AlterNet Interview with Zapatista Insurgente Marcos
By Aura Bogado,
Free Speech Radio News
Posted on
http://www.alternet.org/story/33304/
(Editor's Note: Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos is
considered to be one of the main leaders of the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation [EZLN] based in Chiapas, one of the poorest states of Mexico. In
January 1994, Marcos led an army of Indian farmers and took over the eastern
part of
On New Year's Day, 2006, the Zapatista movement came
out of the jungles and launched the Other Campaign aimed at influencing
upcoming presidential elections in
Free Speech Radio News Anchor Aura Bogado
just returned from
Aura Bogado: Why the Other
Campaign now -- for 2005 and 2006?
Delegado Zero: Well, because we, as Zapatistas, had to endure
a process of preparation -- like the uprising in 1994, where we prepared for 10
years to realize it -- we also had to engage in a process of preparation for
the Other Campaign.
The Other Campaign was
actually born in 2001, when
When we decided that we had
to prepare for this possibility, we anticipated that it would be very likely
that people who had supported us up until that point for indigenous cultural
rights would take back their support at the hour we distanced ourselves from
the political parties, especially from the so-called "institutional
left": the PRD. But at the same time, we had to prepare ourselves against
a surgical strike, a strike from the military or from the police -- under any
pretext, that would attempt to behead the EZLN and without leave it without
direction.
For us, the initiative of the
Sixth Declaration is of the same magnitude, or maybe even greater, than our
Declaration of War in 1994. We had to be prepared to lose our entire
leadership. Because, according to our method, at the same time that we set out
to do something, we have to put our leaders in front to set the example. We had
to be ready to lose not only Marcos, but all of our known leadership, the ones
that will be going out to do the political work: the comandantes,
like Comandanta Esther, Comandante
Tacho, Comandante David, Comandante Zebedeo, Comandanta Susana .. the ailing Comandanta Ramona was also going to come out, but unfortunately
[she died] ... all of us who are more or less publicly known were planning to
come out, so we had to prepare for that, and we had to make plans for the first
exploratory tour, which has fallen on me, which we are doing now.
We specifically choose the
electoral period, so that it would be clear that we want to do something else,
and so that people could really see and could compare and contrast our
political proposal. ... Always, since our birth, we've insisted on another way
of doing politics. Now, we had the chance to do it without arms, but without
stopping being Zapatistas, that's why we keep the masks on.
AB: For people in Latin
America, there is often a lot of hope in politicians like Lula in Brazil,
Kirchner in
DZ: We always turn to look
towards the bottom, not only in our own country, but in
The
struggle of the Argentine youth, fundamentally, this whole piquetero
movement, and of the youth in general in
We think, fundamentally, that
the future story of
But fundamentally, it will be
the people from the bottom that will be able to take charge of it, organizing
themselves in another way. The old recipes or the old parameters should serve
as a reference, yes, of what was done, but not as something that should be
readopted to do something new.
AB: What can men do, for example, to increase the
representation of women anywhere in the world -- from families to cultural
centers and beyond?
DZ: In that respect, for us
and for all organizations and movements, we still have a long way to go,
because there is still a really big distance between the intention of actually
being better, and really respecting the other -- in this case women -- and what
our realistic practice is.
And I'm not only referring to
the excuse of "this is how we were educated, and there's nothing we can do
..." which is often men's excuse -- and of women too, who obey this type
of thinking and argue for it one way or another among other women.
Something else that we've
seen in our process is that at the hour that we [insurgents] arrived in the
communities, and they integrated us as part of them, we saw significant,
unplanned changes. The first change is made internally among the relationship
between women. The fact that one group of indigenous women, whose fundamental
horizon was the home, getting married quite young, having a lot of children,
and dedicating themselves to the home -- could now go to the mountains and
learn to use arms, be commanders of military troops, signified for the
communities, and for the indigenous women in the communities, a very strong
revolution. It is there that they started to propose that they should
participate in the assemblies and in the organizing decisions, and started to propose
that they should hold positions of responsibility. It was not like that before.
But in reality, the pioneers
of this transformation of the indigenous Zapatista woman are a merit of the
women insurgents. To become a guerrilla in the mountainous conditions is very
difficult for men, and for the women, it is doubly or triply difficult … in
addition to the hostile mountainous conditions, they also have to be able to
put up with the hostile conditions of a patriarchal system of our own machismo,
of our relationships with one another.
[Another difficulty that the
women face] is the repudiation of their communities, which sees it as a bad
thing for a woman to go out and do something else. [After passing their
training], a group of insurgent women are now the ones who are superior, and
when they head back down to the communities, they now are the ones who show the
way, lead and explain the struggle. At first this creates a type of revolt, a
rebellion among the women that starts to take over spaces. Among the first
rebellions is one that prohibits the sale of women into marriage, which used to
be an indigenous custom, and it gives, in fact (even though it's not on paper yet)
the women the right to pick their partner.
We also think that while
there is an economic dependence from women on men, it will be very difficult
for anything else to develop. Because in the end, the women can be very
rebellious, and very capable and all of that, but if she depends on a man
economically, she has few possibilities. So in that sense, in the communities
of the Autonomous Rebellious Municipalities and in the Councils of Good
Government, the same women that are already authorities with responsibilities
at the municipal level, or on the Councils of Good Government, open spaces, projects,
and economic organization for women in such a way that they construct their
economic independence, and that gives more substance to [the women's] other independence.
Nevertheless, we're still
lacking a lot in the area of domestic violence from men against women. We have
gained some in other areas, for example, girls who were not going to school are
now going to school. They weren't going before because they were women and
because there weren't any schools, and now there are schools and they go, regardless
of whether they are men or women.
And women are already in the
highest posts of civil authority -- because in the military authority, in the
political organizing, we can say that women need to be included -- but in
matters of civil society, we [insurgents] don't hold authority, we only advise.
So in reality, the women in the communities now reach the civil authority and
autonomous municipal posts, which was unthinkable for a woman to reach before.
[They reach those positions] through their own struggle, not through the authority
of the EZLN.
AB: Do you have any message for [people] in the
DZ: Well, what we've seen
while we've been passing through as we're getting the word out -- we've passed
through
Like we say, the approach of
the Sixth is [to ask]: Who are we? Where are we? What do we want to do? We know
there are a lot of people that sympathize with the Sixth Declaration and with
the Other Campaign. And we want to insist to them that this is their place,
this place right next to those of us who are on this side.
That which has provoked pain
from the border, which signifies death, marginalization, apartheid of some kind
or another -- we have to construct, and break that border with a bridge of
struggle, of dignity. The Other Campaign can be that space. No one will speak
for them, no one will speak for the Mexicanos or Mexicanas or the Chicanos on the other side, instead, they
will construct their own space, defend it, speak for themselves, explain the
reasons why they are there, the difficulties that they face, and what they have
been able to construct as rebelliousness and resistance on that other
side and that we will see each other there in
Aura Bogado is a news producer and anchor at the Free Speech
Radio News.
This
interview is an excerpt from the forthcoming Open Media book "The Other
Campaign, The Zapatista Call of Change from Below" by Subcomandante Marcos
to be published by City Lights Books in April. All royalties from the book will
benefit indigenous media projects in