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

do things. I call the show Cool People Did Cool Stuff, but really, we're all cool people, and we're all doing cool stuff, and even if some of us are also doing uncool stuff, because actually we're all complicated people who do complicated stuff. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, the only person who can determine what is and isn't cool. And this week we're starting a series about the alter globalization movement that destroyed the neoliberal consensus and opened a

crack in the facade of the neo colonial empire. It mean a lot of neo in this episode. People really liked using the word neo in the nineties, and then I think the Matrix just like killed all of that because they were like, yeah, we get it, you made it. Literally. Now there's like a literal guy named Neo and he's like the space Jesus. No, not space Jesus, computer Jesus. He's like, I don't know whatever, and a trans allegory, and like all good movies, it'll get turned into something

terrible by writ wing people eventually. That's besides the point. As you might have noticed or remembered from part one, I am without a guest for this particular series because I wanted to keep real odd hours while researching and recording, and just to kind of mix things up a bit. I want to think my producer, Sophie Lickterman, my audio engineer, hi Eva. Eva's name isn't hi Eva, it's Eva, but

everyone's to say hi to Eva hi Eva. And of course our theme music was written for us by unwoman in part one of this series a couple days ago or very more recently than that. If from my perspective and certainly my dog's perspective, who's going to go out as soon as I finished recording this. But I don't want to say exactly what he's going to go out to do because he's currently curled up by my feet and if I said the word, then he would think

it's happening right now. Anyway, A couple days ago when you heard this, I talked about the rise of neoliberalism in the colonial core the UK and the USA, and how after the collapse of the USSR, neoliberalism rapidly began to spread around the globe. The end of the Cold War was heralded as the end of history. Society had found its final form, some people claimed, and that form was liberal aka capitalists. In this context democracy, Well, some

people didn't want history to end. The end of the Cold War knocked out two of the three big polls of socialism. Democratic socialists took a real hit when there was no longer a USSR for them to look good against, and authoritarian socialist took a real hit when you know the USSR collapsed. But socialism might be best understood as a triangle. I have a bias towards thinking about things

in triangle shape. The three points of the socialist triangle historically are anarchist or anarchistic socialism, authoritarian socialism, and democratic socialism. All three argue for public ownership of capital of the famed means of production. Anarchist socialism and authoritarian socialism are both revolutionary socialism in that they generally argue for directly

seizing the means of production. Authoritarian socialism and democratic socialism are both Marxist and that their ideological lineage can be traced to Marx and before that, authoritarian socialism can be traced a Blanchy. But that is me nerding out and you do not have to remember that democratic socialists generally argue for working within the frameworks of democratic republics in order to move the government towards more socialist ends. This

is why they aren't revolutionary. And with the fall of the USSR they thought they do really well. But instead it turns out capitalism was only playing nice with democratic socialism because democratic socialism was on its side of the Cold War against the USSR. As soon as the USSR fell, capitalism turned on its ally and destroyed it. It's not completely destroyed. I don't want to call that fight over. Democratic socialism still has an important role to play. But

did the democratic socialist places took a real hit? And I am risky and oversimplifying things again. With authoritarian socialism knocked back and democratic socialism knocked back too, anarchists and anarchistic socialism stepped back into the ring. Bottom up socialism. This branch or pole or corner or whatever. Of socialism had been much more prominent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, substantially more prominent than authoritarian socialism throughout much

of the world. But after the Russian Civil War, by like nineteen twenty one, the Bolsheviks had staged their coup and put down the rest of the socialists. The authoritarian socialists came out on top of the socialist club, and you can see our long series about the Russian Civil War for war about that. Now, I want to be clear that the socialism that kicked in hard after the fall of the USSR was not anarchists with quotes in all ways, it was anarchist dick. There were and are

plenty of self identified anarchists in this camp. But the thing that happened after the Cold War was that horizontally structured, direct action focus socialism came back to the center stage, and this time it called itself lots of different things,

especially thanks to the strong grassroots and indigenous components. The actual group that really broke the end of history, the group that brought about the end of the end of history, came about in the kind of cool way that a bunch of horizontal militant democratic leftist groups have come into being a bunch of Marxist Leninist gorillas were like, you know, this Marxist Leninism thing isn't really working with us. We like ways of doing things better and created something syncretic

and beautiful. It'll happen later with the Kurdish gorillas, but for now we're talking about how it happened in Mexico. We're talking about the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas take their name from Emiliano Zapata, a revolutionary leader from the Mexican Revolution.

I am not going to side quest on him particularly hard, because I've been planning a Zapata and Pancho Villa episode since basically forever, or at least since I did the episode about the Maganistas, the indigenous anarchist movement that kicked off the Mexican Revolution. Suffice it to say that Emiliano Zapata was real interesting and specifically was into land reform, that thing where you take land away from the big rich landowners and redistribute it back out to individuals and communities.

It was also probably queer, but I haven't done my deep dive on the guy yet, so I'll give you my verdict on that some other time. Zapatistas take their name from Zapata, but they're entirely their own thing. Their full and formal name is the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. The easy ln what the Zapatistas did and are still doing well. To quote SubCom Modante Marcos, the most famous spokesperson of the Zapatistas, who's also a brilliant writer, I

just want to like point that out. He's actually one of the best selling authors in Mexico, and it's written a ton of stuff. And I've written like a novel that he co wrote. It's called The Uncomfortable Dead, I think, and it was with Paco Agnacio Dabio Dos. Anyway, he's a very poetic writer. Quote. It doesn't appear in any written texts, but rather the ones that haven't yet been

written and yet have been read for generations. But that's where the Zapatistas have learned that if you stop scratching at the crack, it closes back up the wall heals itself. That's why you must keep at it, not only to deepen the crack, but above all, so that it does not clothes. But if there's no crack, well we'll make it by scratching, biting, kicking, hitting with our hands, head an entire body in order to make in history what

we are a wound. Then someone will walk by and see us seize the Zapatistas hitting ourselves hard against that wall. Sometimes that passer by is someone who thinks that they know everything. They pause and shake their head and disapproval, passing judgment and declaring, you will never bring down the wall that way. But sometimes, ever so often, someone else,

an other will walk by. They pause, look understand, stare down at their feet, at their hands, their fists, their shoulders, and their body, and then decide this spot is as good as any. We'll be able to hear them as they make a mark on the unmovable wall, if only their silence was audible, and they go at it end quote. And so the Zapatistas, by their own estimation, they've created an opening, a crack in the wall of the machinery of domination. And I just I really like that metaphor.

You know, we can get really hard on ourselves about like not winning, right. We haven't created a you know, socialist utopia of whatever flavor. But our job sometimes is just to hold open a space and show that this is possible and that fighting against this is possible. Unfortunately, there's cracks in the other direction too, where even when you have a wall of anti capitalist podcasting, there's a wound in it, kind of a little way that the dark gets in, you know. We call those ad breaks.

There's one. So where did the Zapatistas come from. Well, people have been fighting colonization since colonization first reached the shores of Turtle Island. But the most immediate organizational precursor to the Zapatistas is the Fueraes de libreasi on Nassanal the National Liberation Forces the FLN, a much more traditional Marxist Leninist gorilla group. I've read one source that says that this group started in Monterey in northeastern Mexico, and

another that claims it started in Chiapas. I'd believe the former. I believe it started in Monterey. They started in August nineteen sixty nine, after the nineteen sixty eight Flatal Local massacre, when the Mexican Armed Forces gonned down three hundred and fifty to five hundred students in Mexico City. Basically people looked at that shit and were like, Yeah, why are we just protesting when they're shooting us, we should be shooting two and become hard to find, and so they

formed the FLN. After a few years, some folks from the FLEN made their way down to Chiapas and set up in the jungle. Chiapas is a Mexican state down in the southeastern corner of the country, right up against Guatemala. About five and a half million people live there, so roughly the population of Finland, more than the total population of Ireland, and about two thirds the population of New York City. There's a rainforest in Chiapas, the Lacandan Jungle,

that crosses the imaginary line between Mexico and Guatemala. There are a ton of Mayan ruins in the area, and an awful lot of different indigenous groups still live there. After several years of not really getting anywhere in the FLEN, now in Chiapas six folks were like, Okay, we're still part of the FLN, but this branch is called the EAZLN.

So the EASYLN was founded on November seventeenth, nineteen eighty three, for two years, this small group of people lived in near total isolation in the mountains, just learning how to live there basically, and they didn't really make enough connections with the other people who lived there. In nineteen eighty four, a few more folks showed up, including a man who would one day become maybe the only famous Zappatista Subcovedante Marcos, the author that I was talking about before, who would

go on to become its spokesperson. Now, the Flen didn't show up to find a blank slate in Chiapas, and I think that this part is really important. The book The Zapatista Experience by Jerome Beshett picks the start of the Zapatista story as October nineteen seventy four and an indigenous congress that brought together more than a thousand delegates from all sorts of indigenous communities in Chiapas. All sorts of different organizing bodies came from this meeting working together

to try to turn shit around for people. And like, yeah, you can say that the easy Eleen came from the Flen, and that is like technically organizationally true, but you're talking about like six people came from the atheln you're talking about the overwhelming majority of Zapatistas. This is more Their actual background is indigenous organizing, the Indigenous Congress, and I think it's important at this Congress they came together from

a variety of positions. One important part of their organizing was future friend of the pod liberation theology. I think we talked a little bit about liberation theology here and there. We talked about Brazil a while back. Anyway, Liberation theology is a branch of Catholic theology the fights to liberate oppressed people basically that have been growing in Latin America for a couple decades at that point, and had of

course syncretized with indigenous theological structures. Then also at this congress, there are the Maoists, the northerners who came down from central and northern Mexico to help. They were part of

an organization called Proletarian Line. But at least according to some of what I've read, the Proletarian Line folks, the Maoists they were like kind of into government, right like, because they want to create a government, and so they started working alongside the existing governmental power structures in the area,

which caused a lot of tension and infighting. Throughout the seventies, all these indigenous groups started getting a ton of shit done, getting land redistributed, which has always been a major rural and leftist and decolonial goal. Land redistribution basically get land out of the hands of single rich people, the big plantations and shit. It's been the goal almost everywhere forever, and the American left needs to take a lesson from

the rest of the Americas about that. The Indigenous goal was to break down the finca system the big est states and replace it with the traditional hido system, the communal lands. They tried and were repressed, and they tried and then were repressed, and occasionally they made gains, and so it went, and honestly, so it goes. While the maoist faction of the organizing was kind of losing steam.

People were enamored with the idea of the state, and so they're negotiating heavily with a state, and people kept arguing about who got to be leaders, and eventually the infighting split that whole part of things apart. In nineteen eighty three, probably not coincidentally, the same year the easyln the Zapatista's got their start, although on the other hand, I've read that the Zapatista's at the beginning of the ZLN was like so disconnected from what was going on

that maybe it was completely a coincidence. I'm not sure, or maybe this thing that I read was kind of exaggerating how isolated the Zapatistas were because to make the point about how when they started really working with people in the region, Because in nineteen eighty five, the EASYLN started recruiting or finally started succeeding in recruiting, and basically some folks would leave their villages to come live in the gorilla camps, while others would stay put and build

the infrastructural base for the resistance movement in the communities they were already from. This is the clandestine period of the EAZLN, which was definitely necessary. It's called the Mexican dirty War because there's a lot of different dirty wars, where basically it's when the government fights dirty and just like kills a ton of people, usually with the US's help. The CIA is heavily involved in all this shit. The Mexican government was just assassinating hundreds of dissidents during that

time and locking people up. As the government kept showing itself to be more and more fucked up, people got more and more sick of trying to play the liberal democracy game, and more and more people joined the Zapatistas. Soon there were thousands of them. There was one catch, though, that top down thing, the vanguard party that shows up to the jungle to teach everyone how to fight, that wasn't going to work for people. Marcos describes this as the quote first defeat of the EAZLN, which he is

quite glad happened. He's quite glad the EAZLN was defeated. He wrote, quote, we were not teaching anyone to resist. Instead, we became students in a school of resistance, taught by those who had been doing it for five centuries. Still, though at this time they were ostensibly under the direction of the FLN, they were just starting to really build their own autonomy and democratic structures. Where they were and what they probably didn't have, but you, dear listener, do

have a chance to have. Maybe they had it too. Honestly, advertising's kind of everywhere. This is an ad break, that's what's happening. I'm pivoting to ads. Here they are and we're back. Shit was heating up in Mexico at this point. In nineteen eighty eight, a man named Carlos Salinas Dicotari, usually just called Salinas, won the presidential election by a

pretty transparent voter fraud. The New York Times refers to it as an open secret that this was fraud, and this was more or less fully confirmed in two thousand and four when some memoirs from the time were released. Everyone knew that the election was stolen from a leftist candidate. But Selinus held onto power and began to institute that neoliberalization shit fast and furious. His new government was like, yeah, we're just going to privatize all the communal lands. Fuck you.

People marched against these policies. Tens of thousands of people marched against these policies, and there was a march of ten thousand indigenous folks that was heavily Easyln marching undercover in these big marches because at the time, of course, they couldn't be open about doing all these things because they were an armed gorilla group living in the hills Glendestinely, the Easyln held a referendum among their people and the overwhelming majority were like, yeah, no more hiding and waiting,

armed uprising police, Which makes sense. Your government has just been completely stolen. You know it had been stolen before that too, him pretty sure. But anyway, the fact that this is a reference is actually pretty important because Marxist Leninists generally practice something called democratic centralism. The basic idea of democratic centralism is after something has been voted on, everyone has to go along with it, and this is

to keep parties from splitting. It obviously doesn't work Leftist parties, Marxist parties in particular, famously split all the time. But theoretically, democratic centralism could be a form of direct democracy in which people vote on the actual issues and then everyone agrees to go along with the majority vote. In practice, democratic centralism means that the party leaders are elected and they decide what is to be done, and everyone has

to obey their orders. So it's worse than the American system in terms of democratic process, which is saying something because we're not a particularly democratic nation as far as things go here in that we elect lawmakers and don't vote on issues, and money votes every day, and you know, there's so much money in lobbying and all that stuff whatever. But in this case there's no checks and balances. You elect the leader, the leader decides what to do. That's

what Trumpists are practicing right now is democratic centralism. This Zapatistas, though they didn't let their elected dictators dictate, They held a referendum. They worked to find out what people actually wanted, even though they were ostensibly under the command of the FLN. So in January nineteen ninety three, the easy ELN told the FLN they were going to do an armed uprising, and the FLN was like, well, what do we say. No,

the easy LN was like, now We're doing it. At this point, they formed a new governing group amongst themselves, the Indigenous Clandestine Revolutionary Committee, and started to break the chains of Marxist Leninist leadership. The new committee was led by indigenous leaders referred to as commandantes. They built a democratic structure, laws were not imposed from the top down.

By the end of nineteen ninety three, for example, they had passed the Women's Revolutionary Law, which had taken four months of campaigning around various villages and communities to build up a consensus for this law to be passed. For adopting women's rights and centering them as the revolution within

the revolution. And this is a ten point program. The first one reads, quote, women have their right to participate in the revolutionary struggle in the place and at the level that their capacity and will dictate without any discrimination based on race, creed, color, or political affiliation. Other things in the ten points include things like women get paid fairly and can work, and women have the right to decide how many children they will have and take care of.

There's no forced marriages, guest to education, no beating women, etc. Women are fucking equal. Basically, they did all of this while they were in the middle of planning one of the most important military attacks in history. Feminism didn't take a back seat, Democracy didn't take a back seat. Equal rights and horizontalism were the revolution, alongside gorilla training in

the hills, of course. Meanwhile, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was set to go into effect on January first, nineteen ninety four. On that day, Mexico was finally going to get to be fully modernized part of the big Boys club at the expense of their poor. So those Zapatistas were like, yeah, best one, we'll do it. Six five hundred indigenous people were armed and ready to go, and they took off at dawn. They wore balaclavas over

their faces and red bandanas around their necks. They captured four cities in Chiappas, although I've also read five, including the place that was the cultural capital and previously used to be the governmental capital until eighteen ninety two. San Cristobaldeles, the military commander of the San Cristobal force, was a woman who I believe was a cook, although I haven't

yet figured out her name. The implication what I read was that her name was being left out of history on purpose, not as a racer, but for her sake. But I don't know. It might be written out somewhere. There are so many books on the Zapatistas, and I'm trying, and I've been reading and learning about them the entire time. I've been a radical, because these are the people who set up the conditions that radicalized me. As they marched

on the cities, their rallying cry was yabasta. It's usually translated as enough or enough is enough, and I like, enough is enough. Subcommadante Marcos took to the balcony of a government building and read the first Declaration of the Lacandan Jungle, which declared war on the federal army and demanded the removal of President Salinas the usurper. They called on Mexicans to struggle for quote work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy,

justice and peace. In that declaration, they were very clear about where the movement came from. It says we are the product of five hundred years of struggle. Their original plan was to take Chiapas and keep marching towards Mexico City, planning to do something very similar to what the anarchist Maganestas had done nearly one hundred years earlier in the lead up to the Mexican Revolution, liberate territories and bring

the revolution with them as they went. Their plan was to take control of the means of production away from the capitalists and give it to the regional governments, organize free elections, redistribute land, and institute the Women's Revolutionary Law. The Zapatistas had an advantage on their initial attack. The Mexican army was either drunk or hungover from New Year celebrations overall, and was slow to respond. This still wasn't

an easy Fight. The Easy Alend chief of staff Subcome Dante Pedro, died while taking the city of Las Margaritas. He was one of the founders of the Easy Elen, a thin and blonde, hunchbacked man who was thirty one

when he died. The Zapotitisa has also captured a general at his ranch, put him on trial, and released him with the punishment that he would have to quote live until the end of his days, with the pain and shame of having received the forgiveness and kindness of those people who have long been humiliated, kidnapped, robbed, and killed. But Mexico deployed twelve thousand soldiers and the Zapatistas were

wildly outnumbered. Worse, the government was willing to just kill the shit out of their own civilians as a solution to the problem. After four days of fighting, the Zapatistas largely retreated from population centers to avoid putting more civilians in danger, and while the people of Mexico didn't rise up to overthrow their unelected leader, they did start a massive campaign demanding that the government cease fire, and by January twelfth, Selinus ordered a ceasefire and the Zapatista has

announced that they were suspending their offensive. They stopped because it seemed to be what the people of Mexico wanted after ten years of preparing for war. The war lasted twelve days. The era of fire was over. Now was

the era of the word. For several months, the Zapatistas were in peace talks with the government, but by early March they were like, all right, you've said a lot of stuff, mostly really negative, but we've got to go talk to our people and see how they feel about what you've said, because they see themselves as literal representatives of the people, not the embodiment of the people's will in some like czarist or authoritarian way, but literally like, well, no,

I've been delegated to go talk to you all, but I don't make decisions. The people make decisions. I merely communicate with you about those decisions, which is what actual democracy looks like, and you don't get to know it because we live in where we live. Meanwhile, Mexico itself was in crisis. This one party pri had been ruling Mexico for decades and each president would serve one term

and then pick their successor. But Selinas a successor was supposed to be this guy, Luis Donaldo Consolio Murrieta, but he started drifting from the party line. He started talking about the corruption of the government, he started talking about indigenous rights, and then on March twenty third, nineteen ninety four, he was assassinated. It is generally understood that the pri

had him killed. The Zapatistas put out their second Declaration from the Lacandan Jungle, which is a call for a national Democratic Convention, where six thousand delegates from various organizations showed up to discuss building a bottom up democratic movement in the country. I love that the Zapatistas have always been in every tool in the toolbox kind of group.

We'll talk about it more in future episodes. Though occasionally like support candidates in traditional politics, right, and they're also totally fine with occasionally you got to invade some cities, and they also are like, but we're also going to be working the whole time to build a bottom up democratic movement, and you know that rules and is where most of their successes come from. Although again not knocking the fact that they try every tool in the toolbox.

By December, the Zapatistas took control of thirty territories in Chiapas and declared them territories and rebellion. This was the foundation of what's become the autonomous municipalities, which will forever be the real legacy of the Zapatistas. Taking over the big cities was cool and necessary by my estimation. But setting up an actual alternative society and defending it, that's

the reason everyone knows who these people are. I don't know exactly when these signs went up, but when you drive into the autonomous territories, the signs along the road read quote, you are in Zapatista territory, where the people command and the government obeys. And everything I've learned leads me to believe that they mean it when they say that these autonomous regions. Of course terrified the government, which you know, wants to be the governing body. They don't

want autonomous regions, they want to be the government. The state was like, all right, fuck you, we're just going to kill you. But they scoured the jungle and couldn't find the leaders, despite arresting a lot of suspected Zapatista

sympathizers around the country. This is the advantage of having spent ten years building a gorilla base of operations, they did this crackdown where they were arresting sympathizers and shit in classic government way where they were like, oh, we're just looking to talk, but instead they would just arrest

everyone and try and destroy the movement. They failed, and this is a really common thing too, when you try to exert power against power, they'll be like, fuck, you would kill and then when they can't kill you, they're like, just kidding, but we're like friends, Let's just talk it out as friends. So by March nineteen ninety five, the government was back to the negotiating table. It helped that

the Zapatistas had support all over the country. When the government docks the now famous mask spokesperson Marcos and put out a warrant for his arrest with like his legal name or whatever, ten thousand people, tens of thousands of people marched in Mexico City saying we are all Marcos and so. All the while, while all these various failed and halfway successful negotiations are happening with the Mexican State,

the Zapatistas started doing organizing and negotiating. It was probably even more important they started organizing and negotiating with the international community. They met with leftists and anarchists and grassroots activists of all sorts. There were a series of international consultas, and the worldwide alter globalization was born. How they did all of that and what it meant for everyone, including eventually me, we'll keep talking about next week. Anyway, that's

part two of the series. I actually don't know how long this series will be. I'm guessing four parts, but we'll see. It depends on how many side quests I go down, because there's so many cool parts of the ultra globalization movement, Like, of course I want to tell you about the history of the Black Bloc, but I also want to tell you about all the like you know, radical clowns and people who put on giant inflatable tubes and use that to attack the police, and all of

the different like farmers movements. And we've talked about some parts of the altglobalization movement already, you know, listen to our episode about the Argentinian cooperative movement and how as the Argentinian government fell into collapse as a result of all the austerity measures, how people just started taking over factories and running them on their own, because it turns out you actually don't need owners to get things done. You can get things done with the people who know

how to do things, which are the work. And there's just so many cool parts to this story and it makes me really happy to get to tell you, well, this is another one of those episodes I've been thinking about ever since the very beginning of the show, and so I'm I'm glad to finally kind of take the time to do this deep dive. And thanks for coming

along with me on this deep dive. As far as things to plug, I guess I'll keep plugging Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which is an anarchist worker cooperative publisher that I work with. We put out podcasts, we put out books, we put out other things, audiobooks, zines. One of the big things that we do is we put out zines of a lot of different types. We have, for example, our Skills Zine series and our Skills Zine series.

We make all these zines as available as cheap as possible to buy in bulk from us or you can download and print them yourself. And we have like a first aid one and we have one about I think it's called doing it yourself or something. I don't have it in front of me. You think I would have this in front, but I don't. We have a zine

about self managed abortion that hopefully won't well whatever. Actually, I hope it's useful to people like it's great and that's Strangers in a Tangled Olderness And you can find it at Tangled Olderness dot org or you can support on Patreon. If you give us ten dollars a month, we will mail you a zine anywhere in the world every month. And it's cool. And also all those zines are free if I'm want to read them well on the internet. All right, I'll see y'all next week. Bye.

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