Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did
Speaker 1: Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that wherever they are a
Speaker 1: bad things doing by people, there are good people bad
Speaker 1: fight those things. All of history is a give and take.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's hard to look at our society and history
Speaker 1: and see how bad she is and be like, how
Speaker 1: come we never win and make things great? But that
Speaker 1: is selling ourselves short. Without the incredible work and sacrifice
Speaker 1: of millions of people, we would just live in a
Speaker 1: totalitarian hell world instead of you know, a complicated hell
Speaker 1: world with moments of startling beauty. Anyway, I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Margaret Kiljoy, and right now I'm doing a series about
Speaker 1: the pretty successful fight against neoliberalism, starting with the Zapatistas,
Speaker 1: the indigenous rebels in southern Mexico who have a bottom
Speaker 1: up democratic structure and who use a pretty diverse set
Speaker 1: of tactics in their fight for local autonomy and for
Speaker 1: this of autonomous politics across the world. We're on part
Speaker 1: four of that. Well, I guess we're in part four
Speaker 1: of the neoliberalism thing. The part one was just what's neoliberalism?
Speaker 1: But we're on part three of the Zapatistas. We've talked
Speaker 1: about this Appatistas rise, and we've talked about their politics,
Speaker 1: and now I want to talk about how they're structured
Speaker 1: and some of the things that they've accomplished over the decades.
Speaker 1: Before next week, we're going to take a detour into
Speaker 1: another antecedent of the alter globalization movement, which is the
Speaker 1: thing that smash neoliberalism. Neoliberalism still exists. We always think
Speaker 1: of things in this block and white like winning losing way,
Speaker 1: but there is no static win condition. Anyway, you're thinking
Speaker 1: to yourself, Margaret, why haven't you introduced your producer or
Speaker 1: your audio engineer, and you'd be thinking, right, I have
Speaker 1: a producer. Her name is Sophie. I have an audio engineer.
Speaker 1: Hi Eva. Everyone has to say hi to Eva. And
Speaker 1: I also want to tell you that the music was
Speaker 1: written forced by n women. But I also want to
Speaker 1: say that once the Zapatistas took territory and declared it autonomous,
Speaker 1: they just started running everything as they believe it should
Speaker 1: be run through local assemblies and seeing their concept of
Speaker 1: good government, which they use in opposition of the bad government,
Speaker 1: which is the Mexican government that is oppressing them. But
Speaker 1: they didn't keep their heads in the sand. They spent
Speaker 1: most of the latter half of the nineties involved in
Speaker 1: political campaigning trying to get the autonomy of indigenous groups
Speaker 1: in the San Andreas of Kords enshrined into the Mexican constitution,
Speaker 1: or at least to get the government to respect the
Speaker 1: document that they'd already signed, right, which is that document
Speaker 1: that was like, hey, respect indigenous autonomy that was signed
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety six, and the government was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't actually pay any attention to what we sign
Speaker 1: if it's with indigenous people. I mentioned last time that
Speaker 1: Mexico was ruled by one political party for most of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century. It is the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Speaker 1: This party was founded in nineteen twenty eight and then
Speaker 1: it ruled as a one party state more or less
Speaker 1: until the year two thousand and They had like this
Speaker 1: thing where they would be like, oh, each president only
Speaker 1: sits one term, but then each president would sort of
Speaker 1: hand pick their successor. When I talked about government loyalists
Speaker 1: who are harassing asapatistas, I'm talking about people associated with
Speaker 1: or loyal to the PRI. It's hard to pigeonhole the
Speaker 1: PRI with a specific ideology. Besides, they like being the
Speaker 1: people in charge. It started off leftish and then it
Speaker 1: went rightish, and it was them who did all the
Speaker 1: neoliberal restructuring that we talked about. I would say that
Speaker 1: their politics are more defined by like corruption and power
Speaker 1: than any specific ideology. And then in the year two thousand,
Speaker 1: the PRI lost a presidential election. They lost to a
Speaker 1: right wing party, the National Action Party and a guy
Speaker 1: named Vincente Fox. Yet despite this being the election of
Speaker 1: a right wing guy, people were honestly kind of excited
Speaker 1: because he had some big promises about respecting Indigenous rights.
Speaker 1: But also he just wasn't the party who had been
Speaker 1: killing them, because the PRI had been funding paramilitaries to
Speaker 1: kill everyone, and so people were like, hooray, not the PRI.
Speaker 1: Marcos wrote the outgoing president from the PRI and said,
Speaker 1: you did everything you could to destroy us. All we
Speaker 1: had to do was resist, because they outlasted those fuckers.
Speaker 1: Fox agreed to meet with indigenous leaders and this Apatistas
Speaker 1: toured the country and held a bunch of rallies and shit,
Speaker 1: and then showed up in Mexico City in time for
Speaker 1: the inauguration. It was finally going to happen. Indigenous rights
Speaker 1: were going to wind up in the constitution. The Apatistas
Speaker 1: were excited to become simply a civil political organization, and
Speaker 1: then all three of the political parties in the Senate
Speaker 1: of Mexico, including the Social Democrats, the most left wing party,
Speaker 1: came together to be like, nah, we don't really want
Speaker 1: to do that. We want to force indigenous assimilation instead.
Speaker 1: So by two thousand and one, that dream of having
Speaker 1: autonomy while fully at peace with the Mexican state was dead.
Speaker 1: A leader named Cammodante Bruce Les declared on January first,
Speaker 1: two thousand and three, quote, let us not wait around
Speaker 1: for the bad government to give us permission. We should
Speaker 1: organize ourselves like true rebels and not wait for someone
Speaker 1: to give us permission to be autonomous. We govern ourselves
Speaker 1: with or without the law. Then, by August of that year,
Speaker 1: they declared the creation of five good Government Councils. They'd
Speaker 1: been ruling themselves already for about a decade, but they
Speaker 1: wanted to create a bit more of this formal structure
Speaker 1: because they wanted the various regions to better redistribute resources
Speaker 1: amongst each other. And crucially, according to the sixth Declaration
Speaker 1: of the Lacandon Jungle, quote, we saw that the easy
Speaker 1: len with its political military component, was involving itself in
Speaker 1: decisions that belonged to the democratic authorities. So basically they
Speaker 1: bolstered the civilian governmental structures so that the military leaders
Speaker 1: can no longer participate in civilian government and to try
Speaker 1: and create that pretty essential separation between military and civil leadership.
Speaker 1: These good Government councils were in five regions that they
Speaker 1: called caracolas, which is a word that sometimes means snail
Speaker 1: or curl, but in this case it's actually referencing conch shells,
Speaker 1: which traditionally were blown to some and aid from other communities.
Speaker 1: They built their bottom up democracy based on three organizational tiers.
Speaker 1: There's the community or village level, then the municipal level,
Speaker 1: which coordinates dozens of villages, and then you have a
Speaker 1: region which ties together several municipalities. There are assemblies at
Speaker 1: every level, and people are elected to serve on these assemblies.
Speaker 1: Despite the earlier version presented by Marcos in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: four where there were no term limits. You can go
Speaker 1: back to part three and hear them talking about the
Speaker 1: indigenous ways of doing things that they wanted to incorporate.
Speaker 1: By the end of this system, the Good Government Council
Speaker 1: system in twenty twenty three. I believe that people serve
Speaker 1: two or three year terms and these can only be
Speaker 1: served once, and your leadership position can be revoked at
Speaker 1: any time by your constituency. Proposals will come from the
Speaker 1: top level, the Council of Good Government, down to the
Speaker 1: regional assembly. These are then sometimes passed along further down
Speaker 1: to the community delegates who go around and consult people
Speaker 1: in their area. Concerns and amendments and such are passed
Speaker 1: along back up the chain, and new proposals are sent out.
Speaker 1: This can happen several times with any given decision, with
Speaker 1: ideas and thoughts going up and down the chain. They
Speaker 1: put a lot of work into making sure that it
Speaker 1: was you know, the people rule and the government obey
Speaker 1: like the science say when you go into Zapatista territory.
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about how they revisited this
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three. But along the way they put
Speaker 1: in a lot of safeguards. Being in politics is seen
Speaker 1: as a responsibility without any afforded privileges or pay. You
Speaker 1: can't nominate yourself for positions of leadership. Other people have
Speaker 1: to pick you, and there are a lot of formal
Speaker 1: checks and balances, like a commission that audits the various councils,
Speaker 1: and there's the term limits and revocability. Basically, the appetizers
Speaker 1: work very hard to de specialize the role of political leadership. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: though especially in military matters, the government commands because it
Speaker 1: needs to act quickly. They can only give commands that
Speaker 1: they genuinely understand to be the will of the people.
Speaker 1: So for the majority of the history of the Zapatistas,
Speaker 1: that was the structure. But in twenty twenty three they
Speaker 1: changed their system and restructured themselves again. Mainstream news is
Speaker 1: more or less universally use this as an excuse to
Speaker 1: claim that the Zapatista project is over, or that its
Speaker 1: star has waned so dim that it doesn't light up
Speaker 1: much at all anymore. I don't think that that's the
Speaker 1: best way to look at this situation. Though the Zapatzas
Speaker 1: have been it seems losing ground recently to the tide
Speaker 1: of gang and cartel violence, especially along the border with Guatemala,
Speaker 1: and the Zapatistas have become more isolated from the rest
Speaker 1: of Mexican society. According to some sources, people have been
Speaker 1: leaving the area. The Mexican state has sent troops to
Speaker 1: the region, but rather than trying to stop the cartels
Speaker 1: with these troops, well, according to a statement from the
Speaker 1: Easy ln Quote, the only reason they are here is
Speaker 1: to stem migration. That is the order they got from
Speaker 1: the US government, and this is under the Biden administration.
Speaker 1: It's worth pointing out. So the Zapatista has declared the
Speaker 1: dissolution of their autonomous municipalities. This is not the abandonment
Speaker 1: of autonomy, but its refinement, at least as far as
Speaker 1: I can tell. I'm kind of looking at this with
Speaker 1: rose tinted glasses, but they have made a lot of
Speaker 1: statements around this very idea. The social centers they've built
Speaker 1: with schools and health clinics remain open, but the regional
Speaker 1: administrations have been dissolved. The good Government councils have been
Speaker 1: replaced by the local autonomous governments. This isn't a fracturing,
Speaker 1: but a decentralizing. There is still a three tier system
Speaker 1: of decision making assemblies, but now more of the power
Speaker 1: is invested at the local level because the larger structures
Speaker 1: aren't permanent, but are instead called for by the local structures.
Speaker 1: So basically you're like, oh, we need to coordinate this big,
Speaker 1: so you call for the next level up. And then
Speaker 1: if that level is like, oh, we need to call
Speaker 1: this even bigger than you call for the highest level
Speaker 1: of it. These three levels are the local autonomous government,
Speaker 1: the collective of local autonomous governments, and the assemblies of
Speaker 1: collectives of local autonomous government. They did this for two reasons. One,
Speaker 1: I read that it allows them to better focus on
Speaker 1: self defense against the cartels and stuff. I actually am
Speaker 1: unsure the mechanism for how this helps them focus on
Speaker 1: self defense. I don't know. Two, they realized that their
Speaker 1: good government councils were becoming, as Subcommandante Moyses put it,
Speaker 1: pure middle power was beginning to become more clearly invested
Speaker 1: in the top instead of the bottom. Moyses said, quote,
Speaker 1: the proposals from authorities did not go down as they
Speaker 1: were to the people, nor do the opinions of the
Speaker 1: people reach the authorities. As part of this shift that
Speaker 1: they did in twenty twenty three structuring, they're also looking
Speaker 1: to get even more radical with how they're handling property
Speaker 1: in land. For the past few decades, land was either
Speaker 1: owned individually or by families or was part of formalized
Speaker 1: collective land projects. They want to start making more land
Speaker 1: and actual commons that can be worked by Zapatistas and
Speaker 1: non Zapatistas alike, basically being like, you know what, we're
Speaker 1: going to go back to just complete non ownership of land.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason for that is probably ideological, but
Speaker 1: it was also a practical decision. Violent arguments over land
Speaker 1: rights are a huge part of the incursions against Zapatista territory.
Speaker 1: We talked about this last time that basically like the
Speaker 1: Sapatista's like claimed by force an awful lot of indigenous
Speaker 1: territory and took it back in declared it autonomous right,
Speaker 1: and there have been a lot of conflict around land
Speaker 1: rights and who owns land. And so they can say, look,
Speaker 1: anyone can use this, including you, including us, They can
Speaker 1: hopefully de escalate some of that tension. I don't know
Speaker 1: how that's gone yet. Unfortunately, I've mostly just found lots
Speaker 1: and lots of information about when they made this transition.
Speaker 1: I haven't been able to find as much coming in
Speaker 1: a year and a half two years later to see
Speaker 1: how that's been going. But through various means they've ruled
Speaker 1: themselves autonomously for decades, despite the political and military pressure
Speaker 1: applied to them by the Mexican State, and it's honestly
Speaker 1: just breathtaking how much success they've had. And if you
Speaker 1: want to have a lot of success, if you buy
Speaker 1: our goods and services, you will succeed at the very least.
Speaker 1: And having bought goods and services and maybe that'll get
Speaker 1: you used to success and successes will just start rolling in.
Speaker 1: I can't promise that, but I can promise that, and
Speaker 1: we're back. One of the main things that these local
Speaker 1: governments and the bappatiste in military accomplished was keeping neoliberal
Speaker 1: extractive projects out of the region. They stop mining and
Speaker 1: shit like that. Recovering land from the capitalist state is
Speaker 1: pretty much the fundamental idea of autonomy. They've also done
Speaker 1: an admirable job improving the lives of people in the area.
Speaker 1: Although the people in the area remain poor as fuck,
Speaker 1: with a lot of issues around malnourishment and just general
Speaker 1: like it sucks to be poor. The Zapatistas have refused
Speaker 1: all government handouts. They are at war with the government,
Speaker 1: after all, and their isolation has certainly led to problems
Speaker 1: of poverty still, everything I've read leads me to believe
Speaker 1: that people of the area saw their material lives improve
Speaker 1: dramatically under their own autonomy. Zapatistas have set up health
Speaker 1: clinics and schools everywhere. As of twenty twelve, it was,
Speaker 1: to quote Raoul Zabyci, quote two hospitals, eighteen clinics, and
Speaker 1: about eight hundred community health houses in the five regions,
Speaker 1: with no less than five hundred health promoters trained under
Speaker 1: the criteria A adopted by the Zapatistas. The community health
Speaker 1: houses did basic medical care, and they also teach hygiene,
Speaker 1: sexual health and safety, and sit like how to boil
Speaker 1: water in all of that. Also, as of twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: which is just the last numbers I've found, they've built
Speaker 1: three hundred schools, just more schools than I've ever built.
Speaker 1: The schools that they've built teach bilingually to keep people
Speaker 1: from losing their indigenous languages. There are many in the area.
Speaker 1: They teach actual indigenous history. That has been a race
Speaker 1: for Mexican education. And you're not going to be surprised
Speaker 1: to realize this. The pedagogical differences, it's not just that
Speaker 1: they teach slightly different stuff. How they teach it is
Speaker 1: fundamentally different. Zapatista pedagogy is designed to encourage autonomy and
Speaker 1: free thinking. The children and the elders co developed their curriculum.
Speaker 1: There are no grades, and the class advances only as
Speaker 1: everyone in it has learned the topic. Bapatistas also build
Speaker 1: worker cooperatives, where people who work collectively on a project
Speaker 1: share in the decision making and the rewards. Why should
Speaker 1: democracy stop at the doherty er job? And they're not
Speaker 1: fully isolated from the economy of the world. They are
Speaker 1: looking to undercut the coyotes, the middlemen who rip off
Speaker 1: the producers, so they set up distribution cooperatives that supply
Speaker 1: both Zapatista and non Zapatista stores. They also sell coffee
Speaker 1: all over the world. As best as I understand, they
Speaker 1: have a fairly strict no alcohol or hard drugs policy.
Speaker 1: In Zapatista territory or at least several individual areas that
Speaker 1: I have read about do and all told, they are
Speaker 1: about three hundred thousand people, or about five percent of
Speaker 1: the population of Chiapas living in these autonomous communities. The
Speaker 1: most well known Zapatista town, the Zapatista city, is Oventic
Speaker 1: which from nineteen ninety four to two thousand and four
Speaker 1: went from a tiny rural community to an urban center
Speaker 1: or a high school and a hospital. Even some folks
Speaker 1: who don't support the Zapatistas in the area prefer going
Speaker 1: to their hospitals because they won't be treated as racistly. Basically,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of racism against indigenous people in Mexico,
Speaker 1: and much like in the States, racism is applied in
Speaker 1: medical situations very dramatically, and so a lot of people
Speaker 1: are like, Yeah, I'm going to the Zapatista hospital because
Speaker 1: it's going to be better. The medical system they're building
Speaker 1: refuses to erase traditional knowledge. It mixes modalities from Western
Speaker 1: medicine and indigenous medicine, what they call the two medicines.
Speaker 1: The author Gloria Mignot's cited as Zapatista who told her quote,
Speaker 1: this dream started when we realized that the knowledge of
Speaker 1: our elders was being lost. They know how to cure
Speaker 1: bones and sprains, they know how to use herbs, they
Speaker 1: know how to oversee the delivery of babies, but their
Speaker 1: knowledge was being lost with the use of medicines purchased
Speaker 1: in the pharmacy. So he came to an agreement and
Speaker 1: brought together all the men and women that know about
Speaker 1: traditional healing. It was not easy to bring everyone together.
Speaker 1: There were some twenty men and women, older people from
Speaker 1: the communities who acted as teachers of traditional health. About
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty students signed up, most of them
Speaker 1: Zapatista campagneros. Now the amount of midwives, bone setters and
Speaker 1: herbalists in our communities has increased. And this is such
Speaker 1: a fascinating story, like this could have been its own episodes.
Speaker 1: You know, this method of saving traditional knowledge that was
Speaker 1: done not kind of like institutionally, where they found twenty
Speaker 1: healers out of there's three hundred thousand zapatistas, you know,
Speaker 1: they found twenty of them and from that they have
Speaker 1: been able to save this traditional knowledge in the modern world.
Speaker 1: And I think that's cool. The folks who work directly
Speaker 1: for Zapatista infrastructure do so without any sort of wage labor.
Speaker 1: A teacher at a Zapatista school will just be directly
Speaker 1: supported by the community with people meeting their needs. I've
Speaker 1: read a couple different ways that this could happen. For example,
Speaker 1: depending on the land arrangement in the area, like if
Speaker 1: everyone kind of has like parcels and gross food and
Speaker 1: to sustain themselves, which is a arrangement that I've seen
Speaker 1: in traditional communities all over the world as I read history.
Speaker 1: If that's what's going on in this given village, for example,
Speaker 1: other people will work the teacher's parcel to grow food
Speaker 1: on it for the teacher, or as another account put it,
Speaker 1: the students bring the teacher a chicken as tuition. They
Speaker 1: also built an activist training school in the Ricardo Floris
Speaker 1: Mcgonn municipality together with Greek comrades, and there's like all
Speaker 1: kinds of pedagogical stuff that they did there that ended
Speaker 1: up influencing a lot of things, where they like set
Speaker 1: the room up in a hexagon so that everyone can
Speaker 1: see each other, and like, I don't know, it's just interesting.
Speaker 1: And there's this like this back and forth internationally that
Speaker 1: they talk about very consciously where they're like, we don't
Speaker 1: want people to come here and like school us how
Speaker 1: to do things, and we don't want people to just
Speaker 1: come here and just learn from us, because we know everything.
Speaker 1: They talk all the time about how they're like, no,
Speaker 1: we want to share, we want to participate as equals.
Speaker 1: In a global community from the bottom and the left,
Speaker 1: and so some of what they've done, just some of
Speaker 1: what they've done. In nineteen ninety four they threw a
Speaker 1: National Democratic Convention. I think we talked about that a
Speaker 1: little bit. By nineteen ninety six, with the San Andreas Talks,
Speaker 1: they helped start the National Indigenous Convention. That same year
Speaker 1: they also started the international talks that became the Ault
Speaker 1: Globalization movement, which were called the Gatherings for Humanity against Neoliberalism,
Speaker 1: the first of which was held in Chiapas. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and one, they did the March of the Color
Speaker 1: of the Earth, in which millions of supporters came out
Speaker 1: and greeted as Apatista caravan touring the country for thirty
Speaker 1: seven days. And this was done to support that indigenous
Speaker 1: autonomy law that was going to end up included in
Speaker 1: the constitution, ratified into the constitution. That's the word I
Speaker 1: think that of course didn't happen. But while they were
Speaker 1: doing this, while they were doing the march, they traveled
Speaker 1: four thousand miles and through seventy seven events before speaking
Speaker 1: to Congress and having all of the ruling parties left
Speaker 1: and right reject indigenous autonomy, Marco said about this quote.
Speaker 1: At this point, we concluded that the path of dialogue
Speaker 1: with the Mexican political class was exhausted and we had
Speaker 1: to find another path. And you know what path, the
Speaker 1: Zapatistas probably didn't really go down. They probably didn't go
Speaker 1: down the path of ads supported radio. But the thing
Speaker 1: is is everyone does things differently in different regions for
Speaker 1: different reasons, and we are an ad supported podcast. These
Speaker 1: are the ads that support us, and we're back, okay,
Speaker 1: So now that they're like bitter and turned off of
Speaker 1: electoral politics for whole. On January first, two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: they launched what was called the Other Campaign, and it
Speaker 1: was basically a political campaign for no political candidate. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a like don't vote campaign either. It was like,
Speaker 1: we have to build an actual alternative while everyone else
Speaker 1: is busy campaigning. Subcommadante Marcos, calling himself Candidate zero, traveled
Speaker 1: the country, listening to people and hoping to unite a
Speaker 1: new left movement from below. He met with indigenous leaders
Speaker 1: and workers, and people who were marginalized in all kinds
Speaker 1: of ways, like sex workers and youth and women and
Speaker 1: students and the elderly. I think this is around the
Speaker 1: time I first started really seeing the Zapatistas talk a
Speaker 1: lot about trans writes. But that's just for my own memory.
Speaker 1: And so Candidate zero wasn't running for office, but instead
Speaker 1: looking to build from the bottom up to create a
Speaker 1: quote common language to unite people across various struggles, all
Speaker 1: of these different struggles that weren't necessarily talking to each other.
Speaker 1: That was his point, especially people who an't necessarily represented
Speaker 1: by big groups or whatever. This campaign was not met
Speaker 1: with universal support. Some folks felt that it would pull
Speaker 1: votes away from the Social Democratic candidate, the PRD candidate,
Speaker 1: and the election. They're like, ah, why are you dividing
Speaker 1: the vote by not even running another candidate. You can
Speaker 1: tell by my tone of voice that I don't really
Speaker 1: care about that particular concern. The Zapatista position was that, well,
Speaker 1: the PRD had just rejected indigenous autonomy, doing what basically
Speaker 1: all political parties do, which is drift to the right
Speaker 1: once they have power. The Zapatista's also set up a
Speaker 1: system called Escalita in which students from all over Mexico
Speaker 1: and the world come and learn in Chiapas, and they've
Speaker 1: continued to be met with lots of people attacking them.
Speaker 1: In twenty fourteen, paramilitaries attacked them a lot. A compagnio
Speaker 1: named Galliano was murdered on May second of that year.
Speaker 1: I believe fifteen other people were injured in that attack,
Speaker 1: and it seems very likely it was tart. The unarmed
Speaker 1: Galliano refused to surrender and was shot three times and killed.
Speaker 1: He was a school teacher, someone involved in the Escalite
Speaker 1: the movement, and he wrote a lot in English about
Speaker 1: that movement. The pair of militaries destroyed the school and
Speaker 1: health clinic in the same attack, so it seems like
Speaker 1: it was targeted. Those epetises believe it was a targeted assassination.
Speaker 1: For nearly ten years. Subcommandante Marcos changed his name to
Speaker 1: Subcommandante Galliano in honor of his fallen friend. The pair
Speaker 1: of militaries weren't done and they came back in the
Speaker 1: fall to attack more communities. They came into a collective
Speaker 1: workplace with guns and fired into the air and burned
Speaker 1: a Galliano lives poster. They killed a steer, basically trying
Speaker 1: to run people off the land. Then they came back
Speaker 1: and killed another steer, Then they killed a horse, and
Speaker 1: they would just show up the rifles and chainsaws and
Speaker 1: cut down trees and drive by and shoot into houses
Speaker 1: and just you know, be uh, let's go with generally unpleasant.
Speaker 1: In August of that year, the Zapatistas were building a
Speaker 1: new collective workplace, like basically kind of building a new
Speaker 1: village essentially, and the paramilitary showed up and yelled things like,
Speaker 1: these weapons we use are from the government, and this
Speaker 1: land is ours and does not belong to the fucking Zapatistas.
Speaker 1: And it's worth pointing out this particular paramilitary group was
Speaker 1: not local to the area. They destroyed the new village,
Speaker 1: all nine houses of it, and stole all the stuff
Speaker 1: in the new store they've built, and just like basically
Speaker 1: robbed the place. The displaced people were given some money
Speaker 1: by the Zapatistas and given new places to stay. The
Speaker 1: news I could find about these attacks comes from shortly
Speaker 1: after the attacks, so I can't tell you everything about
Speaker 1: how that played out, But in general, the Eazyln as
Speaker 1: a military force, agreed to follow the will of the people,
Speaker 1: which was that they didn't want force met with force
Speaker 1: and an escalation of violence. In twenty eighteen, the Zapatistas
Speaker 1: returned to electoral politics. Briefly, they supported an indigenous but
Speaker 1: non Zapatista woman as a presidential candidate, Maria de Jesos
Speaker 1: Petrucio Martinez. She was with the National Indigenous Congress, running
Speaker 1: as an independent. The National Indigenous Congress is mentioned as
Speaker 1: like a thing that the Zappatitsa has helped form, but
Speaker 1: is not a Zapatista thing. It's a larger Indigenous Congress.
Speaker 1: So Maria was like, all right, I'm going to run
Speaker 1: for fucking office. And in order to run for president
Speaker 1: in Mexico, you need eight hundred and fifty thousand signatures
Speaker 1: to get yourself onto the ballot. But those signatures have
Speaker 1: to be verified in ways that prevent poor people from signing.
Speaker 1: The digital signature had to be done with a phone
Speaker 1: from a list of acceptable phones with like a certain
Speaker 1: operating system and stuff, and even if people had those phones,
Speaker 1: it would sometimes take hours for people in rural areas
Speaker 1: to download the required software onto their phones in order
Speaker 1: to sign. So she got two hundred and sixty seven
Speaker 1: nine hundred and fifty three signatures, which wasn't an to
Speaker 1: get her onto the ballot. And yeah, that's a bit
Speaker 1: about the Zapatistas. In twenty twenty three, they reorganized again,
Speaker 1: and time will tell what that means. Mainstream media refers
Speaker 1: to how their star is waning, and certainly they are
Speaker 1: dealing with fierce attacks. But on the activist signal loops
Speaker 1: I'm on, I still get calls and pronouncements from them
Speaker 1: about events they're organizing, about how they're working to bring
Speaker 1: activists from below into the left, from across the globe
Speaker 1: to listen to each other. Of all of the things
Speaker 1: that stand out to me about the whole Zapatista project,
Speaker 1: it's the attitude of listening together as peers and then
Speaker 1: deciding together as peers that stands out to me. I
Speaker 1: would argue that this is the attitude we need. I
Speaker 1: tell people I'm an anarchist, and that's true, but it's
Speaker 1: not that I'm loyal to anarchism as an ideology. Specifically,
Speaker 1: what I believe in is this stuff about creating and
Speaker 1: respecting diverse movements. Not diverse like some people are vanguardists
Speaker 1: who want to tell everyone else what to do and
Speaker 1: other people aren't, but diverse among people who actually respect diversity.
Speaker 1: Diverse like different people with different backgrounds who desire different
Speaker 1: things and have different methods of going about it. Political
Speaker 1: pluralism isn't about accepting ideological bullies in our ranks, but
Speaker 1: looking around and saying, all of us who believe that
Speaker 1: the revolution comes from the bottom up, we need to
Speaker 1: stand together and learn that compromise isn't a profanity and
Speaker 1: to learn to respect our differences and see them as strengths.
Speaker 1: I'm eternally grateful that the Zapatistas were the single largest
Speaker 1: influence on radical politics and the movement that I came
Speaker 1: up in. I think that if they collapse tomorrow, they'll
Speaker 1: have already earned their places. Some of the coolest people
Speaker 1: have ever lived, doing some of the coolest stuff that's
Speaker 1: ever happened. But they won't collapse tomorrow. Their movement is
Speaker 1: five hundred years old and it's still going. And next
Speaker 1: week we're going to continue this series but cut over
Speaker 1: to another part of the world and to another set
Speaker 1: of tactics that have influenced the ault globalization movement and
Speaker 1: talk to you. Then, I don't really anything to plug
Speaker 1: to support the people who are trying to stop ice,
Speaker 1: that's what I have to plug. And if you are
Speaker 1: one of the people more directly, go read about how
Speaker 1: to stay safe in crowd environments. Okay, I do have
Speaker 1: something to plug. I would really recommend there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of guides put out by a publisher called Crimethink. If
Speaker 1: you go to crimethink dot com where crime thchi NC
Speaker 1: dot com, you'll find a lot of resources and some
Speaker 1: of them are called a Demonstrator's guide to and those
Speaker 1: will have everything you could ever want to know about
Speaker 1: police less lethal munitions and gas masks and goggles and
Speaker 1: how police use batons, and how to form affinity groups
Speaker 1: and all kinds of stuff that can be used to
Speaker 1: stay safe and stay dangerous. Because ice isn't going to
Speaker 1: smash itself, it has to be smashed for them anyway.
Speaker 1: Talked to you soon. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
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