Justin Podur
I
was talking to a Mexican friend who voted for Vicente Fox in the July elections,
and told her I was a Zapatista supporter. She was appalled. "You’re not
Mexican, you don’t know what’s going on there. You can’t know from spending a
few months there. I’m from there and the decisions made by the government affect
me and my family. And I’m against the Zapatistas."
"Okay
fine," I said. "Now give me a real reason."
Why
did I support them, she asked. She didn’t know where to begin with her
opposition, so that would be easier.
I
thought of asking her if I should limit my concern of other people’s suffering
to my family. I thought of telling her about NAFTA, and neoliberal economics and
globalization which turns poor farmers into landless labourers; about
government-sponsored paramilitary and military violence and the theft of
resources from poor Mexicans to rich North American corporations, about racism
and indignities. But we were friends, and this was no lecture. So I said:
"Because I support people when they assert their rights against oppressive
governments– in Mexico and anywhere else."
She
warned me that I didn’t understand what was really happening. Those poor
indigenous people were being manipulated. They were pawns in a power game of
outside agitators who came along and sold them a story about how they could have
a better life if they rebelled.
I
didn’t buy it. But it gave me pause.
I
didn’t buy it because it’s the same line every defender of authority ever
provided when authority’s victims assert their dignity. It’s a kind of thinking
that says: ‘I’m all for the poor and oppressed, but opposed to any specific
thing they might do to resist’. So yes the racism and dispossession and poverty
suffered by indigenous people are appalling. But when they resist, they’re
always being ‘manipulated’, they’re always ‘going about it the wrong way’, it’s
always ‘counterproductive’. Yes the violence of the paramilitaries are
atrocious– but no, that doesn’t mean people should defend themselves.
I
didn’t buy it because I don’t believe that the careful, patient, organized,
clever, eloquent resistance of the zapatistas is the response of a manipulated
people.
But
why did it give me pause?
Because
it made me question my credentials. What claim does a privileged person living
in North America have to support a rebellion of people in a country he doesn’t
live in? When he’s safe and doesn’t have to suffer the consequences?
It’s
something solidarity movements grapple with. But it’s a question wrongly put.
Because the real question is not credentials. Credentials or no, 45 people were
murdered in a church in Acteal in 1997 by paramilitaries. Credentials or no,
there are 70,000 soldiers occupying the state of Chiapas. There are over 100
political prisoners, mostly supporters of the Zapatistas. There are people
suffering poverty, hunger, displacement, dispossession, racism. And our actions
here, pressuring our own governments, pressuring corporations from our countries
eager to reap the benefits of the exploitation of these people, can help. Our
watchfulness can limit the atrocities that elites can get away with. And if, as
my friend charged, we don’t understand the situation, shouldn’t we try to find
out? Shouldn’t we try to learn what’s happening, where our work could make a
difference, where our struggles overlap, where we can learn from the creative
resistance of others? I think so.
Operating
on that assumption, let me now provide an update on what is going on in Chiapas.
On
December 3, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) held a press
conference in the autonomous municipality of La Realidad. There they announced
their intention to go to Mexico City in February to address the national
government, to demand recognition of their rights as indigenous people and to
argue on behalf of the peace initiative proposed in 1996 (by Cocopa). They
announced their desire to move to a more ‘open politics’. They provided a series
of signals which the government could provide to demonstrate a willingness to
dialogue. The most important of these signals is the demilitarization of the
state. ‘Withdraw the troops’, they asked the new president, ‘and you can be
assured of a positive response from us.’
The
intention to move to ‘open politics’ comes after the official change of power on
December 1 from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the state party
which had ruled Mexico for 71 years, to the National Action Party (PAN) and its
new President Vicente Fox. The PAN is a right-wing party. In Guanajuato state, a
PAN government made abortion illegal in August. Its economics are the economics
of privatization and corporate power. And while President Fox emphasized
during his campaign that he would choose dialogue, that he would retire the
troops (sometimes he said retire– other times he said reposition or
reorient) the Zapatistas reminded him in an open letter that his predecessor
Zedillo made similar promises before ordering massive military offenses.
The
Zapatistas emphasized that they would continue to resist the neoliberal economic
policies, the dispossession, and the lack of recognition of indigenous rights.
The only question was whether there was now sufficient political space for
their resistance to be open, or whether they would have to continue as an armed
group, hiding in the jungle.
They
will be heading to Mexico City in February, unarmed, with a civilian
mobilization, in the hope that that space is now open.
Until
then, the new administration of Vicente Fox will have the chance to show whether
such hopes are justified– it will have the chance to begin the demilitarization
of the state, the chance to begin the end of the low-intensity war in Chiapas.
ZNet’s
Chiapas pages are: http://www.zmag.org/chiapas1/index.htm
The
open letter to Fox is at: http://www.zmag.org/Chiapas1/tofoxdec3.htm
