Marcos Sees National
Worker Uprising Coming
In Querétaro,
the Zapatista "Other Campaign" Picks Up the Hammer of the Urban
Worker
After Hearing Testimony in
Eleven Mexican States,
Subcomandante Marcos Sees "A
National Uprising" to Come
By Al Giordano
The Other Journalism with the
Other Campaign in Querétaro
NarcoNews
For don Andrés
Vásquez de Santiago, 96 and still fighting
Photo: D.R. 2006 Bertha Rodríguez Santos
First, to provide context, a
very brief trip down memory lane of the past ten weeks of a tour that, all in
all, will last six months in its first stage. Listening to
"the simple and humble people who fight," Marcos has heard from, and
shone the spotlight upon, indigenous and peasant farmers in Quintana Roo fighting to defend their lands from seizure by
developers of airports and tourist Meccas. He
has taken the testimony "from below" of those most threatened by big
money's plan to turn the state of Yucatán into a
"gigantic hacienda." He has written down notes on how campesinos have organized
in
As the masked rebel spokesman
headed North, he also heard the true stories of teachers struggling to save
public education and democratize their union against corrupt bosses, of
telephone technicians and marginalized sweatshop factory workers in
It is a 21st Century fight
that goes way beyond 20th century hammers and sickles: The Zapatista
"Other Campaign" has been joined by thousands of organizations,
families and individuals; by youths who are tired of being criminalized for
being young and rebellious; by housewives "who see the difference between
the prices of basic products and the low salaries available" noted Marcos
today; by political prisoners and their families; by alternative media and
authentic journalists; by gays, lesbians and "other loves;" by
children; by elders; by everyone left out by the mercantile and political
classes - a breadth of resistance that this country - perhaps no land - has
ever seen weaving its many struggles into one big fight.
Perhaps the greatest
challenge for a movement that began in the mountains of the Mexican Southeast
with a surprise uprising of rural indigenous farmers is whether it can cross
over into the factories, the mines and the urban workplaces and become truly
national. "The Other Campaign will not be a class struggle,"
acknowledged Marcos on Tuesday, "without the workers present."
The "Other
Campaign" reaches out now to the hand that builds and the hand that builds
is reaching back. We begin this report in the recaptured Union Hall of the tire
factory workers that were fired and replaced when the French multinational
corporation Michelin bought the companies - B.F. Goodrich and Uniroyal - where they once labored, and may yet toil again.
"We Will Never Stop
Fighting"
Years ago, the former
syndicate bosses placed the headquarters of the Union of Uniroyal
Workers in the affluent Querétaro neighborhood of
Arnulfo González Nieto
Photo: D.R. 2006 Bertha Rodríguez Santos
"We were once 1,200
workers," said Arnulfo González
Nieto, secretary general of the union that would not die, to the Other
Journalism on Tuesday. "In 1990, Michelin bought our two factories, one in
Querétaro and the other in the Tacuba
section of
"We were sold out by
corrupt union bosses, known as Charros," González Nieto explained.
"Charros
are part of the corporatism of the Mexican government. They work with the big
labor organizations CTM (Federation of Mexican Workers) and CROC (Revolutionary
Federation of Workers and Farmers). They're bureaucrats who become individually
wealthy in an illegal manner due to always being at the service of management.
The fortune of an individual charro often surpasses that of the factory executive or even
its owner. In our case, the CTM signed a contract to protect the interests of
the business against any grievances by the workers."
"We are now
unemployed," continued González Nieto.
"Some of us have gone to find better luck and work in the
"When the CTM betrayed
us, it took over the Union Hall," remembered González
Nieto. "We fought back. We called an assembly and voted in our officers.
In October 2005, we took back this hall and the one in
The new workers at the
Michelin factories, said González Nieto, "live under terrible surveillance. We can't have any contact
with them. Their salaries are extremely low and they must work twelve hours a
day. We've received news of injuries and accidents that harmed the
under-trained workers. And we've learned that this story has happened all over
the world."
Another
In 2004, some members of the Uniroyal Union were invited by tire factory workers in
Workers in
On Tuesday afternoon,
Subcomandante Marcos came to this revitalized Union Hall. There, González Nieto told him: "We are from below and to the
left and so we have adhered to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon
Jungle. We and the brothers and sisters of the EZLN are together now. We are
the same."
Other labor organizers -
teachers, workers in
"We want to understand
the struggle of the workers in the city, particularly in the industrial
sector," said Marcos. "Our roots and our spinal column are the
indigenous people of
Marcos then made proposals to
these workers, as he did two weeks ago to the ex-bracero
workers in Tlaxcala: "We are asking you as
industrial workers to become teachers in the Other Campaign, to teach us and
other sectors what a workers' movement is. You know how to manage contracts.
The indigenous, the youths, the others who don't yet know you need to know how
to do that. Give us classes, please."
"Some see the Zapatista
rebellion, or the fight by Euskadi workers, or your fight,
as defects or exceptions of capitalism," Marcos opined. "But these struggles
are really suggestions of the possibility of another
"To
the proposal that it is time to demand the expropriation of a business, to make
this demand specifically. please add the name of the EZLN. In the case of the mine in Coahuila where so many workers just died, the capitalist is
responsible," said Marcos, suggesting that that mine might be the place to
begin "to take the offensive" and take back businesses into the hands
of the workers. "To say to the workers 'we're going for your factory now'
is something new."
Delegate Zero also proposed
that the union members join him in
As the meeting ended, the
union leaders and members huddled in a back room with the Zapatista
Subcomandante, making plans for the next steps. Men and women who not long ago
were thrown out onto the street stepped up onto a national center stage from
their reconquered Union Hall. From the ashes of a terrible
defeat in this city, just six years ago, after an indefatigable struggle,
sprouts the suggestion of an Other Mexico - the expropriation of a nation from
those that stole it, a national rebellion, an Other Mexico, not just planted,
but also built by human hands.