Raúl Zibechi takes us inside the collectives in resistance of Nuevo San Gregorio and into the hearts of the families who continue to combat counterinsurgency with creativity and courage.
Products from these collectives can be found in our solidarity store.
Considering spirituality as a support for autonomy implies overcoming narrow materialism in order to adopt a broader perspective. In Western thought the key to community is collective land, understood as a means of production and not a comprehensive life space. From what I could sense, and from what is established where the peoples resist (once again I remember the four families in Nuevo San Gregorio), spirituality is a central aspect that complements and sustains the collective possession of land.
When discussing the increased violence in Chiapas, it’s helpful to remember that there is a neoliberal effort underway to bring indigenous peoples in southeast Mexico into the capitalist marketplace. The vehicle for bringing this about is a massive infrastructure development plan, originally named the Plan Puebla-Panama and then re-named the Mesoamerica Project.
The support bases of the EZLN in Nuevo San Gregorio showed us that resistance is not for a day or a year. It is a way of living life. It is not a struggle to obtain something material, or to obtain personal or collective advantages. Even less for immediate results. The struggle is to continue being peoples who are different from hegemonic capitalism. And for dignity.
We are concerned about the facts that foreshadow a territory violated by the desire for accumulation and hatred towards the Zapatista peoples who are building a dignified life based on autonomy. We urgently call for national and international solidarity to express our repudiation of the aggressions against the peoples in struggle and resistance, specifically those in Nuevo San Gregorio, in the face of the persistent stubbornness in continuing to infringe upon the Zapatista territories.
