August 2024.
Actually, the letter is very brief. It came from Cauca, in the geography called Colombia, with a request from our native brothers and sisters, the Nasa people. I believe it was at the end of 2022. Wait… yes, it arrived on October 31, 2022. The Nasa brothers asked that an article be disseminated on the Enlace Zapatista page, that is, that it be published there.
I read the text carefully, compared the data and thought: “if it is published on the page, nobody is going to pay attention to it. And I think that what interests them is not to have many “views”, but that what is said there is read and understood here, in the mountains of the Mexican Southeast. So we are going to do something better than publishing it on the Enlace Zapatista web page: I am going to pass it on to the Zapatista political organizational leadership. Let them be the ones to value it for what it is: an impossible bridge.” Why “impossible”? You will see now:
In those days, the compañeras and compañeros in charge were already discussing and breaking down what, a year later, would be known as “El Común (The Common).”
The meetings were frequent, intense and exhausting. I know this because I attended several of them and because of what Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés told me.
Since then, “The Common” was already looming on the horizon, but at that time the questions “What are we?”, “Where are we?”, “Where are we going?” were in the air.
The impact that the so-called “Tour for Life. Europe Chapter” had had on Zapatismo was taking effect. For weeks, in Committee meetings and community assemblies, the various delegations visiting the varied geographies of Europe below and to the left, reported back based on their notes.
With and because of the delegations, Zapatismo had noted the destruction that “modernity” and “progress” produce in the “developed” territories, the misnamed “western civilization” – which, paradoxically, is to the east of us. And they had found a likeness with those who are different in all senses: resistance and rebellion against the Hydra, the capitalist system. The whole and the parts.
In the words of Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, coordinator of this chapter of the Tour for Life: “It’s bad, we have to hurry.
The results were worrisome:
The accelerated process of destruction of the social fabric in Mexico; the evident failures of the electoral lefts (the “progressivism”) not only in transforming the bases of a criminal system, but also in administering it even in the midst of mediocrity (holding up “corruption” as the source and cause of all evils, instead of seeing it for what it is…an effect… and to also fail in the fight against it), the “seizure of Power” – in reality the arrival to the government by any means -, was nothing but a relay in the position of overseer (presumptuous, arrogant and authoritarian with the peon, and docile and humble with the landowner);
the increasingly strong and terrible protests of nature in the face of Capital’s wars of conquest;
the coordinated advance of so-called organized crime and mega-projects;
migration and displaced populations (developed countries besieged by the effects of wars and policies of conquest in the so-called “peripheral” territories);
cruel and sadistic violence against women and others (aggression against what is different as a new fanatical religion);
children turned into scapegoats (the system sacrificing the future of humanity on the altar of profit);
the resurgence of wars with national-fascist arguments;
the normalization of the catastrophe; the collapse therefore;
everything led to a terrifying conclusion: what we had foreseen and warned about decades before (and which was then the object of mockery and scorn), was coming true.
The future of then is now the present.
But you already know all this. Whether you act accordingly is another matter.
-*-
But returning to the letter from Cauca that asked for dissemination of the text, I passed the text to Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés and called his attention to a part of it.
The Subcomandante read the text and the underlined part, looked up and asked me: “Did you tell them about it? “Of course not,” I answered, ”I don’t know those brothers and sisters.” The SubMoy: “It is as if they had been in the meetings.”
And the fact is that, in meetings of previous months, the committee, the Zapatista political-organizational leadership had been discussing the “isms.”
The underlined part of the text reads:
Along the way we learned that the voice that teaches is Uma Kiwe, our Mother Earth; she shows the way and the strategies… although there has been no shortage of those who want to become advisors to the process or give the line. There was a moment, in 2016, when the process decided to open its doors to other struggles to talk and make them more visible. From there all the isms began to arrive, and everyone wanted to put in their line or evangelize our process with their theoretical content.
All these isms, ecologism, anarchism, Marxism, feminism, Maoism, institutionalism, developmentalism are all constructions and legacies of the West, and although in the territories they are being woven with indigenous knowledge, they bear the stamp of Western rationality. All the isms have been very valuable in supporting and joining this process; some people have been respectful; others, colonialist. At the time it was necessary to say: “all isms are welcome, but here we are and we will continue to be indigenous Nasas.” The liberation of Mother Earth goes beyond the sugar cane fields. The Nasa knowledge, which comes from Uma Kiwe, is the sustenance of this struggle, and if we have contradictions it is precisely because of that battle that takes place in the heart between our Nasa being and the western capitalist imposition.
Faced with the false dilemma between institution or revolution, the peoples propose alternative routes to inhabit this present; the coordinates of the debate transcend a Cartesian scheme, and show us, with their ways of inhabiting and organizing themselves in the minga, the assembly, the celebration, the tulpas and rituals, other possible ways of life. When we are asked: “Rebellion? Revolution? Reform? [we say that] ours is the wët wët fxi’zenxi.”
-*-
In the previous months’ meetings, the committees had been recapitulating their history and, in it, the passing of all the “isms” that had been and still are, giving orders. None of them contributed anything worthwhile. And of course, there were and will be people who only came to get what they could. And they left when they could not get any more. They were not “isms,” they only were, and are, scoundrels. And some female scoundrels (to not forget gender parity).
Ok then. Cheers and here, besides mud and dignity, what we have is a very different “ism”: Zapatismo.
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
The Captain.
August 2024.
P.S.- The complete text is available at https://www.ecologiapolitica.info/63-andrea-fajardo-camacho/.
Original text published by Enlace Zapatista on August 29th, 2024.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.