The climate change the planet is currently facing is a consequence of unrestrained capitalism, warned Carlos Tornel, PhD in Human Geography from Durham University, during the “Pyramids of History, Loves, and, of course, Heartbreaks” encounter, held as part of the 32nd anniversary of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) uprising.
“What we are experiencing today—these severe floods, hurricanes, fires, species loss, heat waves, among others—are the marks of capitalism on the planet,” he declared at the beginning of his presentation.
The researcher added that three decades have passed since international organizations began discussing climate change, but in that same time, greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for global warming, have increased by 65 percent.
Tornel, also a member of the Global Network of Alternatives initiative, stated that “we have exceeded seven of the nine limits” that guarantee the planet’s stability: climate change, loss of life forms, changes in terrestrial ecosystems, water cycles, excessive use of chemicals in agriculture, ocean acidification due to pollution, the amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere, and the excess of plastics and other chemicals.
“Today we are already on a planet 1.5 degrees warmer than the one our great-grandparents knew, but we are headed for a temperature increase of between 2.6 and 3.3 degrees,” he warned.
This, he added, intensifies heat waves, droughts, and extreme rainfall; it raises sea levels, deteriorates ecosystems, leads to species loss, increases migrations, and destroys ways of life, ways of being, ways of knowing, and ways of existing in the world.
“These same phenomena are accelerating, pushing more people into territories that today we can only describe as ruins, as a result of the crimes of this system we call capitalism, which has become institutionalized. We are heading toward a point of no return where ways of life as we know them are becoming increasingly unviable,” he emphasized.
Arturo Anguiano, PhD in Social Sciences, addressed the development of the left in Mexico but considered it “another right wing” because many of its main political leaders had origins in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
He even said that López Obrador’s administration was a mix of “neoliberal and developmentalist” policies and forged alliances with “right-wing” business and religious sectors.
“There is a de-ideologization of MORENA’s proposal and a shift to the right,” he noted. This phenomenon is repeated in other countries where those in power seek “to provide a way out of neoliberalism, which is experiencing various problems and crises.” In his address, Captain Marcos, leader of the EZLN, speaking of “heartbreak,” said that Zapatismo has exposed its form of struggle and organization, seeking to generate conditions of resistance, not to recruit more people, but so that communities can create their own rebellions.
“We Zapatistas see them with what we call realistic hope, a mixture of practice and theory in the action of subversion. It implies struggle everywhere and at all times, that is, across the entirety of geography and the calendar, common to everyone with a project, not of a state-run society, but of social relations, now including nature in those relations—new, different, challenging, subversive relations,” he declared.
Original article by Edgar H. Clemente, La Jornada, December 29th, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.