality and within each municipality, where the communities organized and controlled a governing council. After a long reflection on these experiences, the Zapatistas introduced important changes in their internal structure and in their ways of relating to civil society. In order to inform about them, burying the Aguascalientes and giving birth to the caracoles (snails, seashells), they held a great celebration from 8th to 10th August 2003. Internally they decided to separate the military structure from the civil organization and to harmonize the activities of the autonomous municipalities in every Zapatista region through Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Councils or Boards of Good Government). These new autonomous bodies were created to take care that in Zapatista territory those that lead, lead by following... In each rebel area there will be a Junta, constituted by 10

one or two delegates of each of the Autonomous Councils (of the municipalities) of the area. The autonomous communities and municipalities will thus continue functioning with their own structure, but now they will also have these Juntas de Buen Gobierno, articulating several municipalities. The Juntas will attend to conflicts and difficulties of the autonomous municipalities within the jurisdiction of each Junta. Anyone feeling that an injustice has been committed in his or her community or municipality, or that things are not being done like they ought to be done, according to the community will and the principle of command by obeying, may have recourse to this new instance. These Juntas will also be in charge of any dealings with civil society and if needed with government agencies. Why call the new political bodies caracoles? (Caracol: conch shell). The Zapatistas offered different explanations. The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are in the shape of a caracol, and that those who have good in their hearts and thoughts walk from one place to the other, awakening gods and men for them to check that the world remains right. For that reason, who keeps vigil while the others are sleeping uses his caracol, and he uses it for many things, but most of all as not to forget. They say here that the most ancient ones said that others before them said that the very first people of these lands held an appreciation for the symbol of the caracol. They say, that they say, that they said that the caracol represents entering into the heart, that this is what the very first ones called knowledge. They say that they say that they said that the caracol also represents exiting from the heart to walk the world, that this is what the very first called life. And not only, they say that they say that they said that with the caracol the community was called together for the word to travel from one to the other and thus accord were born. And also they say that they say that they said that the caracol was a gift for the ear to hear even the most distant words. This they say that they say, that they said. The caracoles will be like doors to enter into the communities and for the communities to come out; like windows to see us inside and also for us to see outside; like loudspeakers in order to send far and wide our word and also to hear the words from the one who 11

is far away. But, most of all, they will remind us that we ought to keep watch and to check uprightness of the worlds that populate the world. At the celebration that buried the Aguascalientes, and birthed the caracoles, the Zapatistas announced that in their territories the Plan Puebla-Panam a neoliberal scheme for Southern Mexico and Central America would not be applied. They proposed instead the Plan La Realidad-Tijuana that consists in linking all the resistances in our country, and reconstructing Mexico from the bottom up. As these highlights of the very complex story of Zapatismo illustrate, the Zapatistas do not enclose themselves in a body of doctrine, in an ideology, which usually starts as a guide to action and ends transmogrified into a rigid and authoritarian straightjacket. They have changed continually, enriching their statements and ways, according with changing circumstances and following their intense interaction with other groups and organizations. They listen, learn from others and apply in each step a healthy self-criticism. Yet this is not mere pragmatism. They continue to be solidly attached to certain principles of behavior and they possess a splendid moral integrity. They also possess the strength of character that emanates from a well rooted, open and hospitable dignity. There are few things more distinctive of the Zapatistas that their capacity to listen...and to change, according to what they heard, operating profound mutations in their movement. What some people see as chameleonic behavior or betrayal to sacred principles or doctrinaire statements, is instead an expression of vitality, flexibility, openness and capacity to change. This is the challenge in describing Zapatismo. You need to allude to the mutations of the subject itself and its attitudes. Desperately Seeking Marcos Many people still insist on reducing Zapatismo to Marcos. This looks like racism. An educated white man is surely manipulating those poor, illiterate Mayas. They cannot say what he is saying and even less conceive such a movement. This looks like racism. But, what about the crowds? In 2001 Subcomandante Marcos and 25 Zapatista commanders traveled to Mexico City. For the first 12

time, millions were able to see and hear them. Time and again the crowds did not allow the other Zapatistas or local Indigenous leaders to speak. Marcos! Marcos! they demanded. No one else. They wanted to listen to him. Were they also racists? In the plaza of Tepatepec, Hidalgo, a new legend started. For two years not a drop of water had fallen in the region. The very minute Marcos started his speech a torrential rain began. Of course, said an old woman; This man is turning our political system upside down. Why shouldnt he command the rain? Was she racist? Or just an innocent searcher looking for hope incarnated in a charismatic leader? And what about the millions collecting the Zapatista communiqus penned by Marcos, his stories, his interviews, his letters? What about the editors publishing with impressive love and care his selected writings? (Subcomandante Marcos 2001) The book, with a Foreword by Saramago, celebrates him as one of the best Latin American writers of all times. Norman Mailer writes, in the cover of that book: Marcos has earned his indignation like few men alive. Are these admirers racists as well? Should we think, alternatively, that the system performed its usual operation and did not wait 30 years to sell Marcos Tshirts? (Benetton offered him one million dollars to include his face in its collection.) Or should we accept the view that he really is the timely savior that the world was waiting for; an icon that globaphobics can now use to express their dissent; the new flag for rebellion in these desperate times? Is Marcos the romantic revolutionary, a living substitute for Che? Is he really an extraordinary leader, as wise as he is heroic, awakening us out of confusion and conformity, and thus deserving trust and subordination? No doubt, the person behind the mask is extraordinary. Who can deny his literary talent? Even the very anti-Zapatista Nobel Prize winner, Octavio Paz, recognized it. No one can question his political savvy. Loved and hated by many people, Marcos, like the Zapatistas, remains a mystery and a paradox, a puzzle. Does he really fit into the image of a new revolutionary archetype? Unquestionably, he has charisma. He enchants both the crowds and his readers. But, is he really a leader, romantic or not? And even more pertinent to the point, is he the very core of Zapatismo, as Mao was for Maoism and Che for Guevarism? Is this particular poet-writer-strategist-rebel-revolutionary what many of his followers and readers seem to assume him to be? 13

During the Zapatista March to Mexico City, Marcos experienced for the first time his mesmerizing impact on the crowds. The phenomenon is in fact mysterious. He speaks in a very low voice, without exaltation, mocking himself all the time, always ending in an anti-climactic way his speeches. He looks as the opposite of any leader or demagogue. In person, it becomes very evident how much he abhors a power position. Would this be the secret of his fascination for an audience tired of the rhetoric and attitudes of politicians and publicists? Anyway, he candidly declared afterwards that the Zapatistas did not foresee this problem. Marcos became their spokesperson by accident, at the beginning of the uprising. Observing his effectiveness, they used him extensively in that role. The mask used to avoid personality cult, became counterproductive. His transformation into an iconic image took them by surprise. I do not want to minimize his role as a spokesperson. It has been critical to overcome one of the main challenges for the Zapatistas. Fully rooted in their own culture, they were keenly aware that their radical otherness was an obstacle to convey to others the spirit and meaning of their movement, without betraying their unique view of the world. How to avoid misinterpretation? How to be truthful without colonizing others with their brand of truth? How to share an attitude whose global scope derived from its deep cultural rootedness in Chiapas? Few Zapatistas are proficient in Spanish; none, but Marcos, masters it. But the challenge for effective interaction was not only a question of language. It was associated with the very conception and orientation of the movement, whose radical novelty comes from both its ancient cultural roots and its contemporary innovations. Their views, fully immersed in their own cultures, seemed impenetrable for people of other cultures. Their political stance, strictly contemporary, was conceived outside the modern political spectrum. It has no clear precedents. There were no words to talk about it. This challenge was evident since the uprising started. The Zapatistas needed to draw a line to differentiate themselves from other armed movements in Latin America, the narco-guerrillas, and classic peasant rebellions. Through very effective images, using both ordinary language and the epic tone of some predecessors, they appealed to peoples imagination. Many analysts took the document with which they introduced themselves for a 14

delirious and politically insane declaration. Instead, the people received it a sign of hope, inspiring and awaking them. In a matter of hours the Zapatistas established themselves in a new domain, outside the spectrum of classifications that scholars, analysts and reactionaries would try to pigeon hole them in. After ten years of clandestineness, well trained in the intercultural dialogue through which Zapatismo was born, the Zapatistas and Marcos himself discovered his function as a cultural bridge, in order to open a dialogue with civil society and spread the contagion of dignity and hope. Instead of a cold, abstract ideology, frozen in seductive slogans, Marcos used images, stories, metaphors and characters like Durito and old Antonio. He was not selling any political code or ideology to plug everyone into. In this way, his masked voice became the voice of many voices. Marcos himself explained the futility for scientists and the police of speculating over who is behind the criminal nose and ski mask (Gilly et al. 1995, Marcos 2001, 249). The Zapatistas show themselves by hiding and hide by showing themselves. They are the face that hides itself to be seen, the name that hides itself to be named. It is futile to look both for the individual author of plans and conceptions, or for the real individual self behind the nosed ski mask. Marcos, born on January 1st 1994, will soon vanish. It will no longer be needed; it will not, like Cid or Che, win battles after death; it will not be used as a credential legitimizing power. Today, the Zapatistas are a source of inspiration, not of guidance. Zapatismo escapes all isms. They do not ask the people to affiliate themselves to a church, a party, an ideology, a political strategy or plan. They inspire dignity, courage and self-respect. They nourish with their moral strength and political imagination non-violent initiatives against neoliberalism and globalization. Both the system and its discontents use Marcos. By criminalizing or idealizing the individual behind the mask, they dissipate precisely what they try to take hold of. They are thus unable to see with new eyes the Zapatistas radical stance. Many others, however, derive continual inspiration from them. They do not need to desperately seek Marcos and idolize him. They know that we all are Marcos, in our own way and place, with our own face and dignity, in our own struggle. As the participants in the Zapatista Encuentro of 1996 declared, 15

The rebels search each other out. They walk towards one anotherThey begin to recognize themselvesand continue on their fatiguing walk, walking as is now necessary to walk, that is to say, struggling(The Zapatistas 1998, 43). In the literature generated by the Zapatistas, through their spokesperson, allusions to legends and stories often appear. Don Durito de la Lacandona, an audacious and enlightened beetle who gives contemporary meaning to Don Quixote (the Subcomandante would be his Sancho Panza), was a memorable literary creation for Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize. The fictional encounters with old Antonio allow us to follow, through his stories and allegories, the threads of Indigenous communal wisdom. They operate as a bridge that allows the urban modern mentality, more or less westernized, to take a look at the mystery of alternative worldviews which are beyond its conceptual system. One advantage of a bridge is that it allows walking in both directions. There is something more. Certain things can only be said poetically. Sometimes, you need to tell them that way to prevent their immediate transmogrification by the media. Other times because there is no other way to tell them: as the dialogue among cultures require to transcend the logos of the parties in dialogue and their corresponding conceptual systems, only poetry, appealing to the heart more than to the mind, can construct an intercultural bridge which can be crossed by everyone. Finally, as conventional words and formal categories are increasingly opaque; as the dominant discourse to which they belong prevent to see the reality, instead of illuminating it; as the novelty of what you want to say escape from all the available theoretical frameworks, to tell it poetically can be the only option. From the arguments you can only derive conclusions, Illich used to say; only stories make sense. Of course, you need to be aware that, as the American poet Robert Duncan has observed, Time and time again men have chickened out in the fear of what the genius of poetry demands of them. Poetry was brought to heel and made obedient to the criteria of rational discourse and its old role as a vehicle of vision and prophesy suppressed. For Duncan, 16

if a poet is not a seer, he or she is not a poet. (Simic 2004, 18). A prophet is not someone with a crystal ball to fortune telling or a geomantic, but a person perceiving lucidly and in depth the present, and thus capable of anticipating possibility, trends, openings. In order to share with others what the Zapatistas thought, felt and were doing, there was no other way but poetry, in any of its forms. And this is what Marcos contributed to prepare, although he was not the only poet in the group. Walking at the pace of the slowest All the revolutionary vanguards are obsessively focused on keeping their position of leadership and command. They must be at the top and control, by all means, the masses. And they always are in a rush. They have to be the first to arrive in the Promised Land, which usually means seizing Power. Once in Power, they think, they will be able to lead the people in the realization of their revolutionary project. The Zapatistas are instead focused on seeking consensus and walking at the pace of the slowest. No important political decision is taken by a small group of leaders. As a consequence, the decision process is slow and complex. It requires long and convoluted forms of discussion and consultation. They do not speed it up through the method of voting, which always leaves a balance of winners and losers, majorities and minorities. And the march itself, walking the consensual path, is unavoidably slow. Such search for consensus rejects the assumption of homogeneity in the understanding of social subjects or issues, as well as in the basic attitudes of the assembled people, implicit in conventional democratic consensus. The ballot box for referenda, plebiscite and elections are not only exposed to manipulation and control; they are also based on the assumption that everyone shares a common understanding of the matters to be voted for and that the voters also share some basic attitudes determining the democratic consensus constructed through their votes. Fully aware of the many differences in the plurality of interests, perceptions, attitudes and voices of the real world, the Zapatistas try to identify by consensus the paths to be walked. And in walking them, once agreed upon by everyone, they adjust the pace of the walk to those lagging behind. The slowest, on 17

their part, have been accelerating their pace, as they see the institutional roof falling over them. At the same time, while walking that path, the Zapatistas are resorting to legal and political procedures, in order to construct another level of consensus. They seem convinced that those procedures, structurally embedded one to the other, constitute and express the forms of freedom throughout history. This would be one of the many paradoxes defining Zapatismo. They reject voting in critical decisions, for consensus to be slowly forged in each of their communities and regions, and periodically explore possible consensus, at a wider scale, through procedures using the vote, whose results are affirmed and ratified or denied and rectified when they reach the communities. This is not a contradiction. The two forms nourish and complement each other in their interplay. I explore this aspect in the appendix. The Zapatistas insist that they are rebels, not revolutionaries. Perhaps they are right. The true revolutionaries would be those ordinary men and women whose dignified rebellion, often inspired by the Zapatistas, would be producing a radical change at the grassroots. Such a change has not yet crystallized in enduring institutions, but seems to have very solid foundations. It is perhaps the first social revolution of the XXI century: the revolution of the new commons (Esteva and Prakash 1998, Esteva 2000). Democracy? Presence and representation During their First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, in July-August, 1996, Subcomandante Marcos explained, in an informal intervention, the attitude of the Zapatistas about power when they were preparing the uprising: We thought that we needed to reformulate the question of power. We will not repeat the formula that to change the world you need to seize power, and once in power you will organize it the way it is the best for the world, that is, what is the best for me, because I am in power. We thought that if we conceived a change in the premise of the question of power, arguing that we did not want to take it, this would produce a different form of politics, another kind of politicians, other human beings who could make politics very different to the one practiced by the politicians we suffer today along the whole political spectrum. (EZLN 1996, 69). 18

On 1st January, 1996, in their 4th Declaration of Selva Lacandona, the Zapatistas invited everyone to explore at the local level what the people can do without political parties and the government. For the Zapatistas, the question is not who is in Power, or how any person, group or party got a power position (through elections or other means), but the very nature of the power system. In distancing themselves from the guerrilla tradition, the Zapatistas observed that it always postponed the question of peoples position and role. There is an oppressive power which up there decides in the name of the society, and a group of visionaries decides to conduct the country through the right path and ousts the group in power, seize it and also decides in the name of the society. For us that is a struggle of hegemonies It is not possible to rebuild the world, the society, or the nation states currently destroyed, through a dispute around who will impose its hegemony on the society. (Subcomandante Marcos, in interview with Garca Mrquez, March 2001, in Lopes 2004). Everybody begins to recognize that the electoral procedures require everywhere a profound and complete reform, in order to give back to them credibility and legitimacy. The Zapatistas do not believe that those reforms will be enough to address the problems embedded in the very structure of the democratic nation-state. They do not think that the needed changes should, or can, come from above. They think instead that those changes can only be realized with the transformation of the society by itself, from within, in peoples social fabric in communities, barrios, municipalities. Democracy, in fact, can only be where the people are, and not up there at the top of the institutions, no matter how perfect the procedures to elect representatives who will shape and operate those institutions could be. Instead of putting their trust in the constituted powers, whose legitimacy they question, the Zapatistas deposit their hope in the constituent force, the force constituting the constituted powers, the one that can give, or not, life, meaning and substance to them. Zapatismo has been, from the very beginning, an open appeal to this constituent force of the society, an invitation to those forming it to directly and consciously deal with social transformation, not through their supposed representatives. 19

It is increasingly evident, everywhere, that the constituted powers are not respecting peoples will. The voices of 30 million people, for example, occupying the streets everywhere on February 15th 2003, attempting to stop the war in the Middle East, were not heard. This situation generates increasing disenchantment with formal democracy. It produces a feeling of impotence. Many people react with apathy, indifference, even desperation. Both to vote, or to abandon the ballot box, may be useless or counterproductive. The Zapatistas created an alternative path a political force, instead of a political party, which transforms social and political reality at the grassroots and can enclose and corner the enclosers, the powers that be now enclosing and cornering the people; a force which can control and surround the constituted powers until it becomes possible to substitute them for really democratic institutional mechanisms in a new political regime. The Zapatistas know very well that their current struggle occurs within the legal and political framework of the Mexican State. They do not live in Mars. But they are not trapped in the perverse illusion that the State is the only general political reality or a privileged form of political activity. They recover the conviction that politics is a commitment to the common good, as expressed in common sense, the sense held in the community. They take away from the State and the market the function of defining the good life and reclaim it as a faculty of civil society, i.e. the people. Far from seeing the State as the unique or privileged political horizon, they perceive it as a structure of domination which should be marginalized and dissolved. The Zapatistas are fully aware of the current debate about the situation and prospects of the nation-state itself. They observe that this modern invention, within which the economic society was organized and promoted in both capitalist and socialist forms, is now exposed to a two-pronged attack by transnational forces and institutions, or by internal groups with ethnic, religious or ideological claims. They know that some experts consider that such attack would be dissolving the nation states, whose time came to an end when they surrendered their real power and their legal faculties to private corporations. Some other experts think that the nation states are stronger than ever and should fulfill more than ever their police function, to control peoples resistance and rebellion. Most of the analysts rec20

ognize that the nation states can no longer administer the national economy, until recently their main function, because all economies have been transnationalized and no macronational structure, like the OMC, can be substitute for the states in that function. While some see in this fact the beginning of the end of the nation state, as a political regime, some others consider that what is needed is to reinforce the nation states, for them to be able to control those increasingly opposed to the new global disorder. Still some others, in the left, retake their statist traditions and demand to rebuild the State and its national sovereignty, for it to fulfill the function of transformation and redistribution. As many other groups, everywhere, The Zapatistas seem clearly interested in the different notions of nation and state, abandoned after the creation of the nation-state, which different groups are now reclaiming. They appreciate the efforts attempting to transform the homogeneous state (monocultural or multicultural) into a plural state, according to diverse conceptions. But they have not committed their will or their discourse to any specific political design, suggested as a substitute for the democratic nation-state. They seem convinced that society as a whole (the general design of a society) is always the outcome of a multiplicity of initiatives, forces, and impulses not the fruit of social engineering or theoretical designs. They appeal to sociological and political imagination, while emphasizing that what is really needed is the full participation of everyone, particularly those until now excluded, in the concepts and practices that will give a new shape to the society and its political regime. In their own regions, where they are in control, the Zapatistas seem to be clearing a path in which democracy means presence, rather than representation. Beyond both universalism and relativism The idea of One World is an old western dream, project and design, whose origins can be traced back to the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Apostle Paul. Ever since the apostle Paul had shattered the validity of worldly distinctions in the face of Gods gift of salvation, it had become thinkable to conceive of all humans as standing on the same plane. The Enlightenment secularized this heritage and turned it 21

into a humanist creed. Neither class nor sex, neither religion nor race count before human nature, as they didnt count before God. Thus the universality of the Sonship of God was recast as the universality of human dignity. From then on, humanity became the common denominator uniting all peoples, causing differences in skin color, beliefs and social customs to decline in significance. (Sachs 1992, 103). Accepting the assumption that there is a fundamental sameness in all human beings, the construction of One World was adopted in the West as a moral obligation. It became a destructive and colonizing adventure attempting to absorb and dissolve, in the same movement, all the different traditions and forms of existence on this planet. This old project, supported by all the forms of the cross and the sword, is now carried on under the US hegemony. At the end of the Second World War, such hegemony used the emblem of development (Esteva 1992). At the end of the cold war, when the myth of development was a frayed flag, a new emblem was introduced. Under the cloak of globalization an almost universal culturicide is currently promoted, with more violence than ever, often with a genocidal character. The current global project is economic in nature: it attempts the transmogrification of every man and women on Earth into homo economicus, the possessive and competitive individual born in the West, who is the social foundation of capitalism (and socialism), what makes possible the social relationships defining it. This economic project has a political face: formal or representative democracy. And a moral or ethical face: human rights. (When the economic project requires it, these faces are abandoned). (Esteva and Prakash 1998). Enough! said the Zapatistas to all this. For centuries, their communities entrenched themselves in their own places, resisting colonizers and developers. Such cultural resistance often expressed forms of localism or even fundamentalism. Through atrocious experiences, the Zapatista communities learned that in the era of globalization no localism will survive and no cultural resistance is enough. They also learned that capital has now more appetite than ever, but not enough stomach to digest all those that it attempts to control. Millions of people, as a consequence, and clearly most Indigenous people, are becoming dispensable. 22

The Zapatistas transformed their resistance into a struggle for liberation. They remembered the experience of Emiliano Zapata, who gave them their name. In 1914, when the peasant and Indigenous armies occupied Mexicos capital, after the defeat of the dictatorship bringing them to extinction, Zapata and Villa, the two main leaders of the revolution, fell into perplexity. Their uprising was not to seize power and govern the country. They wanted Land and Freedom. They thus came back to their own places, dismantled the haciendas of the big landowners exploiting them and started to enjoy the land and freedom they conquered through their struggle. Four years later, both of them were assassinated. True, thanks to the revolution most peasants and Indigenous people got some land, but step by step they lost freedom and autonomy in the political regime established after the armed struggle. Todays Zapatistas, as the former, are not interested in seizing power and governing the country. But they learned the lesson of their predecessors. They are clearly interested in the kind of regime to be established in the country. It should permanently and fully respect their land, their autonomy, they freedom, their radical democracy. They do not attempt to impose on others their own conceptions and ways. They only hope that such a regime would be really conceived and constructed by all Mexicans not only a few, not only the elite or a revolutionary vanguard. And that such a regime can be defined by the harmonious coexistence of different peoples and cultures. This position challenges the assumption that there is a fundamental sameness in all human beings. There are human invariants what distinguishes us from other species but not cultural universals: each culture perceives and conceives the world and even those invariants in a different way. This radical rejection of all forms of universalism does not imply to surrender to the risky adventure of cultural relativism. It assumes instead, firmly and courageously, cultural relativity; the fact that no person or culture can assume or resume the totality of human experience; that there are not one or many truths (truth is incommensurable); that the only legitimate, coherent and sensible attitude before the real plurality of the world is radical pluralism (See Panikkar 1995, 1996, and Vachon 1995). The Zapatistas resisted the secular, liberal temptation, of liberating themselves from their own culture in order to adopt 23

some universal ideologies or values. Well affirmed in their own cultures and communities, they opened themselves to wide coalitions of the discontented. Their localization is thus radically different to both globalization and localism. It invites those still searching for a change in the frame of One World to create a whole new world, in which many worlds can be embraced. It is an invitation to go ms all (beyond) mere cultural resistance or economic or political claims (in a struggle for a bigger piece of the existing cake), towards an epic of transformation open to many cultures. It is an invitation, not preaching or instructing. It is not a sermon or a lesson, but a gesture. The Zapatistas are fully aware that in the current situation any local reality is directly and immediately global, in the sense that it is exposed to interaction with global forces and processes. To be deeply immersed in strictly local affairs, to rigorously deal and cope with them, in the way everyone wants and can do, implies dealing with the intertwining, interpenetration and interdependence of all localities. This kind of awareness has compelled many of the discontented with the neoliberal shape of the global project to conceive alternative globalizations. The Zapatistas resist such temptation. They are fully and deeply committed with the articulation of all resistances, with wide coalitions of the discontented, with the gathering of all rebellions. But they do not attempt to subsume all the struggles in a single definition of the present and the future, in a single doctrine, slogan or ideology. They are aware that the shared construction of a real por-venir (the world to come) for all those discontented, increasingly dispensable for capital, can only be realized in a world in which many worlds can be embraced. They know that the time has come to bury for ever the dream and project of constructing One World , which has been the pretext of all colonialisms and today nourishes forms of fundamentalism whose level of violence has no precedents. What is emerging, instead, can be expressed in the formula One No, Many Yeses (Midnight Notes 1997, Kingsnorth 2003). Zapatistas and Zapatismo The record of the Zapatista impact until now is pretty impressive.

24

The Zapatistas were a decisive factor in the dismantling of the oldest authoritarian regime in the world, Mexicos ancient rgime. They created a political option before what looked as the dead end of globalization. The situation in Chiapas changed dramatically; thousand of peasants, mostly Indigenous, got the land they have been struggling for and a new balance of political forces is redefining the social fabric in that state. In the territories occupied by the Zapatistas, in spite of military encirclement and continual paramilitary threats, they have been doing what they said from the very beginning that they wanted to do: after reclaiming their commons, they are regenerating their own forms of governance and their art of living and dying. They have been able to operate autonomously, improving their living conditions, without any kind of services or funds from the government. They are in fact living beyond the logic of the market and the State, beyond the logic of capital, within a new social fabric. This does not imply, of course, to have escaped from the capitalist social fabric defining Mexico and the world, whose dismantling requires to weave another social and political fabric, as the Sixth Declaration of Selva Lacandona states. Thanks to the Zapatistas, autonomous municipalities flourishing in different parts of Mexico have now increasing visibility and political space. Daily attitudes exhibiting Zapatista signs are proliferating. The convening power of the Zapatistas grew from the few thousands of the first week of 1994, to the 3-4 millions for the national and international consultation of 1996, to the more than 40 million (40% of Mexican population), for the 2001 March. All over the world, there are gestures, changes, mobilizations, that seem to be inspired by the Zapatistas. The highly visible social movements against globalization, neoliberalism, or war, quote the Zapatistas as source of inspiration and support them. Thousand of committees, which call themselves Zapatista committees, operate across the world. They were founded as an expression of solidarity with the Zapatista cause. They are still ready to offer such solidarity and some of them are actively engaged in doing something with or for the Zapatistas. Most of them are rather 25

involved in local or issue struggles: for their own dreams, projects, initiatives, or against a specific or general development or injustice: a dam, a road, a dumping ground, a McDonalds... or a war, a policy, a government... One must go back very far in history to find another political initiative with similar global repercussions. As the Zapatistas themselves already noted, what today looks as Zapatismo, walks as Zapatismo, speaks as Zapatismo and everything allows to think that is Zapatismo, is no longer in the hands of the Zapatistas. The beginningor the end? While the Zapatistas affirm today that Zapatismo is stronger than ever, the political classes, the media, many analysts, even some sympathizers, are beginning to consider that the Zapatistas are history. Parallel to the extensive celebrations organized around the world for their 10th and 20th anniversary, there were many attempts to organize their funeral. It was said that they failed as a social and political movement. That far for an improvement, the material conditions of the Zapatista communities have deteriorated under their leadership and control. That the Zapatistas are now increasingly isolated in four municipalities in Chiapas, and are basically irrelevant in the national or international political scene. The Zapatistas have frequently used a very noisy strategy of silence which usually generates wide bewilderment, and suspicions about their political death. They have radically abandoned the conventional political arena. They openly reject all political parties and refuse to have any contact with the government, both for its services or funds which they reject or for a dialogue since the government has not honored its word and signature in the Accords of San Andrs.3 They refuse to participate in the electoral process. All these elements contribute to explain the conventional, reactionary or even sympathetic perception that the Zapatistas are history, that the peak of their movement and initiatives is over.
3

The Zapatistas and the Federal Goverment signed these Accords on February 16, 1996, after a complex negotiation on Indigenous Rights.

26

Twenty years is very little. More is needed, said recently mayor Moiss, one of the best known Zapatistas. Comandante Abraham was more explicit: 20 years have thus elapsed. But we are just beginning. 20 and ten, says Subcomandante Marcos, and those that will come (Muoz 2003, 77). An illusion? The victory of optimism over reality? Are we in the initial phase of Zapatismo or its time is over, it is history and the Zapatista municipalities will decay until their extinction? The depth of the radicality of the Zapatistas, and at the same time their amazing restraint, make it particularly difficult to appreciate their situation and prospects. But it is not impossible to characterize the meaning of their struggle and its impact during the first 10/20 years of its existence. Words are windows of perception, matter of thought. Depending upon the words we use, we see, we think, we act. They form the statements with which we govern ourselves and others. Words always enfleshed in their behavior have been the main weapon of the Zapatistas. Using brilliantly and effectively their words, they have been dismantling the dominant discourse. They continually undermine the institutional system of production of the dominant statements, of the established truth. They thus shake, peacefully and democratically, the very foundation of the existing Power/Knowledge system. While this system hides within spectacular shows of strength its increasing fragility, the Zapatistas exploits for their struggle its profound cracks, denounce it as a structure of domination and control, and begin the construction of an alternative. The importance of Zapatismo derives from its grassroots radicality. (Esteva and Prakash 1998). It operates as a riverbed for the flow of growing discontent with conventional organizations, political parties, and governments, particularly to resist the neoliberal globalization as the current form of capital expansion. The Zapatistas opposed globalization when it was universally perceived as an ineluctable reality, a necessary path, a historical fact. By revealing, before anyone else, that the emperor had no clothes, the Zapatistas awakened those intuiting the situation and yet not daring to recognize it. In showing an alternative, they created an opportunity to escape from the intellectual and political straitjacket in which the dominant truths had trapped us. 27

The radical promise of the Zapatistas is not a new ideological construction of possible futures. It is continually selffulfilled in their deeds, in their daily behavior, as a redefinition of hope. Their position is not equivalent to expectation, as the conviction that something will turn out well. It expresses the conviction that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. Hope is that rejection of conformity and defeat (The Zapatistas 1998, 13). Its name is also dignity, Dignity is that nation without nationality, that rainbow that is also a bridge, that murmur of the heart no matter what blood lives it, that rebel irreverence that mocks borders, customs, and wars. (The Zapatistas 1998, 13) They are fully aware that the expanding dignity of each man and each human relationship must necessarily challenge existing systems (Illich 1972, 18). Their localization is a feasible and effective alternative to both localism and globalization. Their autonomy challenges the centralism of the state, marginalizes the economy and resists modern and capitalist individualization promoted by both internal and external colonizers. Rooted in their dignity, the Zapatistas have been erecting some landmarks and signposts in what looks as a net of plural paths (Zapatismo). Whoever walks by these paths can see, with the diffuse and intense quality of a rainbow, a large range of political perspectives that herald a new social order, beyond both modernity and post modernity (Esteva and Prakash 1998), beyond the economic society (be it capitalist or socialist), beyond formal democracy and the nation state. Ms all (beyond) the current conditions of the world and their intellectual, ideological and institutional underpinnings. The Zapatistas are one in a kind, and at the same time typical. They are ordinary men and women with an extraordinary behavior. They are still mystery and paradox, as the grassroots epic now running around the world. The Zapatistas are no longer the Zapatismo circulating in the world. At the Intercontinental Encounter against Neoliberalism in 1996, the Zapatistas told to all the participants that they were 28

not together to change the world, something quite difficult if not impossible, but to create a whole new world. The phrase was received with fascination and enthusiasm... but also skepticism: it appeared unfeasible and romantic. Step by step, however, as soon as many people started to escape from the dominant intellectual and ideological straightjackets, they discovered in themselves a dignity similar to that of the Zapatistas and started to walk their own path. Todays Zapatismo is no longer in the hands of the Zapatistas. And those daily reinventing it may ignore that the Zapatista initiatives are their original or current source of inspiration. The transition to hope I was talking with doa Trinidad, a magnificent old woman of Morelia, one of the Zapatista communities most affected and harassed by both the military and the paramilitary. I wanted to know how they were feeling in such difficult conditions. She told me, smiling: We are still hungry. We are still threatened and harassed. But now we have hope. And that changes everything. I can imagine the terrible feeling of living under such atrocious oppression and thinking that your children and grandchildren will continue suffering it. If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, if you can nourish some hope, restrictions become bearable and life livable... The Zapatistas have brought prosperity to the communities, if we reclaim the original meaning of the word: from the Latin pro spere, according to hope. In tzeltal, wisdom is to have in your heart the strength to wait. For ten years they have organized their own life with no dependence from the State, whose services, proposals, programs or projects they reject, and they have kept the market at their margin, instead of hanging from it their very existence. They are still dealing with too many restrictions, none of which is a novelty for them. But they have found the path that allows them to overcome one by one of those restrictions, as they walk their path. Hope is the very essence of popular movements (Lummis 1996). Nonconformity and discontent are not enough. Neither is enough critical awareness. People mobilize themselves when they think that their action may bring about a change, when they have hope. 29

And hope, as Vaclav Havel used to say, is not the conviction that something will happen, but that something makes sense, whatever happens. San Pablo Etla, January 1st 2004

30

Postscript: The Other Campaign

A LOT OF WATER has passed under the bridge in the two years since I first wrote these notes. Among the Zapatistas, the consolidation of their new social and political fabric allowed giving to their insurrection the new form that they proclaimed in the 6th Declaration of the Selva Lacandona on the last day of the 6 th month of 2005. Within Mexico and the world, the unabating and deepening breakdown of the political classes and the dominant institutions created dangers and opportunities without precedent. The experience of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno The report the Zapatistas presented in August, 2004, on the operation of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno confirmed their usual style: they say what they do and they do what they say. It also revealed the impressive progress they have achieved in the tasks they set for themselves and the no less impressive obstacles they face. Above all, the Juntas are proof that Zapatismo doesnt pretend to hegemonize or homogenize the world in which we live in either its ideas or its methods. What they have been doing is proof that in the Zapatista lands there is no aim to pulverize the Mexican nation. On the contrary, it is here that the possibility of its reconstruction is being born. (La Jornada, 23-08-04). Indeed, the Zapatistas know that the constituted powers wont fulfill the San Andres Accords. Through their implementation in the Zapatista area the Zapatistas offer valid proofs that they dont produce the negative impacts which were used as pretext for the constitutional counter-reform. Though its those same 31

powers-that-be that havent fulfilled their commitments, civil society is also at fault for not putting enough pressure on them. Given the continually increasing number of Zapatista initiatives, which are always autonomous, it is not always possible to determine their precise make-up. Are they only old wine in new bottles or radically new ideas in old wrappings? I dont know if they are learning by the independent means of trial and error the old path of development and therefore will soon need to redirect their path, or if in reality they have also reclaimed verbs, instead of nouns, and only by inertia are keeping the conventional packaging. Education and health, for example, are words alluding to a bureaucratic and professional system, public or private, that creates dependence and subordination and is generally counterproductive: schools in the educational system produce ignorance; conventional medical care produces ill health. I have the impression that among the Zapatistas learning is more important than education and healing is more important than health. If you use verbs instead of nouns, you recover the initiative and break all dependence. No one can learn or heal for another and this attitude, of taking charge of learning instead of being educated, or of healing instead of being cured, clearly corresponds with the continuous exercise of dignity and autonomy that characterizes the Zapatistas. What appears time and again in their practice, when one observes them closely, is the rebellious autonomy that doesnt yield or subordinate itself to intellectual, ideological, institutional or material straightjackets, though it may sometimes cover its initiatives under the mantel of conventional terms. All said and done, as the Junta de Buen Gobierno of the Chiapas Highlands observed during the celebration of the first year of the Caracoles, its all about not being afraid of continuing to create autonomy, because the indigenous villages should organize themselves and govern themselves, according to their own ways of thinking and understanding, according to their interests, taking into account their cultures and traditions. (La Jornada, 10-08-04). Its Zapatismo, say the Zapatistas, that communities make their decisions at odds with the dominant regime. 32

Ours is not a liberated territory nor a utopian commune. Neither is it the experimental laboratory of an absurdity or a paradise for an orphaned left. Its a rebellious territory in resistance. (La Jornada, 2-10-04). The Lacandona Commune, observes Luis Hernndez, is not a regime, but a practicea laboratory of new social relations[that] recovers old aspirations of the movements for self-emancipation: liberation should be the work of those it benefits, there oughtnt be authorities over the people, the subjects of the social order must have full decision making capacity over their destinies. Their existence isnt the expression of a moral nostalgia, but the living expression of a new politics. (La Jornada 79-04). In their own way, as usual, the Zapatistas continue to test the speed of dreams, with a liberating spirit, accompanied from time to time by those who come to learn and collaborate with them. In the period of the report of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno these others came from 43 countries and many regions of Mexico. The experience of what they are doing does not adequately fit the terms that we use. The Zapatista practices continue ancient traditions but at the same time they constitute a radical newness that is strictly contemporary. The idea of government clearly implies people governing and people being governed, the division of society into these two classes of people within the hollow of an oppressive regime. It assumes a conjunction of institutional mechanisms by which the governors are able to control the governed. Perhaps for this reason, many indigenous communities dont use those terms to describe their own authorities who dont have those same characteristics. They only use these terms to allude to officials or institutions of the government, at any level, which they always view as alien, imposing, and oppressive. In calling their new organs of expression for the collective will, Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Boards of Good Government), the Zapatistas implicitly denounce the Mal Gobierno (bad government) of the dominant structure, but perhaps a new name will need to be invented to express exactly what it means to order while obeying (mandar obedeciendo) that the governed govern and what specific 33

color is taken by the hope that appears in the differentiated names that the communities give to each Junta. The June Jolts In June, 2005, after the joyous announcement of the game with Inter4, which brought them back to the front page of the news, the Zapatistas gave two jolts to the world. The first was the coarse rebuff, simple and crude, of all the presidential candidates and parties. The main jolt came later, with the red alert, when it was announced that all authorities had been evacuated from all Zapatista communities and the Zapatistas liberated all those accompanying them from any responsability about their future actions, while the Defense Ministry announced the destruction of thousands of hectares of poppy plants in the area of influence of the Zapatistas.5 Friends and enemies alike thought that fighting would once again break out. The Zapatistas quickly prescribed a pill of tranquility by reiterating that they would not use weapons with offensive intent. They explained that the evacuation operation had been organized to protect their people while they undertook a consultation on a political initiative that could possibly endanger everything they had achieved up to that time. Those who have closely followed the evolution of the Zapatistas and havent allowed themselves to be distracted by the circus of the approaching presidential succession know that these surprises of June arent such big surprises at all. They are derived from a long process of consolidation of political options in the Selva Lacandona, which included a broad restructuring and continued analysis of the current context, which is characterized by an ever increasing and general breakdown of the political classes. The three constitutional powers as well as the political parties deteriorate continually. The spectacle is pathetic and painful, not so much because there are many things worth saving in every4

The Zapatistas informed about their correspondence with the famous soccer team, of Milan, to organize a tournament or at least a game between that team and the Zapatista team. 5 The Zapatistas, after collective decisions taken autonomously in their communities dont allow the use of alcohol or drugs in their territory and even less the cultivation of them.

34

thing that is being broken down, but because of the consequences of the mess. Since August, 2004, the Zapatistas have called for attentive observation of what is going on. The relentless and frenzied dismantling of the nation state, driven by a political class lacking professional capacities and decency (clearly accompanied in no few occasions by some of the media and all of the juridical system), will result in a chaotic nightmare that not even primetime shows of suspense and terror could equal. (La Jornada, 20-08-04) It is not an encouraging perspective, nor the breeding ground of a revolution. It is not about a necessary and sensible transformation for the progressive substitution of broken or useless parts in an obsolete machine. It is a turbulent and tense process in which the fragments of what used to be the Mexican political system try clumsily and uselessly to express themselves anew; or fight among themselves, clumsily and endlessly, guided by an eagerness to be rid of their rivals on a path which only in the illusions of those involved is an upward path. In fact, it has all the aspects of approaching a precipice toward which all other nation states as well are heading, each one in its own way. With a peculiar humor, in the communiqu that produced the first jolt in June, subcomandante Marcos recalled the context: the war created by capitalism in the era of neoliberal globalization, what the Zapatistas have called the Fourth World War. Amidst the rubble produced in this war of re-conquest lies the economic base, the material base, of the traditional nationstateThe tools and forms of traditional dominance have also been destroyed or severely crippled The destruction thus also reaches the traditional political classes. (June 20th) Through the communiqu the Zapatistas drew a line. They showed how electoral marketing pressures all the parties and candidates to accommodate themselves within the ideological center. They outlined the characteristics of each party and then felt it necessary to define themselves. Up there, they denounced, indecency, impudence, cynicism, and shamelessness ruleWe feel rage and indignation seeing what we see, and we will fight to 35

prevent these shameless people from getting their way. For it is the hour to begin to fight so that all those up there that scorn history and despise us will bear their reckoning and pay their dues. No one was surprised at the distance the Zapatistas took in relation to the PAN or the PRI, but the communiqu distressed those within or near the ranks of the PRD who nurtured hopes that the Zapatistas would fall in line with the campaign of their candidate or would at least leave him in peace. The strength and virulence of the negation bothered them particularly. The political classes and almost all the media adopted an elitist and dogmatic attitude towards the Sexta and showed racism, ignorance and nearsightedness. Although by so doing they involuntarily justified the Zapatistas, they thus made clear the magnitude of the risks the Zapatistas are taking. They are aware based on their experience that the political classes may manufacture any kind of outrage, including one that may endanger everything the Zapatistas have achieved up till now, if and when they feel the Zapatistas action as a threat. While the first jolt persists, extends and deepens, the second finished in Zapatista style, with celebration at the lift of the red alert. The normal risks and pressures havent ceased, those coming from the military and paramilitary as much as those coming from the state and the market. Normality in Zapatista territory is a complete anomaly: they are a people in resistance, pursued relentlessly. But the suspicion that the Zapatistas anticipated an extermination maneuver (that the bulletin of the Ministry of Defense allowed us to suspect) or that they had decided to return to their original form of insurrection, with offensive use of their weapons, was dispelled. Far from being cornered or fugitive, as many suspected, the Zapatistas felt they were strong enough to put forth the decisive challenge presented in... The Sixth (La Sexta) The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, in pure Zapatista style, clearly specified their intention This is our simple word to tell you what our step has been and where we are right now, to explain how we view the world and 36

our country, to say what we are thinking about doing and how we plan to do it, and to invite other people to take the steps with us in a large place called Mexico and an even larger place called the world. The Sixth is an effective synthesis of the years of Zapatista struggle and of their present perception. Theres no way to summarize it and reading it carefully is indispensable. In it the Zapatistas take the difficult initiative of articulating their vision to the thousands of organizations and millions of people that serve in the ranks of the discontented, with the goal of transforming their current resistance, which perhaps is now giving the most it can give, into a struggle for liberation. To unite them, the Zapatistas dont use an abstract doctrine, a political manifesto or a partisan hierarchical structure. They appeal to the recognized moral strength of the people which alone will be able to create a favorable space for the meeting of the different, those who see the world through their own eyes. In a strict sense, the Sixth simply reiterates what the Zapatistas have said they would do since the beginning and have not stopped doing. As I said earlier, ten years ago they liberated the hope that had been trapped in the cowardly or complicit accommodation of all the parties to the neoliberal wave. People started to walk with the Zapatistas on unprecedented paths. Many groups, for example, accepted the challenge in the Fourth Declaration of Selva Lacandona: to walk without the political parties or the government, though perhaps no one really reached as far the Zapatistas in whose territory the communities have gone farther than ever before in creating their own life without government support and at the margins of the parties. Time and again the Zapatistas have tried not only to open themselves to others but also to hand over the initiative to national and international civil society, as they have explicitly proposed since the National Democratic Convention of 1994, in their international encounters against neoliberalism, through their participation in the National Indigenous Congress, the National Liberation Zapatista Front, the March of Indigenous Dignity, the magazine Rebelda and through many other avenues. For diverse reasons and circumstances they couldnt directly participate in the efforts at organizational articulation. Today they have decided to run the risk of doing so. 37

The Sixth is a challenge to the imagination, enabling the social majorities to conceive a viable alternative to a corrupt regime based on violence, exploitation and oppression. Both the nation state and formal democracy are established on the premise that we are competitive and violent individuals that can only coexist if we are controlled by the state which grants itself the sole monopoly on legitimate violence. The citizens struggle is thus reduced to participating in manipulated elections to choose the people who will control them, to observing them and making them accountable (which they never are) and to changing them periodically. Thats why we continue to be exposed to the brutal and manifold violence of the regime that is supposed to protect us from our own violence. The time has come to put another regime in its place, joyfully and peacefully. Thats what the Zapatista initiative is about today. The risks are huge and the Zapatistas arent exaggerating when they say that they could lose everything theyve achieved till now. First of all, President Fox can try a final solution for the problem he promised in his campaign he could solve in 15 minutes. As he has done in other cases, he can twist the law to order the arrest of the Zapatistas and use physical force if it is foreseeable that the Zapatista initiative will set off acute turbulence in the middle of the electoral process and the expected chaos that will characterize the end of his administration. The political parties and their members, sympathizers and allies may excessively resent the initiative of the Zapatistas and may employ their financial, social and media means to isolate and marginalize them, weakening the support that they have had till now. That is: they could intensify what they have unsuccessfully done for a decade. Many sympathizers, who had supported a Zapatismo that they perceived as the expression of marginalized, indigenous groups struggling against a bad government, could step aside, disconcerted, once the anti-capitalist orientation of the struggle has been openly established. Within the so-called left, where many militants are obsessed with securing power, the usual savaging against those on your own side could occur. Some of them will transform the 38

Zapatistas into the principal enemy. That tendency was already observed in some of the reactions to the Sixth, first among the disillusioned, who attempt to rationalize their abandonment of the rank and file of what they saw as Zapatismo, and later with those that were always outside, with certain reservations, and can now comfortably express themselves as against.6 To summarize, the risk is that the Zapatistas will remain alone, isolated, and in the end exposed to extermination. They are clearly aware of that possibility. I think that despite all this they are taking this initiative for consistency, because they trust the strength of what they have woven in their own space, and perhaps because they have no other choice. The current situation demands action. Only with the extension and contagion of the virus of dignity will it be possible to affirm and consolidate what is already there. Looking back on what has occurred during the last 10 years, the Zapatistas cannot continue to wait for civil society to articulate and take the initiative. They will appeal to the pockets of resistance that have been appearing everywhere, and with many of which they have established and maintained contact. Reconstituting Ourselves More than 30 years ago, Ivan Illich anticipated a condition like the current one. He foresaw the moment in which the people would lose confidence in the dominant institutions and the administrators of the crisis. Over night significant institutions will lose all respectability, all legitimacy, and their reputation for serving the public good. It happened to the Roman Church in the Reformation, to the French monarchy in 1793. In one night the unthinkable became obvious. (Illich. 1974, 198)

Note in march 2008. All these risks, anticipated in August 2006, apply today. Felipe Caldern seems to be attempting what President Fox did not dare to do (look for a final solution) and both the political parties and the so-called left have been isolating and disquialifying the Zapatistas.

39

For some time, thought Illich, it might seem possible to patch up the defects of the system in question. No remedy is effective, but still ways are found to try them one after another. Governments think they can deal with the breakdown of utilities, the disruption of the educational system, intolerable transportation, the chaos of the judicial process, the violent disaffection of the youth. Each aspect of the global crisis is dealt with as separate from all others, each is explained in its own manner and treated particularly, each calls for a specific solution. Squabbles about alternative remedies give credibility to the sectorial reform. (Ibdem) For many years patches have been put on the system that is falling apart. The pieces are continually moved around to create the illusion of change and generate the impression that the stability and coherence of the regime has been re-established. Both improvised remedies and profound reforms, however, are increasingly counterproductive: they take the system to its limits and slowly bring all the dominant institutions to a precipice. The clamor of everything that is falling apart obscures minds and prevents listening to reason, but this very process also weakens those that were crushing and suffocating social groups and limiting their participation in the social order. The weakening of control disconcerts the controllers, who often behave like chickens with their heads cut off, and brings to power those people who remain calm. According to Illich, these men and women, of calm disposition and warm heart, wont be a nucleus of terrorists nor devoted to a belief or ideology nor experts of a new kind. They will be examples and will inspire confidence in their citizens by showing that not only is it necessary, but it is possible, to install a convivial society, on condition of conscious use of a disciplined process that recognizes the legitimacy of conflicting interests, the historical precedent out of which the conflicts arose, and that gives credible authority to the decisions of ordinary men recognized by the community as their representatives. In a time of disaster, only a rootedness in history will give the necessary confidence to transform the present. The convivial use of process guarantees that an institutional revolution will remain a tool whose application engenders the ends sought. 40

To appeal lucidly to process, in a spirit of continual opposition to bureaucracy, is the only possible protection against the revolution itself becoming an institution. Whether the application of this process to the inversion of all major institutions is then called a cultural revolution, the recuperation of the formal structure of law, participatory socialism, or a return to the spirit of the Fueros de Espaa, is a matter of labeling. (Ibdem) The Zapatistas have been demonstrating the feasibility of the alternative in their own territory in a manner very similar to the one anticipated by Illich. It is important to highlight the way in which they have inverted the traditional revolutionary process by rejecting the separation between ends and means, and recognizing, instead, as Illich said, that practice gives rise to the ends sought. We dont believe that the ends justify the means. Finally we think the means are the end. We construct our objective at the same time that we construct the means by which we go on struggling. In that sense, the value we give to the spoken word, to honesty and to sincerity, is great, even though at times we may err ingenuously. (Subcomandante Marcos, in an interview with Garca Mrquez, March 2001, reproduced in Lopes 2004, 149). Illich based his anticipation on his awareness that the modern nation-state had been converted into a conglomerate of private entities, formed by large national and international private corporations and by large bureaucratized unions. Periodically, political parties convene all the shareholders to elect a new board. When the institutions that form the nation-state enter into a crisis, as they have now, a path is opened for reconstructing society. in order to reconstitute it. The loss of the legitimacy of the state, as a society based on stakeholders, doesnt invalidate but affirms the need for constitutional procedure. The loss of credibility of the parties, converted into rival factions of stakeholders, doesnt do anything but underline the importance of recourse to contradictory procedures in politics (Ilich. 1974, 209) Illichs anticipation took time to become real. Instead of a sudden detonation, that he believed possible, junctures presented them41

selves that prolonged the agony of the dominant regime and permitted the marginalized to re-functionalize for their own purposes the decaying institutions. But we are now living the situation that he foresaw, in the catastrophic form of the Fourth World War, as the Zapatistas have called it. It is necessary to transform that increasingly general catastrophe, which covers all spheres of reality, from the planetary environment to the privacy of every home, all submitting to a growing violence. It is necessary to transform it in to a crisis of transformation. The specific formal sign of this transformation may indeed be a constitutional process such as that put forth in the Sixth. The constitutional problems arent primarily problems of law but of power, said Lasalle. Constitutions express the way in which power is structured in a society. Up until now, that structure has taking the form of a pyramid. The handful of dignitaries that invented the Mexican state and wrote its first constitution shamelessly initiated the excluding tradition of all our cartas magnas. They didnt take into account the indigenous peoples that then constituted the majority of the population, because they believed, like Morelos, that it was the nations desire to be governed by Spanish descendants (creoles). Only these, 3 per cent of the fledgling Mexicans, would be heard, while the indigenous peoples were treated like foreigners, thus empowering congress to negotiate trade treaties with other nations and Indian tribes. That constitution also established that the religion of the Mexican nation is and always will be that of the Roman Catholic Church and that the nation protects it with just and wise laws and prohibits the following of any other. That perpetual religion of the state lasted only a few decades. Another power structure rejected such an insupportable notion, while those currently governing what remains of the country seem to look back on it with nostalgia. The indigenous and peasant armies that led the revolution had to be listened to in 1917, but another group of dignitaries produced legal formulas of compromise used since then to frustrate the satisfaction of their claims. There is ample consensus as to the necessity of providing ourselves with a new constitution. The whims and fickleness of successive presidents have imposed hundreds of patches on the Constitution of 1917 rendering it profoundly incoherent and increasingly removed from the reality and aspirations of the Mexi42

can people. Beneath the ample consensus mentioned, however, profound and fundamental differences exist. Within the political classes the prevalent intention is to find a new compromise, through procedures like the failed Commission for the Reform of the State created by President Fox, in order to maintain the current structure of domination. In civil society, for the millions who are discontented, the question is posed in completely different terms. It means creating, for the first time, a set of norms for social relations that bases itself on the specific will of all the people, not the decisions of an assembly of dignitaries. That is the current challenge that we can no longer continue to postpone. It is the challenge that the Zapatistas have posed for us. Reclaiming the commons The Mexican experience in this period will probably be studied as the perfect laboratory for revealing the nature of modern power, that is, the extent to which it depends on general perceptions. Power operates based on certain statements that establish the manner in which we govern ourselves and in which we accept to be governed by others, and which also function as certainties, pre-judices, guides for behavior. Only substantial changes in those statements reveal real changes in the system of power, but that kind of change isnt reflected instantaneously and mechanically in the institutional machinery, whose inertia can remain dominant for long periods of time. (They can also become empty shells, with a certain ritualistic function, though the substance has changed, as exemplified by the English monarchy.) What has happened in Mexico since 1994 is that a substantial number of the statements by which we governed ourselves ceased to exist. The genius of the Zapatistas has consisted in making themselves the expression of general insights and common perceptions, giving them a new articulation. Well rooted in their traditions but open to contemporary reality, they changed the words to verbs, to symbols of action. We dont have as yet the statements that will define the new regime of government (if we should still even use that expression). Thats why the structures of power and the institutional machinery seem continually emptier and will therefore continue to fall, like the Berlin wall, until new statements can mold new institutions. Thats why the Zapatistas insist that they are only 43

the prelude to change. They dont want to function as the enlightened vanguard of change, a new elite, making decisions for everyone and trying to impose new statements. They know that their truth isnt everyones and they hope that together we will articulate a new truth. How can we realize this dream? If the people can express themselves democratically, they tend to vote for things that good socialists call petty bourgeois preferences: a little more pornography and sports, more TV than reading This is the reason why socialists as much as liberals accepted that an elite or a vanguard guide the people and make decisions in their name. But the elite corrupt easily. All of them have been corrupted. After the bankruptcy of state socialism and of all variants of the populist, liberal or welfare states, the authoritarian option once again beckons: governing by force and with the market could be the new name of the apocalypse. Or better yet: it is the same old name that comes back at the moment all the masks come down. In a capitalist society it is only possible to govern by force; thats why the state grants itself a monopoly on legitimate force. What was earlier hidden, among other things because of the competition with socialism, is now confessed with cynicism. Governing by force until the point is reached where it is no longer possible to govern people or events, as is now the case. Since the state naturally tends to be arbitrary and unjust, it is necessary to stop it, to place limits on it. This seems to be the starting point of a valid political position. In view of the failure of democratic processes to establish such limits, because they are as corrupted as the elite, communities have begun to emerge as alternatives. They emerge, more than anything, because there doesnt seem to be another option, but also because of the conviction that the future will be, in some way or another, a community fact. Socialism bore a message of communitarianism, but it was translated into collectivism, stateism and self-destruction. Even those that accept the value and potential of communities dont believe them capable of simultaneously confronting the forces of transnational corporations and the modern state. How can we resist the abstract logic of modern power, which seems to have escaped all possibility of human control? The notion of power that pretends to construct itself democratically in the shape of a pyramid, in which it is the base that counts, ends up discovering that it has the shape of a mushroom. (And here the implicit nuclear allusion clearly applies.) 44

At the same time, the vacuity and fragility of the paraphernalia of power is increasingly evident. The powerful can do less and less, except when it comes to destruction. They administer economic, military and political forces and they exhibit them continually, particularly in the media, to conserve what they still have of effective power. The story of the Wizard of Oz is perhaps the best parable of this condition of modern power. After having been able to pass through an extravagant display of illusions of power, Dorothy and her friends encounter a small and timid man, trembling in fear. And the powerful wizard of Oz gently explains to them that theyve come to ask from him what they already have: valor, intelligence, compassion. A few years ago, I tried to share these insights with some Sandinista leaders who had recently come to power. They looked at me with pity: In our hands we have the power that seems illusory to you. We will use it for the benefit of the people, to implement a revolution. What did they have in their hands? The power of Somoza had three pillars: US support, the National Guard, and money. When the Sandinistas entered Somozas bunker, the US stopped supporting Nicaragua, the National Guard had been dissolved and Somozas money was in Miami. They caught only smoke in their hands. They had to rebuild the system of power and in the process they were corrupted and lost the confidence of the people, the confidence with which they could have organized society in a different way. In showing that the Emperor was naked the Zapatistas hastened the fall of the political regime that had ruled for 70 years. They didnt try to convert themselves into its substitute. Instead they obstinately dedicated themselves to reorganizing society from the bottom up, from within each communitys own proper space, and to extending their networks horizontally towards all kinds of coalitions of the discontented. In this fashion they have been expanding and consolidating autonomous spaces that define new commons. The communities dont seem capable of confronting the immense economic and political forces that continue to assault them: the large transnational corporations and a State that they find ever more at the service of capital. Nevertheless, broad coalitions of the discontented continue to extend themselves; they continue their slow accumulation of strength. You can see on the horizon the conditions under which the political inversion of economic domination, of the structures of capital, could 45

be undertaken. Without losing sight of reality, or more clearly, without underestimating the real risks of the circumstances, we shouldnt let ourselves be dazzled by the fireworks of the constituted powers, national and international, including those of the superpower that finally accepts itself as an empire. In the final agonies of a regime, the last remaining forces are used to impress the subjects, to make them believe that it is still what it was Many things can be done with bayonets, except sitting on them, said Napoleon. This repulsive image illustrates well the universal experience: with the army and the police its possible to destroy and intimidate, but it is not possible to rule unless the people allow fear to paralyze their heads and hearts. It would be criminal to idolize misery. The new spaces for autonomy suffer extreme restrictions. But it would be equally criminal not to take into account their capacity for innovation. They arent forms of mere survival or to secure a certain form of subsistence. They are contemporary forms of life, constituting a sociological novelty that updates tradition and reevaluates modernity. They have been conceived in an era in which everything men and women need for their delight can be obtained through technical means now available, and for an era in which the non-economic means to acquire what one needs will permit those needs to be obtained freely and with dignity. These are means which leave behind the era in which the goal of unlimited improvement only concentrated privileges and imposed every kind of suffering on the social majorities, supposedly for their own good. Back from promised futures, that make of the present an always postponed future, the Zapatis-tas confirm themselves day after day in their surprising creation that we feel more and more to be our own. Im not able to see another avenue to escape from the horror that has been insinuating itself among us and that we are only capable of containing through communities and their webs. The Sixth is our opportunity to articulate ourselves with imagination and to walk hope. The apparent infallibility of globalization clashes with the stubborn disobedience of reality. At the same time that neoliberalism pushes forward with its world-wide war, groups of nonconformists and nuclei of rebels are being formed all over the planet. The empire of money confronts the rebellion of pockets of resistance. 46

Yes, pockets. Of all sizes, of all colors, of the most varied forms. Their only similarity is their resistance to the new world order and the crime against humanity that accompanies the neoliberal war. (EZLN Seven Missing Pieces from the Global Puzzle. June 1997) The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people are in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order. The people that come together are the reader, myself and those about whom these essays talk: Rembrandt, the ancient Egyptians, an expert in solitude within certain rooms of a hotel, dogs at nightfall, a man on a radio station. And unexpectedly, our dialogue strengthens our conviction that what is happening to the world today is wrong and what is often said about it is a lie. Never have I written a book with a greater sense of urgency. (John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket. Mexico: Era, 2002)

47

48

Appendix
Civil Society THE THEORETICAL and political history of the expression civil society is very complex and tangled. In the last 20 years people have abandoned the academic and political tradition that had defined it for two centuries and have redefined its meaning and uses. This redefinition was employed in Poland, the Philippines, Argentina and other countries to characterize the unconventional actor that took apart authoritarian regimes. It was also used to allude to a third sector, to civil organizations that distinguish themselves at the same time from the market (capital) and the state. It has been increasingly used to express autonomous action of people at the grassroots, that doesnt only distinguish itself from capital and its state administrators but sets itself against them. Unlike the Marxist tradition, which establishes a hierarchy among those opposing capital (the vanguard, industrial proletariat, classes subordinated to the proletariat, fellow travelers, etc.), civil society maintains the horizontality of the different peoples that define themselves by their resistance and doesnt demand declarations of faith. In Mexico, the heroic actions of the victims of the earthquake of 1985 and of those within the Zapatista insurrection have become benchmarks that give new content and perspective to the use of the expression, wich today identifies new forms of social resistance and political organization. (See Aubry 1994 and Esteva 2001). Non-Violence The profound mutation of the Zapatistas in relation to the use of weapons can be examined in Gandhian terms. For Gandhi, non-violence is the supreme virtue and cowardice the worst vice. The weak have no option but violence or passive resis49

tance, the nonviolence of the weak. What is needed, assumed Gandhi, is the nonviolence of the strong. He saw no reason for 300 million Indians to be afraid of 150 thousand British. Because they were many and thus strong, they should rely on nonviolence. (See Gandhi, 1970, 170-174, 198). In this line of interpretation, the Zapatistas resisted falling into cowardice and were ready to resort to violence when they were the weak, when no one listened to them and they had no option but to use their weapons, as they repeatedly said in the first days of their uprising. They were transformed into champions of nonviolence when insurrection within the civil society made them strong. Wallerstein (2001) has compared Marcos to Gandhi and Mandela. He thus emphasizes nonviolence and offers an interesting perspective, but his focus is particularly unfortunate in relation to Zapatismo because it concentrates the attention and analysis on the supposed leader. I think there are truly profound links, very different from those Wallerstein sees, between Gandhi and the Zapatistas. Gandhi didnt spend time planning and designing the future, he incorporated into the present what he perceived as embodied social ideals. In his struggle, Gandhi opposed exploitation as much in capitalism as in socialism or in any other social organization in which a particular group or class could exploit, discriminate or marginalize others in the name of public or private property, religious principles, traditions or any other thing. And Gandhi, finally, felt the need to practice all that he preached, to embody it, to give it form and substance in his own behavior, including, from the outset, living his criticism of the industrial mode of production and so-called Western Civilization. When he was asked what his message was, he replied my life is my message. And the entire world knows his famous saying Be the change you wish for the world. That attitude, which embraces the three elements, is a precise description of the Zapatistas both in deeds and words. Law and Liberty For a period of ten years the Zapatistas have repeatedly challenged the status quo and its legal form, like refuseniks and like outlaws, and each time, in the same operation, they have resorted to political and legal procedures. The best example is that of January 1, 1994. Theres nothing more illegal than a decla50

ration of war, but the Zapatistas framed the one they pronounced against the Mexican government in constitutional terms: Article 39 establishes all public power comes from the people and the people have at all times the inalienable right of altering or modifying the shape of its government. It is a masterful pattern that can also be observed in the revolutionary laws applied in the Zapatista Zones at the margin of national law, in the San Andres Accords (the cornerstone of which is constitutional reform) and in the Juntas de Buen Gobierno. From the Leyes de Indias imposed by the Spanish, until today in the sovereign state of Mexico, the law has always been employed against the indigenous peoples. It has been, for 500 years, a tool to oppress and marginalize them. This past history is now combined with judicial inflation, a strictly contemporary process through which, increasingly, personal and collective conflicts are taken to tribunals where they undergo a grotesque transmogrification. The tribunals produce a mere illusion of justice; they are entrusted to professionals who derive their dignity and income from the use and abuse of the law to obtain individual profits. The use of their professional capacity is clearly detached from any consideration of the common good, the will of the people or authentic justice. Seven of every ten living lawyers can be found in the U.S. where they are legally bound to use the law for the benefit of their clients, who may well be criminals, even when doing so is openly against principles of justice. O. J. Simpsons case has become a paradigm. To distinguish good from bad it is necessary to resort to professional help which is basically corrupt and put to the service of the highest bidder. These horrors of a judicial system supposedly dedicated to the administration of justice have become more and more pronounced. Justice is no longer the business of the highest court, though the word in usually in its name: Supreme Court of Justice. The notion of justice has been reduced to the mechanical and formal application of unjust laws. Judicial authorities appeal to the law when they cloak despotism in the mantle of show tribunals. Whether or not they recognize the aberrations which are increasingly evident in the law, they maintain that while the law is the law, they have an obligation to apply it. As a consequence, they wash their hands of the atrocities, errors and stupidities of the judicial system, all of which appear to be outside the responsibility of legislative power. 51

Far from abandoning this undermined territory, considering the terrible condition in which they find it, the Zapatistas have reclaimed it. They didnt throw out the baby with the bath water. They are very aware of the necessity of appealing to the formal structure of a people, in order to denounce the cancerous hypertrophy of the dominant regime and to speak the truth, showing the aberration of this modern form of idolatry. Despite its fragility, the word, the verb, the formal expression of legal and political proceedings, can reunite the multitude of men and women, those we call the people (el pueblo), in order to leave behind the present state of things and continue with the work of reconstruction. The structures of political and legal procedures are integral to one another. Both shape and express the structure of freedom in history. If this is recognized, the framework of due process can be used as the most dramatic, symbolic, and convivial tool in the political arena. The appeal to law remains powerful even where society makes access to legal machinery a privilege, or where it systematically denies justice, or where it cloaks despotism in the mantle of show tribunals. (Illich, 1974, 209) To protect the formal structure of liberty, the Zapatistas continually appeal to legal and political procedures, fully conscious of what these procedures are and have been in the history of a people and despite distortions and perversions imposed on them by successive structures of domination. Multiculturalism and Pluralism The notion of multiculturalism doesnt change the homogeneous character of the nation-state. The nation-state is based on the idea of a fundamental similarity, of a sameness and identity of possessive individuals, the economic men who are the fundamental atoms of the social structure. Multiculturalism exiles cultural differences to a secondary condition, an adjective. Instead of confronting discrimination, multiculturalism aggravates it. The plural state (not merely the multicultural one) is a step in the appropriate direction; still, however, bound by the limitations and deficiencies inherent in the nation-state. (See Villoro 1997 and 1998 and Esteva 2001). A coherent attitude toward a 52

true plurality in the world takes the form of radical pluralism, a subject I cannot address here. (See Panikkar 1995 and Vachon 1995) An alternative global project? Is another world possible? This theme of another world is the center of intense controversy as can be observed in the World Social Forum. The groups that maintain positions similar to that of the Zapatistas are in constant tension with those that want one global alternative. Those coming to the forum reject the neoliberal world, but while some consider it imperative to conceive ONE alternative world (as the theme of the forum suggests) and they try to explain all forms of resistance in terms of the definition of that one alternative world, ideology or dream, many groups want the articulation of the forum to act simply as a hinge that leaves an opening for many possibilities. The political transition in Mexico: alternation or regime change? Mexico had the oldest authoritarian regime in the world. The heirs of the revolutionaries of 1910, acting since 1928 through the dominant political party, governed the country for 70 years. They grew to constitute a constellation of mafia groups, selfstyled the revolutionary family, that permeated all the structures of society and government. The regime was a kind of renewable monarchy that replaced the king every six years by means of manipulated and fraudulent elections. This regime has ended. Because the current government has adopted the same neoliberal orientation of its predecessors and labors within the same inertial framework, the potential depth of the political change has been jeopardized. Are we truly in a political transition? Is there in reality a regime change? Or have we a mere face-lift that only promises the neoliberal democratic normalization of Mexico? The ancient regime that characterized Mexican politics for 70 years is effectively liquidated without hope of resurrection. A few comparisons may illustrate the fact. When Miguel de la Madrid took office, the public sector represented two thirds of 53

one of the most closed economies of the world. The state could effectively conduct and control the economy. President Fox now directs a public sector that represents one-fifth of one of the most open economies of the world and the major part of the public resources that he controls are inescapably committed. He cant direct the economy. The political transformation is even deeper. Within the ancient regime most of the political power had been centered in the person of the president; all constituted powers were subordinated to him. And the mafia-like structure of the system controlled the most distant nooks and crannies of the social fabric by way of the many tools of co-option, corruption and repression that were available to those operating the system, and which they continually employed. The current president doesnt seem to have control of any of the constituted powers not of his own party nor even the presidential residence. The peculiar hybrid nature of the Mexican regime, in economic and political terms, has been lost, and there is no possibility of its restoration. Even within the perverse and virtually impossible scenario that the PRI were to take power again and reestablish full control of executive, legislative, and judicial power in the Federation, the states and municipalities, the new governors would not control a political or economic structure at all similar to that of the past, much less be faced with a society at all like those governed under earlier regimes. The old regime is dead, although all kinds of pests still emanate from its unburied body. It will not revive. Whatever the depth of the change we see, to what or to whom do we owe it? Nobody credits the Zapatistas exclusively. Distinct forces struggled for many years against the authoritarian regime of what was called the PRI-government. Moreover, the regime itself undertook its own destruction through a series of more or less bloodless coups detat which started the day Miguel de la Madrid took office as president. All that is clear. As it is likewise clear that the Zapatista uprising produced a dramatic change in the political balance of forces. The political opposition obtained from the government, a few weeks after the Zapatista uprising, more concessions than in the previous 50 years. None of the previous attempts at concessions, many of them recent, had managed to force the regime to grant any of them. The social and political reforms that Salinas had been re54

sisting could only be initiated following the debilitating social and political fracture created by the Zapatista insurrection. The situation of former president Salinas illustrates the situation well. In December 1993, he was at the peak of his glory. He was universally recognized as a global leader who understood the direction of the political winds sweeping the earth. He was lifting his country out of underdevelopment. He was the candidate for director of the World Trade Organization, the institution that quintessentially defines the era of globalization. Within the country, he held in his hands all the threads of political and economic power, succession assured, leaving everything neatly wrapped-up. A few months later. Salinas found himself obliged to self-exile himself in Ireland. His brother went to jail. His policies, which had been universally celebrated, were quickly discredited. As a result of their prior application, however, what the director of the FMI called the first financial crisis of the 21st century was produced. None of his innumerable attempts to return to the upper echelon of public life has succeeded, although he has continued to move behind the scenes and did successfully secure his brothers freedom. Until December 1993, the political opposition had only managed to show slight variants to the left or right of the model and path followed by Salinas. It seemed that, effectively, everything consisted in a perfecting of the democratic processes of a neoliberal republic, suitably fitted into the global pattern favored by the Washington consensus. The Zapatistas created a political option, unleashing at the grassroots a broad mobilization which impeded the consolidation of the republic conceived in a US mold to replace the ancient regime. The Zapatista initiative called into question the kind of regime that would emerge from the current transition. Conventional democratic competition among political parties a novelty in Mexico is now combined with struggles, often fierce, among the diverse mafia-like groups that remained from the PRI and within each of the parties. The fundamental breakdown of the political classes has created conditions of instability and uncertainty that are very dangerous. No one can now take for granted that the dominant political forces will successfully consolidate a neoliberal republic conforming to the US model. Nor can the option provided by the Zapatistas be taken for granted as its replacement. But neither can this latter option 55

be swept aside although that is precisely what the media and political parties continually try to do. On the other hand, all the current political forces appear to bind themselves to one form or another of accommodation with world globalization. In denying that perspective and creating an alternative, the Zapatistas havent denied the reality of the internationalization of capital, of the functioning of the world market, of the global embedding of the mass media, or of the existence of other global forces and phenomena: what they call the Fourth World War. But in lucidly establishing the direct and immediate connection between the global and the local, they were the first to confront the globalist perspective and stand by an option that up till now they have advanced, and that awakens a growing interest in the world. The Basta Ya! has taken many forms on the way, repeatedly exposing the current dilemma. In 1999, for example, Subcoman-dante Marcos indicated The world faces two options: Kosovo or Chiapas At the end of this millennium Chiapas and Kosovo demonstrate that it is the hour of those who differ, the hour of alternative, and the world must choose (El Dia, 26th May, 1999). Globalization, whether conventional or alternative, assumes homogenization, a uniform condition or a similarity taken as identity. Instead of assuming the real plurality of the world, all kinds of means are employed to dissolve differences, submerge them or suppress them, creating ONE world, this one or that one (The humanism that defines this position is every day more openly totalitarian). Chiapas, the Zapatistas, create an option so that different people can live together without ceasing to be who they are. It is the position summed up in the motto: a world in which many worlds fit. Class, Class Analysis, Class Organizations There seems to be an intolerable contradiction between organizing ourselves as a civil society and creating class organizations. The first would be liberal or reactionary with a Hegelian heritage, ideological confusion, paralysis, and attachment to the status quo. The second would be truly revolutionary with a Marxist-Leninist heritage (whether Trotskyite, Maoist, Guevarist or whatever), expressive of ideological clarity and scientific rigor. Since the National Democratic Convention in 1994, this subject has grown into a fierce obstacle for the articulation of peoples efforts, dead56

locking and stymieing those who would be united. It persists as an acute source of perplexity and confrontation among those who militate on the left of the ideological spectrum. Classifying is a human gift, one of the human invariants. We do it continually, in applying our capacity to abstract, to mentally separate the qualities of an object in order to consider them in isolation. This activity may become a threat, obsession or mania, but it constitutes a form of relationship and dialogue with the real. I classify grains of corn in order to select those I will use for my next crop. I classify plants to select the ones I can eat. I classify the people I meet so that I will know how to address them; one does not address a child as one does a woman or an elder. One also classifies as an exercise of ones power. With plants, with animals, with people. If I have strength enough to impose my will, my classification can turn into an exercise in domination. Via classification, as applied by man, comes the concept of mass that despite its radical resonance has an ecclesiastic and bourgeois origin. One of the most brilliant contributions of Marx was his notion of social class and his class analysis applied to capitalist societies. Up until today, it doesnt seem possible to adequately understand what happens in the real world nor our condition in it if we dont rigorously apply the class analysis inherited from Marx. Capital, or more accurately, capitalists, owners of the means of production, with the support of government officials at their service, have imposed social relationships that characterize the dominant regime of production, that subordinate us to them and allow them to exploit and repress us. These social relationships didnt arise spontaneously, nor through an idyllic, natural and expedient evolution, as its defenders claim. They were imposed by means of violence and despite continuous resistance. The discussion of social classes in a capitalistic society has always been the cause of intense debate. In the 1970s an old controversy centering on the condition of the peasants was revived. Conventional Marxism classified the peasants as pettybourgeois or even reactionaries and in any case subordinated them to the industrial proletariat. The debate took place primarily among Marxists, who were classified, in relation to this subject, as proletarists, de-proletarists and peasantists (proletaristas, desproletaristas y campesinistas). This controversy was parallel to 57

the debate which aired between those who addressed the indian question. (Conventional Marxists referred to them as ethnicists). All these debates were related to distinct theoretical and political positions concerned with correctly identifying both the actors involved in societal transformation and the structure of their organizations. In this setting the controversy over class organizations can be examined. In confronting capitalists to dispute with them over their working conditions, industrial workers created specific organizations, typically unions. Beyond any discussion of what has happened to them, for example when they became, as has often happened, corrupt instruments of the corporative power of the state, it is evident that they have played a decisive role in improving the conditions of workers in capitalist society, in reducing working hours, increasing salaries and other benefits, in addressing abuses in the workplace, etcetera. The fundamental problem, under the current circumstances, is not to analyze the class condition of diverse peoples or groups within capitalist society, which, although clearly essential, has been well discussed and about which there is no real dispute among those on the left. The issue at hand is the character of autonomous organizations which are not simply reduced to disputing with capital (or with capitalists) in terms of class interests, but which try to move forward on their own path, beyond the logic of capital. This implies recognizing that class organizations are constituted according to what capital imposes on people. In a fundamental sense, by their own configuration, those organizations are forced to dance to the tune that capital plays. An organization that wants to go beyond the logic of capital or tries to obey its own logic, not one imposed by its economic and social condition, doesnt need to confine itself to class definitions. This break with old definitions shouldnt be confused with the marketing eagerness of parties and candidates that convert their structures into catch-alls and admit everyone through their wide ideological doors. Another aspect of the subject that I can only mention here refers to the very character of classes, as an abstraction. In the real world people struggle, real men and women, not the classes. This is not meant to imply that class struggle is a mere unreal fantasy, but situates it in the theoretical locale, the theoretical niche, appropriate to it. 58

At this point, I can only cherish the hope that those who dogmatically persist in the construction of class organizations wont hold up the enormous organizational effort that we need to carry out in so-called civil society. Ah! Power I dream of an intellectual who destroys proofs and universals, who discovers and reveals, within present day limitations and inertia, weaknesses, openings, lines of force; one that is always changing location. He doesnt know precisely where he will be or what he will be thinking tomorrow because he is completely absorbed in the present. (Michel Foucault) Those that to be heard must die, the always forgotten in revolutionary work and political parties, those absent in history, those always present in misery, the small, the deaf, the eternal infants, those without voice or face, the receivers of disdain, the incapacitated, the abandoned, the uncounted dead, the inciters of tenderness, the professionals of hope, those of worthy countenance denied, those with pure anger, those of pure fire, those for whom enough is enough, those of the early morning, those that say: everything for everyone, nothing for us (para todos todo, para nosotros nada). Those with the word that walks, us, we want no duty, no glory, no fame. We simply want to be prologue to the new world. A new world with a new way of doing politics, a new type of politics by people in government, by men and women that command by obeying (que manden obedeciendo). (Talk by subcomandante Marcos, La realidad, May 17th, 1994) In these notes I have tried to make clear the way in which the Zapatistas have made real that new form of doing politics, thereby dissolving the question of power. It seems pointless to me to play with words and say, if power is always the power to do what you want to do, the Zapatistas have been exercising their power. Or that, inverting the discourse, the people are exercising their proper power, and we will thus talk of empowering, as if power were some thing that some have and others dont and that needs to be redistributed. We need different words 59

for talking about what isnt simply the opposite of power (that which resists it), but also something radically different. It isnt its reflection or its opposite. It is in another place. With French pedantry, Foucault (1970, 1981, 1992, 2002) had suggested something of this kind. He brilliantly described the characteristics of the existing system of knowledge/power, its role in the construction of modern society and its regime of power, and the form of political uprising taken today by the rebellion of subjugated knowledge. He ably dispelled what appeared an unacceptable contradiction in his proposal: maintaining at the same time that power has died and that power is everywhere. According to Foucault, the radical rejection of the power of the powerful (which is more and more fragile and incompetent, useful only for destruction), doesnt presume powerlessness. Nor does it look for the construction of an alternative or different power, which would only reproduce the evil that had been rejected. It heralds new sociological and political inventions that express themselves in regenerated social relationships which arent determined or conditioned by power. Foucault said, on the one hand, that the question is not to modify the conscience of the people or what they have in their heads, as reformists and revolutionaries along the entire political spectrum try to do. It is about changing the political, economic and institutional regime that produces truth, or more clearly, the statements in accordance with which we govern ourselves and others. On the other hand, he also maintained that what was needed was a simultaneous upheaval of ideologies and institutions, in order to formulate an historical knowledge of struggle to be expressed in the autonomization of cultural nuclei interconnected in a reticular form. Whew! What a tongue twister! But the subject is interesting. It offers a path that allows us to build bridges between conventional political thought, which now operates as a lens for many people, and the radical political innovations that we are witnessing. Foucault said that while humanists propose modifying ideologies without changing institutions, the reformists want to modify the institutions without modifying the ideological system. We have examples from the past and present on all sides: change everything in order to change nothing. What is necessary is to act simultaneously on both the ideological and the institutional planes. Its pointless to reform 60

from head to tail the institutions if their ideological orientation is maintained. And nothing is served in changing the ideologies of those that head these institutions if the institutions themselves are retained intact. Its about co-motion, not development, or conscientization (as Freire thought), or unleashing the process of change, aiding the awakening, reforming the apparatuses of the state, combating corruption, inefficiency or counter-productivity in the institutions Co-motion is a nice word. It assumes moving with the other, like in a dance, and doing it with everything, with heart, stomach and the entire being, not only the head. And, commotion works through contagion. At the ideological level, what is needed is the daring to renounce general, globalist discourses and their theories in order to reinvent speech, the language, the categories, the systems that produce the statements with which we govern ourselves We need to abandon scientism and realize that humanism is more and more openly totalitarian, a provocateur that prostitutes thinking and whose paradigm is the professionalized and institutionalized technocrat. At the institutional level, instead of occupying ourselves with reforming or struggling against institutions or taking them into our hands, we need to dissolve them, that is, eliminate the necessity of their existence, which comes from the artificial creation of scarcity, professional specialization and the reduction of human needs and their satisfaction to institutional problems resolvable through the application of appropriate processes, procedures and technologies. This criticism includes the demythification of formal democracy as we progress in the organization of alternative forms of government and a structuring of society that takes the form of a web and which is postulated as a substitute to the growing organic integration which inevitably is equivalent to the institutional integration of power. We are not concerned here with decentralization, as certain autonomisms suggest: that is simply a transfer of the center to the periphery, consistent with certain norms and geared toward efficiency in terms of Anglo-Saxon colonial discourse that produced theories and practices of popular participation, community development and autonomous regions or communities. We are not concerned here about creating, for the indigenous peoples multiethnic autonomous regions that are only decen61

tralized forms of the vertical apparatus of the state. Rather we are concerned with reconfiguring the center dissolving it, supporting it in multiple cultural nuclei which are autonomous centers for the production of truth and are interconnected as a web, thus eliminating the need for a common center. We speak here of the step from decentralization to decentralism, in a pattern whose pale, mechanical image can be found today in the operation on a global scale of the postal system, the telephone, or internet The breaking down of the apparatuses of state defined power consists above all in dissolving the professionalization and institutionalization of the needs and capacities of people. It is not about destroying those apparatuses and even less of putting them in the hands of a collective or popular administration, since its those very apparatuses which contain alien and alienated patterns, the virus of power. Its about articulating other ways of thinking and doing that would replace those apparatuses, rendering them unnecessary. Instead of institutions that are more and more openly counterproductive (schools producing ignorance, health systems sickening, transportation systems paralyzing), each one of which is a mechanism of domination, oppression and discrimination, it is about putting into operation other techniques and technologies under the effective control of the people, through which they can effectively express their activities, their capacities, their creativity. The modernization of political machinery leaves it increasingly powerless, since its fragmented and feudal character make its effective coordination impossible when faced with the web of communicating vessels that define reality. The unavoidable rigidity that defines the operative terminals of all public apparatuses (trapped in their norms, their square windows) make them ineffective before the changing vitality of the real world. From top to bottom, in these conditions, the driving forces fall into the social void; from the bottom up, into the institutional void. Whats needed, what the Zapatistas have been continually doing, could be expressed in the following terms: Localize criticism: It is not obtuse, primitive or nave empiricism nor equivocal eclecticism, nor opportunism or permeability to any theoretical enterprise. It isnt a kind of asceticism. It is about an autonomous form of production that 62

doesnt need a common set of norms to affirm its own validity. Strengthening and deepening the insurrection of subjugated knowledge: Reclaiming the historical content buried or masked within functional incohe-rencies and formal systematizations. Revaluing knowledge disqualified because it had been considered useless, insufficiently elaborated, nave or hierarchically inferior to scientific knowledge. Popular wisdom is not common knowledge, because it doesnt imply unanimity. The knowledge we talk about is more specific, local, regional, differentiated Juxtaposing and combining learned knowledge with local memory to form an historical knowledge of struggle. This requires demolishing the tyranny of globalizing discourse with its hierarchy and the privileges it derives from the scientific classification of knowledge, which has intrinsic effects of power. Abandoning the perspective of the society as a whole as a condition for moving forward. This is to dream with last nights, said Foucault. The society as a whole is the result of innumerable factors and impulses that no one can control. Simultaneously rejecting the hypothesis of innate egoism (key to the illusion of perfect competition) and innate altruism (key to the illusion of perfect cooperation). Cooperation and reciprocity are social relationships that should be invented and reinvented continually. What resists supports, said an old Mexican politician when he opened Congress to the opposition in order to legitimize the PRI. Where there is power there is resistance, said Foucault. The important thing is the strategic codification of points of resistance, so that they effectively propitiate the autonomization of the cultural nuclei that are connected in the form of a web. All webs are made of holes. Their strength and capacity for retention depend on the strategic arrangement of the holes. This arrangement should be conceived as an opening without defined limits, without a general plan, without any vision of the society as a whole Addressing the inequalities that are unavoidably produced given the heterogeneity of the knots of an open web shouldnt take place under the ridiculous assumption of the altruistic and unilateral character of the strong knots toward 63

the weak, but rather by giving new meaning to the interchanges that take place within the complex interaction of social relationships. I am aware of the rigidity and confusion of these paragraphs in which I try to escape from the straitjacket of the dominant notions of power and I use Foucaults jargon as a set of contour lines. This is not something that can be done lightly, in the frame of notes like these. Yet here it is. (See Esteva 1994, 1998, 1999, 2003; Holloway, 1998, 2002).

64

Some Bibliographical Clues (Including References)

Aguirre R., C.A., Echeverra, B., Montemayor C. y Wallerstein, I. 2002. Chiapas en perspectiva histrica. Barcelona: El Viejo Topo. Araitz, N. 1997. Tierno veneno. De algunos encuentros en las montaas indgenas de Chiapas y Guerrero. Barcelona: Ed. Virs. Aubry, A. 1994. Qu es la sociedad civil? San Cristbal de Las Casas: INAREMAC. . 2003. Autonomy in the San Andrs Accords: Expression and Fulfillment of a New Federal Pact, in: J. Rus, R.A.Hernndez and S. Mattiace, Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Avils, J. 2001. Nosotros estamos muertos. Mxico: Ocano. Autonomedia. 1994. Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution. New York: Autonomedia. Barrn P., D. (Ed.). 2001. La guerra por la palabra: A siete aos de la lucha zapatista. Mxico: Rizoma. Barry, T. 1995. Zapatas Revenge: Free Trade and the Farm Crisis in Mexico. Boston: South End Press. Cam Ursa, G. y D. Ttoro Taulis. 1994. EZLN: El ejrcito que sali de la selva. Mxico: Planeta. Centro de Anlisis Poltico e Investigaciones Sociales y Econmicas (Capise). 2003. La ocupacin militar en Chiapas: El dilema del prisionero. San Cristbal de Las Casas: Capise. Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolom de Las Casas (CDHFBC). 1996. Ni paz ni justicia. Segundo informe general y amplio acerca de la guerra civil que sufren los choles en la zona norte de Chiapas, diciembre de 1994 a octubre de 1996. San Cristbal de Las Casas: CDHFBC. . 1998. La legalidad de la injusticia. San Cristbal de Las Casas: CDHFBC. 65

. 1998. Acteal, entre el duelo y la lucha. San Cristbal de Las Casas: CDHFBC. Centro de Informacin y Anlisis de Chiapas (CIACH). 1998. Relatos del viejo Antonio. Mxico: CIACH. Chiapaslink. 2000. The Zapatistas: A Rough Guide. Londres: Calverts Press. Chomski, N. et al. 1995. Chiapas Insurgente: Cinco ensayos sobre la realidad mexicana. Navarra: Txalaparta Editorial. Collier, G. 1999. Land & the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (Rev. Edition). Oakland: Food First Books. Comisin Nacional de Intermediacin. Archivo histrico: enero 1994-julio 1998. 2002. Mxico: Serapaz. Condearena, L. 1997. Chiapas: el despertar de la esperanza. Donosita: Ed. Gakoa. Coordinadora de Organismos no Gubernamen-tales por la Paz (Conpaz). 1996. Militarizacin y violencia en Chiapas. Mxico: Conpaz. De Vos, Jan. 1996. Lacandonia, al filo del agua. Mxico: Ciesas. Durn, M. (Comp.). 1994. Yo Marcos. Mxico: Ediciones del milenio. Durn, M. y Marcos. 1999. El tejido del pasamon-taas. Barcelona: Ed. Virs. Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional (EZLN). 1994. Viaje al centro de la selva. Memorial zapatista enero-agosto 1994. Mxico: Argos. . 1994 y 1995. La palabra de los armados de verdad y fuego. Mxico: Fuenteovejuna. . 1994. Documentos y comunicados 1, 1 de enero/8 de agosto de 1994. Mxico: Era. . 1995. Documentos y comunicados 2, 15 de agosto de 1994/29 de septiembre de 1995. Mxico: Era. . 1995. Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqus of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. New York: Monthly Review Press. . 1996. Crnicas intergalcticas EZLN. Primer Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neoliberalismo. Mxico: Planeta Tierra. . 1997. Documentos y comunicados 3, 2 de octubre de 1995/24 de enero de 1997. Mxico: Era. . 1997. Chiapas: del dolor a la esperanza. Madrid: Libros de la Catarata. 66

. 2001. Comunicados del EZLN2000. San Cristbal de Las Casas: Ediciones Pirata. . 2001. La marcha del color de la tierra. Comunicados, cartas y mensajes del EZLN del 2 de diciembre de 2000 al 2 de abril de 2001. Mxico: Rizoma. Elorriaga, J. Ecos de Cerrohueco. El presunto juicio de un zapatista. Mxico: FZLN. Esteva, G. 1992. Development, in: W. Sachs (Ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. . 1994. Crnica del fin de una era: El secreto del EZLN. Mxico: Posada. . 1998. Autonoma y democracia radical: el trnsito de la tolerancia a la hospitalidad, in: M.Bartolom y A. Barrabas (Eds.), Autonomas tnicas y estados nacionales. Mxico: CONACULTA/INAH. . 1999. The Zapatistas and Peoples Power. Capital & Class 68 (Summer). . 2000. The Revolution of the New Commons, in: C. Cook and J. Lindau (Eds.), Aboriginal Rights and Self-Government. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. . 2001. Introduccin, in: CEDI, Experiencias organizativas de la sociedad civil en Oaxaca. Oaxaca:CEDI. . 2002. Ms all de la igualdad y la representacin: la democracia radical, in: A. Hmond and D.Recondo (Eds.), Dilemas de la democracia en Mxico. Mxico: IFE/CEMCA. . 2003. Meaning and Scope of the Struggle for Autonomy, in: J. Rus, R.A. Hernndez and S. Mattiace, Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. . 2003. A flower in the hands of the people. New Internationalist. 360, September. Esteva, G. and M. Prakash. 1998. Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures. London: Zed Books. Foucault, M. 1970. La arqueologa del saber. Mxico: Siglo XXI. . 1980. Power/Knowledge (Ed. by Colin Gordon). New York: Pantheon Books. . 1984. The Foucault Reader (Ed. by Paul Rabinow). New York: Pantheon Books. . 1992. Microfsica del poder. Madrid: Las ediciones de La Piqueta. 67

. 2002. Defender la sociedad. Mxico: FCE. et al. 1981. Espacios de poder. Madrid: Las ediciones de La Piqueta. Gandhi, M. 1970. Gandhi: Essential Writings, Ed. por V.V.Ramana Murti, Nueva Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation. Gilly, A. 1997. Chiapas: la razn ardiente. Mxico: Era. Gilly, A., Subcomandante Marcos, C. Ginzburg. 1995. Discusin sobre la historia, Mxico: Taurus.Mentioned in Subcomandante Marcos 2001, 249. Gonzlez Pedrero, E. 1993. La cuerda floja. Mxico: FCE. Gilly, A., Subcomandante Marcos y C. Ginzburg. 1995. Discusin sobre la historia. Mxico: Taurus. Hardt, M. and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harvey, N. 1998. The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. Durham: Duke University Press. Hayden, T. (Ed.). 2002. The Zapatista Reader. New York: Thunders Mouth Press/Nation Books. Hernndez N., L. 1995. Chiapas: La guerra y la paz. Mxico: ADN Editores. . 1999. The San Andrs Accords: Indians and the Soul. Cultural Survival Quarterly. Issue 23.1 April 30. . 2003. El zapatismo, fuente de inspiracin para los movimientos altermundistas. La Jornada, 29 diciembre, 1, 11-12. Hobbes, T. 1839. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmnesbury. Vol. III: Leviatn: or, the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Eclessiatical and Civil. London: John Bohn. Holloway, J. 2002. Cambiar el mundo sin tomar el poder: El significado de la revolucin hoy. Buenos Aires. Herramienta, BUAP. y E. Pelez (Eds.). 1998. Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico. Londres: Pluto Press. Illich, I. 1972. Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution. London: Marion Boyars. . 1974. Tools for Conviviality. London: Marion Boyars. .1996. Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars. (First published in 1972). Kingsnorth, P. 2003. One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement. London: The Free Press. Le Bot, Yvon. 1997. El sueo zapatista. Mxico: Plaza y Jans. Lenkersdorf, C. 1996. Los hombres verdaderos. Voces y testimonios tojolabales. Mxico: Siglo XXI. 68

Lopes, Ramn. 2004. El espejo y la mscara: Textos sobre zapatismo anexos a Mxico ida y vuelta. Madrid: Ediciones del Caracol. Lpez, M.P. 1996. La guerra de baja intensidad en Mxico. Mxico: Plaza y Valds/UIA. Lpez y Rivas, G. 1995. Nacin y pueblos indios en el neoliberalismo. Mxico: Plaza y Valds/UIA. Mndez, G. 2003. 20 y 10: El fuego y la palabra. Mxico: Rebelda/ La Jornada. Meyer, Jean. Samuel Ruiz en San Cristbal. 2000. Mxico: Tusquets. Miranda O, R. (Comp.). 1995. Chiapas: El regreso a la utopia. Chilpancingo: UAG/Editorial Comuna. Midnight Notes. 1997. One No, Many Yeses. N. 12. Jamaica Plain, MA. . 2001. Auroras of the Zapatistas. Local & Global Struggles of the Fourth World War. New York:Autonomedia. Moguel, J. 1998. Chiapas: La guerra de los signos. Del amanecer zapatista de 1994 a la masacre de Acteal. Mxico: Juan Pablos Editor/La Jornada. Montemayor, C. 1997. Chiapas: La rebelin indgena de Mxico. Mxico: Joaqun Mortiz. . 2000. Los pueblos indios de Mxico hoy. Mxico: Planeta. Montemayor, C., B. Echevarra, C. Aguirre Rojas. 1991. Chiapas en perspectiva histrica. Barcelona: Viejo Topo. Moreno Toscano, A. 1996. Turbulencia poltica: Causas y razones del 94. Mxico: Oceano. Muoz, G. 2003. 20 y 10: El Fuego y la palabra. Mxico: Rebelda/ La Jornada Ediciones. Panikkar, R. 1993 . La diversidad como presupuesto de la armona entre los pueblos, en Wiay Marca (Barcelona), No. 20. . 1995. Invisible Harmony: Essays on contemplation and responsibility. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. . 1996. The Defiance of Pluralism. Soundings 79.1-2 (Spring/ Summer). Ponce de Len, J. (Ed.). 2000. Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcomandante Marcos.Nueva York: Seven Stories Press. Rojas, R. 1995 y 1996. Chiapas: Y las mujeres qu? Mxico: La Jornada Ediciones. Ross, J. 1995. Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas. Monroe: Common Courage Press. 69

Rovira, G. 1994. Zapata vive. La rebelin indgena de Chiapas contada por sus protagonistas.Barcelona: Ed. Virs. Rovira, G. 2000. Women of Maize: Indigenous Women and the Zapatista Rebellion. Latin America Bureau. Ruggiero, G. y S. Sahulka (Eds.). 1998. The Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the 1996 Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. Nueva York: Seven Stories Press. Ruiz, S. y otros. 1998. Actealuna herida abierta. Mxico: ITESO. Rusell, P. 1995. The Chiapas Rebellion. Austin: Mexico Resource Center. Sachs, W. 1992. One World, in: W. Sachs (Ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Simic, Ch. 2004. The Wealth Poverty Buys. The New York Review of Books, vol. LI, nm.17, 4 de noviembre, pp.18-21. Soriano H., S. (Coord.). 1994. A propsito de la insurgencia en Chiapas. Mxico: Asociacin para el Desarrollo de la Investigacin Cientfica y Humanstica de Chiapas. Subcomandante Marcos. 1995. Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqus of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. New York: Monthly Review Press. . 1996. La historia de los colores. Guadalajara: Ediciones Colectivo Callejero. . 1998. La historia de las preguntas. Guadalajara: Ediciones Colectivo Callejero. . 1998. Cuentos para una soledad desvelada. Mxico: Publicaciones Espejo. . 1998. Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (Ed. by John Holloway and Elona Pelez). London: Pluto Press. . 1999. Don Durito de la Lacandona. San Cristbal de Las Casas: CIACH. . 1999. Desde las montaas del sureste mexicano. Cuentos, leyendas y otras postdatas.Barcelona/Mxico: Plaza y Jans. . 1999. La revuelta de la memoria. Textos del subcomandante Marcos y del EZLN sobre la historia.San Cristbal de Las Casas: CIACH. . 2000. Detrs de nosotros estamos ustedes. Barcelona/Mxico: Plaza y Jans. . 2000. The Zapatistas: A Rough Guide (Ed. by Chiapaslink). London: Calverts Press. . 2001. Los del Color de la Tierra. Navarra: Ed. Txalaparta. 70

. 2001. Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings. New York: Seven Stories Press. . 2002. The Zapatista Reader. (Ed. by Tom Hayden). New York: Thunders Mouth Press/Nation. --- 2005. Conversations with Durito - Stories of the Zapatistas and Neoliberalism. New York: Autonomedia. The Zapatistas. 1998. Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the 1996 Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. New York: Seven Stories Press. Toledo, V. 2000. La paz en Chiapas: Ecologa, luchas indgenas y modernidad alternativa. Mxico: UNAM/Ediciones Quinto Sol. Trejo, R. (comp.). 1994. Chiapas: la guerra de las ideas. Mxico: Diana. Vachon, R. 1995. Guswenta or the Intercultural Imperative. Montreal: Interculture. Vzquez Montalbn, M. 2000. Marcos: El seor de los espejos. Mxico: Aguilar. Villoro, L. 1997. El poder y el valor. Mxico: FCE. . 1998. Estado plural, pluralidad de culturas. Mxico: Paids/ UNAM. Viqueira, J:P: y M. Ruiz. 1995. Chiapas: los rumbos de otra historia. Mxico: Ciesas. Wallerstein, I. 2001. Immanuel Wallerstein: crtica del sistema mundo capitalista. Mexico: Era. Weinberg, B. 2000. Hommage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggle in Mexico. Nueva York: Verso. Womack, J. 1998. Chiapas, el Obispo de San Cristbal y la revuelta zapatista. Mxico: Cal y Arena. . 1999. Rebellion in Chiapas: An Historical Reader. New York: The New Press.

71

Some Zapatista Web Pages

Ya Basta! Pgina oficial del Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional (EZLN). http://www.ezln.org/ FZLN Pgina oficial del Frente Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional. http://www.fzln.org.mx/ Rebelda La revista Rebelda publicada por el FZLN on line. http://www.revistarebeldia.org/main.html Enlace civil. http://www.enlacecivil.org.mx/index.htm Colectivo de Solidaridad de la Rebelin Zapatista. Desde Barcelona. http://pangea.org/ellokal/chiapas/home/mexp.htm Accin Zapatista. http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/nave/ Zapatista Net of Autonomy and Liberation. www.actlab.utexas.edu/~zapatistas/ Indymedia Chiapas. http://chiapas.mediosindependientes.org/ Zapatista Index. http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/zapatista.html Introduction to Mxico and the Zapatistas. http:// flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/begindx/ EZLN Chiapas Battalion. www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/5225/bzalx/ plalxbz.html Chiapas Media Project. http://www.chiapasmediaproject.org/

72