By Hermann Bellinghausen
La Jornada

November 24, 2006

Bagdad, Tamaulipas, November 23: December 1, the day that Felipe Calderón takes office, will be “the beginning of the end for a political system that, since the Mexican Revolution, became deformed and began to cheat generation after generation, until this one arrived and said, ‘Enough,’” warned Subcomandante Marcos during a press conference. Calderón, he added, “will begin to fall from his first day.”

He stated, “we are on the eve of either a great uprising or a civil war.” As to the question of who would lead the uprising, he responded, “the people, each one in his or her own place, within a system of mutual support. If we can not succeed in having it happen that way, there will have to be spontaneous uprisings, civil explosions all over, a civil war in which each person is only looking out for his or her own well-being, because the possibility is already there for things to cross that line.” He cited the case of Oaxaca, where “there are no leaders or political bosses; it is the people themselves who have organized. It will be like that across the entire country.”

With respect to the current phase of the Other Campaign, he explained, “after the Zapatistas lifted the veil that was obscuring the reality of indigenous communities in Chiapas, we ventured out to find poverty in the countryside and in the cities, and now we see it on the coast as well. In this country, there is a façade being propped up by the political parties, and recently by Vicente Fox, that says everything is fine.”

In the case of the northern part of the country, he added, it “is chilling” how different reality is from what they say it is: “they say the north supports the PAN, that they love Fox, that everyone lives well. But what we saw was equal to what is happening in the most humble of indigenous communities in the southwest.”

He posited that Oaxaca is “an indicator” of what is happening across the country. “In Nuevo Laredo, they told us that the problem in Tamaulipas is that everyone here is like Ulises Ruiz: the municipal president, the state congress, the governor. There are too many in the mold of Ulises Ruiz and the people are getting tired of it. If there is not a civil and peaceful way out, which is what we propose in the Other Campaign, it will turn into each person finding their own way however they can.”

He continued, “we do not recognize the official president or the legitimate one. What happens at the top does not matter at all to us. What matters is what will arise from below. When we carry out this uprising, we will do away will the entire political class, including those who call themselves the ‘parliamentary leftists.’”

With regard to the violence and power of drug trafficking, he asserted that these provide “another façade,” which affects the northern states more than anything, where the central focus is on security, and not on the situation of poverty that exists. “The conflicts between drug traffickers, or between drug traffickers and security forces, or between drug traffickers and politicians, are overstated, because we know that the politicians are in league with some of the drug cartels. Meanwhile, the fundamental is forgotten; for example, what is happening in Playa Bagdad, Nuevo Laredo or Reynosa, to mention Tamaulipas. These places only make it into the news when there are clashes between groups of criminals, while what is happening to the people who are working and struggling is forgotten.”

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Posted by IMC Chiapas correspondent Oscar Beard