Gibler: Time and Urgency - Reflections on the Politics of Listening in the Other Campaign
July 20, 2006
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Journalist John Gibler, whose in-depth coverage of the Zapatista Other Campaign has been among the most widely read and
respected, files a new report in The Narco News Bulletin today responding to some of the scathing critiques launched in
recent days and weeks against that endeavor, and against Subcomandante Marcos specifically. "Many of the criticisms
leveled against the Other Campaign," writes Gibler, "can be attributed to the failure or the refusal to take seriously
the goal of the campaign's first phase: listening."
Gibler reports:
"Since the beginning, the Other Campaign has been critiqued for going against the elections, for slamming the Party of
the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and its presidential candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, for not attending Bolivian
President Evo Morales' inauguration, for ignoring the National Dialogue (a left organization with links to opposition
political parties) and for being so stridently anti-capitalist. These critiques take aim at the whole enterprise of
grassroots organizing outside of political parties, governments, and corporations; that is, of drawing such sharp lines
of inclusion and exclusion. The Other Campaign drew these lines and has not looked back since.
"But others have launched critiques of the Other Campaign that purport to stem from within the overall goals of the
campaign and take aim thus not at the structure of the project, but its implementation. Guillermo Almeyra, for example,
recently published in the magazine Memoria one of the most sweeping critiques of the Other Campaign, a critique that
serves as a model for how the politics of listening are mischaracterized and underestimated."
Read the full story, with much unique insight gleaned from Gibler's tireless work following the Other Campaign caravan
throughout this year, in The Narco News Bulletin:
From somewhere in a country called América,
Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin