Cultural Synergy: A Zapatista hope for New Year's Day

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It was exactly nineteen years ago, on January 1, 1994, that the Zapatistas first emerged in the international political forefront; and gradually, their political agenda of Liberty, Democracy, and Justice, their inclusive, participatory, and non-hierarchical forms of organization, and their groundbreaking and imaginative opposition to neoliberalism, became a key influence on grassroots organizing worldwide, including the 1999 protest in Seattle and the current Occupy movement.

As Tom Hayden notes in his introduction to his edited book The Zapatista Reader (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002, pp. 1-2), the Zapatistas have gone through long periods of silence on the basis of Indian traditions, while Mexican politicians rush to issue their obituary. Nevertheless, the Zapatista movement has been constantly returning to the political forefront to address civil society with new ideas and proposals. And this is what happened eleven days ago as well.

Photograph by Tim Russo upsidedownworld.org

On 21 December 2o12, tens of thousands of Zapatistas protested silently in the streets of cities of Chiapas they had occupied in the 1994 uprising. It was a profound manifestation of their moral authority; as Tim Russo eloquently put it in the Upside Down World website, it was "the echo of a unified and deafening silence that shouted YA BASTA! once again." The protest was followed by a poetic message by Subcomandante Marcos, and a communique by EZLN describing the flourishing autonomous Zapatista communities, and putting forward six new political initiatives. I am pasting the opening lines of the text from the dorset chiapas solidarity website:

In the early morning hours of December 21, 2012, tens of thousands of indigenous Zapatistas mobilized and took, peacefully and silently, five municipal seats in the southeast Mexican state of Chiapas.

In the cities of Palenque, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, Ocosingo, and San Cristóbal de las Casas, we looked at you and at ourselves in silence.

Ours is not a message of resignation.

It is not one of war, death, or destruction.

Our message is one of struggle and resistance.

These incredibly moving images reminded me of the novelist and Nobel laureate José Saramago, who had written that "[i]n recent years Chiapas has been the place where the most disdained, most humiliated, and most offended people of Mexico were able to recover intact a dignity and an honor that had never been completely lost" (Prologue: Chiapas, a Name of Pain and Hope, in Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Juana Ponce De Leon, ed., New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002, p. xx).

And in the same way that these dignified and honorable people marched in silence so as to be heard, they cover their faces so as to have a face; behind their masks, there are all of us. As they put it in the remarkable remarks at the opening ceremony of the international Encounter they held in Chiapas in August 1996 (Zapatista Encuentro: documents from the 1996 Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998, pp. 24-25):

Behind this, we are you.

Behind our masks is the face of all excluded women,
        of all the forgotten native people,
        of all the persecuted homosexuals,
        of all the despised youth,
        of all the beaten migrants,
        of all those imprisoned for their words and thoughts,
        of all the humiliated workers,
        of all those dead from neglect,
        of all the simple and ordinary men and women
              who don't count,
              who aren't seen,
              who are nameless,
              who have no tomorrow.

And I cannot think of a better way to welcome their return than to put forward an insight into the core of their political project, as well as a fruitful reflection on it. Thus the first of the following quotes is from Subcomandante Marcos' appeal to the national and international civil society on 30 August 1996, which is available at the EZLN Communiques webpage of the Struggle archive.

What makes us different is our political proposal. [...] We do not want others, more or less of the right, center or left, to decide for us. We want to participate directly in the decisions which concern us, to control those who govern us, without regard to their political affiliation, and oblige them to "rule by obeying". We do not struggle to take power, we struggle for democracy, liberty, and justice.

The second is an excerpt from the introduction by John Holloway and Eloína Peláez to their edited book Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (London: Pluto Press, 1998, pp. 16-17):

The central notion of dignity, so much emphasised by the Zapatistas, implies not only a recognition of one's own dignity but also of the dignity of others: it thus implies an aversion to violence and precludes the denial of dignity to others on the basis of race, gender, nationality or any other supposed identity. Beyond that, the crucial issue is not which form of struggle is correct, but how the different forms of struggle are articulated or brought into relation with one another. That is why all the political initiatives of the EZLN point towards experimenting with political forms with the aim of making effective the principle of 'commanding obeying', the principle that those who lead should be effectively subjected to the rule of those whom they claim to lead.