By Gloria Muñoz Ramírez on December 31, 2023
The Zapatista’s struggle for Dignity. Chiapas Feb. 2001, photo: Bill Hackwell
What motivates today a group of Valencian activists to make a whirlwind trip to the Mexican Southeast to celebrate with the Zapatistas the 30th anniversary of the beginning of their insurrection? What are the reasons why 90 indigenous delegates from different parts of Mexico travel by caravan to be with their brothers and sisters? Why do students, activists, workers, searchers, plastic artists, filmmakers, dancers, rockers and theater people feel summoned?
The answers are multiple and can be analyzed from the struggles to which they belong and the reflection they find in the thirty-year-old Zapatismo or in the wars that flood the world; in the need to organize to face their misfortunes, in the fight against orphanhood, in the awareness of the national and global disaster and the impossibility of not moving. Yes, but not only.
This weekend people from 20 countries of the world and from almost the entire national territory will arrive at the Zapatista caracol of Dolores Hidalgo, in the municipality of Ocosingo, Chiapas, also in search of a celebration, a party, a dance and a sharing of actions and thoughts. The videos made by the EZLN as an invitation leave no room for doubt. They continue to speak with the heart of a child, now more of a girl, and of thousands of adolescents whose parents were not yet born or were very young when their grandparents decided to take up arms, militarily take seven municipal capeceras, declare war on the Mexican State and say “Enough is enough”, the emblematic phrase of the movement that continues to cross borders.
“Here we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the armed uprising against oblivion, against death and destruction,” says the welcome banner. There will come the launch of the proposal “No Man’s Land. Land of all”. What movement in the world today dares to call for an international self-managed and anti-capitalist party with everything working against it? The same that dared to take up arms at the height of the neoliberal boom, predicting that the worst would come?
From here on, the work of non-surrender and coherence will continue. But today the 30 years of their armed public presentation will begin with another dance.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English