An Operating Room in the Lacandon Jungle
In the construction of what will be the headquarters of one of the operating rooms of COMÚN, there is something that is not made explicit in the images. Among those working on the construction there are partisans, compañeros from the National Indigenous Congress and Zapatista compas; of various religions or without religion; of different generations, languages, roots, histories.
And not only. There is, in this building in the making, the work, support and solidarity of people, groups, collectives, organizations and movements from various parts of the world, in addition to Mexico, who, with their effort, creativity and inventiveness, managed to pay for the materials. Even native peoples from the Lacandon Jungle supported us with pay when they could not go to work. And there was no shortage of people who offered gravel banks and even dump trucks to haul the materials.
In the design, let’s say the architectural design of the building, the following happened: we consulted with a professional architect who offered to carry out the project… in exchange for 500,000 pesos. The Zapatista Interzona thought: “if, to make another new and better world, we do not depend on the great theoreticians and thinkers, but with our own thinking and our own practice we are achieving it, then let’s make a building according to what we want and with our knowledge”. In this way, the knowledge of native communities was brought together, regardless of whether they are Zapatistas or not, or what religion they profess, or their political party, or their language, or their color, or their affective, sexual, emotional, social identity, their size, their weight, their calendar and their geography.
It is not finished, it is true. And although it lacks walls, rooms, bathrooms, ceilings, equipment, instructors and the aforementioned instruments for surgery and laboratory, all the colors are already in its foundations. It is not only the work of the Zapatistas, but of COMÚN.
In those trenches; the mixer whose ball bearing failed (and the mechanics have already dismantled the part and a commission has gone out to get the replacement); the partitions; the pozol; the rebar; the worker who fainted and was treated by the Zapatista autonomous health service (nothing serious, just an excess of worms); the simultaneous courses of Herbal Medicine, Hueseras (Bonesetters), Midwives, and General Health; the electric and mechanical bicycles of the health promoters who are attentive to those who are working on the construction; the workshop to repair them because they break down when they fall; the buckets to carry sand, gravel, cement and water; the temporary satellite internet that was installed so that the workers could be in touch with their families, their fields, their animals; the jokes and jokes in different languages and manners; the practical masonry workshop that the most judicious ones give to the youngsters who want to learn; the hope rekindled by the first rains that wet them, yes, but also give water to the land from which corn, beans, vegetables, grass for the cattle, pumpkins (ugh! ); the life that streams and rivers need; and the tercias and tercios documenting images and sound.
In this whole, each part has its who, its what, its when, its how.
Each piece of the puzzle is necessary to complete it. Each person is who they are and does not stop being who they are, but they become common to build something, a whole that benefits the parts without subordinating them, co-opting them, recruiting them, lecturing them, absorbing them.
-*-
Perhaps someone will, one day, theorize about the Common. With more or less hard words, more or less complicated, more or less confusing. Maybe even great theses, deep reflections, publications in articles, magazines, books, specialties, round tables, lectures, symposiums. In short, those things that are done at tables and desks while, outside, life and death are battling.
But, if you ask the parties that now converge in those foundations of an operating room in the Lacandon Jungle. If you ask them who or why they did this; why they contributed their work; why they sweated in the sun; why they got wet in the rain; why they gave their time and even paid to work; why they organized activities, collections, festivals, expositions and I don’t know what else, to obtain economic funds that cross oceans and borders, and that regardless of languages, geographies and calendars became common; why they committed themselves to something that seemed a delusion, a folly, a dream.
Perhaps they will answer -in many languages, in many colors, in many geographies, in many calendars, in many ways-: “For life.”
Because, it usually happens that there are times when small, apparently insignificant things -like a construction with no apparent defined profile, in the middle of that nothingness that the geographic charts indicate d“Selva Lacandona”- (far from social networks, academia and opinion journalism, mass media, political grid, the churches of the political parties, the coffee revolutions and counter-revolutions, the bibles and catechisms of capitalism and its supposed alternatives, the medium, large or small islands of each person’s daily life, the individual sorrows and joys, a multiverse that repeats in its variants the same nightmare), have a big soul and a collective heart.
And I tell you this because, watching the videos of the last RebelArte and RevelArte meeting, I saw a small model, a little wooden house whose front read “Quirófano Común” (Common Operating Room). That was a little more than a month ago. That was (a little wooden house), just a few weeks ago, what today is implied in the Lacandon Jungle. El Común made it grow, walk, dress up, get ready and sit in an acahual, at the foot of a mountain that, years ago, became a ship for life.
-*-
Who keeps track of the sweat, the tears, the sleeplessness, the illnesses, the hunger, the bookkeeping, the poster, the promotion, the organization of those who work today, near and far, in that corner?
Well, at least us, the Zapatista peoples.
Because, as SubMoy says, “he who does nothing, is he who sees nothing and hears nothing, and only looks at his navel and still says he knows the world”.
Okay. Cheers and yes, maybe we don’t know how to put into words what the Common is, but we are learning to put it into practice. Or not?
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
El Capitán.
Junio del 2025.
P.S.- If the struggle is for life, then may life finally find a respite to flourish in that geography called Palestine, far away but so close to the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.