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Date: Thu, 25 May 1995 00:00:07 -0700
Sender: "R. Byers" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Resisting the NWO (fwd)
Richard:
I hope you're enjoying your vacation.
I thought I'd pass along this commentary, which came through on
the Chiapas list. I think it is of interest to all of thus who are
concerned about the New World Order. The Zapatistas are remarkable for
many things, but one of their great achievements lies in tying what could
be seen as a "local situation" to changes going on globally. The writer
of this commentary remarks that the Zapatistas have become a moral force
that influences all of Mexico, and he could have gone on to say that they
are having an influence on the whole world. It is also beginning to look
as though the larger world has had an influence on the situation
vis-a-vis the Zapatistas in Mexico. Many people have commented that it
is only because of international attention and the importance of
international financial markets that the government of Mexico has been
restrained from the usual immediate bloody repression against the people
of Chiapas. Not that they aren't doing their best to cause Chiapans to
suffer, but they've had to be more careful and restrained than in the past.
Anyway, Chiapas continues to teach us all lessons about courage,
creativity, and the shape of the NWO.
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Randy Byers •••@••.•••
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 21 May 1995 15:10:30 -0500 (EST)
From: •••@••.•••
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: Eng. Trans. - A. Garcia de Leon commentary
Friends: Here is a commentary published in the Jornada of the 18th.
I liked it and thought some people who can't read Spanish might
appreciate it too. I should do more of this, I know. - Bonnie
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Antonio Garcia de Leon
The impossible taming of the rainbow
The dialogue in San Andres Sacamch'en reflects, in its scanty results, many
of the aspects that are obstructing the necessary and urgent political
transformation of the country today. It reflects the resistance of the
system to being transformed, something that runs through the wounded body
of the old political class from Tabasco to Guanajuato and from Yucatan to
Sonora. Paradoxically too, those conversations have an ambivalent
character; on the one hand, and despite the government efforts to describe
them in terms of "strength" or minimize the influence of the EZLN, the fact
is that the rebel demands have escaped the siege and already are in the
center of national debate, projecting the necessity for a change of the
Mexican political system as a whole. Thus, and without going beyond their
mountains, the zapatistas today extend themselves throughout the country
and the world, and without trying to take power over reality they are
transforming it at an accelerating pace. On the other hand, and given the
low profile of the governmenal negotiators, the talks give the impression
of being a ceremony of distraction, as the true intentions were being
decided elsewhere, while the Army advances materially in its war of
positions, and the most reactionary forces of Chiapas - the state
government and the ranchers' guards - get ready for new provocations and
battles.
And while, on one side, the conflict is seen in almost entirely military
terms, on the other a war of movements is deployed that has involved, for
months now, broad swaths of the organized and dispersed civil society,
which sees the zapatistas as the detonators, the ferment, or the seed of a
mobilization which leads us, like it or not, to a national dialogue and
towards a more and more needed agenda of transition to democracy. And in
that transition, the "material" is not what is decisive: for this reason
commander Tacho himself has said, referring to the problem of power, that
the zapatistas don't want the Palace of Government, "that's just a
building..."
In the first conception, the correlation is linked to the structures of
newtonian physics, like something that can be weighed "materially" - in a
crude and premodern conception of the material -, and in which the
zapatistas are, in relation to the government's military forces, almost
insignificant. If we observed that one aspect of the correlation, any
negotiation would seem useless, and the rebels' assertion that they are the
stronger ones would appear exaggerated. This brings the declarations for
extermination, like those of Fidel Velazquez or those of the bishop of
Papantla, and certainly brings on the mocking smiles of the government
envoys, or is seen by them as one more rudeness in the insupportable
"propaganda" of the EZLN, an irreverence of people who don't know that in
this country only the government has the right and the media to make
propaganda, or to make itself the guardian all the political forces that
operate within its laws.
The real fact is that in no society are tasks proposed, however crazy they
seem, for which the necessary and sufficient conditions for a solution do
not already exist, or are not already in the process of appearance and
development. For this reason the originally disproportionate demands of
the zapatistas have, little by little, over the course of just a few
months, been materializing, and "making themselves possible"; not only
that, but it is in this capacity to generate unhoped-for situations where
much of the germinal force of the rebels lies, that moral influence which
is the most non-material and enduring in the nature of things.
And it's that the war in Chiapas has another physical dimension (more
resembling that of the unusual behavior of particles in modern physics),
since it has been penetrating the spaces of national politics like a drop
of water perforates a rock, like rays of light that cross the screen,
gaining a new character and a new tone, expressing themselves in another
materiality. It has been influencing the language and the way things are
said, and has returned concepts to their most simple and basic forms, the
most difficult to express and define. When all is said and done, these
modern forms of politics, that paradoxically proceed from the most
"backward" corner of the country, have placed themselves in the center of
the flow of a Mexico in transit towards the new by the most unexpected
path, transforming politics and the jurassic sectors of parties and
organizations as it goes. And the "Westernization" of the country implies,
in terms defined by Antonio Gramsci in the second decade of this century,
the emergence of a new historic bloc, of new hegemonies and of a peaceful
revolution that is posed in terms not seen previously. Today in Mexico and
to the degree that the country modernizes, the "civil society" becomes a
more and more complex and resilient structure, capable even of surviving
the catastrophic eruptions of earthquakes or of the current economic
situation, capable of escaping the siege of the State, the parties, the
churches and all the rigid forms of organization and control. Their
structures are, paraphrasing the Italian revolutionary, "like the trench
system of modern war", and under the trembling and the inefficiency of the
State, the emerging structure of the civil society becomes more and more
evident...
And it is these non-material and invisible trenches that have been dug
throughout the country, in large measure, by a crazy little army of
Indians, disproportionate in their demands: there lies a great part of the
capital accumulated and the strength which cannot be submitted to military
siege, because it is a multicolored material resembling the little drops of
water suspended in the air after a storm, that generally go unnoticed and
(inasibles) for those who see the world in black and white. Curiously,
too, it is in this varied immateriality of the rainbow where the strength
of the zapatistas lies. Because if we bear in mind the moral presence of
the EZLN, the correlation is reversed and the dimensions of the system turn
out to be insignificant, eroded by its own bumbling, bloodied by the crimes
of the State which anger us all. From this stems as well the extreme
prudence of these wise ones of the mountains who know very well that they
confront a terrorist organization, that of the old corporative State,
penetrated by organized crime and wounded to the death, the one that has
kept itself in power by resorting to successive ceremonies of treason.
An idea-force is running through the country and transforming it, a
principle of hope walks today on the highways, the factories and the
ejidos, and in this immense flood the zapatistas will be recognized in the
future as those who put in the varied drops of color, made of the
indomitable material of the rainbow.
-- translated by Bonnie Schrack
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