On the same day NAFTA went into effect, January 1st, ’94, the Zapatistas declared war on the Mexican government, saying that NAFTA meant death to indigenous peoples.
Peter Rosset talking:
The Zapatistas control about a third of the territory of the state of Chiapas, which they organized into five autonomous regions. And each one of those regions has a capital, a capital town or seat of administrative government called a caracol, which means “snail” in Spanish. So, in each of the five caracoles on New Year’s Eve, they had a 20 anniversary celebration with thousands of people from Zapatista communities, often wearing ski masks or bandannas covering their faces, dancing all night to live music, with thousands of people who came from all over Mexico and all over the world, in fact—from Europe, from Africa, from the Middle East, from Asia, from the United States—to participate in this celebration, a celebration on one hand of 20 years since the Zapatistas said “Basta” to NAFTA and neoliberal economic policies, but also to celebrate all the things that the Zapatistas have achieved in those 20 years in terms of constructing an alternative form of autonomous self-government in the territory that they control. It was very festive, and there’s a huge amount of energy here in Chiapas right now.
Comandante Zebedeo, “We have never had these rights—freedom of expression, the right to organize, the freedom to set prices of our produce. When we produce something, it is the buyer who sets the price of our product, and that is where the exploitation begins. They pay us as little as one peso for our products, but don’t consider the work and sacrifice which we make in the bulk and the weight of our work. And this costs us work. It costs us hunger. It costs us the little money we have invested there. And when it doesn’t produce, when it does not bear fruit, we don’t benefit. Others benefit, and the true workers remain the same, with their arms crossed and their land exploited.”
indigenous people in Mexico, since the Spanish conquest 500 years ago, as they said, have been treated almost like animals in a very racist society—the poorest of the poor, the most excluded, most indigenous communities without running water, without electricity, without effective education or healthcare. And that’s one of the reasons why the Zapatistas rose up. They also rose up because they knew that that was going to go from bad to worse with NAFTA and with free trade.
I think the most important thing now, 20 years later, is that in one small area, the southeast of Mexico, where they control territory, they’ve managed to create a different system—a small vision of what an alternative society would look like with collective and rotating self-government, with their own autonomous education system, autonomous healthcare system, production cooperatives and societies, the recovery of the local economy, their own system of administration of justice—in other words, their own legal system, which is much fairer than the federal Mexican legal system—tremendous promotion of young people and of women into positions of importance in the self-government process. So, it’s really exciting to see what is possible to achieve if you control your own territory and if you have a different vision of how society could be organized.
we face in Mexico and in the world—in the United States, as well, and in many countries—what Subcomandante Marcos has called “media terrorism,” and that the mainstream media, what it does is it frightens people with unexplained images of threats and violence, making people support right-wing governments and repressive measures, and never really reports on what’s going on in the grassroots on what are the real causes of problems, what are real solutions, what do local alternatives look like when they’re actually functioning. We never hear anything like that. And I think the Zapatistas, amongst many other social movements, are fed up with that. And so, for example, in the New Year’s Eve celebration, they said it was open to everybody in the world except the news media, because they’re tired of the distorted and bad coverage. Of course, the media was there, and some of the alternative media, like Democracy Now! and like many other sources of alternative media, do have much more balanced and accurate coverage, but we don’t see that accurate coverage in the mainstream media, neither in Mexico nor anywhere else.
right from the beginning, before the Zapatistas even really came public, they already had a revolutionary law of women. And what they say is that their goal is that women should have 50 percent of all positions of authority in the self-governing process. We know that women are 50 percent of the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Council, which is the maximum authority in the Zapatista movement. And things that one can see just in Zapatista territory is a whole generation of young indigenous women who have graduated from the Zapatista autonomous school system who are now, from 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old and who are in positions of authority, who are participating in what they call the Good Government Councils, the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, who are articulate.
And something—it’s a small anecdote, but that really moved me the other day, a Zapatista agro-ecology promoter was in my office, and he was talking about how the young women, indigenous women now in the indigenous communities in Zapatista territory are different from indigenous women before, because, he said, they no longer look at the floor when you talk to them. They look you directly in the eye. And I think that’s a small thing, but it really sums up how Zapatistas—the Zapatismo is changing the role of women in indigenous society here in Chiapas.
I think that the obstacles faced by the Zapatistas today, specifically, for them, are the counterinsurgency campaign the Mexican government carries out against them, which includes a negative media campaign, but also the problems that all of us in Mexico face. There have been tremendous reforms pushed through by the right-wing president, Enrique Peña Nieto, which are basically rolling back the remaining positive things left over from the Mexican revolution. So we’re facing very difficult times here in Mexico.
– source democracynow.org
Peter Rosset, professor of rural social movements and “agro-ecology” at the ECOSUR Center for Research and Graduate Studies in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico. He also works with the global peasant and family farm movement, La Via Campesina.