
It is the first day of January 2025.
I am riding in the passenger seat of a collective shuttle that takes us from San Andres Larrainzar to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. I am looking at the greenery of my surroundings, while smiling at the lessons and renewed hopes of the last few days. A confession from the driver pulls me out of my contemplative state: “They grow pot here.” I don’t know him. I have barely exchanged a few words with him to greet him, wish him a happy new year, agree on the destination and payment, ask him how he spent New Year’s Eve. A little intimidated, I look at him and ask: “How?” He answers quite naturally in a Castilian language that seems like his second language: “Here they plant mota. Before they used to pay 800 pesos a kilo, but now they only give 300.”
Puzzled and uncomfortable, I try to end the conversation with a “how terrible,” but he continues: “The Army came to clean up, but they left most of it”. Surprised by the turn of his story, I decide to continue: “That’s very messed up,” and he answers: “I don’t do that, I went north to work, to Tijuana, but the job ended and I went back.”
The talk continued to our destination. He told me how many young people flee town for fear of being recruited or killed by organized crime. In order to pay for the trip and the coyote, the families pawn their houses and land, which they almost never manage to recover, as the young men do not always manage to cross the border and, if they do, the interest becomes unpayable.
A few days earlier, during the first session of the Encounters of Resistance and Rebellion, the subcomandante insurgente Moisés (https://acortar.link/Y9BBEK), spokesman for the EZLN, explained this in greater depth: in the face of the violence that unfolds in a large part of the state of Chiapas, thousands of indigenous peasants hock their lands in exchange for money in order to migrate to the US. They do not always make it and this causes them to lose their land. “More than 28 thousand undocumented Mexican minors were deported from the US” to Mexico, it was recently reported in these pages, most of them (a little more than 3 thousand), are originally from Chiapas. At the same time, a new landowning sector is emerging,” continued Sub Moisés, ”made up of money lenders, many times linked to illicit businesses. This is just one link in the system that the Zapatistas have been analyzing for decades: destruction / depopulation, reconstruction / reordering.
Forced migration, whether due to direct violence, poverty or climate change, is one of the expressions of the storm, as the Zapatistas call it. Along with it, there are other phenomena such as wars, with their genocides and annihilations of large populations, or ecocide and its consequent climate change, to mention a few. These are phenomena produced and accelerated by the current economic model, which converge today in different parts of the world or in the same region, such as in Acapulco, Guerrero, which has been hit by criminal violence and natural phenomena turned into social disasters, and which returning to “rebuild” in order to continue exploiting it.
What to do in the face of this devastating and overwhelming global reality?
Protest, although there is plenty, is no longer enough. The necessary denunciation is not heard. Political reality and science fiction only offer dystopias. In a world devoid of utopias, hopelessness and meaninglessness accompany barbarism.
Aware of this reality, and accustomed to imagine and build alternatives with everything against them, the Zapatista peoples have listened to their grandparents, have dialogued with scientists from many disciplines, have received and met with resistances from all over the world, and when they confirmed and reconfirmed their hypothesis, the storm, they began to prepare for the day after, and better yet, they prepared themselves to build alternatives for that next day. And so, they have begun to show it to the world: the commons.In the caracol of Oventic, in a 12-episode play on December 31 and January 1, the Zapatista youth managed to synthesize much of their thinking and proposal. They showed the storm, but also the day after (https://acortar.link/PlOndu). With organization, desire for life, scientific basis and looking to the past to imagine the future, the Zapatistas take new steps in their organizational process, one that continues to be a reference for the world. They invite us to think the unthinkable: a world without capitalism. With the aesthetics and poetics that they themselves have designed to narrate the world, the Zapatista Mayans once again invite us to a horizon that breaks schemes and temporalities. Like that poem by Gabriel Celaya that became an emblem for so many generations desirous of a better world, today we can say that Zapatismo is a weapon loaded with the future.
Original text by Raúl Romero published in La Jornada on January 15th, 2024.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.