Vive y la Lucha Sigue (working title)
by Simon Fitzgerald and Kristin Bricker
The Zapatistas have not garnered nearly as much international media attention in the past few years as they were able to in the first years after their armed insurrection. While this could be taken as a sign that they have “lost their war with the Mexican government,” the opposite is true as Mary Ann Tenuto Sanchez points out in the March/April edition of 
Left Turn. The Zapatistas' bottom-up implementation of the San Andrés Accords is their new weapon in their guerra contra el olvido (war against oblivion). Zapatismo continues to spread like wildfire because it offers Mexico’s indigenous people the opportunity to create for themselves that which the mal gobierno has denied them for so long: “work, land, shelter, bread, health, education, democracy, liberty, peace, independence, and justice” (from the Zapatistas' 11-point plan).
We were able to witness the effectiveness of implementing “autonomy without permission” during our brief stay in the Peace Camp at the relatively new Zapatista base of support in Apaz, Chiapas, this past June. We even had the opportunity to meet members of the Zapatista’s newest army. However, the masked soldiers we met were not armed with guns, but rather medicine. In this time of non-violent political engagement, these Zapatista fighters were on the offense against disease, vaccinating approximately 25 tiny Zapatistas from Apaz and surrounding communities during their brief visit to the area.
Apaz is a town of approximately 1,500 people located in the mountains halfway between San Cristobal and the state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez. Residents first met face to face with Zapatistas in 2002 during one of the consultas, which function both as a horizontal decision-making mechanism and as an outreach tool that engages communities not en la resistencia. The consulta opened the line of communication between the Zapatistas and people in Apaz, and in early 2003 members of a collectively-owned milpa (cornfield) in Apaz told the Zapatistas that they were no longer able to afford their electricity payments, which were as high as $1000 pesos per two-month cycle. The Zapatistas informed them that no one en la lucha pays their electricity bills, so the seventeen families of the milpa joined the resistance and ceased their payments.
The Zapatista’s utility delinquency dates back to 1994, when E.Z.L.N.-supported governor-in-rebellion Amado Avendaño called a rate-payers strike against the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) to pressure the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) governor of Chiapas to step down (the PRI stole the election through ballot-box rigging, vote-buying, and an assassination attempt on Avendaño that killed three people in his campaign and left him permanently maimed). The rent-payers strike trudges on as electricity rates continue to rise out of control. The strike represents a form of tax resistance against the mal gobierno and the insistence that electricity is a right. The strikers demanded preferential rates of no more than 10 pesos per month for citizens of Chiapas because the state supplies half of Mexico’s hydroelectricity supply. The collective resistance against unaffordable rates inspired the seventeen Apaz households to join the struggle. However, for many of these impoverished families, some of whom were forced to pull their children out of school so they could work, the rate strike was not so much about politics as it was about an inability to make the increasingly expensive payments. While many Zapatista communities continue to receive electricity despite not paying their bills because residents have physically prevented CFE workers from cutting their wires, Apaz residents constitute a smaller base of support for whom physical resistance to the shut offs was not feasible. As a result, the Apaz Zapatistas have been without electricity since February.
The fight for affordable electricity is part of a bigger Zapatista struggle for “the right to sustenance of water, of land, of wood, of electricity, all of which indigenous people have very little of” (from a speech by the bases of support to their compañer@s without water, translated from the April 2004 Rebeldía). Feeling the pressure of being denied crucial public services themselves, the Apaz base of support was eager o take part in the April 10 march to bring water to the Zapatista communities of Jech’vo and Elambo Alto y Bajo in the Zincantán municipality of Chiapas. The local Partido Revolución Democrática (PRD) governor Martin Sanchez shut off the water of the three communities, because they did not pay into municipal coffers and did not take part in local government-mandated community projects. As they were running dangerously low on water, the bases of support from the surrounding areas organized a convoy of trucks and approximately 4,000 unarmed marchers to deliver jugs of water to the afflicted communities. However, when the protest, which consisted largely of families with small children, reached Jech’vo the marchers were attacked by PRDistas armed with sticks, rocks, machetes, and guns. Thirty-five Zapatistas were injured, seventeen of whom suffered gunshot wounds. The Mexican Red Cross reported that two additional Zapatistas were killed, but the bien gobierno has neither confirmed nor denied these deaths. The marchers fled, but the PRDistas had set up roadblocks with logs and municipal police cars (a sure sign of government complicity), so almost 500 people, including the Apaz base of support, were unable to return to their homes for fifteen days. When the displazad@s (displaced persons) were finally able to reach their homes, the ones who lived closest to Jech’vo found them destroyed. According to the Apaz Zapatistas, the PRDista mob had smashed precious glass windows, thrown large rocks through the roofs of houses, and ransacked community stores. Thankfully, Apaz itself was spared from this violence, and they now have a Peace Camp to protect them.
To add insult to injury, no one in the supposedly left-wing PRD condemned the attack on the march (with few exceptions). Instead, they called it a “community conflict,” removing the responsibility for the violence from political structures and actors. Furthermore, the local PRD government supported the PRDista mob by allowing it to act with impunity: attacking the march, setting up roadblocks with government vehicles, and raiding and ransacking towns. In an e-mail alert from the Oakland-based Chiapas Support Committee, Tenuto Sanchez says that this impunity constitutes state support and is a reason to expand the traditional definition of “paramilitary” from a fighting force trained by the federal government and armed by the state to include the PRD mob. According to her definition, “if a group is armed and its objectives and behavior are the same as a paramilitary group, then for all intents and purposes it is a paramilitary group.” While the government may not be directly involved in every act of violence against the Zapatistas, it stands to benefit when they are attacked. Each attack increases the possibility that police and the military may enter bases of support and autonomous municipalities under the auspices of protecting the people from paramilitary violence. The attacks are the mal gobierno´s foot in the door of Zapatista strongholds.
While international activists were shocked to learn that the paramilitaries involved in the attack on the water march in Jech´vo were affiliated with the PRD mayor and allowed by the local PRD government to act with such impunity, the Apaz Zapatistas were not at all surprised. They consider the three local ruling parties (PRI, PRD, and the Partido de Trabajo) to be one in the same. They hold them equally responsible for shutting off their electricity, and, as relative newcomers to the Zapatista movement, they were shocked when we told them that the E.Z.L.N. supported PRD presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cardenas in the 1994 elections. When we attempted to learn about the intricacies of the different Mexican political parties from a Zapatista perspective, our compañer@s in Apaz repeated the same simple phrase until we got their point: “Todos son iguales” (“They are all the same”). This, along with the violence against the march in Zincantán, highlights the fact that the rebellion against the mal gobierno is more than just opposition to the oldest corrupt party in Mexico, the PRI (who also holds the title of the longest running dictatorship in modern political history). Rather, the Zapatistas rebel against the corruption of the entire political system and its political parties.
While the Zapatistas have long since ceased their military offensive against the Mexican government, their struggle is not over. In imperialist fashion, the Mexican government and its cronies continue to view the Zapatistas as a threat, simply because the indigenous people want to run their own lives, rather than having the government control them in its historically negligent and violent fashion. The government continues its policy of low-intensity warfare, and the Zapatistas continue to be threatened and killed by paramilitaries, which are central to a low-intensity military campaign. The brutal, broad daylight assassination of prominent Zapatista Eduardo Vázquez Álvaro on a main street in Chilón during our stay in Apaz underscores this point. His assassins, whom locals suspect were hired by a local wealthy landowner, shot Vázquez three times, mutilated his body with a machete, and ran over him with two cars. Not surprisingly, the military and police unsuccessfully attempted to enter Chilón to patrol it after the murder. This campaign of government-sanctioned violence in the face of persistent Zapatista non-violence is proof that Mexico’s power elite are as threatened by “autonomy without permission” as they were by the Zapatistas’ guns.
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