Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People, What
Speaker 1: did Cool Stuff? I'm your host, Margaret Kildrey, and this
Speaker 1: week I am continuing this ongoing series about neoliberalism and
Speaker 1: the resistance to it, with a focus on the Zapatistas
Speaker 1: of Mexico and the ultra globalization movement that sprung up
Speaker 1: around the turn of the millennium. Today we're talking Zapatistas. Also,
Speaker 1: I have a producer named Sophie who isn't on the
Speaker 1: call today. I also have an audio engineer named Eva
Speaker 1: hi Eva. And our theme music was written for us
Speaker 1: by unwoman. Where we last left our indigenous peasant rebels,
Speaker 1: they'd broken from their Marxist Leninist roots to become an
Speaker 1: indigenous led grassroots army. They'd spent ten years preparing to
Speaker 1: wage war on the Mexican government and the ruling pri Party,
Speaker 1: and on January first, nineteen ninety four, they'd gone and
Speaker 1: started that war. The war blasted twelve days. It ended
Speaker 1: with a stalemate when it became clear that the people
Speaker 1: of Mexico supported the Zapatistas in their goals, but weren't
Speaker 1: going to rise up to overthrow the state. Always prepared
Speaker 1: to listen to the people. The Zapatistas entered into negotiations
Speaker 1: with the state and moved their focus from war to
Speaker 1: local autonomy. And there's an easy narrative you can draw,
Speaker 1: and as one would expect, the easy narrative is a
Speaker 1: little bit false. You can say that the Zapatistas, they
Speaker 1: became an army, they fought the Mexican government to a standstill,
Speaker 1: and then they put away their guns and now have
Speaker 1: autonomy in Chiapas. And I guess each point of that
Speaker 1: narrative is technically true. They became an army, they declared
Speaker 1: war on Mexico and forced concessions from the government in
Speaker 1: the San Andreas Accords, which is the settlement that they
Speaker 1: signed on February sixteenth, nineteen ninety six. And they do
Speaker 1: maintain more autonomy over their lands than most indigenous groups
Speaker 1: do in the Western hemisphere. But the conflict hasn't ended,
Speaker 1: not even now thirty years later. The Sound and Dress
Speaker 1: Accords agreed to some basic things, more or less boiling
Speaker 1: down to the right to autonomous decision making at the
Speaker 1: local level and local control of natural resources. Basically, leave
Speaker 1: us alone, stop stealing all the shit in our territory,
Speaker 1: which is not the kind of thing. A nation state
Speaker 1: usually wants to cede to the people. They usually want
Speaker 1: to be able to control things and be the government.
Speaker 1: That's why they call themselves the government. So as soon
Speaker 1: as the peace accords were signed, the government, as all
Speaker 1: settler governments have done with all agreements with indigenous people
Speaker 1: without any exception I've personally ever found, they just went
Speaker 1: ahead and completely ignored the document that they just signed.
Speaker 1: The Sound and Address Accords didn't matter. The government, and
Speaker 1: this will shock you, pretty quickly started fighting dirty, using
Speaker 1: both formal and informal military forces against the Zapatistas. Zapatistas
Speaker 1: and their supporters put on March after March, especially in Mexico,
Speaker 1: but also all over the world to try to pressure
Speaker 1: the Mexican government to hold to the accords that it
Speaker 1: had fucking signed. I spent a lot of time over
Speaker 1: the last couple of weeks reading a lot of reflections
Speaker 1: about the Zapatistas from twenty to twenty five years later,
Speaker 1: talking about what they've accomplished in the area, and one
Speaker 1: thing stands out. For a very very long time, the
Speaker 1: autonomous territories managed to keep organized crime like cartels and
Speaker 1: shit out of their area and in Mexico. This is
Speaker 1: a really big deal. It wasn't easy. They're also losing
Speaker 1: ground in the past few years, but we'll talk about
Speaker 1: that more later. Pretty much immediately after the Zapatistas declared autonomy,
Speaker 1: the government, in order to crush the Zapatistas started arming
Speaker 1: and empowering paramilitary groups in the area. These aren't even
Speaker 1: like the cartels. These are presented as loyalists. They're just
Speaker 1: we want the ruling Prii party to be in charge,
Speaker 1: large enthusiasts who are armed, and maybe the most dramatic
Speaker 1: example of that I have found is the Acatil massacre
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety seven. Akatil is this tiny town in
Speaker 1: Chiappas that was home to a Catholic pacifist indigenous rights
Speaker 1: group called Lasa Behas the Bees, which I believe is
Speaker 1: still around and is the first cool people that I'm
Speaker 1: going to focus on this week. This group got their
Speaker 1: start in nineteen ninety two over a land dispute. I've
Speaker 1: read so many accounts of this now and it is
Speaker 1: very confusing, and it is confusingly written because people have
Speaker 1: simplified it in different ways that leave out different important
Speaker 1: parts of it. All over the place. But basically there
Speaker 1: was this guy, I think he was associated with the Prii,
Speaker 1: the ruling party, and he thought he owned some land.
Speaker 1: His nephew was an activist and he thought that the
Speaker 1: land was communally owned. Became a big whole community argument,
Speaker 1: and a group of indigenous pacifists Catholics were like, let's
Speaker 1: settle this peacefully and communally, and they formed a group
Speaker 1: called the Bees, based on how bees live and work
Speaker 1: together collectively. As soon as they formed this pacifist group,
Speaker 1: like the next day, someone who supported the owner, the
Speaker 1: guy who thought he owned the land. Someone who supported
Speaker 1: him went and shot the nephew and two other nephews
Speaker 1: for good measure, killing one of the nephews. Five of
Speaker 1: the local residents, who I believe were Bees, called for
Speaker 1: an ambulance for the survivors, but instead of an ambulance,
Speaker 1: cops came and the five people were sent to jail,
Speaker 1: ostensibly because they were being blamed for the violence, but
Speaker 1: actually it was just because of the underlying politics of
Speaker 1: the whole thing. And so the Bees had their first
Speaker 1: campaign free those five people. They went on a pilgrimage
Speaker 1: or a march, depending on the political position of the piece.
Speaker 1: That you read about it in Leasas don't like calling
Speaker 1: things pilgrimages. Everyone is obsessively secular in both means stream
Speaker 1: media and leftist media. But I am under the impression
Speaker 1: that they presented this as a pilgrimage that they went on.
Speaker 1: Maybe five thousand people joined that march, and the state
Speaker 1: was like, all right, fine, we'll let these five innocent
Speaker 1: men go. Geez, what's this big fuss about? And so
Speaker 1: they succeeded at their first thing. Well, I don't actually
Speaker 1: know how the land dispute shook out in the end.
Speaker 1: So that's the bees. They're liberation theologist, indigenous rights groups
Speaker 1: trying to make the world a better place than Chiapas,
Speaker 1: which means that they're down with the Zapatistas. But they're
Speaker 1: not actually Zapatistas themselves, because they're pacifists and the Zapatistas are,
Speaker 1: you know, an army. The two groups are allied instead.
Speaker 1: But when all of these loyalist paramilitaries started getting armed
Speaker 1: in the outskirts of Zapatista territory, people started getting displaced
Speaker 1: awful fast because all of these paramilitaries are going around
Speaker 1: and you know, being shitty, and everyone has to fl
Speaker 1: maybe six thousand or so people were displaced in a
Speaker 1: couple months in nineteen ninety seven, and many of them
Speaker 1: found refuge among the bees, including in the village of Akatil.
Speaker 1: The right wing are famously cowards. Fascism, for example, is
Speaker 1: a coward's ideology. You feel big and strong by stamping
Speaker 1: on the weekend defenseless, but run from a fair fight.
Speaker 1: That's the fascist way. The loyalists weren't fascists. They were
Speaker 1: just awful monsters of their own sort, and they were cowards,
Speaker 1: at least from my position. They were also desperate people
Speaker 1: offered a chance to suck up to the government. I guess,
Speaker 1: depending on how you look at it. Most of the
Speaker 1: paramilitaries themselves were indigenous people, but their motto seemed to
Speaker 1: become like only loyal indigenous people should be allowed to exist,
Speaker 1: Like I think literally, they were basically saying that while
Speaker 1: killing people. And I call them cowards because they went
Speaker 1: and they found a target that they knew wouldn't fight
Speaker 1: back and they fucking massacred them. On December twenty second,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven, around sixty paramilitaries went into the town
Speaker 1: of Aktil with masks and aks. While people were gathered
Speaker 1: at mass and the gunman spent six hours hunting people
Speaker 1: down in the village and slaughtering them. They did all
Speaker 1: kinds of shit that I'm not going to say on air,
Speaker 1: of the sexual violence variety, and of violence against the
Speaker 1: unborn variety. It's bad. If you want to read about it,
Speaker 1: you can. There's sources in my show notes and survivors
Speaker 1: of this massacre are really upfront about what happened. They're
Speaker 1: not afraid to talk about it. And these people were
Speaker 1: killed for being leftists, for being allied with the Zapatistas.
Speaker 1: One survivor describes making it to the woods where she
Speaker 1: was taken in and cared for by Zapatista women from
Speaker 1: a nearby camp. Forty five people died that day, all
Speaker 1: of them unarmed, many of them children. Meanwhile, the cops
Speaker 1: were stationed about two hundred meters away at a local
Speaker 1: school and just ignored the entire thing. Some people were
Speaker 1: arrested and for this massacre and spent about a decade
Speaker 1: in prison, while others have been named but remained free.
Speaker 1: And of the people who were arrested, an awful lot
Speaker 1: of them maintain their innocence, and a lot of activist
Speaker 1: groups agree. It seems very likely that most of the
Speaker 1: people who went to prison for this were scapegoaded by
Speaker 1: the government to avoid getting the actual perpetrators of this
Speaker 1: crime in trouble because they were loyal to the government.
Speaker 1: The people of Akatil do a reenactment of the massacre
Speaker 1: every year. An article in slate dot com put it
Speaker 1: quote villagers see the ritual retelling of their story as essential,
Speaker 1: not only as a way to pay respect to the
Speaker 1: martyrs who helped bring global visibility to the guerrilla war
Speaker 1: in Chiappas, but also as a reminder to those who
Speaker 1: remain in power that the horrors that took place here
Speaker 1: will not be erased from history. And because the survivors
Speaker 1: won't shut up about this coming on third years later,
Speaker 1: the state keeps offering them a quote friendly solution aka
Speaker 1: a cash payout, being like, well, you shut up about this,
Speaker 1: will give you some money. And the survivors, at least
Speaker 1: the ones that I've read about, refuse this. What they
Speaker 1: want is the state to recognize it's culpability in the
Speaker 1: massacre and charge the people who armed and encouraged the
Speaker 1: loyalist paramilitaries. And I believe you know the actual people
Speaker 1: who carried it out, And I don't know everything about
Speaker 1: the time and place in context about this gorilla war.
Speaker 1: I read a decent bit about it, but there's so
Speaker 1: much more to know, so I can't say this for sure,
Speaker 1: but it absolutely looks to me like the paramilitaries did
Speaker 1: this to a katiel because they knew the bees were
Speaker 1: Pacifist and they were too chicken shit to head into
Speaker 1: Zapatista territory. There had been limited attacks on Zapatistas, but
Speaker 1: nothing on the same scale. That doesn't make the pacifist
Speaker 1: morally wrong or misguided to not have been armed to
Speaker 1: defend themselves. It's just a thing to remember. Some gun
Speaker 1: rights people here in the United States say things like
Speaker 1: in armed society is a polite society, and this is
Speaker 1: statistically untrue. The more small arms there is in a community,
Speaker 1: the more that regular violence becomes gun violence. But as
Speaker 1: I read history, a thing that I see again and
Speaker 1: again is that an armed group is often afforded more
Speaker 1: respect than an unarmed group. It's not that internally a
Speaker 1: group is safer while armed, it's probably the opposite, But
Speaker 1: in terms of external threats, well, there's a reason the
Speaker 1: Mexican state was willing to negotiate with the Zapatistas, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't because the Zapatistas asked nicely. But that said,
Speaker 1: the Bees lost forty five of their members in a
Speaker 1: horrific act of violence, but the group continued. They accepting
Speaker 1: that this kind of thing and teaching forgiveness and response
Speaker 1: to it is a core part of many Pacifist teachings,
Speaker 1: including theirs, and they teach an indigenous theology that syncretizes
Speaker 1: Catholicism with Mayan beliefs, and as best as I can
Speaker 1: sort out, they continue to fight for indigenous rights, land, sovereignty,
Speaker 1: and all the good shit. But speaking of good shit,
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of ads for stuff which may or
Speaker 1: may not be good shit. It might be regular shit.
Speaker 1: Who am I to say, That's up to you to decide.
Speaker 1: That's freedom, baby. You can decide whether or not these
Speaker 1: ads are good. And we're back. The Zapatiste has kept
Speaker 1: going to of course, the state made another offensive into
Speaker 1: Zapatista territory in nineteen ninety eight when they attacked three
Speaker 1: territories to arrest local leaders and including one territory named
Speaker 1: after the anarchist and veteran of the pod Ricardo Flores mcgon,
Speaker 1: And just while I'm bringing up mcgon, I'm currently on
Speaker 1: the coolsone Media book Club reading a bunch of mcgon's
Speaker 1: fiction about revolution. If you want to hear that he
Speaker 1: wrote a lot anyway, he was from a long time ago.
Speaker 1: He was from before the Mexican Revolution. His big uprisings
Speaker 1: were like very early nineteen tens and stuff. You can
Speaker 1: listen to our whole podcast episode about it if you
Speaker 1: want so. The Zapatista's named a territory after mcgone, and
Speaker 1: the state comes in and they smash up municipal offices,
Speaker 1: they beat random civilians, they arrest whoever they want. They're
Speaker 1: resting dozens of people, and in response to this, the
Speaker 1: Zapatista has actually refused to counterattack in a military fashion.
Speaker 1: They're not trying to go back into a hot war
Speaker 1: because they have a pretty strong mandate from the people.
Speaker 1: They're not supposed to be declaring war, but instead building alternatives.
Speaker 1: Though that said, at least in one of these government raids,
Speaker 1: the raiders, the government was met with gunfire. In June
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight, when the government invaded the community of
Speaker 1: San Juan Dey liber Todd and one of the main
Speaker 1: things that I want to talk about today. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about their governing structure and stuff too in
Speaker 1: a bit, but I want to talk more about who
Speaker 1: the Zapatistas were politically, because everyone's always trying to kind
Speaker 1: of put them in different categories and things, but we
Speaker 1: can actually understand them on their own terms. I think
Speaker 1: what they did and what they do is the clearest
Speaker 1: way to understand them, And by and large, outside observers
Speaker 1: use the broad label libertarian socialists to describe them, not
Speaker 1: even as like a definition for them, but like as
Speaker 1: the most useful way to describe them. The Zapatisas want
Speaker 1: bottom up democracy, and they want community ownership and like
Speaker 1: worker cooperatives and all that stuff. But broadly speaking, they
Speaker 1: tend to reject labels, at least as a group. Like
Speaker 1: just now, when we talk about the territories that they've named,
Speaker 1: they've got one named after the indigenous anarchist Ricardo Floris mcgon,
Speaker 1: And this man was not a fan of religion. He
Speaker 1: wrote extensively about how the three pillars, the three heads
Speaker 1: of the hydra of oppression, were authority, capital, and religion.
Speaker 1: And the Zappetiss have a territory named after him, and
Speaker 1: they have another named after Saint Juan Diego, who was
Speaker 1: the first indigenous North American saint. But these things aren't contradictory.
Speaker 1: Their lack of labeling besides Zapatismo has led to some confusion,
Speaker 1: and they've addressed this confusion a few times in different
Speaker 1: ways over the years as they've evolved, because who they
Speaker 1: were thirty years ago is not who they were now.
Speaker 1: Who they are forty years ago is very different. One
Speaker 1: of the first interviews that their spokesperson, Subcommadante Marcos ever
Speaker 1: gave at least one of the first interviews that I found,
Speaker 1: was in May nineteen ninety four, and it was with
Speaker 1: anarchists from various federations and such throughout I believe Mexico.
Speaker 1: In it, the interviewers quote another easy Elen officer who's unnamed,
Speaker 1: who said, quote, we are not Marxists, nor are we gorillas.
Speaker 1: We are Zapatistas, and we are an army which look
Speaker 1: fucking goes hard. We talked last week a little bit
Speaker 1: about how the Zapatista started off more traditional Marxist Leninists
Speaker 1: and then changed to indigenous ways. Marcos describes that in
Speaker 1: this interview, he says, quote, there began a confrontation, a
Speaker 1: relationship of convenience between two ways of making decisions. On
Speaker 1: one hand, there was the initial proposal of the e ZLN,
Speaker 1: a completely undemocratic and authoritarian proposal, as undemocratic and authoritarian
Speaker 1: as an army can be, since an army is the
Speaker 1: most authoritarian thing in this world and also the most
Speaker 1: absurd in that one single person can decide the life
Speaker 1: and death of his subordinates. On the other hand, there
Speaker 1: was the indigenous tradition that before the conquest was a
Speaker 1: way of life, and that after the conquest became their
Speaker 1: only way of surviving. In other words, the communities isolated
Speaker 1: cornered saw themselves obligated to defend themselves collectively, to live collectively,
Speaker 1: to govern themselves collectively. And I like this quote a
Speaker 1: lot because they're like I was talking about how, yes,
Speaker 1: there's this indigenous method of collective decision making and working together,
Speaker 1: but that it's not like before conquest everything was like
Speaker 1: perfect and you know, absolutely utopian, and everyone was totally
Speaker 1: working together. But rather that that is the seed that
Speaker 1: after conquest became their only way of surviving, was that
Speaker 1: they drew upon their own history of collective decision making
Speaker 1: in collective governance in order to survive, and then Marcos
Speaker 1: goes on to explain this method quote, the isolation of
Speaker 1: the indigenous communities provoke the development of another type of state,
Speaker 1: a state to deal with the survival of the collective.
Speaker 1: Of a democratic collective. With these two characteristics, the leadership
Speaker 1: is collective and it is removable at any moment if
Speaker 1: you hold a position in the community, First, the community
Speaker 1: has to have appointed you, independent of your political affiliation.
Speaker 1: The community can remove you. There isn't a fixed term
Speaker 1: that you have to complete. The moment that the community
Speaker 1: begins to see that you are failing in your duties,
Speaker 1: that you are having problems, they sit you down in
Speaker 1: front of the community and they begin to tell you
Speaker 1: what you have done wrong. You defend yourself, and finally
Speaker 1: the community, the collective, the majority, decides what they are
Speaker 1: going to do with you. He talked about how the
Speaker 1: way that the Zapatistas determined their ideas isn't about one
Speaker 1: ideology at war with other ideologies, but in conversation with
Speaker 1: each other, and more importantly, in conversation with people, different
Speaker 1: ideas should be put forth and tried and discussed among
Speaker 1: all the people, whether it is to quote Marcos again
Speaker 1: quote a Trotskyite proposal, a Maoist proposal, an anarchist proposal,
Speaker 1: or proposals from Gueveraists or the Castristas or the existentialists,
Speaker 1: or whatever issts you might think of end quote. One
Speaker 1: ideology shouldn't try and exterminate the others, but instead quote
Speaker 1: the people have to decide what proposal to accept, and
Speaker 1: it's the people you have to convince that your opinion
Speaker 1: is correct. This will radically change the concept of revolution,
Speaker 1: of who the revolutionary class and what a revolutionary organization
Speaker 1: is end quote. And that the government has quote a
Speaker 1: vision for the country that they have imposed on the
Speaker 1: people with the arms of the federal army. We cannot
Speaker 1: reverse the logic and say that now the Zapatista vision
Speaker 1: is going to be imposed with the arms of the
Speaker 1: Zapatista army. And do you know what else is imposed
Speaker 1: through force of arms? I don't know, probably not. Our
Speaker 1: ads those are because we all like eating, including me,
Speaker 1: and including all the people who make the show possible,
Speaker 1: so which actually includes the sponsors. Life is complicated, politics
Speaker 1: is complicated. Here's the ads, and we're back. Despite the
Speaker 1: Sapatiste has actually been pretty clear about what they do,
Speaker 1: if not what labels apply to them, outsiders have continued
Speaker 1: to argue about exactly what they are and what slot
Speaker 1: to put them in. At some point, probably two thousand
Speaker 1: and one or two thousand and two, a North American
Speaker 1: anarchist journal called Green Anarchy published a critical article called
Speaker 1: the easy ln are not Anarchists? With not in all caps.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of thing of the easy Eleen
Speaker 1: really really easily could have ignored. But some Zapatista sat
Speaker 1: down and wrote a response which is frankly more than
Speaker 1: the article deserved. They say that quote the article entitled
Speaker 1: the easy Len is not Anarchist reflected such a colonialist
Speaker 1: attitude of arrogant ignorance. Several of us decided to write
Speaker 1: a response to you. Our political and military body encompasses
Speaker 1: a wide range of belief systems from a wide range
Speaker 1: of cultures and cannot be defined under a narrow ideological microscope.
Speaker 1: There are anarchists in our midst just as there are
Speaker 1: Catholics and Communists and followers of Centaia. We are Indians
Speaker 1: in the countryside and workers in the city. We are
Speaker 1: politicians in office and homeless children on the street. We
Speaker 1: are gay and straight, male and female, wealthy and poor.
Speaker 1: What we have in common is a love for our
Speaker 1: families and our homelands. What we have in common is
Speaker 1: a desire to make things better for ourselves and our country.
Speaker 1: None of this can be accomplished if we are to
Speaker 1: build walls of words and abstract ideas around ourselves. And
Speaker 1: the rest of the piece is pretty amazing too, if
Speaker 1: you want to read an indigenous critique not of anarchism,
Speaker 1: but of folks from the US trying to tell this
Speaker 1: Zapatista is how they should fight. I liked quote your
Speaker 1: article used compromise as though it were a profanity for us.
Speaker 1: It is the glue that holds us all together in
Speaker 1: a common struggle. Without these compromises that allow us to
Speaker 1: work together, we would be nowhere, lonely slaves waiting to
Speaker 1: be exploited, just like we have been in the past.
Speaker 1: That said, by two thousand and five, the Zapatista has
Speaker 1: released a statement to clarify their political position a little bit.
Speaker 1: They are explicitly anti capitalist and they see themselves as
Speaker 1: coming from quote below and to the left, which means
Speaker 1: essentially libertarian socialism, again not as a word to label
Speaker 1: them with, but as like the broadest applicable category to
Speaker 1: understand it. I believe they want anti capitalism that comes
Speaker 1: from the grassroots, rather than working with state institutions, political parties,
Speaker 1: or vanguards. As of that declaration, they also occasionally run
Speaker 1: political candidates and shit, you know, they're really not into
Speaker 1: getting pigeonholed tactically. By twenty eleven, Subcondidante Marcos wrote a
Speaker 1: piece called I Shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of
Speaker 1: this planet. A revolutionary vanguard, for context, is the Marxist
Speaker 1: belief that the way to create a revolution is for
Speaker 1: a small group of revolutionaries to decide how to have
Speaker 1: a revolution and lead everyone else towards the revolution, in
Speaker 1: contrast to the anti authoritarian models that are about working
Speaker 1: with the will of the people. It's hard to say
Speaker 1: things like the Zapatistas believe about this or that issue,
Speaker 1: because you're talking about thirty years and you're talking about
Speaker 1: three hundred thousand people who are radically democratic. But I
Speaker 1: did find in that interview with Marcos from nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: four an awful lot about their early feminism, from the
Speaker 1: very beginning the easy LN has included women in its
Speaker 1: ranks and leadership best as I understand. We talked about
Speaker 1: the Law of Women last week that they instituted. One
Speaker 1: of the first big democratic projects they did was having
Speaker 1: people go around and agree that they're going to do
Speaker 1: some serious feminism. The Law of Women states that women
Speaker 1: are the equal of men in all respects, including family planning.
Speaker 1: In the easy LN, the military people had access to
Speaker 1: condoms and birth control. Marcos admitted in the interview that
Speaker 1: in a way, women in the military were only half
Speaker 1: free because they had the right to choose not to
Speaker 1: have children, but if they got pregnant and decided to
Speaker 1: stay pregnant, they had to leave the military while they
Speaker 1: were pregnant. Most would go down the mountain into the
Speaker 1: villages to seek termination. The sexual politics of the military
Speaker 1: were interesting. I have no recent information to compare it to,
Speaker 1: so that's just how it was in nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 1: But I think it's just like an interesting look at
Speaker 1: how a anti authoritarian military, well an anti authoritarian society's military,
Speaker 1: which is authoritarian but is trying to be as a
Speaker 1: galitarian as possible, how they chose to handle some stuff.
Speaker 1: Anyone who wanted to sleep together, had to tell their
Speaker 1: commanding officer who they were sleeping with. And I believe
Speaker 1: when and where this was for military efficiency. If they
Speaker 1: were attacked, the commander needed to know who was fucking
Speaker 1: and wasn't going to be quickly available. Interestingly, and maybe
Speaker 1: this is only interesting to me as a history nerd
Speaker 1: who finds the war history interesting, it seems like the
Speaker 1: co ed nature of the military and the lack of
Speaker 1: ban on fraternization meant that they had fewer problems with
Speaker 1: STIs than many other militaries have had because people were
Speaker 1: sleeping with the romantic partners by and large. Also, Marcus
Speaker 1: talks about just like their actual physical isolation in the
Speaker 1: jungles being part of why they didn't have as many
Speaker 1: problems with STIs. The interviewers also asked to Marco's point
Speaker 1: blank about homophobia within Zapatista society. This was interesting to
Speaker 1: me because when I was coming up in politics talking
Speaker 1: to folks who spent time in Chiapas, they talked about this.
Speaker 1: The Zapatista line has always been one hundred percent consistent.
Speaker 1: The Zappatistas are pro gay, pro sex worker, pro trans.
Speaker 1: They organize along transsex workers in the cities and hold
Speaker 1: up people's freedom to be whoever they are. A friend
Speaker 1: of mine back in probably two thousand and five or
Speaker 1: so said that when he was in Chiapas, there was
Speaker 1: sort of a distinction between what we said publicly and
Speaker 1: how things were on the ground in these small traditional villages.
Speaker 1: He'd asked one woman what she thought about gay couples,
Speaker 1: and she asked him to explain what that meant. He did,
Speaker 1: and her response was basically, oh, that's silly. Again, this
Speaker 1: was decades ago and is absolutely just an anecdote, But
Speaker 1: those interviewers asked Marcos about this in nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: and he was fairly forthcoming of what the Zapatistas, who
Speaker 1: are themselves indigenous, want to do flies in the face
Speaker 1: of some indigenous social norms around the role of women
Speaker 1: and men and things like homosexuality. They talk openly about
Speaker 1: how while they are indigenous people taking a lot of
Speaker 1: cues from their history and culture, they're also looking to
Speaker 1: change parts of their culture too. Marcos was clear that
Speaker 1: in traditional societies there there was absolutely no law against
Speaker 1: homosexuality and no punishment for people who are homosexual, that
Speaker 1: people weren't arrested, but that many gay people were picked
Speaker 1: on or mocked and then accepted within their communities. Within
Speaker 1: the military, queerness was much more institutionally accepted. The only
Speaker 1: rule about who you fuck is you have to tell
Speaker 1: your commanding officer so that they know who is and
Speaker 1: isn't combat ready. So it was with this open anti
Speaker 1: ideology of grassroots participatory democracy that they began to build
Speaker 1: their autonomy and what that autonomy looked like. And I
Speaker 1: think the details about this shit are going to be
Speaker 1: interesting to you. We're going to talk about it on Wednesday.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I don't actually have too much to plug
Speaker 1: here at the end of this. If you want to
Speaker 1: hear mcgon's fiction, I do a reading of it, and
Speaker 1: I don't know, go to build autonomy with people and
Speaker 1: learn what that means collectively, and don't be like, this
Speaker 1: is the way the Zapatistas do it, so we have
Speaker 1: to do it the same way. Instead. The thing to
Speaker 1: copy is there ideas of how to find out what
Speaker 1: the ideas of your area are, and my idea is
Speaker 1: to be done recording for now. Cool People Who Did
Speaker 1: Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website. Coolzonemedia
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