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

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

2025/6/9
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Margaret Kildroy: 我在继续关于新自由主义和对其的抵抗的系列节目,重点关注墨西哥的萨帕塔派和千禧年之交出现的超全球化运动。萨帕塔派已经从他们的马克思列宁主义根源中脱离出来,成为一个由土著领导的草根军队。他们花了10年时间准备对墨西哥政府和执政的PRI党发动战争,并在1994年1月1日开始了这场战争。战争持续了12天,最终以僵局告终,因为墨西哥人民支持萨帕塔派及其目标,但不打算起义推翻国家。萨帕塔派总是准备倾听人民的意见,与国家进行谈判,并将重点从战争转移到地方自治。萨帕塔派成为了一支军队,他们与墨西哥政府打成了平手,然后他们放下了枪支,现在在恰帕斯拥有自治权。他们向墨西哥宣战,并迫使政府在圣安德烈斯协议中做出让步,该协议于1996年2月16日签署。他们对其土地的自治权比西半球的大多数土著群体都多,但冲突并没有结束,即使是30年后的现在。圣安德烈斯协议同意了一些基本的事情,或多或少归结为在地方一级进行自主决策的权利和对自然资源的地方控制。民族国家通常不希望将这种事情割让给人民,他们通常希望能够控制事物并成为政府。政府完全无视他们刚刚签署的文件,圣安德烈斯协议无关紧要。政府开始使用正规和非正规的军事力量对萨帕塔派进行肮脏的斗争。萨帕塔派及其支持者发起了一次又一次的游行,特别是在墨西哥,但在世界各地,试图迫使墨西哥政府遵守其签署的协议。自治领土长期以来一直设法将有组织犯罪(如卡特尔)排除在其区域之外,这在墨西哥非常重要。为了粉碎萨帕塔派,政府开始武装和授权该地区的准军事团体。这些准军事团体被认为是效忠者,他们只是“我们希望执政的PRI党执政的热情支持者,他们被武装起来”。1997年的阿卡蒂约尔大屠杀是最引人注目的例子。

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This chapter explores the transformation of the Zapatistas from a Marxist-Leninist group into an indigenous-led grassroots army. Their 12-day war against the Mexican government resulted in a stalemate, leading to negotiations and a focus on local autonomy. While technically achieving some autonomy through the San Andres Accords, the conflict persists due to the government's disregard for the agreement.
  • Zapatistas transitioned from Marxist-Leninist roots to indigenous-led grassroots army.
  • 12-day war ended in stalemate due to public support for Zapatistas.
  • San Andres Accords granted limited autonomy but were largely ignored by the government.
  • Ongoing conflict despite some autonomy in Chiapas.
  • Zapatistas successfully kept organized crime out of their territories for a long time.

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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kildroy, 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, 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 10 years preparing to wage war on the Mexican government and the ruling PRI party. And on January 1st, 1994, they'd gone and started that war. The war lasted 12 days.

It ended with a stalemate when it became clear that the people of Mexico supported the Zapatistas and their goals, but weren't going to rise up to overthrow the state. Always prepared 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 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 Andres Accords, which is the settlement they signed on February 16th, 1996.

And they do maintain more autonomy over their lands than most indigenous groups do in the Western Hemisphere. But the conflict hasn't ended. Not even now, 30 years later. The San Andres 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. 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 without any exception I've personally ever found, they just went ahead and completely ignored the document that they just signed. The San Andreas 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 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 weeks reading a lot of reflections about the Zapatistas from 20, 25 years later.

talking about what they've accomplished in the area. And one 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, 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 PRI party to be in charge, enthusiasts who are armed." And maybe the most dramatic example of that, I have found, is the Akatiyol massacre of 1997.

Acatiel is this tiny town in Chiapas that was home to a Catholic pacifist indigenous rights group called Las Abejas, 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 1992 over a land dispute. I've 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 PRI, the ruling party, and he thought he owned some land. His nephew was an activist, and he thought that the land was communally owned. It became a big whole community argument, and a group of indigenous pacifist 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, 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 immediately.

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. Places don't like calling things pilgrimages. Everyone is obsessively secular in both mainstream media and leftist media, but I am under the impression that they presented this as a pilgrimage that they went on.

Maybe 5,000 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. So that's the bees. They're liberation theologists, indigenous rights groups trying to make the world a better place in Chiapas. Which...

It 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. 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 flee.

Maybe 6,000 or so people were displaced in a couple months in 1997, and many of them 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 weak and defenseless, but run from a fair fight. That's the fascist way.

The loyalists weren't fascists. They were 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 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 22nd, 1997, around 60 paramilitaries went into the town of Akhtiyl with masks and AKs while people were gathered at mass. And the gunmen 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 of this massacre are really upfront about what happened. They're not afraid to talk about it. 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. 45 people died that day, all of them unarmed, many of them children.

Meanwhile, the cops were stationed about 200 meters away at a local school and just ignored the entire thing. Some people were arrested 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 the police were arrested.

Most of the people who went to prison for this were scapegoated 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.com put it, quote,

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 30 years later,

The state keeps offering them a, quote, friendly solution, a.k.a. a cash payout, being like, will you shut up about this? We'll 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 its 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 the time and place and context about this guerrilla war. I've 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 Akatil 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 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, an armed society is a polite society, and this is statistically untrue. The more small arms there is in a community, 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 it wasn't because the Zapatistas asked nicely. But that said, the Bees lost 45 of their members in a horrific act of violence, but the group continued.

They accepting that this kind of thing and teaching forgiveness in response to it as a core part of many pacifist teachings, including theirs. And they teach an indigenous theology that syncretizes Catholicism with my own 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. That's freedom, baby. You can decide whether or not these ads are good.

♪♪

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Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in-store or online for easy drive-up and go-pick-up or delivery. Subject to availability, restrictions apply. Visit JewelOsco.com for more details. And we're back. The Zapatistas kept going too, of course. The state made another offensive into Zapatista territory in 1998 when they attacked three territories to arrest local leaders, including one territory named after the anarchist and veteran of the pod, Ricardo Flores Magón.

And just while I'm bringing up Magan, I'm currently on the Cool Zone Media Book Club reading a bunch of Magan'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 1910s and stuff. You can listen to our whole podcast episode about it if you want. So the Zapatistas named a territory after Magan.

And the state comes in and they smash up municipal offices. They beat random civilians. They arrest whoever they want. They're arresting dozens of people. And in response to this, the Zapatistas actually refused to counterattack in a military fashion. They're not trying to go back into a hot war 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, 1998, when the government invaded the community of San Juan de Libertad. And one of the main 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 use the broad label libertarian socialist to describe them, not even as like a definition for them, but like as the most useful way to describe them. The Zapatistas 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 just now, when we talk about the territories that they've named, they've got one named after the indigenous anarchist Ricardo Flores Magan. 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 Zapatistas have a territory named after him. 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 have addressed this confusion a few times in different ways over the years as they've evolved. Because who they were 30 years ago is not who they were now. Who they were 40 years ago is very different.

One of the first interviews that their spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, ever gave, at least one of the first interviews that I found, was in May 1994. And it was with anarchists from various federations and such throughout, I believe, Mexico. In it, the interviewers quote another EZLN officer who's unnamed, who said, quote, We are not Marxists, nor are we guerrillas. We are Zapatistas, and we are an army. Which, look, fucking goes hard.

We talked last week a little bit about how the Zapatistas started off more traditional Marxist-Leninists and then changed to indigenous ways. Marcos describes that in this interview. He says, quote,

On one hand, there was the initial proposal of the EZLN, a completely undemocratic and authoritarian proposal. As undemocratic and authoritarian as an army can be, since an army is the 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.

And I like this quote a lot because I like how it's talking about how, yes, there's this indigenous method of collective decision-making and working together, but

But that it's not like before conquest, everything was like perfect and, you know, absolutely utopian and everyone was totally working together. But rather that that was the seed that after conquest became their only way of surviving was that they drew upon their own history of collective decision making and collective governance in order to survive. And then Marcos goes on to explain this method. Quote,

The isolation of the indigenous communities provoked the development of another type of state, 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 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 way that the Zapatistas determine 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,

End quote. One ideology shouldn't try and exterminate the others, but instead, quote, end quote.

This will radically change the concept of revolution, of who the revolutionary class and what a revolutionary organization is." 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 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 this show possible. So which actually includes the sponsors. Life is complicated. Politics is complicated. Here's the ads.

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And we're back. Despite the Zapatistas actually being 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 2001 or 2002, a North American anarchist journal called Green Anarchy published a critical article called The EZLN Are NOT Anarchists, with NOT in all caps. This is the kind of thing that the EZLN really, really easily could have ignored. But some Zapatistas sat down and wrote a response, which is frankly more than the article deserved. They say that, quote,

The article entitled The EZLN is Not Anarchist reflected such a colonialist attitude of arrogant ignorance, several of us decided to write 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 Santeria.

We are Indians 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. 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 U.S. trying to tell the Zapatistas how they should fight. I liked, quote, That said...

By 2005, the Zapatistas released a statement to clarify their political position a little bit. 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 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 2011, sub-candidate Marcos wrote a piece called, "'I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of 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, because you're talking about 30 years and you're talking about 300,000 people who are radically democratic.

But I did find in that interview with Marcos from 1994, an awful lot about the early feminism. From the very beginning, the EZLN has included women in its ranks and leadership, best as I understand. We talked about 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 EZLN, the military, people had access to condoms and birth control. Marcos admitted in the interview that 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, so this is just how it was in 1994, but I think it's just like an interesting look at how an anti-authoritarian society's military, which is authoritarian, but is trying to be as egalitarian 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 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 STIs than many other militaries have had because people were sleeping with their romantic partners by and large. Also, Marcos 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 Marcos point blank about homophobia within Zapatista society.

This was interesting to 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 100% consistent. The Zapatistas are pro-gay, pro-sex worker, pro-trans. They organize along trans sex workers in the cities and hold up people's freedom to be whoever they are.

A friend of mine back in probably 2005 or so said that when he was in Chiapas, there was sort of a distinction between what was 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 was decades ago and is absolutely just an anecdote.

But those interviewers asked Marcos about this in 1994, and he was fairly forthcoming. Some 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 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, 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 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 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 Magan's fiction, I do a reading of it. And I don't know, go build autonomy with people and 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 their 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 Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas. And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas. It's Pride Month, and you know what that means. Friendship, parties, dancing. Correct. And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is? Bowen, we talked about this. I'm not a thing. Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. A Casamigos margarita during Pride. Now that.

It's a slay. Ah, Casamigos. Anything is a slay. Because anything goes with my Casamigos. Anything goes with my Casamigos. Beau, you're a poet. Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company, White Plains, New York. Casamigos Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume.

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