WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA MEXICO News Journal Update - (en) Sicilia Libertaria: January 1, 1994: the Zapatista insurrection turns thirty by Andrea Mazzocco (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

At the first light of dawn on January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN) showed itself publicly for the first time.
This rebel and dreamer army, after ten years of clandestinity in the
heights of Chiapas, a state on the southern border of Mexico, finally
comes out into the open. ---- The Mexican Army barracks present in the
Chiapas area are understaffed. There are several soldiers on leave for
the holidays; those who remained are still recovering from the
after-effects of alcohol and a night of celebrations to welcome the new
year. They are not ready when it all begins, and certainly many will not
have believed the news.

At the first light of dawn on January 1, 1994, over seven thousand
indigenous people rose up, occupying the major centers of the state,
such as San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Ocosingo, Las Margaritas, Comitán,
Altamirano, and snatched from the hands of the landowners over 200,000
hectares of lands, to be redistributed to those who until then had only
been able to cultivate the owner's land. Not everyone is armed, those
who don't have a rifle resort to sticks, bows with arrows, slingshots.

We realize very quickly that this is not a classic twentieth-century
revolution, indeed perhaps it is (anticipating it) the first revolution
of the new millennium. There are no faces but balaclavas; there are no
names or personalities to exalt, the names take up the names of fallen
comrades and comrades; they say they fight for the oppressed and want
true national liberation, not the seizure of the palace of power in the
capital. The watchword is autonomy.

Another thing that appears clear about this insurrection is the
practical proof that revolution is not an extemporaneous act of heroism,
a "peak" in which to conquer everything immediately, but a process. An
endless process, the Zapatista "walking asking", in which we always
carry forward theory and practice together, trying and trying again,
making mistakes, failing, getting back up. Many times SubComandante
Marcos, spokesperson for the organization at the time of the
insurrection and in the following years, spoke of how Zapatismo faces
everything by imagining the worst possible hypothesis, and tries to
build actions and reactions from that assumption. This is how it went on
January 1st thirty years ago, the EZLN was ready for defeat, but such an
extreme gesture was due to an extreme situation: five hundred years of
oppression, violence, abuse, slavery. It was not a defeat, despite many
tragic deaths (including the late SubComandante Pedro) and after twelve
days of fighting, when the ceasefire was proclaimed (thanks to the
pressure of Mexican and international public opinion), Zapatismo had a
territory where put into practice what he had already been laboriously
trying to develop for a few years.

Zapatista autonomy is based on self-government and common ownership of
the land: already in the first months of 1994, thirty autonomous
Zapatista municipalities were founded, grouping within them the
communities of the same region. To the community assemblies are
therefore added the municipal assemblies and the municipal authorities,
rotating positions of administrative management of the region pertaining
to each municipality. The land is redistributed, distinguishing between
lands of family use, assigned to each family for their sustenance, and
lands of collective use, whose production was intended for the
collective sustenance of the community or municipality. This model will
develop for the following ten years until the introduction of a third
level of autonomous government, that of the area, grouping together
various municipalities. In fact, in 2003 the Comandancia General of the
EZLN concluded the transfer of responsibility from the military to the
civil administration. In each area, five initially, a Caracol is founded
(literally snail, snail, to metaphorically recall the spiral, they are
political-administrative management centers) and in each of them a Good
Government Council begins to operate, the maximum expression of the
Zapatista autonomous government . It is with the arrival of the good
government councils that all the other fields of autonomy are
harmonised, structuring and making the autonomous educational system,
the health system more efficient (thanks to the fundamental help of many
supportive doctors who accompanied the trial), the autonomous judicial
system and the cooperative production system (colectivos).

A profound analysis of the organization began in 2013, a self-criticism
that encompasses all its spheres at three hundred and sixty degrees.
SubComandante Marcos figuratively "dies," being reborn as SubComandante
Galeano, taking the name of a Zapatista master murdered by
paramilitaries. He is no longer even the spokesperson for the
organization, this role has now passed to Sub-Comandante Moisés. This
phase leads to a profound revision of the structure of autonomy, now
being able to count on more than twenty years of "practical testing"
which restores the awareness of what is going well and what can be
improved. In 2019, to have greater capillarity in the territory (also
due to the great growth of the organization, in terms of numbers and
territorial extension), the zones go from five to twelve, as do the
caracoles.

This decade has seen the resurgence of paramilitary violence in Chiapas,
the entry of the Narcos into previously marginal territories, the
violence of the State in imposing major works harmful to the natural and
social balance of the Mexican south-east, a pandemic, the evidence of
climate change and the increase in extreme weather phenomena. The
"storm", to paraphrase Zapatismo, what the EZLN has been talking about
for years and what it is preparing to face. The capitalist storm,
against which only a global alliance can cope, materialized in the
"Declaration for life" of January 1, 2021, signed by hundreds of
organizations worldwide and the foundation stone of the "Gira por la
Vida", which saw its first chapter in Europe in the last three months of
that same year.

This decade, the third since the insurrection and the fourth since the
birth of the organization in 1983, is the one that brings us to the
present day, and it is the one that brought two great organizational
innovations that bring the Zapatista organization into its fifth decade .

It is precisely as this date approaches that the Zapatista organization
decided to make public its transformations and, even more admirably, its
failures. If until now the three levels of self-government rose from
bottom to top, culminating in the Good Government Councils, now the
pyramid has been overturned, putting the community, the first level,
back at the centre. The councils and town halls were cancelled, and the
assembly was put back at the center to the detriment of the rotating
positions, which by their own admission were starting to "disconnect"
from their community, thinking they could decide for it, rather than
implement its proposals. Therefore, at the center there are now the
Local Autonomous Governments (GAL), one in each community. The latter,
in addition to administering their community, can bring common proposals
to their region, in which the Zapatista Collective of Autonomous
Governments (CGAZ) will meet, and to their area, in which the Assembly
of Collectives of Autonomous Governments will meet Zapatistas (ACGAZ).
The Caracoles remain the physical reference point for each area.

The second big news announced in these days approaching the anniversary
is the establishment of lands in which the principle of non-ownership
applies. To be sure, in none of the Zapatista lands does the principle
of ownership as understood by us apply: the lands assigned to families
are still part of the community's lands, the family cannot dispose of
them at will and it is not possible to sell or privatize them. The same
obviously applies to collective lands, cultivated with voluntary work
for the support of the entire community. This new typology of land, the
third therefore, is based on the concept of being no man's land, and
therefore automatically everyone's land, common. These lands want to be
returned to the population without any distinction, including political
affiliation. This means that they will be at the disposal of the
Zapatista population as well as the non-Zapatista population. They will
not be managed by any authority other than the people who live in those
territories, who will independently manage the cultivation shifts. At
the end of the cultivation cycle there will be no taxes or payments in
kind, the entire harvest will be at the disposal of those who worked it,
while the improvements to the land will remain for the benefit of the
next round.

This great innovation, approved by a consultation in all the Zapatista
centers, perhaps represents the best possible response to the changed
context now experienced in Chiapas. Because if since 1994 the Mexican
government has tried to divide the population, funding paramilitary
groups that faced the Zapatista organization, the entry of drug
trafficking cartels into the region increases variables and violence,
and requires first of all the union of forces from Bass. A continuous
dialogue therefore between the Zapatista and non-Zapatista populations
could be the only possible response to this war.

To paraphrase the latest statements, there is no manual to follow in
what the Zapatista organization is building, the only possibility is to
continue to question ourselves and to make self-criticism and innovation
the beacons for continuing the journey. And if this organization
continues to move forward, forty, thirty, twenty and ten years later, we
can look optimistically to the years ahead.

Long live the Zapatista revolution.

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca