Desinformémonos Editorial Team Photos: Luis Enrique
(Castellano) (Euskara)
In its New Year’s speech, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation denounced three decades of “bad governments” since its armed uprising in 1994 and announced a new stage in its autonomy project, which seeks to leave private property behind and move towards “common property” as a collective form of organizing life, land, and resources.
From the Caracol of Oventic, in the municipality of San Andrés Larráinzar, support bases and the Zapatista command stated that the promises of democracy, justice, and freedom remain unfulfilled in Mexico, as misery, inequality, repression, and plunder persist. “They closed the doors, windows, and cracks on us… we had no choice but to take up arms so that there would be democracy, freedom, and justice for all,” they recalled when evoking the context of the uprising.
Subcomandante Moisés maintained that current governments continue to serve bankers and transnational businessmen, whom he called “the owners of the overseers,” and questioned social policies, considering them mechanisms to buy consciences and perpetuate power. He pointed out that events such as the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa and the femicides in Ciudad Juárez are evidence of the lack of institutional justice. “That democracy, justice, and freedom have not been achieved,” he said.
In its central message, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation presented the horizon of “El Común” (The Common), a proposal that seeks to overcome the ‘I’ and “mine” in order to build collective relationships that guarantee human life and that of the planet in the face of the social and climate crisis. The movement estimated that this process will take between 100 and 120 years and called on workers in the countryside and the city, in Mexico and around the world, to organize themselves based on their own realities. “We already have the horizon, we have already found it, and it is for human life and other lives: it is the common,” said Moisés.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation is a movement that since 1994 has been fighting against dispossession, racism, and bad governments. In Chiapas, it has built autonomous territories with their own authorities, justice, education, and health systems, outside the state and political parties, from where it promotes a permanent critique of capitalism and the forms of domination that put the lives of peoples at risk.
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