ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION
SIXTH ZAPATISTA COMMISSION
Mexico
To:
The House of Indigenous Peoples and Communities “Samir Flores Soberanes”; The Otomí Indigenous Community residing in Mexico City; The UPREZ-Benito Juárez.
From: Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés.
I write to you on behalf of the women, children, elders, men, and other Zapatistas who resist in the mountains of southeastern Mexico.
We embrace our compañeros and compañeras and compañeroas from the various groups, collectives, movements, and organizations that are present today. And we would like to take this opportunity to thank them and, through them, all the good people who have shown solidarity and support in the face of the attacks we have suffered at the hands of the governments of the so-called 4T. We offer you our respect and gratitude.
Although geographically distant, we are close in our commitment to resistance and rebellion against the monster, the Capitalist Hydra that exploits human beings, feeds on the blood, destruction, and death of entire peoples, rapes women, persecutes those who are different, represses the search for justice, plunders territories, and has discovered how to inflict pain on those who search for their disappeared loved ones.
It seems that there are few things that unite and define us, but they can be summed up in the struggle for life. In this struggle against death, we come together with different races, colors, beliefs, geographies, ways of life, and calendars.
Beyond borders, customs checkpoints, armies, wars, lies, slander, and blockades, we learn to call “compañero,” “compañera,” or “compañeroa,” those who are different from us but similar in their steadfastness in resistance and creativity in rebellion, those who share commonality in the commitment to destroy the beast that lives off our labor, revels in our pain, mocks our rebellion, and believes that history is eternal, as eternal as its dominion.
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It is our belief that the backbone of our struggle is the Común. That is, to seek and find what unites us, but without ceasing to be who we each are. To renounce trying to convert everyone, everything, into our image and likeness. To renounce the conscious or unconscious construction of new pyramids to replace the current ones so that everything changes but remains the same. To renounce imposing a single path, a single pace, an identical mode, a carbon copy.
To speak of respect, support, and solidarity is to speak into the void if it is not demonstrated in the real practices of each person.
We, the Zapatista communities, originally of Mayan descent, believe that the COMMON is something to be built. A space where we can live together without anyone more or anyone less. “Cabal,” we Zapatista peoples say, which does not mean “equality,” “similarity,” “command and obedience,” but rather difference in a common endeavor.
There are no recipes, no manuals, no theory for this. Instead, there is the realization of the need for new forms. Not only of struggle and organization, but also and above all of new ways of relating among those who, like you and us, resist and rebel against the cruel fate of the deadly box of the capitalist system.
Nor is there a single way of achieving the COMÚN. There is no paper, writing, song, poem, play, film, painting, sculpture, or building that serves as a guide where we can check off or cross off each step as we succeed or fail.
Each of us, according to our own calendar, geography, and way of life, will find our own ways. It has been useful for us to study the Storm and the misfortune, destruction, and death it brings. So we believe that, with el Común, we will have a better way to face the storm and survive it. This is so that history does not repeat itself, where, with each change, those at the top rearrange themselves at the top and those at the bottom end up even lower… or disappear without anyone noticing.
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And now, the Otomí sisters in resistance and rebellion in Mexico City are opening a space in the house they have occupied and maintained amid harassment, lies, pretense, and deception. They create a space with their eyes fixed on the distance. They build a space looking not upward, but outward, to the sides, where there are others like them. They offer them the space, the time, and the means to say to each other, “Let’s share with each other.”
They do so in their own way, according to their own calendar and geography. They will have successes that we will all celebrate. They will have setbacks that we will help them resolve. They will have blows that we will alleviate with sisterly words. And their example will be a seed that, in other calendars, in other geographies, will give birth to a different plant, distinct but the same in its dignity.
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That is why we want to applaud the initiative of our Otomí compañerxs, mainly women, who have decided to create a common space in the house they recovered from the hands of imposters, of caxlanes disguised as indigenous people, who discriminate against, threaten, and attack the indigenous people of Mexico City. It is only because they do not give up that they are persecuted. Only because they do not sell out, they are attacked. Only because they do not give in, they are discriminated against.
This is how we have to do the things we set out to do. Under pressure, attacks, lies, slander, and silence. More than 500 years and the old and new conquistadors, who are the same in these calendars, do not understand that resistance and rebellion are in our blood.
We inherited it from our parents, our grandparents, and our grandparents’ grandparents, going back centuries. We will pass it on to our children, our children’s children, and so on until the world is a dignified place, a place of life.
For more than 500 years, they have been trying to change us, trying to turn us into caxlanes who only look out for themselves, without thinking about others.
More than 500 years and we are still who we are. As Tata Juan Chávez said: “We are who we are.” And we are resisting a war that wants to erase us as who we are. That wants to turn us into a little sticker in the colorful album of the history from above.
“We are what we are” means that we are the language that speaks to us, the color that clothes us, the culture that lives within us, the history in which we are born every day, at all hours, in all places.
Cheers to the COMÚN at Casa Samir Flores Soberanes. May other ways to prepare for the storm and, above all, for the day after emerge.
Thank you, Otomí sisters. Thank you, Citizens of the City. Please accept our embrace, which is another way of telling you that we respect and admire you.
From the mountains of southeastern Mexico.
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés.
Mexico, October 12th, 2025.
Original text published at Enlace Zapatista on October 12, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.