The Festival of Rebellion and Resistance Against Capitalism made its way through Mexico in December 2014 and January 2015. The festival was organised by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), a federation of indigenous communities in resistance from around the country.
The event provided useful insights into the ravages of capitalism in Mexico and the current state of the Zapatista movement and the indigenous struggle.
Most of the nearly 3,000 registered participants were indigenous activists, representing more than 20 indigenous language groups. There were many non-indigenous activists from organisations and collectives affiliated to the “Other Campaign”, which the EZLN initiated in opposition to the presidential election of 2006. The event also attracted more than 400 international guests, mainly from the Americas and Europe.
Perhaps the most important guests were a group of campesinos (small farmers and rural workers) and students from the state of Guerrero. They are parents, siblings and surviving classmates of 43 students from the rural teacher-training college at Ayotzinapa, who were forcibly disappeared (i.e. kidnapped by government forces and allegedly handed over to a drug cartel) for their organised opposition to the government’s neoliberal education “reforms” and their struggle against the conditions of extreme poverty and neglect they live and work under.
The issue of the 43 students has provoked outrage in Mexican society, as it demonstrated the links between all levels of government, all the major political parties and organised crime in the bloody repression of social movements.
We joined the festival for its last two legs, both in Chiapas. First was the New Year fiesta in the town of Oventik, in an area of Zapatista self-government. Oventik is an impressive place, as it has been built by the community.
In addition to shops and dwellings, there are a school, sport facilities, a church and a building dedicated to the organisation of women. Almost all the buildings are adorned with murals depicting dignified and happy masked Zapatista men, women and children, as well as revolutionary heroes from Emiliano Zapata to Che Guevara.
At roughly 11pm, more than 1,000 people gathered around a stage and watched as 43 empty chairs were set out. The families of the missing students were then welcomed. They held pictures of their missing sons, as we chanted “No están solos!” / “You are not alone!” Two of the parents gave speeches.
We had heard parents of the Ayotzinapa students speak twice before in Mexico City. Always they apologised for not being “orators”, for being “just” campesinos. In truth, these parents have become key orators and leaders of the struggle in Mexico.
Their fierce determination to speak out has kept the issue alive and has rallied large numbers to their cause for more than six months now.
The Ayotzinapa families also attended the conference sessions that began three days later at CIDECI-Unitierra, the University of the Earth, a Zapatista-built and run campus on the outskirts of San Cristobal.
The first day of the two-day event comprised reports from all of the previous sessions that had occurred in different states as well as new contributions by people telling of the problems that capitalism is causing in their local area. The two main themes that emerged were dispossession and repression.
Much of the dispossession related to “mega-projects”: dams, mines, highways, airports. One of the most obscene examples is the proposed Parque de las Siete Culturas, the Seven Cultures Theme Park in Puebla, whose investors will profit from selling knowledge about indigenous cultures. To make way for this development, the indigenous people are being displaced from their land – but not without resistance. Their representative stated that they “refuse to be turned into cultural merchandise”.
As for repression, we learned that Ayotzinapa is representative of a broader pattern in Mexico. Virtually every community in resistance spoke of the political prisoners taken from their struggle. Many also could talk of their disappeared or slain. Ever harsher anti-protest laws are being enacted. Bravery underlies all of the examples of radical activism in Mexico.
The final day involved the proposals session. Everyone was free to make proposals for action, and more than 100 speakers did. But these proposals were not discussed and debated, fleshed out, amended, adopted or rejected. They were simply stated, then added to the more than 400 pages of minutes.
While the event allowed for a sharing of stories, some participants expressed that their communities had raised money to send them there, and when they got back would want to know what courses of action had been decided.
The event was not structured to allow these decisions to be made. It appears that decision making – other than for local matters – is confined to the CNI leadership, which has a representative structure, and to the EZLN, which has an essentially military structure.
The Zapatistas and the larger networks of indigenous resistance in Mexico have maintained themselves impressively over the last 21 years. Numerous and varied mass struggles have continued to emerge, the most recent surrounding the 43 students. They have not yet achieved justice, but the government’s attempts to silence them have certainly failed.

Patrick Weiniger

Lourdes García Larqué

The Zapatista festival of resistance

Last year ended with some long-awaited good news. After 52 years of US aggression against the Cuban people, with the aim of reversing the gains of their 1959 revolution, the US government announced the easing of some travel and financial restrictions on Cuba and the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the government it had unsuccessfully sought to topple. The move followed 17 months of secret negotiations between Havana and Washington.
So far this is only a partial victory, as the end of the blockade requires legislative changes by the US Congress. But one of the most pleasing immediate results of the détente was the release of the three remaining members of the “Cuban Five” in December.
These were Cuban citizens arrested in Miami for gathering information about anti-Castro terrorist groups and their plans to commit terrorist activities in both Cuba and the USA. These terrorists – such as former CIA asset Luis Posada Carriles, who has bragged about organising the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airline flight that killed 73 people – operate openly in Miami. Over the years they have killed more than 3,000 people.
Since the US state could not be relied on to investigate these organisations, Cuba sent five of its own citizens. Cuba then voluntarily presented the information they gathered to the US government in the hope that it would act to protect human lives. Instead, it arrested the Cubans, convicted them in rigged trials and sentenced them to jail terms ranging from 15 years to multiple life sentences.
The release of these men follows a years-long international campaign, which included a speaking tour last year in Australia by the daughter of one of the last three prisoners. Aili Labañino finally has been reunited with her father, Ramón.
Cuba solidarity websites across the world show pictures of her family joyously celebrating his return. But when Aili was in Melbourne last August, her father had been in the US prison system for nearly 16 years.
She explained: “The USA looks at each of the Five with malice, as they represent Cuba. Just see how they had been separated from each other and sent to remote prisons.”
For the first two years, the US government would not even reply to the families’ requests for visas to visit them in prison. It was only due to the pressure of the international campaign that these men were eventually relocated from the “box”: metal punishment cells with 24 hours of light, no clock, meals at different times, cold in temperature, with only a pair of shorts and a sheet for protection.
Eventually Aili was able to get a visa to see her father in prison once or twice a year. “We can only touch when we arrive and when we leave. But during the visit we sit next to each other or across from each other and we talk very long, about what we are doing. He tells us some experiences from prison, but not the saddest experiences so we don’t feel sad.
“And at the end we always end up making plans as if he is going to be in Cuba the next day, and it is a day closer to be together walking with his three daughters on the streets of Havana, from east to west, and maybe to other countries to thank everyone for their support.” Mercifully, now they can.
Aili explained how the mistreatment of her father and his comrades fitted the pattern of US policy towards Cuba to that point. “Since the triumph of the revolution, the US has felt very frustrated being so close to Cuba and not being able to make Cuba submit to their rules. So, on top of financing terrorists, they also have other means to put pressure on us. So, trying the Cuban Five and charging them with the highest sentences, it is a way in which they try to have Cuba at their mercy.”
The trial of the Five was a farce. “During the trial … the US government paid over a million dollars to 27 journalists … to write about the case in a negative way, labelling them as spies, when they were not that, they only published public information.
“What happened is illegal; you are not allowed to make this type of publicity during a trial. The journalists also harassed the jury, who were followed, had photographs taken of them as they exited the courts, and photos of their cars and number plates. The jury was scared, and they felt pressured to make certain decisions.”
Like many other family members of the Five, Aili spent years tirelessly campaigning for their freedom. She explained that her father “gives us a lot of optimism. We don’t have the right to be sad when we have our freedom, so we use our freedom to talk about the Five.”
What of the terrorist organisations on which the Five were gathering information? “Since the triumph of the revolution in Cuba, there has been ongoing harassment, and many individuals and organisations have been engaging in anti-Cuban activities, mainly from Miami.
“These organisations are not part of the US government; however, they receive its support. Such terrorist attacks have taken over 3,000 lives. An example is a bomb that was placed in a Cubana de Aviación plane that carried 73 people flying from Barbados. Family members of these people are still claiming for justice every day in Cuba, and want Posada Carriles to be brought to justice, but he walks free in the streets of Miami.
“Same with Orlando Bosch. He recently died, but he also was involved in several anti-Cuban activities. He died as an old man, never brought to justice. He was a person who publicly declared in Miami what he has done, but nothing happened to him.”
The release of the Five is cause for celebration, as is the US acknowledgement that its attempt to isolate and economically strangle Cuba has failed. This amounts to an important reversal for the world’s most powerful imperialist bully.
The US is changing its strategic orientation to Cuba, but the imperial beast has not changed its spots. At the same time as it is lifting some sanctions against Cuba, president Obama signed into law a range of sanctions against the freely and fairly elected left wing government of Venezuela. That government faces the spurious charge of repressing anti-government protesters.
This charge comes from a country in which an FBI-coordinated campaign of violence drove the Occupy movement from city squares, and where police routinely and with virtual impunity shoot dead unarmed Black people. Perhaps it could be concluded that the US now considers the inspiration of Venezuela’s electorally mandated “socialism of the 21st century” to be a greater challenge to neoliberal capitalism in today’s post-Cold War reality.
As for Cuba, during the recent announcement of the resumption of relations, neither side suggested that the deal included any commitments from Cuba to alter its economic policies or dismantle its social welfare programs.
The US has demanded that Cuba allow citizens freer access to the internet (internet connections in Cuba are slow primarily because of the US blockade). While the US should play no role in determining Cuba telecommunications policy, the policy in itself is not objectionable. But the entire embargo on Cuba should be lifted without conditions, and this has not yet been offered. Cuba should be free to trade with whomever it chooses.
However, integration into global capitalism will not be a way forward for the mass of Cubans. It would only benefit Cuba’s politico-military officialdom, foreign corporations and investors from the ranks of the Miami-based reactionaries who fled Cuba after the revolution.
[Thank you to Lourdes Garcia Larque for help with interpreting and translation.]

Cuba’s partial victory against the US empire

Magdalena García Durán is an indigenous Mazahua woman from San Antonio Pueblo Nuevo in central Mexico. Commenting in the run-up to 20th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising in the distant southern state of Chiapas, she tells an interviewer:
“Living as an indigenous woman in a big city is not easy. I had to wear different clothes, dye my hair and wear high heels to go to meetings at my son’s school. It was thanks to the struggle of the Zapatistas that now I wear my indigenous clothes with pride.”
In Chiapas prior to the 1994 uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), indigenous people would not walk on the same part of the footpath as mestizos (Spanish speakers of mixed heritage), nor feel confident to look them in the eye. In its two decades of struggle, Zapatismo has achieved much in the area of indigenous dignity, and dignity for all of Mexico’s oppressed.
On New Year’s Day in 1994, 3,000 armed, mostly indigenous Mayan fighters emerged from the Lacandon Jungle and seized several towns and cities in Chiapas. In the ensuing years, the EZLN and its chief spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, became heroes of the international movement against corporate globalisation. The Zapatista cry of “Ya Basta!” (Enough!) was an inspiration.
Origins 
The roots of the EZLN were several. First, there was Mexico’s 1968 generation of student radicals. In the same era that students were on the streets of Paris and occupying university administration buildings around the world, thousands of student radicals rallied in Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City.
Ten days before the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the government carried out a massacre in which hundreds were killed. In the aftermath, many young revolutionaries went to the countryside to prepare for armed struggle against the state. The National Liberation Forces (FLN) guerrilla group was founded in 1969 and eventually chose Chiapas as an area of operation. Many EZLN commanders emerged from this group.
Another source of what became Zapatismo was the left wing of the Catholic Church, in particular the Chiapan bishop Samuel Ruiz, a practitioner of liberation theology. Ruiz was impressed with the community work of the revolutionaries; much of his work intertwined with theirs. The activities of these two organised forces coalesced in the bitterness of indigenous peoples still suffering racist oppression.
The catalyst for the uprising was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, the US and Canada, which came into effect the day the Zapatistas launched their uprising. The EZLN described NAFTA as “a death certificate for the indigenous people of Mexico”. One of the major social gains of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 was the constitutional right of campesinos (peasants/ rural workers) to seek title to unused agricultural land.
This was always an imperfect process, but without it, the landless rural poor had no hope. Under NAFTA this was to be abolished along with prohibitions on foreign agribusinesses buying Mexican land, and trade protections for farmers.
Government violence
At the outset of the rebellion, the EZLN agenda was to transform all of Mexico, not merely the parts of Chiapas to which their operations subsequently became limited. They took their name from a leader of the Mexican Revolution. Emiliano Zapata was one of the most radical figures of that revolution, who led an army of peasants fighting for land redistribution under the slogan “The land belongs to those who work it”.
The government of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI by its Spanish initials) – which had ruled Mexico for more than 60 years – responded to the Zapatista revolt with a massive military operation in Chiapas. This included aerial bombing of Zapatista-held towns.
Mexicans throughout the country were appalled. Tens of thousands of people rallied in city squares to demand an end to the war on the EZLN. This forced the government to accept a truce within 12 days.
The Zapatistas then engaged in peace talks with the PRI regime. The talks yielded very few results. The one document that both parties signed off on was the 1996 San Andres Accords, which committed the Mexican government to grant autonomy, recognition and rights to the indigenous population. But President Ernesto Zedillo reneged on the deal.
Retreat
The political system had betrayed the Zapatistas, and they had little hope of achieving success through a military offensive. The movement focussed on building communities in the Lacandon Jungle, based on dignity, democracy and justice. These Zapatista communities are wonderful experiments in communal self-government.
They are based on mass participation and collective decision making. The communities reject any assistance at all from “bad governments”, and instead have built their own schools and medical facilities, overseen by their “good government councils”.
All of this relies on solidarity from various activist networks, including funding provided by foreign-based NGOs. The Electrical Workers Union in central Mexico was involved from an early stage, sending members to help set up electricity facilities. Every year thousands of activists travel to Chiapas to learn about the struggle and help with community-building projects.
These communities in resistance have faced various forms of violence from state and paramilitary groups over the past 20 years. For instance, on 22 December 1997, pro-government paramilitaries opened fire on a prayer meeting of a pro-EZLN pacifist group in the Chiapan village of Acteal. Forty-five people aged between 8 months and 61 years were killed.
That the Zapatistas have survived is an impressive achievement. But life in the area is still difficult. Attaining basic nutrition is an ongoing struggle, and the communities’ medical facilities are not well supplied.
Politics of Zapatismo
It would be arrogant and unreasonable to dismiss their project because of these limitations. It is a struggle that deserves support and admiration. But there is another error that observers can make. The Zapatistas are lauded by some commentators, such as sociologist John Holloway, for “changing the world without taking power”.
This misreads as political success the constraints that reality has placed on the movement. The initial aims of the EZLN were not distinct from those of other armed insurgencies, and power was part of the equation. The Zapatistas’ First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle from 1993 lacks the poetry of the subsequent five declarations, and instead instructs EZLN fighters to “advance to the capital of the country, overcoming the Mexican Federal Army, protecting in our advance the civilian population and permitting the people in the liberated area the right to freely and democratically elect their own administrative authorities”.
These aims were overly ambitious given the balance of forces. But they demonstrate a desire to confront existing power at its centre, to defeat it and replace it with something more democratic.
That a revolution has not taken power in Mexico should be lamented, not celebrated (though of course this is not the Zapatistas’ fault). The Zapatistas survive and are working for the benefits of the people in the areas of Chiapas to which they are restricted. At the same time, the bad governments in Mexico City and the state capitals continue with the same destructive agendas.
‘Free trade’ destruction
Far from lifting Mexico into the First World, NAFTA has helped to keep Mexico’s economic growth lower than at any time since the 1930s Depression. Farmers suffer because they cannot make a living competing with subsidised food imports from the US.
Workers’ wages are lower than in 1994. More than half the country lives in poverty. Around 100,000 Mexicans have died of hunger in the last 15 years. Increased mining by US and Canadian corporations has caused awful environmental damage.
Now the government is involved in the process of creating the world’s biggest “free-trade” agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Often referred to as “NAFTA on steroids”, this proposed agreement includes Australia as well as the US, Canada, Japan, Vietnam, Peru and others.
Mexico’s capitalist parties have finally succeeded in changing the constitution to allow the country’s oil industry to be privatised, as per the strictures of NAFTA. The Electrical Workers Union, one of the few democratic unions independent of PRI control, has been essentially smashed. The PRI still uses electoral fraud to install its presidential candidates in office and violence to repress its opponents.
While the Zapatistas have done much to improve women’s rights within their communities, the general plight of women in Mexico is deplorable. State forces conduct organised sexual violence to punish activist women and their families.
Fortunately the Zapatistas have not been the only ones resisting this state of affairs. Mexicans have launched many mass struggles since 1994, from the 10-month student occupation of the National Autonomous University in Mexico City in 2000, to the struggles of oil workers and electrical workers against privatisation, to the massive protests against stolen elections of 2006 and 2012, to recent teachers’ struggles against regressive education “reforms”.
In all of these struggles are people inspired by Zapatismo. And the Zapatistas have reached out to other sectors in struggle, most recently through “the Other Campaign”, launched in 2006, in which Marcos and other Zapatistas toured Mexico, collaborating with a vast range of social movements and organisations of the left.
Ultimately it is these national movements, with strong bases in the urban centres, which, if victorious, can do more to challenge capitalism than can be achieved in remote areas of Chiapas. This is not only because the power of our enemies is concentrated in the cities, but also because urbanisation means that people are increasingly concentrated there too. It is here that the question of political power is posed most sharply.
This explains why the most important heroes of the Latin American left of the early 20th century are those who have taken governmental office: most importantly, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. In the last two years of his life, the government he led arranged for the construction of more than 500,000 new public houses, mostly built by grassroots organisations and communal councils. This is just one measure that demonstrates that the damage of neoliberal capitalism can be overcome on a grander scale than has been achieved so far in Chiapas.
As Subcomandante Marcos puts it: “Another world is possible, but only on top of the corpse of capitalism.”

The Zapatistas’ legacy of rebellion

El Salvadoran anti-mining campaigner Vidalina Morales recently toured Australia to raise awareness about the destruction that OceanaGold, a Melbourne-based company, is unleashing in her country. Red Flag’s Patrick Weiniger spoke to her about the issues.
For nearly a decade, Canadian-based multinational Pacific Rim has been trying to establish a gold mine in the small Central American country of El Salvador.
The project, in the department of Cabañas, has met strong opposition from the local community, whose water supplies would be poisoned by contaminants from the operation.
In 2007 the president of El Salvador prohibited the mine. But Pacific Rim is suing this desperately poor nation for US$315 million.
Under CAFTA-DR – the Central American free trade agreement – a company can sue a government if it makes decisions that negatively affect the company’s economic interests. (This will also be the case if Australia signs the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently being negotiated.)
This year, Pacific Rim was taken over by OceanaGold, an Australian company based in Melbourne.
Environmental vandalism
“At the moment this project is in the process of exploration; it has not gone into production. But already in the prospecting phase, rivers and lakes have been destroyed, animals have died from drinking the water and crops have been lost”, explained Vidalina.
“The main issue we face in El Salvador in relation to pollution is that 92 percent of our rivers are contaminated. As the Latin America Water Tribunal has reported, El Salvador is facing water stress; there won’t be enough water in the future.”
Cyanide is used to separate gold from ore, in a process involving large amounts of water that then becomes toxic waste. This waste is deposited in tailings dams, which are supposed to prevent the cyanide and other toxins from entering the local water supply.
Tailings dams in developing nations often fail. Vidalina pointed out the particular reasons that this would be the case in her country: “There are five major volcanos in El Salvador. We feel the earth tremble every day.”
There has been much resistance to the mine. “From 2004 we started finding out about these mining projects. We visited places affected by mining to see what the horrendous consequences are. Then we went back to our community and held educational forums and seminars to inform people of the likely consequences.
“This was a grassroots movement that started in the communities. We have been able to work with other communities and founded the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining (MESA).”
The problem of water contamination from mining is not only a national problem. “This is an issue that affects all of Central America. Right now, every country in the region, with the exception of El Salvador, has mining projects.”
MESA activists are also well aware of OceanaGold’s terrible record in the Philippines. “We learned that the company carries out mining projects in communities that are very environmentally vulnerable. We know that the Human Rights Commission in that country is concerned and is trying to take measures against the company.”
Intimidation
Violence is often used by giant companies to intimidate locals out of challenging destructive corporate practices. The struggle over the mine in El Salvador is no exception:
“In 2006 the death threats started, and divisions within the community started. In 2009, two men and an eight-months-pregnant woman were murdered. Then there was a wave of death threats against journalists and community radio station.
“We believe that the origin of all this violence is the presence of Pacific Rim in our department. In 2012 the son of one of our female comrades was killed. This woman was well known for denouncing the potential consequences of mining on her land.
“This year the death threats continued. A comrade from Mesa received threats and was robbed, and a male comrade was fired at four times, but fortunately none of the bullets struck him.”
Vidalina’s direct predecessor within the campaign was one of the people assassinated. Marcelo Rivera was a teacher and prominent community activist in the campaign against the mine. He was disappeared on 18 June 2009.
His assassins kept him alive for nine days, during which time they tortured him before dumping his corpse in a well. The initial explanation by the National Civilian Police – that the death was just the act of “gang members” – is considered dubious by many people following the campaign.
 “Normally any assassinations or killings are dismissed as the acts of street gangs. But we are concerned that these killings are performed by hit men who know what they are doing. So we are pressuring the attorney-general to find the real perpetrators of the crimes – not just the person who carried out the physical act, but who is behind it, who planned the act.”
‛Free’ trade
The US$315 million lawsuit by Pacific Rim has already cost El Salvador US$7 million in legal fees. As Vidalina pointed out, this is “a lot of money in country that that has so many needs like education and services that are not being met”.
The case holds lessons for Australia. As John Passant previously noted (“Keeping us in the dark on free trade”, Red Flag #12), if Australia signs on to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it will establish “an investor-state dispute settlement. This would allow foreign corporations to sue governments. For example, if the Australian government harms a corporation’s investment (‘reduces its expected profits’) through, say, environmental regulation, the door to litigation may be opened.”
El Salvador proves that this threat is real. Undoubtedly poorer nations – whose national budgets are far smaller – will be hurt the most. In many cases, it could well be Australian companies inflicting the pain on these poorer trans-Pacific “partners”.
“These free trade agreements are very negative”, Vidalina explained, “especially for countries like El Salvador whose only exports are our natural resources. The big countries are after our natural resources like our water, our forests and our minerals. And when people dare to resist, they sue you, they have these legal tools to start a lawsuit against us.” If this lawsuit were to succeed, the damages would amount to nearly half of El Salvador’s annual education budget.
But this is not stopping activists trying to protect their land and their communities. “Our people won’t sit still if this project proceeds. They will rebel and take action against it. But we know these companies will hire their private security, who are very likely to try to kill anyone who opposes these projects.
“We ask people in Australia to keep an eye on what Australian companies are doing overseas in countries like ours. Because in El Salvador there is widespread rejection of these mining projects, and it is only fair that companies like OceanaGold respect the sovereign rights of a nation to protect its resources.”
[Further info: <a href="http://www.waternotgold.info">waternotgold.info</a> and <a href="http://www.stopesmining.org">stopesmining.org</a>. Translations by Lourdes García Larqué.]

The Zapatista festival of resistance

Cuba’s partial victory against the US empire

The Zapatistas’ legacy of rebellion

Mining multinationals exploit Central America

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