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

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People, What
did Cool Stuff? I'm your host, Margaret Kildrey, and this
week I am continuing this ongoing series about neoliberalism and
the resistance to it, with a focus on the Zapatistas
of Mexico and the ultra globalization movement that sprung up
around the turn of the millennium. Today we're talking Zapatistas. Also,

(00:26):
I have a producer named Sophie who isn't on the
call today. I also have an audio engineer named Eva
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

(00:48):
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

(01:11):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:54):
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,

(02:17):
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

(02:37):
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

(02:58):
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

(03:21):
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,

(03:46):
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

(04:09):
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

(04:30):
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.

(04:51):
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,

(05:12):
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,

(05:36):
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

(06:00):
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.

(06:23):
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.

(06:45):
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

(07:06):
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

(07:27):
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

(07:49):
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

(08:10):
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

(08:31):
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

(08:55):
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

(09:19):
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,

(09:42):
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

(10:05):
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

(10:28):
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

(10:49):
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,

(11:10):
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

(11:34):
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

(11:56):
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.

(12:17):
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

(12:41):
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

(13:02):
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

(13:24):
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

(13:44):
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

(14:05):
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

(14:28):
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

(14:49):
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

(15:09):
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,

(15:31):
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

(15:51):
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

(16:13):
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

(16:34):
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

(16:57):
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,

(17:20):
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

(17:42):
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

(18:03):
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,

(18:25):
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,

(18:46):
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

(19:11):
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

(19:37):
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.

(20:01):
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

(20:23):
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

(20:44):
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.

(21:05):
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.

(21:27):
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.

(21:48):
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

(22:10):
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

(22:30):
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,

(22:53):
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

(23:14):
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

(23:37):
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,

(24:00):
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

(24:22):
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

(24:45):
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

(25:05):
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

(25:27):
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

(25:50):
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

(26:11):
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

(26:33):
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

(26:53):
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

(27:17):
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

(27:37):
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