Ten Years After

The Zapatistas and Ayotzinapa

What follows is an article written by Neil Harvey and published in La Jornada less than two months after the disappearance of 43 student teachers from Ayotzinapa. What is more than astounding is that today, ten years after their disappearance, their whereabouts are still unknown. Their friends, families and relatives continue the search, not only for their whereabouts, but also for justice and closure. Despite election promises by AMLO to get to the bottom of the case during his presidency, he hasn’t done so with less than a week to go in office. What is more astounding still is that the situation has only got worse since then. The article mentions that between 2006 and 2014 some 27 thousand people went missing. In 2023 alone, almost 22 thousand people disappeared, an average of 60 people per day.

Perhaps the most astounding thing of all, happily, is that thirty years after erupting on the world stage, the Zapatistas are still here in Chiapas building another possible world. In the ten years since the students disappeared and the article was written, they remain steadfast in their view that, as AMLO passes the baton to Claudia Sheinbaum, real change will not come from above but from restructuring of social and societal relationships from below.

The Zapatistas also invited the family and friends of the 43 to the First Festival of Rebellions and Resistances as 2014 drew to an end. Schools for Chiapas was present and here we share some modest photos of the event with you.

The Zapatista encounter at the Oventik caracol on November 15^th with the mothers, fathers and relatives of the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa underlines the centrality of the word of those who are directly affected by State violence. As Insurgent Sub-commander Moisés points out, the word of the relatives has succeeded in making many people in Mexico and around the world wake up, ask questions and doubt.

It is thanks to the struggle of the relatives that the attempt to incriminate the students themselves has been broken and it is thanks to the spread of solidarity that the posture of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the Ayotzinapa case is an isolated one is exposed as absurd. If there have been more than 150 thousand deaths and more than 27 thousand missing people since the beginning of the so-called war against drug trafficking in 2006, how is it possible to say that the 43 missing from Ayotzinapa represent an isolated case? Rather, those who are isolated are the officials who only seek political damage control and to rebuild their international image.

The Zapatistas also appreciated the words of the relatives as the best weapon to fulfill the duty of not forgetting what has happened. This duty to remember is fundamental for the construction of new human relationships of solidarity. The past, present and future are intertwined in a historical memory that demands justice and an end to impunity.

Historical memory takes on special importance in a week in which both the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, on November 20^th, and the founding of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), on November 17^th, are celebrated, two events separated not only by time, but also by their political and social characteristics. Although November 20^th, 1910 represents the break with the Porfirian regime, the result was the reconstruction of an authoritarian political power in a more institutionalized form. The post-revolutionary regime took up the just popular demands and, to a large extent, turned them into mechanisms of corporatist and clientelist control, generating new cycles of worker, peasant and popular resistance. The student movement of 1968 brought to light the crisis of this system and unleashed a long struggle to democratize political life and create more just conditions for the majority of the population. However, the crisis of the PRI regime was not resolved in this sense, but by the imposition of a neoliberal regime led by the business and political sectors most aligned with the interests of foreign governments and transnational corporations.

BAEZLN welcome the families of the 43 to Oventic

Another way out of post-revolutionary authoritarianism has been that undertaken by the EZLN, a movement that represents the convergence of the revolutionary left of the 1960s and 70s with the local resistance of the indigenous communities of Chiapas to the exploitation of landowners and political repression by state authorities. For ten years the Zapatistas built a movement in silence and their declaration of ¡Ya Basta! on January 1^st, 1994 broke the image of the first-world Mexico that Salinas wanted to sell to investors. From then on, the Zapatistas have built their own forms of autonomous government, despite the aggressions at the hands of the Army, paramilitaries and groups affiliated with the different political parties.

For the Zapatistas, therefore, the current crisis in Mexico opens up different possibilities. One is the recomposition of the groups and leaders of the parties in power, which does not offer justice, but rather continuity. An alternative is the construction of other relationships based on the control of the government by society. In this way, says Sub-commander Moisés, the result will not be a change of names and labels where the one at the top remains at the top at the expense of those at the bottom. The real transformation will not be a change of government, but of a relationship, one where the people rule and the government obeys.

At this moment, the demands are very clear: the appearance of the missing people alive; the punishment of the authorities at all levels; and an end to the conditions that continue to allow these crimes. These are demands that have become the duty of everyone and the necessary step towards a just and dignified future.

Original by Neil Harvey, La Jornada, November 19th, 2014.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.