Zapatista Leader Visits Border

The Albuquerque Journal ^ | November 2, 2006 | Rene Romo

[CedarDave]

CIUDAD JUAREZ— Mexican and American supporters joined the charismatic Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos on Wednesday to briefly close the Stanton Street Bridge border crossing linking El Paso and Mexico.

The demonstration, with about 800 people participating, was a show of solidarity with striking Oaxaca teachers and union members.

The protest also was another chance for Marcos to reach out to the Mexican people as he continues a nationwide tour— billed "The Other Campaign"— to promote the rights of indigenous peoples, including political autonomy and ending privatization of public resources. Marcos and others contend the Mexican government neglects the country's poor people, especially Indians.

"We have arrived here to tell Oaxaca that she is not alone," said Marcos, who became famous as the spokesman for an indigenous peasant takeover of several towns in Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas in 1994... "We have arrived here to say that Chihuahua, Juárez, El Paso, that the whole country ... is also in this fight."

~~ snip ~~

"The Other Campaign does not recognize this border," said Marcos, wearing his customary black ski mask that reveals only his eyes and a battered camouflage cap. "The Other Campaign considers our companions from the other side (the United States) as part of Mexico, as part of our blood, and this fight does not recognize either this helicopter, or this boundary, or this flag."

~~ snip ~~

[He was] encircled by a protective ring of supporters trying to hold the crowd off. Several people waved red flags with the old Soviet-era hammer and sickle.

[CedarDave]

This is scary; typical leftist academic who is just another far left pinko agitator:

Neil Harvey, an NMSU government professor, said he delivered a statement of support from SOLAS to Marcos. "It's about the responsibility of academics and students to support progressive change, progress and development for all," Harvey told a Journal reporter.

[CedarDave]

Please PING your Mexico list.
Thanks...

[nmh]

If the head of MEXICO would lift its own people UP, we wouldn't have ILLEGALS HERE or CRIMIGRANTS. The CRIMIGRANTS could steal and murder their own.

[3AngelaD]

I am not surprised he went to Juarez. Some left-wing publisher in El Paso got a U.S. federal government grant to publish a kids book he wrote teaching them all how to be good little Marxists.

[DogBarkTree]

I ran a google image search on this guy. Apparently there are no photos of him without the mask. The pipe is a nice touch dontcha think?

[CedarDave]

The southern part of the country is full of these Marxist types. The northern part of the country is more capitalist oriented. The incoming president (December 1) understands the need for jobs in his own country so there is some hope, but it is not going to happen immediately. No matter how much the old and incoming president denounce a border wall, if one was in place it would give impetus to building an economy based on jobs not welfare.

[nmh]

We need to get back to what America is all about - NOT diversity but SELF RELIANCE and HARD WORK. Using DIVERSITY is a distraction. Race or ethnicity has NOTHING to do with it.

[StJacques]

A Mexican Left Watch ping for you all.

Subcomandante Marcos is now touring Mexico trying to stir things up. It appears he has found new sources of funding to support his activities. His "Other Campaign" (Otra Campaña) is a broad-based attempt, and which he probably can be credited with starting, to address social and economic change in Mexico outside of the political process. The Otra Campaña seeks a new Mexican Constitution and enhanced powers for Mexico's poor and indigenous minorities and it denies that the electoral process can ever be a means for securing true change. For a long time it was presented as a unique proposal of the Mexican Left, but it now appears to be aligning itself with other Latin American leftist movements and it is also bringing Lopez Obrador and the radical elements of the PRD, who are promoting their own "Alternative Government" with Lopez Obrador as "Legitimate President" right now, closer to the EZLN than they have been in the past.

But anyone who thinks that Subcomandante Marcos speaks for Mexico is woefully mistaken. His popularity is really among radicalized university students and the radical fringe, who see him as a romantic figure, and among certain rural indigenous communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca where the EZLN has a very small base. Almost everywhere else in Mexico he is treated as a curiosity and his political support is almost non-existent. I would wager that there are large numbers of outside agitators counted amon those attending his rallies. This does not represent the sentiments of the locals in any way.

[CedarDave]

His popularity is really among radicalized university students and the radical fringe, who see him as a romantic figure, and among certain rural indigenous communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca where the EZLN has a very small base.

I guess we can include some students and at least one professor on the campus of NMSU in that group.

Thank you again for your perspective on events south of the border.

[SAJ]

The only reason Marcos is still breathing is that effectively nobody considers him worth the cost of a bullet.

[StJacques]

"The only reason Marcos is still breathing is that effectively nobody considers him worth the cost of a bullet."

I agree with that. He's actually becoming something of a leftist showman.

[livius]

He is actually a pudgy little guy who is the son of a furniture-store owner and had a comfortable middle class youth. He keeps the mask on to maintain the mystique...probably the only way he gets the visting American lefty girls to sleep with him.

There was an uproariously funny picture of him trying to start his motorbike to make a grand rabble-rousing tour of Mexico sometime last year. Pudgy guy on a motorbike.

Still, he is a rabble rouser and as such is dangerous.

[Ben Ficklin]

The Zapatistas are seeking an autonomous, indigenous region with indigenous customary law.

See page 6, number 7:
Mexico's Unfinished Symphony: The Zapatista Movement

This sets up conflicts on Mexico's reforms in the ag collectives(ejidos). Mexico's attempts to privatize the collectives by passing land titles to the ejidiantros is opposed by the indians. These ejidos are pre-columbian.

[StJacques]

Thank you for the link, believe it or not, I just read the whole thing.

Some comments if I may ...

--The author is correct to say that the causes of the Zapatista rebellion are profound and far-reaching. I don't think that was very hard to do. Nor do I think it is difficult to point out that Mexico's indigenous minorities have been left out of the national picture as Mexico has developed. I regard this as pretty much common knowledge.

--The timeline he relates of the "history" of the Zapatista Rebellion and the reasons for their rejection of the outcome at numerous stages of the process is also accurate. He does deserve points for objectivity on that because the Zedillo government never acted in good faith in my opinion, because it was basically incapable of summoning the will to do anything substantive at a time when Mexico's economy was collapsing; the collapse of the peso, inflation raging like a runaway train, declining GDP, etc. There was simply no way Mexico was going to launch a broad-based reform program for the indigenous minorities the Zapatistas claimed to represent.

--Even though the author does mention that the Zapatista leadership came from "the north" as did the organizers of other indigenous resistance movements at that time, what is missing in that article is a confrontation of the most basic difficulty almost everyone has when dealing with the Zapatistas. They are NOT an "indigenous guerrilla movement." No; they are middle and upper class young Mexican intellectuals from central and northern Mexican who went to Chiapas "in search of a revolution," or perhaps better stated, "to start a revolution." I have little doubt that these young men cared deeply about the people they went to help, they endured hardship and faced significant danger. And the "powers that were" which they confronted were, and still are, genuinely corrupt. But one thing which seems to keep getting lost in the Zapatista story in my opinion, is that they arrived with a pre-conceived agenda as to how the problem would be solved and, in many ways, Marcos and his compadres have never let go of it. They are committed, and at all costs, to the cultural preservation of the local indigenous cultures through the diminution of private property in land ownership, the rejection of the modernizing aspects of a useful education, and the maintenance of indigenous cultural identity through an autonomous removal of these groups from the political processes of Mexican life. In one sentence, they recognize that the modernization of the indigenous Mexican peoples will mean their acculturation into modern Mexican life, which is what Marcos, the EZLN leadership, and others who have journeyed south to start this guerrilla movement fear more than they do economic and social progress for these same groups. With this basic problem in hand, the negotiating process looks a lot different when one examines the goals of the Mexican government, and note that I said goals and not means since I could never defend the means the Mexican establishment applied in this whole wretched story.

It was the desire of the EZLN leadership to prevent the acculturation of these indigenous Mexican peoples which led them to their Otra Campaña program, something they wanted to take place outside of the political system. As such, it was in the tradition of the Mexican Left in that it was "home grown" leftism, not readily associated with the larger Latin American Left, who the Mexicans have traditionally looked down upon, at least until quite recently. APPO, Lopez Obrador and his "Alternative Government" program, and others have tried to place themselves within the Otra Campaña, because Marcos actually achieved a fair degree of respectability for standing up to the Zedillo government, which everyone knew was corrupt to its core. And I think he has made the mistake of coming to enjoy his own celebrity a bit too much, because it now appears that he is permitting the ideas he and his fellow EZLN leadership developed to be misused by groups who are very much in touch with the larger Latin American Left. Subcomandante Marcos has grown soft over the past few years hanging out at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and picking up impressionable college girls. He's quickly making himself irrelevant in my opinion.

[Ben Ficklin]

I don't disagree with anything you wrote, I was trying to point out that there is an indigineous movement in Mexico and Latin America that shouldn't be ignored.

Since that article was written, Fox washed his hands of the problem and the recent legislature did nothing.

It should be noted that Marcos endorsed no one for president, and according to yesterday's FR thread, he is still campaigning for the indians(in Juarez).

My uneducated assessment is that for the the Chiapas indian, if there are oil deposits to be developed there, the issue of those deposits being developed by Pemex or Exxon is irrelevant. For the Chiapas farmer with 6 acres of corn, the issue is not how much US corn would be allowed into the country without a tariff by Obrador or Calderon, but that the tariff will soon fall.