Part Four: The Alter-Globalization Movement: From the Zapatistas to the Battle of Seattle - podcast episode cover

Part Four: The Alter-Globalization Movement: From the Zapatistas to the Battle of Seattle

Jun 11, 202531 min
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Episode description

Margaret continues telling you about the rise of neoliberalism and the rise of its opposition and about better ideas about how to globalize society. 

Sources:

Direct Action: an Ethnography, David Graeber
The Zapatista Experience, Jerome Baschet
https://www.piie.com/commentary/speeches-papers/did-washington-consensus-fail
https://www.spiegel.de/international/interview-with-ex-neocon-francis-fukuyama-a-model-democracy-is-not-emerging-in-iraq-a-407315.html
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/zapatista-womens-revolutionary-law-as-it-is-lived-today/
https://www.proceso.com.mx/reportajes/2019/1/3/pedro-el-subcomandante-del-ezln-que-murio-el-dia-del-levantamiento-217985.html
https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-faq/how-much-of-britain-is-below-the-poverty-line/

https://www.tni.org/en/article/a-short-history-of-neoliberalism
https://bigthink.com/thinking/classical-liberalism-explained/
https://schoolsforchiapas.org/ezln-the-path-of-the-zapatista-movement-40-years-after-its-foundation/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306422018819354

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-25550654

https://web.archive.org/web/20090813155006/http://greenanarchy.info/etc/ezln_response.htm

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/26/world/americas/mexico-zapatista-subcommander-marcos.html

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/zapatistas-have-been-revolutionary-force

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/the-woman-who-wont-let-mexico-forget-a-massacre.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Abejas

https://schoolsforchiapas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Interview-with-Subcomandante-Marcos.pdf

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ejercito-zapatista-de-liberacion-nacional-a-zapatista-response-to-the-ezln-is-not-anarchist

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/mexicos-zapatista-indigenous-rebel-movement-says-it-is-dissolving-its-autonomous-municipalities

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jerome-baschet-the-reorganization-of-zapatista-autonomy

https://schoolsforchiapas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Ra%C3%BAl-Zibechi-Zapatista-Autonomy-PDF.pdf

https://illwill.com/zapatista-autonomy

https://chiapas-support.org/2014/10/04/anatomy-of-a-paramilitary-attack-on-the-zapatistas/

https://wagingnonviolence.org/2014/05/assassination-world-stands-solidarity-zapatistas/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that wherever they are a bad things doing by people, there are good people bad fight those things. All of history is a give and take. Sometimes it's hard to look at our society and history and see how bad she is and be like, how come we never win and make things great? But that

is selling ourselves short. Without the incredible work and sacrifice of millions of people, we would just live in a totalitarian hell world instead of you know, a complicated hell

world with moments of startling beauty. Anyway, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and right now I'm doing a series about the pretty successful fight against neoliberalism, starting with the Zapatistas, the indigenous rebels in southern Mexico who have a bottom up democratic structure and who use a pretty diverse set of tactics in their fight for local autonomy and for this of autonomous politics across the world. We're on part four of that. Well, I guess we're in part four

of the neoliberalism thing. The part one was just what's neoliberalism? But we're on part three of the Zapatistas. We've talked about this Appatistas rise, and we've talked about their politics, and now I want to talk about how they're structured and some of the things that they've accomplished over the decades. Before next week, we're going to take a detour into another antecedent of the alter globalization movement, which is the

thing that smash neoliberalism. Neoliberalism still exists. We always think of things in this block and white like winning losing way, but there is no static win condition. Anyway, you're thinking to yourself, Margaret, why haven't you introduced your producer or your audio engineer, and you'd be thinking, right, I have a producer. Her name is Sophie. I have an audio engineer. Hi Eva. Everyone has to say hi to Eva. And I also want to tell you that the music was

written forced by n women. But I also want to say that once the Zapatistas took territory and declared it autonomous, they just started running everything as they believe it should be run through local assemblies and seeing their concept of good government, which they use in opposition of the bad government, which is the Mexican government that is oppressing them. But

they didn't keep their heads in the sand. They spent most of the latter half of the nineties involved in political campaigning trying to get the autonomy of indigenous groups in the San Andreas of Kords enshrined into the Mexican constitution, or at least to get the government to respect the document that they'd already signed, right, which is that document that was like, hey, respect indigenous autonomy that was signed in nineteen ninety six, and the government was like, yeah,

we don't actually pay any attention to what we sign if it's with indigenous people. I mentioned last time that Mexico was ruled by one political party for most of the twentieth century. It is the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party. This party was founded in nineteen twenty eight and then it ruled as a one party state more or less until the year two thousand and They had like this thing where they would be like, oh, each president only sits one term, but then each president would sort of

hand pick their successor. When I talked about government loyalists who are harassing asapatistas, I'm talking about people associated with or loyal to the PRI. It's hard to pigeonhole the PRI with a specific ideology. Besides, they like being the people in charge. It started off leftish and then it went rightish, and it was them who did all the neoliberal restructuring that we talked about. I would say that their politics are more defined by like corruption and power

than any specific ideology. And then in the year two thousand, the PRI lost a presidential election. They lost to a right wing party, the National Action Party and a guy named Vincente Fox. Yet despite this being the election of a right wing guy, people were honestly kind of excited because he had some big promises about respecting Indigenous rights.

But also he just wasn't the party who had been killing them, because the PRI had been funding paramilitaries to kill everyone, and so people were like, hooray, not the PRI. Marcos wrote the outgoing president from the PRI and said, you did everything you could to destroy us. All we had to do was resist, because they outlasted those fuckers.

Fox agreed to meet with indigenous leaders and this Apatistas toured the country and held a bunch of rallies and shit, and then showed up in Mexico City in time for the inauguration. It was finally going to happen. Indigenous rights

were going to wind up in the constitution. The Apatistas were excited to become simply a civil political organization, and then all three of the political parties in the Senate of Mexico, including the Social Democrats, the most left wing party, came together to be like, nah, we don't really want to do that. We want to force indigenous assimilation instead. So by two thousand and one, that dream of having autonomy while fully at peace with the Mexican state was dead.

A leader named Cammodante Bruce Les declared on January first, two thousand and three, quote, let us not wait around for the bad government to give us permission. We should organize ourselves like true rebels and not wait for someone to give us permission to be autonomous. We govern ourselves with or without the law. Then, by August of that year,

they declared the creation of five good Government Councils. They'd been ruling themselves already for about a decade, but they wanted to create a bit more of this formal structure because they wanted the various regions to better redistribute resources amongst each other. And crucially, according to the sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, quote, we saw that the easy len with its political military component, was involving itself in

decisions that belonged to the democratic authorities. So basically they bolstered the civilian governmental structures so that the military leaders can no longer participate in civilian government and to try and create that pretty essential separation between military and civil leadership.

These good Government councils were in five regions that they called caracolas, which is a word that sometimes means snail or curl, but in this case it's actually referencing conch shells, which traditionally were blown to some and aid from other communities. They built their bottom up democracy based on three organizational tiers. There's the community or village level, then the municipal level, which coordinates dozens of villages, and then you have a

region which ties together several municipalities. There are assemblies at every level, and people are elected to serve on these assemblies. Despite the earlier version presented by Marcos in nineteen ninety four where there were no term limits. You can go back to part three and hear them talking about the indigenous ways of doing things that they wanted to incorporate. By the end of this system, the Good Government Council

system in twenty twenty three. I believe that people serve two or three year terms and these can only be served once, and your leadership position can be revoked at any time by your constituency. Proposals will come from the top level, the Council of Good Government, down to the regional assembly. These are then sometimes passed along further down to the community delegates who go around and consult people

in their area. Concerns and amendments and such are passed along back up the chain, and new proposals are sent out. This can happen several times with any given decision, with ideas and thoughts going up and down the chain. They put a lot of work into making sure that it was you know, the people rule and the government obey like the science say when you go into Zapatista territory. And we're going to talk about how they revisited this in twenty twenty three. But along the way they put

in a lot of safeguards. Being in politics is seen as a responsibility without any afforded privileges or pay. You can't nominate yourself for positions of leadership. Other people have to pick you, and there are a lot of formal checks and balances, like a commission that audits the various councils, and there's the term limits and revocability. Basically, the appetizers

work very hard to de specialize the role of political leadership. Sometimes, though especially in military matters, the government commands because it needs to act quickly. They can only give commands that they genuinely understand to be the will of the people. So for the majority of the history of the Zapatistas, that was the structure. But in twenty twenty three they

changed their system and restructured themselves again. Mainstream news is more or less universally use this as an excuse to claim that the Zapatista project is over, or that its star has waned so dim that it doesn't light up much at all anymore. I don't think that that's the

best way to look at this situation. Though the Zapatzas have been it seems losing ground recently to the tide of gang and cartel violence, especially along the border with Guatemala, and the Zapatistas have become more isolated from the rest of Mexican society. According to some sources, people have been

leaving the area. The Mexican state has sent troops to the region, but rather than trying to stop the cartels with these troops, well, according to a statement from the Easy ln Quote, the only reason they are here is to stem migration. That is the order they got from the US government, and this is under the Biden administration. It's worth pointing out. So the Zapatista has declared the

dissolution of their autonomous municipalities. This is not the abandonment of autonomy, but its refinement, at least as far as I can tell. I'm kind of looking at this with rose tinted glasses, but they have made a lot of statements around this very idea. The social centers they've built with schools and health clinics remain open, but the regional administrations have been dissolved. The good Government councils have been replaced by the local autonomous governments. This isn't a fracturing,

but a decentralizing. There is still a three tier system of decision making assemblies, but now more of the power is invested at the local level because the larger structures aren't permanent, but are instead called for by the local structures. So basically you're like, oh, we need to coordinate this big, so you call for the next level up. And then if that level is like, oh, we need to call this even bigger than you call for the highest level

of it. These three levels are the local autonomous government, the collective of local autonomous governments, and the assemblies of collectives of local autonomous government. They did this for two reasons. One, I read that it allows them to better focus on self defense against the cartels and stuff. I actually am unsure the mechanism for how this helps them focus on

self defense. I don't know. Two, they realized that their good government councils were becoming, as Subcommandante Moyses put it, pure middle power was beginning to become more clearly invested in the top instead of the bottom. Moyses said, quote, the proposals from authorities did not go down as they were to the people, nor do the opinions of the

people reach the authorities. As part of this shift that they did in twenty twenty three structuring, they're also looking to get even more radical with how they're handling property in land. For the past few decades, land was either owned individually or by families or was part of formalized

collective land projects. They want to start making more land and actual commons that can be worked by Zapatistas and non Zapatistas alike, basically being like, you know what, we're going to go back to just complete non ownership of land. Part of the reason for that is probably ideological, but it was also a practical decision. Violent arguments over land rights are a huge part of the incursions against Zapatista territory.

We talked about this last time that basically like the Sapatista's like claimed by force an awful lot of indigenous territory and took it back in declared it autonomous right, and there have been a lot of conflict around land rights and who owns land. And so they can say, look, anyone can use this, including you, including us, They can hopefully de escalate some of that tension. I don't know

how that's gone yet. Unfortunately, I've mostly just found lots and lots of information about when they made this transition. I haven't been able to find as much coming in a year and a half two years later to see how that's been going. But through various means they've ruled themselves autonomously for decades, despite the political and military pressure applied to them by the Mexican State, and it's honestly

just breathtaking how much success they've had. And if you want to have a lot of success, if you buy our goods and services, you will succeed at the very least. And having bought goods and services and maybe that'll get you used to success and successes will just start rolling in. I can't promise that, but I can promise that, and we're back. One of the main things that these local governments and the bappatiste in military accomplished was keeping neoliberal

extractive projects out of the region. They stop mining and shit like that. Recovering land from the capitalist state is pretty much the fundamental idea of autonomy. They've also done an admirable job improving the lives of people in the area. Although the people in the area remain poor as fuck, with a lot of issues around malnourishment and just general like it sucks to be poor. The Zapatistas have refused

all government handouts. They are at war with the government, after all, and their isolation has certainly led to problems of poverty still, everything I've read leads me to believe that people of the area saw their material lives improve dramatically under their own autonomy. Zapatistas have set up health

clinics and schools everywhere. As of twenty twelve, it was, to quote Raoul Zabyci, quote two hospitals, eighteen clinics, and about eight hundred community health houses in the five regions, with no less than five hundred health promoters trained under the criteria A adopted by the Zapatistas. The community health houses did basic medical care, and they also teach hygiene, sexual health and safety, and sit like how to boil

water in all of that. Also, as of twenty twelve, which is just the last numbers I've found, they've built three hundred schools, just more schools than I've ever built. The schools that they've built teach bilingually to keep people from losing their indigenous languages. There are many in the area. They teach actual indigenous history. That has been a race for Mexican education. And you're not going to be surprised to realize this. The pedagogical differences, it's not just that

they teach slightly different stuff. How they teach it is fundamentally different. Zapatista pedagogy is designed to encourage autonomy and free thinking. The children and the elders co developed their curriculum. There are no grades, and the class advances only as everyone in it has learned the topic. Bapatistas also build worker cooperatives, where people who work collectively on a project share in the decision making and the rewards. Why should

democracy stop at the doherty er job? And they're not fully isolated from the economy of the world. They are looking to undercut the coyotes, the middlemen who rip off the producers, so they set up distribution cooperatives that supply both Zapatista and non Zapatista stores. They also sell coffee all over the world. As best as I understand, they have a fairly strict no alcohol or hard drugs policy.

In Zapatista territory or at least several individual areas that I have read about do and all told, they are about three hundred thousand people, or about five percent of the population of Chiapas living in these autonomous communities. The most well known Zapatista town, the Zapatista city, is Oventic which from nineteen ninety four to two thousand and four went from a tiny rural community to an urban center

or a high school and a hospital. Even some folks who don't support the Zapatistas in the area prefer going to their hospitals because they won't be treated as racistly. Basically, there's a lot of racism against indigenous people in Mexico, and much like in the States, racism is applied in medical situations very dramatically, and so a lot of people are like, Yeah, I'm going to the Zapatista hospital because it's going to be better. The medical system they're building

refuses to erase traditional knowledge. It mixes modalities from Western medicine and indigenous medicine, what they call the two medicines. The author Gloria Mignot's cited as Zapatista who told her quote, this dream started when we realized that the knowledge of our elders was being lost. They know how to cure bones and sprains, they know how to use herbs, they know how to oversee the delivery of babies, but their knowledge was being lost with the use of medicines purchased

in the pharmacy. So he came to an agreement and brought together all the men and women that know about traditional healing. It was not easy to bring everyone together. There were some twenty men and women, older people from the communities who acted as teachers of traditional health. About three hundred and fifty students signed up, most of them Zapatista campagneros. Now the amount of midwives, bone setters and

herbalists in our communities has increased. And this is such a fascinating story, like this could have been its own episodes. You know, this method of saving traditional knowledge that was done not kind of like institutionally, where they found twenty healers out of there's three hundred thousand zapatistas, you know, they found twenty of them and from that they have been able to save this traditional knowledge in the modern world.

And I think that's cool. The folks who work directly for Zapatista infrastructure do so without any sort of wage labor. A teacher at a Zapatista school will just be directly supported by the community with people meeting their needs. I've

read a couple different ways that this could happen. For example, depending on the land arrangement in the area, like if everyone kind of has like parcels and gross food and to sustain themselves, which is a arrangement that I've seen in traditional communities all over the world as I read history. If that's what's going on in this given village, for example, other people will work the teacher's parcel to grow food on it for the teacher, or as another account put it,

the students bring the teacher a chicken as tuition. They also built an activist training school in the Ricardo Floris Mcgonn municipality together with Greek comrades, and there's like all kinds of pedagogical stuff that they did there that ended up influencing a lot of things, where they like set the room up in a hexagon so that everyone can see each other, and like, I don't know, it's just interesting.

And there's this like this back and forth internationally that they talk about very consciously where they're like, we don't want people to come here and like school us how to do things, and we don't want people to just come here and just learn from us, because we know everything. They talk all the time about how they're like, no, we want to share, we want to participate as equals. In a global community from the bottom and the left, and so some of what they've done, just some of

what they've done. In nineteen ninety four they threw a National Democratic Convention. I think we talked about that a little bit. By nineteen ninety six, with the San Andreas Talks, they helped start the National Indigenous Convention. That same year they also started the international talks that became the Ault Globalization movement, which were called the Gatherings for Humanity against Neoliberalism,

the first of which was held in Chiapas. In two thousand and one, they did the March of the Color of the Earth, in which millions of supporters came out and greeted as Apatista caravan touring the country for thirty seven days. And this was done to support that indigenous autonomy law that was going to end up included in the constitution, ratified into the constitution. That's the word I

think that of course didn't happen. But while they were doing this, while they were doing the march, they traveled four thousand miles and through seventy seven events before speaking to Congress and having all of the ruling parties left and right reject indigenous autonomy, Marco said about this quote. At this point, we concluded that the path of dialogue with the Mexican political class was exhausted and we had to find another path. And you know what path, the

Zapatistas probably didn't really go down. They probably didn't go down the path of ads supported radio. But the thing is is everyone does things differently in different regions for different reasons, and we are an ad supported podcast. These are the ads that support us, and we're back, okay, So now that they're like bitter and turned off of electoral politics for whole. On January first, two thousand and six, they launched what was called the Other Campaign, and it

was basically a political campaign for no political candidate. It wasn't a like don't vote campaign either. It was like, we have to build an actual alternative while everyone else is busy campaigning. Subcommadante Marcos, calling himself Candidate zero, traveled the country, listening to people and hoping to unite a new left movement from below. He met with indigenous leaders and workers, and people who were marginalized in all kinds of ways, like sex workers and youth and women and

students and the elderly. I think this is around the time I first started really seeing the Zapatistas talk a lot about trans writes. But that's just for my own memory. And so Candidate zero wasn't running for office, but instead looking to build from the bottom up to create a quote common language to unite people across various struggles, all of these different struggles that weren't necessarily talking to each other. That was his point, especially people who an't necessarily represented

by big groups or whatever. This campaign was not met with universal support. Some folks felt that it would pull votes away from the Social Democratic candidate, the PRD candidate, and the election. They're like, ah, why are you dividing the vote by not even running another candidate. You can tell by my tone of voice that I don't really

care about that particular concern. The Zapatista position was that, well, the PRD had just rejected indigenous autonomy, doing what basically all political parties do, which is drift to the right once they have power. The Zapatista's also set up a system called Escalita in which students from all over Mexico and the world come and learn in Chiapas, and they've continued to be met with lots of people attacking them.

In twenty fourteen, paramilitaries attacked them a lot. A compagnio named Galliano was murdered on May second of that year. I believe fifteen other people were injured in that attack, and it seems very likely it was tart. The unarmed Galliano refused to surrender and was shot three times and killed. He was a school teacher, someone involved in the Escalite the movement, and he wrote a lot in English about

that movement. The pair of militaries destroyed the school and health clinic in the same attack, so it seems like it was targeted. Those epetises believe it was a targeted assassination. For nearly ten years. Subcommandante Marcos changed his name to Subcommandante Galliano in honor of his fallen friend. The pair of militaries weren't done and they came back in the fall to attack more communities. They came into a collective workplace with guns and fired into the air and burned

a Galliano lives poster. They killed a steer, basically trying to run people off the land. Then they came back and killed another steer, Then they killed a horse, and they would just show up the rifles and chainsaws and cut down trees and drive by and shoot into houses and just you know, be uh, let's go with generally unpleasant.

In August of that year, the Zapatistas were building a new collective workplace, like basically kind of building a new village essentially, and the paramilitary showed up and yelled things like, these weapons we use are from the government, and this land is ours and does not belong to the fucking Zapatistas. And it's worth pointing out this particular paramilitary group was

not local to the area. They destroyed the new village, all nine houses of it, and stole all the stuff in the new store they've built, and just like basically robbed the place. The displaced people were given some money

by the Zapatistas and given new places to stay. The news I could find about these attacks comes from shortly after the attacks, so I can't tell you everything about how that played out, But in general, the Eazyln as a military force, agreed to follow the will of the people, which was that they didn't want force met with force and an escalation of violence. In twenty eighteen, the Zapatistas

returned to electoral politics. Briefly, they supported an indigenous but non Zapatista woman as a presidential candidate, Maria de Jesos Petrucio Martinez. She was with the National Indigenous Congress, running as an independent. The National Indigenous Congress is mentioned as like a thing that the Zappatitsa has helped form, but is not a Zapatista thing. It's a larger Indigenous Congress. So Maria was like, all right, I'm going to run

for fucking office. And in order to run for president in Mexico, you need eight hundred and fifty thousand signatures to get yourself onto the ballot. But those signatures have to be verified in ways that prevent poor people from signing.

The digital signature had to be done with a phone from a list of acceptable phones with like a certain operating system and stuff, and even if people had those phones, it would sometimes take hours for people in rural areas to download the required software onto their phones in order to sign. So she got two hundred and sixty seven nine hundred and fifty three signatures, which wasn't an to get her onto the ballot. And yeah, that's a bit

about the Zapatistas. In twenty twenty three, they reorganized again, and time will tell what that means. Mainstream media refers to how their star is waning, and certainly they are dealing with fierce attacks. But on the activist signal loops I'm on, I still get calls and pronouncements from them about events they're organizing, about how they're working to bring activists from below into the left, from across the globe

to listen to each other. Of all of the things that stand out to me about the whole Zapatista project, it's the attitude of listening together as peers and then deciding together as peers that stands out to me. I would argue that this is the attitude we need. I tell people I'm an anarchist, and that's true, but it's not that I'm loyal to anarchism as an ideology. Specifically, what I believe in is this stuff about creating and

respecting diverse movements. Not diverse like some people are vanguardists who want to tell everyone else what to do and other people aren't, but diverse among people who actually respect diversity. Diverse like different people with different backgrounds who desire different

things and have different methods of going about it. Political pluralism isn't about accepting ideological bullies in our ranks, but looking around and saying, all of us who believe that the revolution comes from the bottom up, we need to stand together and learn that compromise isn't a profanity and to learn to respect our differences and see them as strengths. I'm eternally grateful that the Zapatistas were the single largest influence on radical politics and the movement that I came

up in. I think that if they collapse tomorrow, they'll have already earned their places. Some of the coolest people have ever lived, doing some of the coolest stuff that's ever happened. But they won't collapse tomorrow. Their movement is five hundred years old and it's still going. And next week we're going to continue this series but cut over to another part of the world and to another set of tactics that have influenced the ault globalization movement and

talk to you. Then, I don't really anything to plug to support the people who are trying to stop ice, that's what I have to plug. And if you are one of the people more directly, go read about how to stay safe in crowd environments. Okay, I do have something to plug. I would really recommend there's a bunch

of guides put out by a publisher called Crimethink. If you go to crimethink dot com where crime thchi NC dot com, you'll find a lot of resources and some of them are called a Demonstrator's guide to and those will have everything you could ever want to know about police less lethal munitions and gas masks and goggles and how police use batons, and how to form affinity groups and all kinds of stuff that can be used to

stay safe and stay dangerous. Because ice isn't going to smash itself, it has to be smashed for them anyway. Talked to you soon. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Google zone Media. For more podcasts on Google zone Media, visit our website goalzonemedia dot com. Check us out on ieartradio, app, app a podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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