“In this semillero, we want to showcase different perspectives that confront the same reality: what you call the world and what we call the storm,” announced Captain Marcos, who, along with Sub-commander Moisés, will be the sole speakers during the three-day workshop “The Storm Inside and Outside According to the Zapatista Communities and Peoples,” which began on April 2nd at CIDECI – University of the Earth facilities in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas.
The concept of “storm” according to the Zapatistas originated in 2015, Captain Marcos recalled, during the seminar “Critical Thinking in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra,” where, along with guests from various parts of Mexico and the world, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) presented an analysis of contemporary capitalism and called for a debate on strategies of resistance and rebellion against this same storm.
“We described the wars and their characteristics, and now they are happening; we described how nature would respond to the war it was receiving, and now it is happening,” Captain Marcos recalled on the first day of the encounter.
Sub-commander Moisés presented the collective vision—”a vision of visions, of peoples organized as Zapatistas”—on a specific aspect of the storm that humanity is experiencing: the climate crisis. In his presentation, the EZLN leader listed the changes that Zapatista communities are seeing and suffering in their territories, changes that have specifically altered their way of life and their irrigation and planting practices. “Where it used to rain, it doesn’t rain now; where it was cold, it’s starting to get hot; the trees are blooming differently: some are early, others are late, and others aren’t blooming at all. We should take this into account and take it seriously because no matter how much we fight for freedom, we won’t have homes, we won’t have life if planet Earth is completely destroyed,” Sub-commander Moisés said.
During the event, Captain Marcos recommended reading the book ‘’Navigating Collapse’’, which “dismantles all the lies that those in power tell about climate change.”
“The book tries to show that climate change is not a historical accident, but a symptom of capitalism that has irreversible effects. There is complicity among all modern knowledge systems, governments, and transnational corporations to propose what we call in the book ‘false solutions’ to climate change, solutions that only serve to legitimize capitalism,” says Carlos Tornel, editor of Navigating Collapse and collaborator with the Global Network of Alternatives, in an interview.
“The logic of capital is to try to convince us that everything can be done with a technological change where you replace one thing with another and that’s it, everything else can remain the same. Up there they say, ‘Let’s give money to adapt to this world degraded by capitalism,’ while the Zapatistas say, ‘It’s not about that, but about how we are going to defend life, the life that remains, through a process of siding with life,’” says Tornel.
At the close of the first day, Captain Marcos announced that during the first week of August, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) will organize a workshop with experts on the topic of the climate crisis. “It is no longer enough for us to agree with the analysis; we need to learn about experiences of resistance and rebellion. What is being done in the face of this, and is it true that humanity is the enemy of planet Earth, or is the enemy a system?” he stated.
Original article by Orsetta Bellani, Resumen Latinoamericano, Aprul 4th, 2026.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.