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

hi Eva. And our theme music was written for us by unwoman. Where we last left our indigenous peasant rebels, they'd broken from their Marxist Leninist roots to become an indigenous led grassroots army. They'd spent ten years preparing to wage war on the Mexican government and the ruling pri Party, and on January first, nineteen ninety four, they'd gone and

started that war. The war blasted twelve days. It ended with a stalemate when it became clear that the people of Mexico supported the Zapatistas in their goals, but weren't going to rise up to overthrow the state. Always prepared to listen to the people. The Zapatistas entered into negotiations with the state and moved their focus from war to local autonomy. And there's an easy narrative you can draw, and as one would expect, the easy narrative is a

little bit false. You can say that the Zapatistas, they became an army, they fought the Mexican government to a standstill, and then they put away their guns and now have autonomy in Chiapas. And I guess each point of that narrative is technically true. They became an army, they declared war on Mexico and forced concessions from the government in the San Andreas Accords, which is the settlement that they

signed on February sixteenth, nineteen ninety six. And they do maintain more autonomy over their lands than most indigenous groups do in the Western hemisphere. But the conflict hasn't ended, not even now thirty years later. The Sound and Dress Accords agreed to some basic things, more or less boiling down to the right to autonomous decision making at the local level and local control of natural resources. Basically, leave us alone, stop stealing all the shit in our territory,

which is not the kind of thing. A nation state usually wants to cede to the people. They usually want to be able to control things and be the government. That's why they call themselves the government. So as soon as the peace accords were signed, the government, as all settler governments have done with all agreements with indigenous people without any exception I've personally ever found, they just went ahead and completely ignored the document that they just signed.

The Sound and Address Accords didn't matter. The government, and this will shock you, pretty quickly started fighting dirty, using both formal and informal military forces against the Zapatistas. Zapatistas and their supporters put on March after March, especially in Mexico, but also all over the world to try to pressure the Mexican government to hold to the accords that it

had fucking signed. I spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks reading a lot of reflections about the Zapatistas from twenty to twenty five years later, talking about what they've accomplished in the area, and one thing stands out. For a very very long time, the autonomous territories managed to keep organized crime like cartels and shit out of their area and in Mexico. This is a really big deal. It wasn't easy. They're also losing ground in the past few years, but we'll talk about

that more later. Pretty much immediately after the Zapatistas declared autonomy, the government, in order to crush the Zapatistas started arming and empowering paramilitary groups in the area. These aren't even like the cartels. These are presented as loyalists. They're just we want the ruling Prii party to be in charge, large enthusiasts who are armed, and maybe the most dramatic example of that I have found is the Acatil massacre

of nineteen ninety seven. Akatil is this tiny town in Chiappas that was home to a Catholic pacifist indigenous rights group called Lasa Behas the Bees, which I believe is still around and is the first cool people that I'm going to focus on this week. This group got their

start in nineteen ninety two over a land dispute. I've read so many accounts of this now and it is very confusing, and it is confusingly written because people have simplified it in different ways that leave out different important parts of it. All over the place. But basically there was this guy, I think he was associated with the Prii, the ruling party, and he thought he owned some land. His nephew was an activist and he thought that the

land was communally owned. Became a big whole community argument, and a group of indigenous pacifists Catholics were like, let's settle this peacefully and communally, and they formed a group called the Bees, based on how bees live and work together collectively. As soon as they formed this pacifist group, like the next day, someone who supported the owner, the guy who thought he owned the land. Someone who supported him went and shot the nephew and two other nephews

for good measure, killing one of the nephews. Five of the local residents, who I believe were Bees, called for an ambulance for the survivors, but instead of an ambulance, cops came and the five people were sent to jail, ostensibly because they were being blamed for the violence, but actually it was just because of the underlying politics of the whole thing. And so the Bees had their first

campaign free those five people. They went on a pilgrimage or a march, depending on the political position of the piece. That you read about it in Leasas don't like calling things pilgrimages. Everyone is obsessively secular in both means stream media and leftist media. But I am under the impression that they presented this as a pilgrimage that they went on. Maybe five thousand people joined that march, and the state was like, all right, fine, we'll let these five innocent

men go. Geez, what's this big fuss about? And so they succeeded at their first thing. Well, I don't actually know how the land dispute shook out in the end. So that's the bees. They're liberation theologist, indigenous rights groups trying to make the world a better place than Chiapas, which means that they're down with the Zapatistas. But they're not actually Zapatistas themselves, because they're pacifists and the Zapatistas are, you know, an army. The two groups are allied instead.

But when all of these loyalist paramilitaries started getting armed in the outskirts of Zapatista territory, people started getting displaced awful fast because all of these paramilitaries are going around and you know, being shitty, and everyone has to fl maybe six thousand or so people were displaced in a couple months in nineteen ninety seven, and many of them found refuge among the bees, including in the village of Akatil. The right wing are famously cowards. Fascism, for example, is

a coward's ideology. You feel big and strong by stamping on the weekend defenseless, but run from a fair fight. That's the fascist way. The loyalists weren't fascists. They were just awful monsters of their own sort, and they were cowards, at least from my position. They were also desperate people offered a chance to suck up to the government. I guess,

depending on how you look at it. Most of the paramilitaries themselves were indigenous people, but their motto seemed to become like only loyal indigenous people should be allowed to exist, Like I think literally, they were basically saying that while killing people. And I call them cowards because they went and they found a target that they knew wouldn't fight back and they fucking massacred them. On December twenty second, nineteen ninety seven, around sixty paramilitaries went into the town

of Aktil with masks and aks. While people were gathered at mass and the gunman spent six hours hunting people down in the village and slaughtering them. They did all kinds of shit that I'm not going to say on air, of the sexual violence variety, and of violence against the unborn variety. It's bad. If you want to read about it, you can. There's sources in my show notes and survivors of this massacre are really upfront about what happened. They're

not afraid to talk about it. And these people were killed for being leftists, for being allied with the Zapatistas. One survivor describes making it to the woods where she was taken in and cared for by Zapatista women from a nearby camp. Forty five people died that day, all of them unarmed, many of them children. Meanwhile, the cops were stationed about two hundred meters away at a local

school and just ignored the entire thing. Some people were arrested and for this massacre and spent about a decade in prison, while others have been named but remained free. And of the people who were arrested, an awful lot of them maintain their innocence, and a lot of activist

groups agree. It seems very likely that most of the people who went to prison for this were scapegoaded by the government to avoid getting the actual perpetrators of this crime in trouble because they were loyal to the government. The people of Akatil do a reenactment of the massacre

every year. An article in slate dot com put it quote villagers see the ritual retelling of their story as essential, not only as a way to pay respect to the martyrs who helped bring global visibility to the guerrilla war in Chiappas, but also as a reminder to those who remain in power that the horrors that took place here

will not be erased from history. And because the survivors won't shut up about this coming on third years later, the state keeps offering them a quote friendly solution aka a cash payout, being like, well, you shut up about this, will give you some money. And the survivors, at least the ones that I've read about, refuse this. What they want is the state to recognize it's culpability in the massacre and charge the people who armed and encouraged the

loyalist paramilitaries. And I believe you know the actual people who carried it out, And I don't know everything about the time and place in context about this gorilla war. I read a decent bit about it, but there's so much more to know, so I can't say this for sure, but it absolutely looks to me like the paramilitaries did this to a katiel because they knew the bees were Pacifist and they were too chicken shit to head into Zapatista territory. There had been limited attacks on Zapatistas, but

nothing on the same scale. That doesn't make the pacifist morally wrong or misguided to not have been armed to defend themselves. It's just a thing to remember. Some gun rights people here in the United States say things like in armed society is a polite society, and this is statistically untrue. The more small arms there is in a community, the more that regular violence becomes gun violence. But as I read history, a thing that I see again and again is that an armed group is often afforded more

respect than an unarmed group. It's not that internally a group is safer while armed, it's probably the opposite, But in terms of external threats, well, there's a reason the Mexican state was willing to negotiate with the Zapatistas, and it wasn't because the Zapatistas asked nicely. But that said, the Bees lost forty five of their members in a

horrific act of violence, but the group continued. They accepting that this kind of thing and teaching forgiveness and response to it is a core part of many Pacifist teachings, including theirs, and they teach an indigenous theology that syncretizes Catholicism with Mayan beliefs, and as best as I can sort out, they continue to fight for indigenous rights, land, sovereignty, and all the good shit. But speaking of good shit, there's a bunch of ads for stuff which may or

may not be good shit. It might be regular shit. Who am I to say, That's up to you to decide. That's freedom, baby. You can decide whether or not these

ads are good. And we're back. The Zapatiste has kept going to of course, the state made another offensive into Zapatista territory in nineteen ninety eight when they attacked three territories to arrest local leaders and including one territory named after the anarchist and veteran of the pod Ricardo Flores mcgon, And just while I'm bringing up mcgon, I'm currently on the coolsone Media book Club reading a bunch of mcgon's

fiction about revolution. If you want to hear that he wrote a lot anyway, he was from a long time ago. He was from before the Mexican Revolution. His big uprisings were like very early nineteen tens and stuff. You can listen to our whole podcast episode about it if you want so. The Zapatista's named a territory after mcgone, and the state comes in and they smash up municipal offices,

they beat random civilians, they arrest whoever they want. They're resting dozens of people, and in response to this, the Zapatista has actually refused to counterattack in a military fashion. They're not trying to go back into a hot war because they have a pretty strong mandate from the people. They're not supposed to be declaring war, but instead building alternatives. Though that said, at least in one of these government raids,

the raiders, the government was met with gunfire. In June nineteen ninety eight, when the government invaded the community of San Juan Dey liber Todd and one of the main things that I want to talk about today. We're going to talk about their governing structure and stuff too in a bit, but I want to talk more about who the Zapatistas were politically, because everyone's always trying to kind of put them in different categories and things, but we

can actually understand them on their own terms. I think what they did and what they do is the clearest way to understand them, And by and large, outside observers use the broad label libertarian socialists to describe them, not even as like a definition for them, but like as the most useful way to describe them. The Zapatisas want bottom up democracy, and they want community ownership and like worker cooperatives and all that stuff. But broadly speaking, they

tend to reject labels, at least as a group. Like just now, when we talk about the territories that they've named, they've got one named after the indigenous anarchist Ricardo Floris mcgon, And this man was not a fan of religion. He wrote extensively about how the three pillars, the three heads of the hydra of oppression, were authority, capital, and religion. And the Zappetiss have a territory named after him, and they have another named after Saint Juan Diego, who was

the first indigenous North American saint. But these things aren't contradictory. Their lack of labeling besides Zapatismo has led to some confusion, and they've addressed this confusion a few times in different ways over the years as they've evolved, because who they were thirty years ago is not who they were now.

Who they are forty years ago is very different. One of the first interviews that their spokesperson, Subcommadante Marcos ever gave at least one of the first interviews that I found, was in May nineteen ninety four, and it was with anarchists from various federations and such throughout I believe Mexico. In it, the interviewers quote another easy Elen officer who's unnamed, who said, quote, we are not Marxists, nor are we gorillas. We are Zapatistas, and we are an army which look

fucking goes hard. We talked last week a little bit about how the Zapatista started off more traditional Marxist Leninists and then changed to indigenous ways. Marcos describes that in this interview, he says, quote, there began a confrontation, a

relationship of convenience between two ways of making decisions. On one hand, there was the initial proposal of the e ZLN, a completely undemocratic and authoritarian proposal, as undemocratic and authoritarian as an army can be, since an army is the most authoritarian thing in this world and also the most absurd in that one single person can decide the life

and death of his subordinates. On the other hand, there was the indigenous tradition that before the conquest was a way of life, and that after the conquest became their only way of surviving. In other words, the communities isolated cornered saw themselves obligated to defend themselves collectively, to live collectively,

to govern themselves collectively. And I like this quote a lot because they're like I was talking about how, yes, there's this indigenous method of collective decision making and working together, but that it's not like before conquest everything was like perfect and you know, absolutely utopian, and everyone was totally

working together. But rather that that is the seed that after conquest became their only way of surviving, was that they drew upon their own history of collective decision making in collective governance in order to survive, and then Marcos goes on to explain this method quote, the isolation of the indigenous communities provoke the development of another type of state, a state to deal with the survival of the collective.

Of a democratic collective. With these two characteristics, the leadership is collective and it is removable at any moment if you hold a position in the community, First, the community has to have appointed you, independent of your political affiliation. The community can remove you. There isn't a fixed term

that you have to complete. The moment that the community begins to see that you are failing in your duties, that you are having problems, they sit you down in front of the community and they begin to tell you what you have done wrong. You defend yourself, and finally the community, the collective, the majority, decides what they are

going to do with you. He talked about how the way that the Zapatistas determined their ideas isn't about one ideology at war with other ideologies, but in conversation with each other, and more importantly, in conversation with people, different ideas should be put forth and tried and discussed among all the people, whether it is to quote Marcos again quote a Trotskyite proposal, a Maoist proposal, an anarchist proposal, or proposals from Gueveraists or the Castristas or the existentialists,

or whatever issts you might think of end quote. One ideology shouldn't try and exterminate the others, but instead quote the people have to decide what proposal to accept, and it's the people you have to convince that your opinion is correct. This will radically change the concept of revolution, of who the revolutionary class and what a revolutionary organization is end quote. And that the government has quote a vision for the country that they have imposed on the

people with the arms of the federal army. We cannot reverse the logic and say that now the Zapatista vision is going to be imposed with the arms of the Zapatista army. And do you know what else is imposed through force of arms? I don't know, probably not. Our ads those are because we all like eating, including me, and including all the people who make the show possible, so which actually includes the sponsors. Life is complicated, politics

is complicated. Here's the ads, and we're back. Despite the Sapatiste has actually been pretty clear about what they do, if not what labels apply to them, outsiders have continued to argue about exactly what they are and what slot to put them in. At some point, probably two thousand and one or two thousand and two, a North American anarchist journal called Green Anarchy published a critical article called the easy ln are not Anarchists? With not in all caps.

This is the kind of thing of the easy Eleen really really easily could have ignored. But some Zapatista sat down and wrote a response which is frankly more than the article deserved. They say that quote the article entitled the easy Len is not Anarchist reflected such a colonialist attitude of arrogant ignorance. Several of us decided to write

a response to you. Our political and military body encompasses a wide range of belief systems from a wide range of cultures and cannot be defined under a narrow ideological microscope. There are anarchists in our midst just as there are Catholics and Communists and followers of Centaia. We are Indians in the countryside and workers in the city. We are politicians in office and homeless children on the street. We are gay and straight, male and female, wealthy and poor.

What we have in common is a love for our families and our homelands. What we have in common is a desire to make things better for ourselves and our country. None of this can be accomplished if we are to build walls of words and abstract ideas around ourselves. And the rest of the piece is pretty amazing too, if you want to read an indigenous critique not of anarchism, but of folks from the US trying to tell this

Zapatista is how they should fight. I liked quote your article used compromise as though it were a profanity for us. It is the glue that holds us all together in a common struggle. Without these compromises that allow us to work together, we would be nowhere, lonely slaves waiting to be exploited, just like we have been in the past. That said, by two thousand and five, the Zapatista has released a statement to clarify their political position a little bit.

They are explicitly anti capitalist and they see themselves as coming from quote below and to the left, which means essentially libertarian socialism, again not as a word to label them with, but as like the broadest applicable category to understand it. I believe they want anti capitalism that comes from the grassroots, rather than working with state institutions, political parties,

or vanguards. As of that declaration, they also occasionally run political candidates and shit, you know, they're really not into getting pigeonholed tactically. By twenty eleven, Subcondidante Marcos wrote a piece called I Shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of

this planet. A revolutionary vanguard, for context, is the Marxist belief that the way to create a revolution is for a small group of revolutionaries to decide how to have a revolution and lead everyone else towards the revolution, in contrast to the anti authoritarian models that are about working with the will of the people. It's hard to say things like the Zapatistas believe about this or that issue, because you're talking about thirty years and you're talking about

three hundred thousand people who are radically democratic. But I did find in that interview with Marcos from nineteen ninety four an awful lot about their early feminism, from the very beginning the easy LN has included women in its ranks and leadership best as I understand. We talked about the Law of Women last week that they instituted. One of the first big democratic projects they did was having people go around and agree that they're going to do

some serious feminism. The Law of Women states that women are the equal of men in all respects, including family planning. In the easy LN, the military people had access to condoms and birth control. Marcos admitted in the interview that in a way, women in the military were only half free because they had the right to choose not to have children, but if they got pregnant and decided to stay pregnant, they had to leave the military while they

were pregnant. Most would go down the mountain into the villages to seek termination. The sexual politics of the military were interesting. I have no recent information to compare it to, so that's just how it was in nineteen ninety four. But I think it's just like an interesting look at how a anti authoritarian military, well an anti authoritarian society's military, which is authoritarian but is trying to be as a galitarian as possible, how they chose to handle some stuff.

Anyone who wanted to sleep together, had to tell their commanding officer who they were sleeping with. And I believe when and where this was for military efficiency. If they were attacked, the commander needed to know who was fucking

and wasn't going to be quickly available. Interestingly, and maybe this is only interesting to me as a history nerd who finds the war history interesting, it seems like the co ed nature of the military and the lack of ban on fraternization meant that they had fewer problems with STIs than many other militaries have had because people were

sleeping with the romantic partners by and large. Also, Marcus talks about just like their actual physical isolation in the jungles being part of why they didn't have as many problems with STIs. The interviewers also asked to Marco's point blank about homophobia within Zapatista society. This was interesting to me because when I was coming up in politics talking to folks who spent time in Chiapas, they talked about this. The Zapatista line has always been one hundred percent consistent.

The Zappatistas are pro gay, pro sex worker, pro trans. They organize along transsex workers in the cities and hold up people's freedom to be whoever they are. A friend of mine back in probably two thousand and five or so said that when he was in Chiapas, there was sort of a distinction between what we said publicly and how things were on the ground in these small traditional villages. He'd asked one woman what she thought about gay couples, and she asked him to explain what that meant. He did,

and her response was basically, oh, that's silly. Again, this was decades ago and is absolutely just an anecdote, But those interviewers asked Marcos about this in nineteen ninety four, and he was fairly forthcoming of what the Zapatistas, who are themselves indigenous, want to do flies in the face of some indigenous social norms around the role of women

and men and things like homosexuality. They talk openly about how while they are indigenous people taking a lot of cues from their history and culture, they're also looking to change parts of their culture too. Marcos was clear that in traditional societies there there was absolutely no law against homosexuality and no punishment for people who are homosexual, that people weren't arrested, but that many gay people were picked on or mocked and then accepted within their communities. Within

the military, queerness was much more institutionally accepted. The only rule about who you fuck is you have to tell your commanding officer so that they know who is and isn't combat ready. So it was with this open anti ideology of grassroots participatory democracy that they began to build their autonomy and what that autonomy looked like. And I think the details about this shit are going to be interesting to you. We're going to talk about it on Wednesday.

And yeah, I don't actually have too much to plug here at the end of this. If you want to hear mcgon's fiction, I do a reading of it, and I don't know, go to build autonomy with people and learn what that means collectively, and don't be like, this is the way the Zapatistas do it, so we have to do it the same way. Instead. The thing to copy is there ideas of how to find out what the ideas of your area are, and my idea is to be done recording for now. Cool People Who Did

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