Mexico

Mexico
Subcommander Marcos

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
Unlike virtually all other armed revolutionary movements, the zapatistas have not sought to seize state power. Taking up arms was the only way to be heard and part of a larger strategy for expanding the space for democratic struggle. In the summer of 2003 Marcos writes to us from the mountains of the Mexican Southeast:

The globalization of power has demonstrated throughout the world that it has entered its most aggressive stage by making military war its primary weapon of domination. We zapatistas express solidarity with the just struggles of the people of the world against the power of money. The zapatistas have received many offers to buy their consciences, and they keep up their resistance nonetheless, making their poverty (for he who learns to see) a lesson in dignity and generosity.

Because we zapatistas say that "For everyone everything, nothing for us," and, if we say it, it is what we live. The recognition of indigenous rights and culture, and the improvement of living conditions, is for all peoples, not just for the zapatista indigenous. The democracy, liberty and justice to which we aspire are not just for us. We have emphasized to not a few people that the resistance of the zapatista communities is not in order to engender pity, but respect.

Here, now, poverty is a weapon which has been chosen by our peoples for two reasons: in order to bear witness that it is not welfare that we are seeking, and in order to demonstrate, with our own example, that it is possible to govern and to govern ourselves. The support we are demanding is for the building of a part of that world where all worlds fit.

The purported zapatista project for a "Mayan Nation" exists solely in the papers of some of the stupidest military persons in the Mexican Federal Army who, knowing that the war they are waging against us is illegitimate, are using this poor argument in order to convince their troops that, by attacking us, they are defending Mexico. The high military command and their intelligence services know, however, that the aim of the EZLN is not to separate itself from Mexico, but, as its initials say, for "national liberation."

The separatist project for the Mexican Southeast does indeed exist, on the other hand directed by the federal government. Mexico will be divided in 3: The north, with its states incorporated into the economic and commercial framework of the American Union; the center, as provider of consumers with middle and high level purchasing power; and the South-Southeast, as a territory to be conquered for the appropriation of natural.But plans on paper are one thing, and reality is another. Big capital's voracity, the corruption of the political class, the inefficiency of public administration and the increasing resistance of groups, collectives and communities, have all prevented the plan from being fully implemented.

The globalization of Capital needs the destruction of the Nation State. For some time the Nation State has been (among other things) the trench where local capital has taken refuge in order to survive and grow. But there is only a bit of rubble left of the trench. In the countryside, small and mid-size producers have been succumbing in the face of large agro-industry. They will soon be followed by the large national producers. In the cities, the "malls," the commercial centers, are not only destroying small and mid-size businesses, they are also "swallowing up" the large national companies. Not even to mention national industry, which is already in its last death throes.

National businessmen are quite wrong if they think that foreign capital will be satisfied with the electricity industry and oil. The new power in the world wants everything. And so there will be nothing left of national capital but nostalgia and, if they're lucky, some minor positions on the boards of directors.

Dying national capital, in its historical blindness, looks at any form of social organization with terror. The houses of rich Mexicans are protected with complicated security systems. They fear that the hand which is going to snatch what they have away from them is going to come from below. By exercising their right to schizophrenia, rich Mexicans are revealing not only the real source of their prosperity, but also their shortsightedness. They will be dispossessed, yes, but not by improbable popular rage, rather by an avarice that is even larger than theirs: those who are indeed rich where the wealth is. Misfortune will not enter by assaulting the great mansions at dawn, but through the front door and during office hours. The thief will not have the physique of the destitute, but of the prosperous banker.

Heads of State