Captain Marcos, leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), reappeared on the public scene weeks before the end of the six-year term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In recent days he has issued four statements to criticize megaprojects, displacements, violence by organized crime, disappearances and the political activities of the right and the progressive left.
The so-called megaprojects do not lead to development, but rather “are only commercial corridors opened so that organized crime has new markets,” he said in a statement entitled Adagios, released on Thursday night.
Chiapas indigenous people flee their homes due to attacks by hitmen
Chiapas indigenous people flee their homes due to attacks by hitmen
He stated that “the dispute between rival cartels is not only about human and drug trafficking, it is above all the dispute over the monopoly of the floor fee in what is wrongly called the ‘Maya Train’ and the ‘Trans-Isthmus Corridor’.”
And he stated that since “trees and animals cannot be charged fees, instead they can be charged to communities and companies that settle on that other useless border in the Mexican southeast”; With this, “the growth of wars for territorial control is ensured, in which the hologram of the Nation State will be absent.”
The Zapatista leader maintains that “based on the criterion that the violence of what they call ‘Organized Crime’ is an anomaly of the system, it is not only false, it also prevents us from understanding what is happening (and acting accordingly). It is not an irregularity, but a consequence. The objective is agreed upon: the State wants an open market (‘free: from intruders – that is, from native peoples -), and the others want control of a territory.”
He explains: “in the image and likeness of what was called State Monopoly Capitalism, in which Capital expected the State to create the conditions for its implementation and development, now it is about what the military calls a ‘pincer maneuver’: both – State and Organized Crime – seize a territory, destroy it and depopulate it, and then big Capital comes in to rebuild and reorganize.
“Those who say that there is an alliance between governments and organized crime are lying. Just as there is no alliance between a company and its clients. What there is is a simple -albeit costly- commercial operation: the State offers an absence and the cartel in question ‘buys’ that absence and replaces the presence of the State in a town, region, zone, country. The gain is mutual between seller and buyer, the loss is for those who survive in those places. ‘Whoever pays or lends, commands’ is the old aphorism that analysts and social scientists ‘forget’.”
Regarding what is called “Organized Crime,” he added, “the State and Capital make a wrong calculation (it is usual): they assume that the employee will adhere to what was agreed upon. And not that he will operate on his own.”
Marcos relates that this “happened with the encouragement and creation of paramilitary groups, which, as they were formed by indigenous people, were thought to be controllable. After all, they were ignorant and manipulable people; then Acteal came.”
That is why he referred to how Las Abejas de Acteal describe the 1997 massacre, with its cruelty and the resulting impunity, as only the prelude to the current nightmare. “The State thinks that those of the so-called Organized Crime are its servants and come and go as they are told or forced to. It is because of this belief that they get the surprises they suffer.”
The Zapatista leader asks the question: Why in a federative state militarized for 30 years, are the cartels and their confrontations flourishing now with the governmental approval of those who invaded the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, claiming that they were thus avoiding the “balkanization” of the republic? Yes, it seems that the Mexican territory is more fragmented than ever.”
The clandestine grave called Mexico
On August 8, in a text that he called: a pick and a shovel; of solidarity, empathy and courage, Marcos pointed out that in “the clandestine grave called Mexico” and “the monstrosity of a system, another occupation has been created: that of searching mother,” a task carried out by hundreds of women throughout the country that is “the most terrible, distressing, painful and anachronistic of all occupations” that exist in Mexico.
“The entire political and electoral spectrum has already passed through the governments, all the electoral banners, all the party acronyms and the pressure of the searchers is growing.”
The searchers, Marcos emphasized, “not only look for those who are absent, they also look for the shame, the dignity and the humanity that was lost with a government position, a line in the Excel spreadsheet of the payroll payment due to surrenders.”
He pointed out that, “the missing persons, their current situation and the indifference they provoke above, are the overwhelming proof that frivolity and cynicism are virtues in the political work of the right… and of the progressive left.”
Indigenism in Mexico, a simulation: EZLN
On August 2, in a writing titled: Let us suppose, without conceding, the leader of the EZLN joins the campaign for the liberation of the Chol indigenous José Díaz Gómez, a Zapatista support base, who was liberated two days later. He said that “indigenism in Mexico is a simulation. All modern justice systems are unreformable, because they are based on an assumption that reality denies on a daily basis, because whoever pays, rules.”
“Let us suppose, without conceding, that your native people, your language, your culture, your way, then, is the Chol, a people of Mayan roots, who live in the southeastern Mexican states of Chiapas, Tabasco and Campeche. That, like all native peoples, you have suffered contempt, racism, injustice, beatings, deception and mockery – in addition, of course, to forced disappearances, imprisonments, rapes and murders – just for being who you are: an indigenous Chol.”
On August 1, Captain Marcos issued the first statement in which he criticizes the violence, displacements and megaprojects of the Fourth Transformation. Marcos used lines from the poem “Romance Sonámbulo” by Federico García Lorca, where he hints at an intention to return. “But who will come? And where will they come from?”
He made allusions to the wind, praising the strength of where he said he was: “the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.” “I could tell you the exact date, but it is not relevant or something, depending. You may not understand this firm but apparent resignation or resistance: the mountain in enduring one blow after another; the wind in its apparent retreat, giving up to return later. Always the same, always different.”
He said that in the matter of the displaced and in the eviction of life by extortion, “the State is not a solution but a problem.”
He criticized the megaprojects of the Morena government. “It is these hasty twists and turns that worry the mountain. It has seen worse, if you ask it. No, what concerns them are the storms that come with bulldozers, excavators, mineral prospectors, tourist companies, factories, shopping centers, trains, governments that pretend to be what they are not, destruction, death. In short: the system.”
“They hear the wind in La Polvorilla and in the wound that the Trans-Isthmus Train, a suppurating wound, makes in the hearts of the natives who fight (…) in tortured Haiti and in the Mayan cenotes defiled by the rails of demagogy.”
Source: proceso
