Zapatistas!! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution
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ZapatistasZapatistas!! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution Autonomedia POB 568 Williamsburg Station Brooklyn, New York 11211-0568 USA Phone and Fax: (718) 963-2603 Printed in the United States of America All photos are Copyright 1994 by Joshua Schwartz. All rights reserved. [ Readme ] Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/Zapatistas/ Readme This is the full text of the book: !Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution The book is published by Autonomedia and is available through major distributors such as Inland. (You are urged to get a copy of the book, not just because purchasing it will create some money to send to the Indigenous communities of southern Mexico, but also because there are a bunch of excellent photographs in the book, including a photo essay by Joshua Schwartz). !Zapatistas! contains the full, English language text of every communique published (along with several that were not published, as well as many interviews, letters, and essays) from the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) from December 31, 1994 through June 12, 1994. !Zapatistas! was produced by an all volunteer Editorial Collective, and many of the translations were "farmed out" to volunteers all over the internet. This book (and much of the publicity about the EZLN would not have been possible without the growing community of politically-minded people on the internet. For any further information, (especially if there are people who did volunteer translation and want a free copy of the book--I have lost my old account and can no longer access your addresses) please contact either Todd Prane at [email protected] (please put the word "todd" or the word "zapatista" (or both!) in the subject line for a quicker response) or Matt Miscreant at [email protected] for any further information about the Editorial Collective or the book. En Solidaridad con la Revolución Zapatista, todd prane, for the editorial collective Page 1 of 373367 [ Anti-Copyright ] Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/Zapatistas/ Anti-Copyright Text anti-copyright @ 1994 Autonomedia, editors, and contributors. This book may be freely pirated and quoted for non-commercial purposes, provided that a portion of any income derived thereby returns to the Indigenous and campesino communities of Southern Mexico. Please inform the editors and publishers at: Autonomedia POB 568 Williamsburg Station Brooklyn, New York 11211-0568 USA Phone and Fax: (718) 963-2603 Printed in the United States of America All photos are Copyright 1994 by Joshua Schwartz. All rights reserved. A portion of the proceeds from the publication of this book will be donated to the Zapatistas. ISBN: 1-57027-014 Page 2 of 373367 [ Preface ] Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/Zapatistas/ Preface We put this book together because we believe that the Zapatistas should be heard in their own words. In their hurry to analyze the Zapatistas many have ignored the analyses that the Zapatistas themselves have developed through years of struggle. As far as we know, this book is the largest collection of their communique's, letters, and interviews in any language anywhere in the world. We think that people wishing to understand the Zapatistas should listen to them. This book was produced through the donated labor of a large number of people around the US and Mexico working in solidarity with the EZLN. All of the people who worked on this book believe in the justice of the EZLN's demands and the legitimacy of their struggle. The efforts that helped to make this project a reality are greatly appreciated. Not everyone has the time or the desire to read every word of a 350-page book. If you aren't going to read all of the material here, you can get a fairly good idea about who the Zapatistas are by reading: The Introduction, The Southeast in Two Winds, El Despertador Mexicano, Responses to Government Lies, What Are They Going to Forgive Us For?, On Misunderstandings about the EZLN and the Real First Uprising, Interview with Major Ana Mari'a, On the Outcome of the Dialogue, Professionals in Hope, We Are Surrounded, To the Workers of the Republic, Interview with Subcommander Marcos (Chapter 11), Second Declaration from the Lacandona Jungle, and the Responses to the Peace Accord Proposal. Translators: Eugenio Aguilera, Peter B., Elizabeth Bright, Paul Coltrin, Shelly Feiner, Robin Flinchum, Christine Halvorson, Huasipungo, Selene Pinti Jaramillo, Susan Marsh, Matt Miscreant, Javier Ortega, Michael Pearlman, Barbara Pillsbury, Todd Prane, Leopoldo Rodri'guez, Pablo Salazar Devereaux, The Subaltern Studies Collective of the University of Maryland, Ruth Warner The Copyediting and Proofing Army: Matt Black, Elizabeth Bright, Sara Brodzinsky, Mitchel Cohen, Dema Crassy, Christine Halvorson, Bazooka Joe, Tommy Lawless, Todd, Rachel Rinaldo, Joshua Schwartz, Michael Ulrich, Bill Weinberg Page 3 of 373367 [ Preface ] Book and Cover Design: Matt Black, Jim Fleming, Joshua Schwartz, and the Editorial Collective Photos: Joshua Schwartz The Editorial Collective: This book project was conceived of and coordinated by the Editorial Collective. We are Zapatista solidarity activists, revolutionaries, workers, dreamers. We work for wages and we also work for ourselves. We pay too much rent and don't get enough sleep. We are inspired by the vision of the Zapatistas because we, too, dream of a better world. Dema, Eugenio, Matt B., Matt M., Pablo, Sara, Todd Nothing for themselves, so that we would have everything: Sara and Todd A note on translation: We have done our best to create a book that is both easy to read for English speakers and true to the original Spanish. There are several language and translation issues that make this difficult. This book was translated by a large number of volunteers. This effort made the publication of this book possible, but it made consistency in the translations difficult. We think that it is important that the same words be translated in the same way each time, and all of the translations have been checked thoroughly for consistency. Another difficulty in translation was the original Spanish. Most of the Zapatistas are not native Spanish speakers. Their Spanish is sometimes awkward, and the concepts that they use are not always clearly expressed in Spanish, and are even harder to translate into English. Readers should be aware that there are many possible translations for some words, and should keep this in mind as they read the text. A note on sources: We have tried to authenticate all the materials in this book. We have been able to trace nearly all the materials to their first publication, either by the EZLN or by the media. We have included the original sources when we were able. Many materials came from the book La palabra de los armados de verdad y fuego, a documentary anthology of the EZLN Page 4 of 373367 [ Introduction ] Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/Zapatistas/ Introduction by Harry Cleaver The time of revolution has not passed. Despite celebrating the collapse of Soviet-style communism and promising yet another social and economic renaissance, the world capitalist system is in deep trouble: East and West, North and South. If you listen carefully to the celebrating voices, those of the rich and the powerful in their corporate offices and government buildings, you can pick up a nervous undertone. If you watch the policy-makers closely, you may notice that the smiles are often thin and the hands that hold champagne glasses sometimes twitch, involuntarily. If you listen even more carefully, you can discover why. In the background you can hear another set of voices--those from below--far, far more numerous. These are voices the powerful do not want to hear, but they are having a harder and harder time ignoring them. Some of these voices are quiet and determined, talking together in bare tenements. Some are singing and reciting poetry in the plazas, or stirring young hearts with old tales deep in the forests. Some are discussing, planning their future, inventing new worlds. Many are angry, increasingly impatient, sometimes shouting on picket lines or chanting in the streets. All are talking about revolution, whether they use that term or not. The policy- makers of capitalism have good reasons to worry. Global Crisis Throughout the North, the old Second and First Worlds are both in deep crisis. In the East the imposition of Western-backed austerity has brought ever-wider unemployment and the destruction of social protections. Factories are closing; beggars haunt the streets. The budding "free" market is in the hands of Western carpetbaggers and local organized crime. Opportunistic politicians are fanning smoldering economic unrest into the flames of ethnic and racial hatred. In the West--which ex-communist countries are supposed to emulate--all-time high unemployment, vicious attacks on wages and welfare benefits, and experiments with economic and social restructuring have failed to produce a new cycle of growth. There, too, factories rust, homelessness spreads, and politicians channel discontent into racism and the fear of others, especially immigrants. The capitalist societies of the North, in short, are reeling, and can no longer offer attractive models for the South. Page 65 of 373367 [ Introduction ] The situation in the South, in turn, is even more dramatic. A decade of debt crisis, austerity, famine, soaring unemployment and spreading disease has spawned only a few isolated pockets of profits and growth. Here and there multinational corporations have reopened their runaway plants, taking advantage of cheap wages guaranteed by police-state repression (e.g., Mexico, China). But for the most part the postwar development project is a fading memory, and talk of "sustainable growth" has the ring of fantasy to it.