 |
|
|
 News Around the Republic of Mexico | January 2006 
Zapatistas Push for National Movement
 AP
| | Subcomandante Marcos says he won’t stand for office when Mexicans choose a new president in July. |
San Cristobal De Las Casas, Mexico – Amid a rising leftist tide in Latin America, Mexico’s Zapatista rebels have come out of their jungle hideouts calling for a national movement to fight for social justice for the 50 million Mexicans living in poverty.
But unlike leftist leaders who have won elections in Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela, the ski-masked Zapatista chief Subcomandante Marcos says he won’t stand for office when Mexicans choose a new president in July.
Instead, the pipe-smoking poet has launched an “alternative campaign,” a six-month road trip from Mexico’s southernmost state to the U.S. border. He promises a new way of doing politics that will “shake this country up from below.”
His followers are slum leaders, poor Indians, students and trade union bosses who flocked to see Marcos in the first week of his tour, which started New Year’s Day. They say there are enough poor and angry Mexicans for the Zapatista campaign to make a real difference.
“Millions of us have been forgotten by the system and are left struggling to make a living like animals,” said Domingo López, the white-bearded head of Indian immigrants in the Hormiga, a slum neighborhood of San Cristobal de las Casas in the rural southern state of Chiapas. “Together with our brothers, the Zapatistas, we can make a noise that the politicians will have to hear.”
The effort comes amid a groundbreaking presidential campaign, the first since Vicente Fox’s surprise victory in 2000 ended 71 years of one-party rule.
Zapatista followers argue there is historic change sweeping the hemisphere, and they offer as proof a string of leftist victories, including that of Evo Morales who was elected the first-ever Indian president of Bolivia last month. “A wind is blowing to the left across Latin America,” said Mario Alvarez, head of the Workers Central trade union federation, which has allied with the Zapatistas. “Mexicans, with our tradition of revolution, will join this wave with a passion.”
However, Marcos has attacked all the candidates, including leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is favored in many polls to win the election.
“In the coming days, we are going to hear a mountain of promises and lies that try to raise our hopes that things will improve if we change one government for another,” said Marcos, who Mexican authorities have identified as former university lecturer Rafael Sebastian Guillen – an identity he has never acknowledged.
It is yet to be seen whether the Zapatistas will be able to rally major support outside of their base in Chiapas, with its scattered, rural population.
The majority of Mexico’s 107 million people live in big cities in the center and north of the country and many are skeptical about whether the Zapatista rebellion, with Indian peasant farmers as its main supporters, is relevant to their lives.
“People here in the capital don’t care about masked guerrillas,” said Mexico City taxi driver Rogelio Bernal, 43.
“They are worried about issues such as traffic and crime.”
Some analysts say the rebels real agenda is simply to strengthen their bargaining position to negotiate with the new Mexican government that will take power later this year.
About 20,000 Zapatistas live in a collection of self-governed villages and farms and refuse to let any police or government officials enter their land. While President Vicente Fox has refrained from using the army against these communities, he has not officially recognized the Zapatistas’ authority there.
“The Zapatistas have hit a brick wall,” said Miguel Alvarez, head of Serapaz, a pacifist group that helped with negotiations between the government and rebels in the 1990s. “The way forward for them is to get more legal recognition so they can get themselves into the system in the long term.”
López Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party has not expressed a position on the Zapatistas – even after Marcos called him a traitor.
While Marcos advocates revolutionary leftist change, López Obrador, the charismatic former Mexico City mayor, is running on a more moderate leftist platform supporting big government and welfare spending.
Emilio Zebadua, a Democratic Revolution federal deputy from Chiapas, claims the Zapatistas are bargaining for a López Obrador victory and want to use their movement to pressure the new government from the left.
“We can envisage a Mexico in a year’s time that has a center-left government with the Zapatistas heading a national movement fighting for issues such as Indian rights,” Zebadua said.
Brazil has a similar situation with the center-left government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva being lobbied by the radical Landless Rural Workers’ Movement.
Zebedua said he is confident that a Democratic Revolution government would be able to work with the Zapatistas on a new rights bill for Mexico’s 13 million Indians.
Mexico’s Congress passed an Indian rights law in 2001, but it failed to meet Zapatista demands that Indians have ownership over the minerals in their land.
However, Zebedua conceded that it could be harder to meet some of the rebels’ more radical demands.
Since the Zapatistas first stormed this town of San Cristobal on New Year’s Day 1994, they have made no other armed attacks against the Mexican government.
Still, they have continued to use revolutionary rhetoric and to picture the late Latin American rebel Che Guevara as a model leader.
In his first rally of the new tour, Marcos stood with 10 masked Zapatista leaders who took turns cursing free trade amid cheers from the crowd of 15,000. He invited the disenchanted of all stripes to join in his campaign for change.
“I am talking to all the political groups of the left: communists, libertarians, anarchists,” Marcos said. “Whether you are black, white or red, fat or thin, there will be a place for you.” |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us