Giordano: Zapatistas Activate a New Kind of Bomb in theMexican Southeast
August 23, 2005
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Al Giordano reports today from Chiapas, Mexico on the series of historic encounters between the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN) and groups from around Mexico and the world. The meetings are the beginning of the process
outlined in the Zapatistas' Sixth Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle and their proposal to create, as Mexico begins
another presidential election cycle, "The Other Campaign."
Giordano gives a glimpse of what the formation of a new kind of power, "from below," looks like in its early stages, as
Mexicans from all walks of life - workers, neighborhood activists, student radicals, peasant organizers, and more, all
"of the left" but many having been at odds for years - come together to try to join forces in a meaningful,
revolutionary way, for the first time. And as one young participant, from the state of Veracruz, puts it, "There is
nobody with the moral authority better to lead this fight than the EZLN."
Giordano reports:
"Most of the organizations present were formed in the past five years by sectors of Mexican society that have been
ravaged by the privatization of government tasks as imposed by the rules of the market. Their demands have been ignored
and their people made into outcasts by political parties and institutional organizations and leaders, including those of
the Old Left that, according to some of younger folks like Morita, they sounded like. They are at the margins. And it is
through the margins and the marginalized - who together in this country and this work make for a majority of minorities
- that the Zapatistas have begun to arm a kind of bomb and a corresponding explosion to come. The bomb under
construction is, among other qualities, inter-generational. That is one difficult bomb to arm. But - lookey here - it is
yet a more difficult one for the powerful to deactivate once it begins ticking."
...
"All day and for much of the night, the word kept being spoken: The workers from metallurgy factories in the Pacific
port of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán took the microphone and told the history of their organizing as workers, their
current strike, and the strong repression against them. They invited the Zapatistas - who've announced that they're
coming out so we'd better get the party started - to their factories to visit and speak with the workers. Then came an
organization of small business salespersons, inviting the Zapatistas to come to the largest wholesale marketplace in
Mexico City, known as La Merced.
"A jovial, bearded fisherman from Manzanillo, Colima got his turn. 'We are struggling against very rich and important
men.' He received an especially roaring applause when he cut his presentation short, allowing others to speak. (Later,
Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos, after listening to more than 100 such presentations, mentioned, specifically, the desire
of the out-coming Zapatista delegations to join the fishermen on their boats.)"
Read the full report here:
And keep reading Narco News as this story, this history, continues. "Those who look only to the powers from above - to
the Commercial Media, to the owning-class, to its politicians and parties," writes Giordano, "will be the last to see
that great wave rolling over what they mistakenly thought to be real, static and permanent."
From somewhere in a country called América,
Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin