An Interview with Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Spokesperson and Military Commander of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)

An interview with Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, spokesperson and military commander of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)

MARTA DURÀN DE HUERTA Translated, edited and introduced by NICHOLAS HIGGINS

It has been just over three years since the signing of the peace agreements at San Andres Larrainzar between the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and the Mexican federal government. While the talks broke down before all the tabled themes could be discussed, agreement was reached on the topic of Indian rights and culture. Since then the government has consistently failed to convert this agreement into constitutional law, a position viewed by the Zapatistas as further proof of governmental intransigence and an abject failure to take the possible peaceful resolution of the conflict seriously. More alarming still has been the increase in government linked paramilitary activity in Chiapas, a strategy of combat that most observers refer to as low intensity warfare. Conditions reached an all-time low with the massacre of  unarmed Indians in December , soon followed by the renunciation of Bishop Samuel Ruiz as the president of the only existing mediation body, the CONAI, and its subsequent dissolution. Attempts by foreign observers to visit Zapatista communities have also been made increasingly difficult, with the notorious expulsion of  Italian observers in May  being indicative of a more general governmental stance towards perceived foreign intervention. As political parties throughout the country begin preparing themselves for the presidential elections in the year , Mexico may yet witness the end of  years of uninterrupted rule by the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Below, Subcomandante Marcos, spokesperson and military commander of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, talks exclusively of the nature of Zapatista politics and the reasons behind the latest peaceful Zapatista offensive, which

 Marta Duràn de Huerta is a lecturer in the Faculty of Political Science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She has written three books on various aspects of the Zapatista uprising and she is a regular contributor to the Mexican national press.  For the last eighteen months Nicholas Higgins has been conducting research in Mexico on the Zapatista uprising, where he was a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Scholar at El Colegio de México. He is currently a doctoral candidate and part-time lecturer at the University of Kent’s London Centre of International Relations.

International Affairs ,  () - 

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took the form of a historic national referendum on  March. The interview was conducted in the Lacandon jungle, Chiapas, on  January, seven weeks before the referendum took place. Q What is the nature of the Zapatistas’ new relationship with power? The first thing to say is that traditional politics, or at least the most commonly understood conception of traditional politics, is always defined in respect of the state, and in particular in respect of the power or control of the state and the political forces that it commands. The essential point of traditional politics is therefore to set oneself the objective of taking power, and as a consequence, a political force within the state is traditionally one that plans a programme, or creates an organization that holds this view of the nature of politics. When we said that we are trying to produce and encourage a new type of politics, we hold it as fundamental that you must define yourself in another form when confronted with power. Q What is the political raison d’être of the Zapatistas if their objective is not to take power? Another of the characteristics of traditional politics is that it always tries to impose a hegemony of sorts; a hegemony of class, or of a vision of the world, or a political position over the rest of society, and it tries to steer society and the nation towards that end. In the case of a new politics that does not propose the taking of power, and when confronted with the search for hegemony, the first task is to recognize that there are differences between all of us, and that in light of this we aspire to a politics of tolerance and inclusion. You cannot aspire to eliminate the other, that which is different, and neither can you ignore it. This new politics has to do with the forms by which those others, those who are different, have the space to participate, the space to be, and what is more, that they have a place in a project of political participation. This is central to our reason for not seeking power. It is not only that we do not set ourselves the task of taking power, but we propose that the very relationship of power with society must itself change. It must invert itself, or turn itself around in some form. This new relationship with power we have synthesized in the phrase, ‘mandando obedeciendo’ (command obeying). That is to say, power must change its relationship of conqueror, or rather those who command must also be those who obey, and the mechanisms necessary to achieve this must be put in place. Q How should a country organize itself to achieve a system of ‘direct democracy’? The first point to make clear is that we do not have either recipes, doctrines or dogmas about how each person should go about his or her life. All we can do is share our own experiences, our own history, and present an alternative that works for us. We recognize that there are different histories, different organizations, and different social groups all of which have their own story to tell, and in this sense we do not propose our own as the way things must be. Basically, we

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offer our history as a guide or a reference that can be used when seeking the political recognition of difference. We believe that the practice of direct democracy can achieve this recognition for certain aspects of the social life of the communities. When I say communities I’m not referring only to indigenous communities but also to villages, city neighbourhoods and agricultural collectives (ejidos). This is to suggest that people can discuss and take decisions about how to resolve their own problems, and to suggest that these decisions will be infinitely better than the decisions that are normally taken from the centre. However, a moment arrives when these problems expand beyond the local or regional setting and become national problems. It is then that the exercise of direct democracy at a local level must look for other routes by which it can include other realities and other social groups, and together search for the means of their resolution. Q What is the Zapatistas’ national project? We can summarize our project in the same manner in which we end all our communiqués, that is: a nation with democracy, freedom and justice. By democracy, though, we do not simply mean elections. For while the struggle for democracy in Mexico is a fight for clean, transparent and fair elections, it also goes further. It is not a struggle that can be limited to the electoral aspect of democracy only. We fight for a democracy that will create a new relationship between those who govern and those who are governed, what we have called ‘command- obeying’. Until now, and in the best of cases, representative democracy or electoral democracy has referred simply to the citizen participating in an electoral process, choosing a candidate on the basis of programmes or policies, and then proceeding to delegate the taking of political decisions to that person or that party. From that moment on, or at least until the next election, that delegate, being either a person or a party, and supposedly with the backing of the majority, commands. In the new relationship that we are proposing, representative democracy would be more balanced. It would enrich itself with direct democracy, with the continual participation of the citizens, not only as electors or as consumers of electoral proposals, but also as political actors. We believe that the moment a politician is chosen to govern, he is not receiving a mandate to direct society but rather he is being commanded to fulfil a function, and that as such he should be placed under society’s vigilance and sanction. We are trying to encourage the increased participation of citizens. We want them to be more watchful that those who govern are fulfilling society’s needs, that they take decisions and issue mandates, under the command of the citizens, mindful of those who they govern. We believe that there should be a system of permanent evaluation of a government’s work. We propose a mechanism of sanction, which will function not only as punishment but also in the form of positive recognition. When an

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elected party is not fulfilling its role, these mechanisms should also permit society to reverse a decision that has been made during an electoral process. It should provide the means by which they can be replaced by another person or political group in a manner that alternates power between different political forces. To this extent society would not care which political force was in power, but what would be important would be that this force does what the majority wants, and not only during the period of elections. The democracy for which we fight must also have an equity in the presen- tation of political proposals. Behind the proposals of some political parties there is a lot of economic power, a lot of media power, and behind others there is not much, or very little; in this sense the balance with which they are presented to the citizens is uneven, unequal and unfair. What is more, the realm of politics cannot be the reserve of the professional politician only. We think that any citizen, or any group of citizens, has the right, and must exercise it, to engage in political activity and to aspire to whichever governmental post they desire. The other fundamental aspect of the democracy that we want for Mexico is the recognition of differences and rights. Because there is no average or ordinary Mexican, and each social group has its differences, the democracy that we want must recognize these rights and not impose the rights of some above the rest. It is most obvious in the case of the indigenous, but equally you could talk about groups like homosexuals, lesbians, the disabled, the retired, all those who have specific differences and therefore should have specific rights. This in broad brushstrokes is our national project in respect of democracy. As for freedom, we mean that the citizen and the nation should be free to choose their own path, and to subscribe to a political proposal and make from it what they will. That means they should be free from external forces, like the forces of money and the forces of financial power, which can often dictate the destiny of a country. We want a Mexico free from economic pressures, free from supranational financial strategies that decide national policies and internal politics. We think that decisions that affect Mexicans should be taken by Mexicans. In as far as we speak of justice, we refer to justice in two senses. To justice in life, giving access to the means necessary to live; to a fair salary, to housing, to food, to health, to education, to political rights, and to land. We also refer to justice in the sense of administrative justice, to society’s punishment of those who have committed criminal offences. It is clear that in our country the justice system serves only to guarantee immunity to those that have most, and to administer injustice to those that have nothing. There is no just administration of the laws of our country and they are applied with discrimination. This broadly, is the country that we want, of which we dream, a democratic country, free and just. A country, that if you were to contrast it with the Mexico of today, you would see a very different country, another country, a better country.

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Q How can the demands of Mexican civil society be combined with the demands of Zapatista civil society? The question is badly phrased. When we talk of civil society what we refer to is non-political society, or rather the mass of citizens who are not involved in professional politics, those who are at the very margins of what is considered to be the focus of the political class. Here [in Chiapas] we also talk of indigenous civil society, what is normally referred to as the national indigenous movement. It is a movement that has its own history, a history that ante-dates the history of this country as a nation, and one that carries a long body of experience before which the nation has a series of unsettled debts that must be honoured. Civil society, like political society in general, has demands similar to those of the indigenous movement in that they both want democracy, freedom and justice. We do not therefore believe that there is a way in which these demands can be combined with Zapatismo in the sense that Zapatismo already is an expression of the demands that arise from both civil society and the national indigenous movement. But I also want to emphasize that there are other expressions of civil society’s demands as well; some are to be found in the political parties, others in social organizations, others in cultural groups, and equally, as regards the indigenous movement, they can be found in other indigenous organizations, and in the work of students of the indigenous problematic. All have their own specific, as well as general, demands. They have their own struggles. Zapatismo, or neo-Zapatismo, as they call it now, as an expression of both, believes that the fight for the respect of indigenous peoples’ rights is also the struggle of civil society. We believe that what is at stake is a country where there is no justice, no democracy, and no freedom. That this country in addition to deciding to sacrifice these three things, has also sacrificed nearly  million indigenous people. We believe that things cannot continue this way. We say, let’s fight for our rights which is also a form of fighting for the rights of everyone, and for this reason we call on everyone to combine their efforts. We think that the proposals that will resolve these demands will not arise solely from Zapatismo, in this case not even from the indigenous movement alone, nor from any single one of the sectors that make up civil society. Rather, it will be as a result of encounters and dialogues between all these elements that a proposal will be produced. We know that the solutions will not come from power, they will not come from those who govern because they are in crisis, they have another way of seeing problems, and ultimately they are not interested in what is happening below. The solution to these demands, and therefore the struggle that we are involved in, will be a product of the organization of agreements and of the direction that those from below choose in a combined manner.

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Q What is the significance of the Forum for the Reform of the State and the National Indigenous Congress? You are referring to two separate movements. The Forum for the Reform of the State was a meeting of diverse political and social forces which was convened by the Zapatista National Liberation Army with the aim of making a series of proposals at a national level on the theme of democracy and justice. We considered then not only that there were not adequate channels to make many of these proposals known, but above all there was not the space for these proposals to engage with other proposals. The Forum was in  and it had its moment and its limits. It was the first encounter in many ways, and it was the first exchange, but there is still much to be said on this point and others (encounters) are still to follow. This is distinct from what happened with the National Indigenous Congress, which has resulted as part of a process of encounters that has been developing since the talks in San Andres. It was at the San Andres dialogue that the EZLN convened all the social groups that had to do with the indigenous problematic— intellectuals, social organizations, political organizations, including the government—to look for paths towards the recognition of the rights of the Indian peoples. This was only one of many tabled topics at San Andres, and we call it Table One. Discussion of this first theme at San Andres overflowed into what was called the National Indigenous Forum where proposals about the indigenous problematic could already be encountered, and it finally resulted in the first San Andres agreements (between the government and the Zapatistas). Later this National Indigenous Forum transformed itself into the National Indigenous Congress which has grown as a national organization of agreement for shared indigenous experiences. Currently the National Indigenous Congress fights in a parallel manner for recognition of the Indian peoples and right now their principal demand is the fulfilment of the San Andres Accords—that is to say they want indigenous rights elevated to a constitutional level as was agreed. While the Forum for the Reform of the State has still to be developed and more fully explored, the National Indigenous Congress has already made its mark on Mexican history at the end of the century.

Q How would you explain that the foreigners that come to Zapatista communities in Chiapas come from a feeling of solidarity for a struggle against neo-liberalism, rather than in any attempt to manipulate or steal the natural wealth of the region? I imagine that the question is for the benefit of the people that are not from the (Zapatista) communities, because the people of the communities know this very well. However, we do not call them foreigners but internationals, referring to other nations, and not to their foreigness. The communities have realized that these people come to fight beside us for a just and dignified peace. The best way, though, to explain to the people outside is that they come for themselves and see what these people from other countries do and say here.

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I would not say that they come only to give but also to receive. In one form or another the encounter between the Zapatista indigenous communities and the people from other nations has been a process of teaching, learning, and of recognition of one another. We think that each has received, in a positive manner, elements that affirm one another in their struggles. They (the internationals) gain a much more complete idea of how the communities are really organized, that is to say a more exact, less idealistic and more realistic view. They discover, among other things, that the people of the communities are human, and like them they are not perfect, not people with extraordinary virtues but ordinary and common people with their defects and their faults, but also a people with a willingness to fight. People who have made a decision to convert the effort of the individual into a collective effort, to resist first, and later to transform this resistance into something better, more fair, and more just… Equally the communities have realized that the colour, the culture, the language, or the fashion (as they say round here) of these people does not have anything to do with the intentions of the heart, as the compañeros say. That exploitation or solidarity, that injustice or intolerance has nothing to do with the exterior but with the intentions that an individual or a group has towards another. We think that they (the internationals) come, in one form or another, looking for a mirror, a form of seeing their own personnel struggle reflected, a means of affirmation. That this mirror does not always show the best has also to be understood. For the people of the communities themselves, the internationals have also acted like a mirror that has reinforced them, it has also helped them to expand their horizons, freeing them from the temptations of fundamentalism or of millenarianism that can be held within a movement that has an ethnic majority as in our case. Transnational companies, international capital or financial capital don’t come to visit Zapatista communities. Men and women, students, teachers, sometimes marginal groups, sometimes not, above all from Europe, but also from the United States, South America, Asia, they all come to learn and to give a little, or a lot, of what they know, to exchange it with the communities and to receive something in return. The foreigners (and yes, these are the foreigners) that come to rob and manipulate the wealth of the country, they do not come to the Zapatista communities they go to Los Pinos [the President’s official residence] or to the PRI [the ruling party]. Q What has been the most positive outcome of the San Andres Accords and why does the Mexican federal government not want to honour them? The most useful thing about the San Andres Accords was the way they were made possible. The San Andres Accords are the product of an encounter in many senses. It was an encounter of many social and political forces on one side of the table and the government on the other side. The San Andres Accords are not the result of the EZLN demands and the reply given to these demands but a result of the demands of the national indigenous movement together with the EZLN, intellectuals and students of the

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indigenous problematic put forward and discussed with the federal government which produced the agreements, which were then signed. The most useful thing about the San Andres Accords is that they are a precedent for a dialogue of many parts, of many characters, of many actors, that produced a positive result. The government does not wish to honour them quite simply because it would signify the recognition of two things: () that they have not fulfilled their job of good government, and () that they have been, and continue to be, the principal obstacle, for the EZLN, to the peaceful resolution of the conflict. Honouring the San Andres Accords would signify a definitive opening of the doors to peace, it would be to begin a process towards the rapid resolution (of the conflict) by peaceful and political means. The government does not want this, it does not want the conflict to be resolved by peaceful means but by the route of arms. There is much more to say about the significance of San Andres but it is there in our communiqués, and in the various announcements released by social forces at the national and international level. What is clear is that by failing to honour the accords the government wants to impede the spread of Zapatismo. Q In the best case scenario, assuming the government does recognize the San Andres Accords, what would happen next? In the instance that they fulfil the San Andres Accords together with another series of measures, we hope that what will happen afterwards will be a clearer, more definitive process of dialogue and negotiation, to the effect that the fulfilment of the accords, and of the five conditions that we are demanding, would signify that the government accepts and finally decides to take the peaceful route to resolve the conflict and that it is prepared to adopt that route with all the consequences involved. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case, the government does not seem to be prepared to recognize the San Andres Accords, it is not predisposed to assume the peaceful route, to assume it with all the costs, and it continues betting on resolving it by military means. Each day that passes, each act of violence that you can see in indigenous land, not only in Chiapas but throughout the country, confirms this governmental approach.

Q What do you hope to achieve by the national Consulta on 21 March? And why do you consider it necessary that the Mexicans who live abroad participate? We have conceived this Consulta for the Recognition of the Rights of the Indian Peoples and for the end of the war of extermination as a great mobilization at every level, but a mobilization that starts from below. In all our political initiatives we have always attempted to open a space so that more

 Central among these conditions is the withdrawal of the majority of the estimated , Mexican military troops from Chiapas and the disarmament of the paramilitary groups of which there are currently some ten in operation.

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people participate and that new people participate. In each step that we take we try to learn from the previous steps and try not to repeat the mistakes that we have made before. We try to find new paths and new options that give the people other forms to convert themselves into actors and not spectators of a political decision that is going to be very important for our country. That is, a decision on the attainment of peace through the recognition of the rights of the original inhabitants of Mexico or of the first Mexicans when Mexico wasn’t even Mexico. We conceived the first stage of the Consulta as a stage of diffusion and promotion. We hope that the people of the neighbourhoods—the colonos, the kids in gangs, students, teachers, peasants, workers, labourers, religious people, homosexuals, lesbians, disabled, retired people, children, women, young people, everyone—that they will organize themselves and they will begin to diffuse the Consulta. Why? Because the objective of the Consulta is to engender another form of citizen participation; (to return to what we have already said in response to an earlier question), to oblige those that command that they ‘command obeying’. The first step is to oblige them to listen to us, so that the people are involved in important decisions: for example, whether there is peace or war in Chiapas. This is a non-violent effort to try to make ourselves heard; we are not invoking a war but a peaceful effort to spread our cause. Everyone as a citizen has the right to make themselves heard, and the Consulta is a mechanism by which the government can be made to listen. We do this not only for Mexico’s  million indigenous people but also to give voice to all of Mexico’s  million citizens. For this reason we have conceived of the Consulta not simply as a referendum, but also as an encounter and a dialogue between the Zapatistas and the rest of the people. We are therefore sending , Zapatista delegates to every municipio (region) in the country, so that they can meet the people, talk with them, and consult with them, in addition to offering them an opportunity to vote. In this way the people can discuss with the compañeros what it is they truly want, and what we want is that they recognize our rights. Two compañeros, a man and a woman, will go to each of the , municipios and they will talk with teachers, students, housewives, neighbours, ejidatarios, indigenous groups, student assemblies, workers’ movements, with unions, with everyone there is to talk to and to explain what it is we want. We believe that this exercise can set an important precedent for all political forces, showing that they have to be continually in dialogue with the people, at all levels. Our main hope for the Consulta is, of course, to see a peaceful mobilization. A key objective of the Consulta is also to show to the Congress of the Union whether or not the Mexican population supports the government’s proposed amendments to the San Andres Accords of Table One.

 Colonos are the people who live in colonias, a unit approximately equivalent to a borough in London.

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We are also calling on the Mexicans who live abroad to participate in the Consulta. These Mexicans have a long history, but the fundamental point is that owing to a lack of opportunities within our own country they have had to go abroad. The majority of them have been practically expelled from Mexico in the sense that they have had to confront the disjuncture of having to resolve the way they want to live with the means by which they and their families have to live. They thus feel obliged to leave and to go above all to the United States to earn money which they then send back to their families. As if by pure magic these Mexicans, the second they leave the country, lose all their rights despite the fact that their family, their history, their roots, and their culture continue to be in Mexico. They are denied a right to an opinion about the affairs of their country even though in every sense it continues to be their country. The Consulta will therefore attempt to provide one of these main sources of migrants to the United States, namely the indigenous, an opportunity to vote as well… We are, therefore, asking people to organize, to participate and to have an opinion about their history, their roots and also about their future. This includes those with Mexican ancestry, whose relatives, grandparents, or great grandparents are Mexican and who culturally and in their hearts are still Mexican. There are also the so-called Mexican–Americans, los chicanos, we also want them to participate, because no matter how they identify themselves, ultimately it is this country that remains their central cultural reference point. We want to hear their opinion. Then there are those who are temporarily abroad, for schooling or for work, who should also decide on the country’s future, an important part of which is the position adopted towards the Indian peoples. Remember that the Consulta not only asks about the COCOPA’s initiative and the San Andres Accords, but also about militarization. We ask the people abroad if they want to return to a militarized country, as well as asking them if they want to recognize the rights of the Indian peoples, and if they should have the right to participate with all their cultural and historical richness in the development of this country. We are therefore asking if the government should change its manner of governing and instead convert itself into a government that ‘commands obeying’. We are asking people’s opinions about all these things and also about how we should continue in the future. We believe that consistently developing these processes of consultation is important to every Mexican whether they be living abroad or not. All of this is born of our call for the International Consulta and for mobilization, because we are not only calling on Mexicans who live abroad to participate but all men, women, children, old people, all the honest people to an International Day for the Excluded of the World, that will have its central act on  March, the day of the Consulta. We are calling on everyone from the five continents to do all they can in favour of the rights of the excluded of the world.

 The COCOPA is a cross-party group of Mexican congressmen who are involved in an attempt to have an amended version of the Table One San Andres Accords passed into Mexican federal legislation.

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In particular among these are the indigenous of Mexico who are excluded from the project the government wants to advance, but we recognize that there are also excluded people in North America, Canada, Central America, South America, Spain, the Basque country, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Austria, Australia, Russia, Japan, Africa, Asia, and in all these places the excluded have their own name, their own history, their own struggle and their own dreams. We ask all of them, and all those involved with them, to unite with us in this International Day for the Excluded of the World, so that in their country, city, province or village they take part in demonstrations in favour of the recognition of the rights of the excluded, and that these acts coincide with the day of the Consulta. We continue to believe in honest people, the desire to participate and to do something for others. What is lacking most of the time is the channel, the space, or the opportunity to do it. So here is the Consulta for the Recognition of the Rights of the Indian Peoples and for the end of the war of extermination. It seems to me that these are just demands, worthy of peoples’ participation.

Translators’ postscript: on  March, the Zapatista National Consulta took place as planned. Some three million people participated, with over  per cent voting in favour of honouring the San Andres Accords, recognizing Indian rights, withdrawal of the Mexican military from Chiapas and for the government to begin ‘command obeying’.

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