San Cristobal de las Casas

It was about noon on January first when I heard about it. Earlier that morning tourists and locals in the market town of San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico had woken up to find themselves in the middle of an uprising. Local indigenous peoples along with a few non-indigenous supporters had orchestrated the guerilla takeover of large parts of the state of Chiapas, one of the poorest in Mexico. They called themselves the EZLN, or in English the Zapatista National Liberation Army. In Philadelphia in the USA we knew nothing about them, their issues, their plans, or their hopes, but we figured that they were on the right side of the struggle and by early afternoon we were organizing a demonstration in support of them in front of Independence Hall, which turned out, conveniently, to also be next door to the Mexican Consulate. As word got out about what the EZLN was we felt secure that we had made the right decision.

That was 1994, and in the eight years since the level of solidarity with the EZLN and the indigenous peoples of Chiapas has varied widely, as have the fortunes of the EZLN itself and the conditions of the indigenous people who made up much of the membership of the base organizations it represents.

I arrived in Chiapas for the first time only about four days ago, not to participate in the Zapatista Revolution, but because I was traveling in Mexico and felt I should offer the little help I could as I passed by. It is in many ways what I expected and in many ways not. Eight years on the EZLN’s uprising has left a confusing legacy.

San Cristobal itself is a particularly pretty tourist town. Already in 1994 it was one of the main stops on the Gringo Trail (the must-see/must-do North American tourist route through Mexico), and it seems to have prospered in the years since the EZLN made themselves known to the world. Their occupation of San Cristobal lasted only a couple of weeks, but they have certainly left their imprint on the local scene. There is a conspicuous amount of leftist commercial activity, from solidarity cafes (serving organic/EZLN Fair Trade coffee) and fancy Cuban themed bars referring in one way or another to Ernesto Che Guevara, to hundreds of indigenous women sitting on sidewalks and near the impromptu artisans market behind piles of embroidered jackets, hammocks, bags and wool hats, but always featuring little figures of EZLN guerillas in balaclavas (made famous by the superstar of the EZLN folk heroes, the Ladino Subcomandante Marcos) holding little wooden guns, and black balaclavas embroidered in red with the letters EZLN. It could be a scene to make an IMF banker happy; local entrepreneurs capitalizing on local resources and advantages to develop economically. The only fly in the ointment for that IMF banker would be the fact that the EZLN started their uprising with the explicitly stated goal of defeating Neo-liberalism, and timed their uprising to coincide with the start of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), which embodies many of the ideal of what is now called Globalization.

The Zapatistas were one of the first organized movements against Globalization, years before Seattle made the term ‘Anti-Globalization’ famous, and the EZLN suffered massacres and repression for their stand years before Carlo Guilliani was viciously gunned down by police in Piazza Alimonda on that late July afternoon last year during the g8 summit in Genoa.

Last Summer was the crest of the Anti-Globalization Movement as hundreds of thousands of protestors made their way to Genoa, despite media terror campaigns and harassment from police and border guards, so as to express their hopes for a better world and to give the g8 leaders a message of resistance, but it was also when the Movement had to face it’s first great dilemma as the Italian government, with the approval of it’s g8 allies, demonstrated the fact that they were willing to go to extreme means to silence and terrorize the protestors. Since Genoa, and particularly after the September 11th attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, the Anti-Globalization Movement finds itself in crisis.

After Genoa, it was becoming clear that many that had supported the Movement were getting cold feet. Often this was expressed as a concern over the threat posed by sharing demonstrations with groups like Black Block, despite the fact that it was obvious to anyone who attended the Mobilization in Genoa that the police violence was directed at non-violent protestors and had no correlation to activity of groups not espousing non-violence such as Black Block. It is a simple psychological phenomenon when faced with violence to direct your aggression not at the source of violence but at a more convenient, but more harmless target. It’s safer and it’s less likely to get more violence directed at you. Scanning the articles and internet postings of the post Genoa period you will find many examples of this scapegoating of Black Block, alongside relatively muted comments against the police and civil authorities that engaged in the violence against the demonstrators.

After September 11th, Black Block diminished as the reason for staying away. This was partly because it became clear to many in the West what Violence was, both perpetrated against States, but also by States (the US government can feel happy that it more than made up for the civilians it lost in NYC by killing civilians in Afghanistan). Somehow watching the image of the carnage in NYC, it was hard to get excited about a couple of looted banks and a few destroyed cars (curiously, the Black Blocks attack on the Marassi Prison in Genoa received almost no mention in the lists of horrors they were said to have perpetuated). The new explanations was based on ‘strategic’ arguments: that is was necessary to show ‘solidarity with the victims of 9-11’, that it was foolish to risk the ‘good name’ of the Anti-Globalization Movement (or the particular group involved) in a cause made unpopular by the terrorist attacks, and even that maybe faced with ‘anti-globalists’ like Ossama bin Laden it might be better to support a ‘more compassionate globalization’.

While there may be many who changed their minds about Globalization and the Anti-Globalization Movement for honest reasons, it is hard to ignore the fact that all this hand-wringing and mass departures from the Movement coincide with the advent of real dangers for the participants in the Movement, whether direct violence or loss of fundraising opportunities by supporting possibly unpopular causes.

From the beginning the Zapatistas faced violence and intimidation in their pursuit of justice in a world rapidly converting to Neo-Liberalism. What for many of us was the occasional demonstration, was for the indigenous people of Chiapas their daily lives for the past 500 years as local landowners conspired to make themselves rich through global trade by exploiting the poor. After eight years of struggle and repression Chiapas may have some lessons to teach the rest of us about the Anti-Globalization struggle.

It is my hope that as I learn from the struggle here that I may be able to offer some of those lessons in these series of articles.

francisco rojas

frojas@genoaresistance.org

http://www.genoaresistance.org

Feb. 17, 2002

San Cristobal de las Casas

There is a series of videos being shown in a local café in San Cristobal on the Anti-Globalization protests. Seattle….Prague….Genoa. It is being organized with the hope of promoting a discussion on the Anti-Globalization Movement and how the Zapatista Revolution in Chiapas relates to it.

So far the discussion has been muted.

Possibly, there are many reasons that while the videos have been well attended (standing room only), they haven’t resulted in a lively debate. Maybe the multi-lingual background of the participants makes people hesitant to comment, or maybe the relatively quite ways of the local indigenous people inhibits gregarious Europeans. I think it is symptomatic of the Anti-Globalization Movements current crisis.

Despite the numerous outsiders in San Cristobal, either as tourists, peace camp volunteers, or development workers of one type or another, it is reasonable to assume that the concerns of First World activists, whether in the US, Europe, Canada or Australia or elsewhere, are not of the greatest importance. Certainly, among First World activists here, there can be a sense that the events of the European and North American Movement are far away and of secondary importance. Somehow reality disproves that idea.

There is a tendency not to want to speak of bad news in the movement here (a tendency much like what we have elsewhere), but it is becoming clear that things have taken a dramatic turn for the worst in Chiapas over the past six months. There are more incidents of government pressure on Autonomous Communities, there is increasing activity among the paramilitary groups that harass the Zapatista supporters, and there are more split communities, where different parts of a village are loyal to different sides of the struggle.

This is often attributed to the policies of the President Vincente Fox’s (PAN, National Action Party [right] government in Mexico and the local Chiapas government under the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution [left]) that have increased the repressive activities that the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party [?]) has pursued for the last 8 years since the start of the Zapatista Revolution. Yet I wonder of this strong coincidence between the crisis among the Revolution here and the Anti-Globalization movement abroad can be simply written off as chance.

Long before September 11th, long before Genoa, and long before the onset of the current problems here in Chiapas there was a meeting last winter of police and counter-insurgency specialists to formulate a response to the growing power of the Anti-Globalization Movement. It is best documented that it was there that the State response to Genoa was organized with Italian Police representatives visiting the sites of other Anti-Globalization protests and specifically to Quebec, Canada and Gothenburg, Sweden where protests were held last Spring in the lead up to Genoa.

I have written previously that the shooting of protestors in Gothenburg, and the killing of Carlo Giulliani in Genoa, where, in my opinion, premeditated acts to terrorize protestors away from the Movement. The nature of the police violence in Genoa gives me no doubts that it was planned to stop further big mobilizations by scaring away non-violent protestors. That this effort was much wider is now becoming much clearer to me.

September 11th was a bit of good luck that the forces of repression could not have imagined in their brightest dreams. It has allowed the massive acceleration of a campaign of terror against any group or anyone opposed to the Neo-liberal Global order designed by the WEF and implemented by the g8 governments with the assistance of the IMF/WB which they control.

Who would have expected last winter that the US would have fought a war killing thousands in Afghanistan, started to build an extensive new network of military bases around the world, and deployed troops in Colombia and the Philippines, with a long list of potential new wars and interventions to be followed up in the coming years? At the same time countless First World activists have been arrested and harassed on a number of flimsy accusations, and as it’s becoming clear, Third World activists are being violently repressed and murdered. And all of this with hardly a word of caution, yet alone dissent from it’s NATO allies, Russia, China or, for that matter, almost any government.

While all this may seem a sad state of affairs, it is also a sign of our victory. If the people’s movements around the world were not showing signs of success there would be no need for the g8 and it’s cronies to respond in so brutal a manner. The coming elections in Zimbabwe are a clear demonstration of the lengths that those in charge will go to in order to stay in power, no matter what slogans of Justice or Freedom they used to get to power. Never have the rich given up anything without a fight, and never have the powerful given up their power without violence.

The question posed by this current state of repression is whether the sacrifices to date will have been pointless or whether we are going to press on with the struggle we have started despite the risks. The Argentinean people are now facing that question head on because they have no other choice. Their peaceful cooperation with the Neo-liberal order has left what was the 10th richest country in the world only some decades ago, bankrupt and in chaos.

We have a chance at a better world and we have our enemies scared. Time to see if we are serious about what we believe in.

In coming articles, more about Chiapas and the world……..

francisco rojas
frojas@genoaresistance.org
http://www.genoaresistance.org