The January 1, 1994 The Mexican “dream” of entering the “First World” thanks to the free trade agreement with the USA and Canada collided with the ideological and material opposition of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. “At dawn on the first day of the first month of 1994, an army of giants, that is, of rebellious natives, entered the city to shake the passing world,” he wrote Subcommandante Marcos. In the first hours of this New Year's Eve, indigenous men and women of Mayan origin with different languages and clothing occupied seven communities of the year Chiapas rejecting the idea of neoliberal homologation, reclaiming the politics of difference, remembering the cultural and organizational distances of the indigenous world compared to the urban world and contrasting life, the common good and the idea of collectivity with that of the singularity of the center, that one still open gap in the wall of individual thought and makes a proposal for Mexico possible for everyone and a “world that can contain many worlds”.
Indigenous men and women, their faces covered with balaclavas, unexpectedly changed the scene Mexico and history by revisiting the idea of revolution and using armed insurrection not to seize power but to demand universal rights, starting from the internal deconstruction of the indigenous cosmogony through the enforcement of feminist discourses and practices and peaceful coexistence in the original communities and the reminder that the world is a conjunction of non-homogenizable varieties. Indigenous men and women are now a recognized and present topic in political debate, so much so that presidential candidates seek their support, but the Mexico It is not yet defined as plurinational in the constitution.
30 years ago a San Cristobal de Las Casas, the indigenous people suffered from extremely violent racism: they were forbidden to walk on sidewalks or enter shops, there was no tourism and the mixed race “Coleto” lived in the memory of being the old capital of the border state with Guatemala. Now they walk with their heads held high, they open clubs, there are those who live the urban context without betraying their own traditions, those who are absorbed by Western society, those who stay in the community, those who belong to a party those who are close to the revolutionary dream. Given the open and extensive contradictions that exist, perhaps the greatest achievement of the EZLN is that the indigenous women and men of Mexico have achieved freedom and rights, although still inadequate, unthinkable when Salinas De Gortari signed naphtha with the USA and Canada.
Thirty years later, the world is very different than it was on that day in 1994, and they are different San Cristobal, Chiapas and Mexico. Tourism, for example, has been the most important local economic sector in this border state with Guatemala for years and the urban and infrastructural changes are the pretext and cause for the expulsion of the poor and poor from the cities, the displacement of indigenous communities and the irreversible change in an area. Accelerating the tourism process was one of the Mexican government's responses to the Zapatista revolt, which sought to co-opt original communities, enrich the territory and thus divide collective needs. This clearly says that Mexico would be a different country today, regardless of the idea one may have of the revolutionary action of the EZLN, and with the country also the social movements of the continent and the Europeans who saw them as innovative in the Neo-Zapatismo sensitive and heterodox speaker.
An imperfect story, made up of mistakes and stumbling blocks, separations and infatuations, internal conflicts within communities and the structure, a story that has fascinated intellectuals and artists from all over the world and with which it lives in open conflict Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, current President of Mexico, for whom the electoral defeat in 2006 was due not only to the possible fraud of the PRI, but also to the positioning of the EZLN, which said it was distant and uninterested in the outcome of the presidential elections. For “AMLO,” the lack of support for the EZLN and criticism of the Mexican institutional system meant defeat. A conflict that continues openly and in both directions to this day. For the Zapatistas, asserting one's own imperfection is a political and practical method. After the founding of the Autonomous Zapatista Rebel Communities (MAREZ) and thus the Good government councilors (JBG), which invented an alternative government to the federal government thanks to the “building” of schools and clinics and thus designed an autonomous health, education and justice system, did not hesitate to question everything. They admitted their mistakes with a series of public statements that accompanied the countdown to celebrations of the first 30 years of the struggle.
“In summary, I can tell you that MAREZ and JBG helped us learn that theory without practice is just talk,” he writes Marcos On November 14th of this year, he was no longer a subcommander, but a captain, as he was at the beginning of his “career” in the EZLN. “Practice without theory runs like a blind man. And since there is no theory about what we started, i.e. no manual or book, we also had to create our own theory. We felt our way theory and practice. I think that's why we're not particularly liked by revolutionary theorists and avant-gardists, because not only are we taking their jobs, but we're also showing them that talk is one thing and reality is another. And here we are, the ignorant and backwards as they call us, who cannot find the way because we are just farmers. But here we are and even if they deny us, we exist. That's how it is.”
The EZLN has resisted the militarization of the territory by five presidents (today there is in Chiapas). 72 bearings or military bases around the area of Zapatista influence), to paramilitarization (the sadly famous massacre of Actually In the 1997) and low-intensity warfare. Today they are confronted with organized crime and the joint violence of criminals and big business interests and are resisting, perhaps for this reason they have decided to change their form of organization despite their mistakes. Almost certainly for this reason, although they have not fired a shot since January 12, 1994, they remain an army that dreams of being able to stop, but as Marcos always wrote: “If there is a myth in all this “, then that's it.” is not the balaclava, but the lie that has been repeated since these days, even by very educated people, namely that the war against the Zapatistas only lasted 12 days“.