Partial aereal view of the deployment, on 31 December 2018, of zapatista troops belonging to the 21st Infantry Division (the same one that, 25 years earlier, took the municipal seats of Altamirano, Oxchuc, Huixtán, Chanal, Ocosingo, Las Margaritas, and San Cristóbal de Las Casas, in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas — now reinforced with combattants from the 2nd and 3rd generation, zapatistas who were children or had not been born in 1994, and who grew in resistance and rebellion against the militarization, paramilitary atacks, and lies, slander and treason by the bad governments of the right or the progressive “left” and the “Marxist-Leninist” “revolutionary” “vanguards”). The material is a courtesy of the free, autonomous, independent, alternative media or whatever they’re called “Regeneración Radio” (https://www.regeneracionradio.org/); the edition showed was done by the Support Teams of the Sixth Commission of the EZLN. January 3, 2019. The EZLN thanks the compas from Regeneración Radio for sharing their communication work.

Words of the EZLN’s CCRI-CG to the Zapatista Peoples on the 25th Anniversary of the Beginning of the War Against Oblivion

Words by Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés

Words by the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee

Words by the Good Government Council “Towards Hope”

Words by Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés:

Listen in Spanish: (Descarga aquí)  

December 31, 2018

To our compañeros and compañeras who are Zapatista bases of support:
To our compañeras and compañeros who are Zapatista Autonomous Authorities:
To our compañeras and compañeros who are part of the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee [CCRI] and those who are Regional and Local Authorities:
To our compañeras and compañeros who are milicianas and milicianos:
To our compañeras and compañeros who are insurgentas and insurgentes:

I speak in the name of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation.

I speak in your name, as it is my job to be your voice and your gaze.

Our hour as Zapatista peoples has come, and we see that we are alone.

I want to tell you clearly that this is what we see, compañeras and compañeros who are support bases, milicianos, and milicianas: we are alone, just as we were 25 years ago.

Alone we rose up to awake the people of Mexico and of the world, and today, 25 years later, we see that we are still alone. But we did try to tell them, compañeras and compañeros, you were witness to the many gatherings we held as we tried to wake others, to speak to the poor of Mexico in the city and in the countryside.

(Continuar leyendo…)

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Al pueblo mapuche
Al pueblo chileno
A los pueblos originarios de América
A la Sexta Internacional

Hermanos y hermanas del digno pueblo mapuche,

Los pueblos, naciones, tribus y barrios que conformamos el Congreso Nacional Indígena, el Concejo Indígena de Gobierno y el EZLN abrazamos solidariamente la familia del compañero mapuche Camilo Catrillanca, quién fue asesinado durante una operación de un grupo táctico de Carabineros de Chile ocurrido el 14 de noviembre de 2018 en la comunidad de Temucuicui en la región de la Araucanía. Conocemos la lucha centenaria que el digno pueblo mapuche ha hecho para defender sus bosques y ríos así como la represión y montajes que los cuerpos policiales del mal gobierno chileno efectúan sobre territorios mapuches para acabar con la defensa de la vida.

Los pueblos, naciones, tribus y barrios del CNI, el CIG y el EZLN condenamos el cobarde ataque de mal gobierno chileno y de sus fuerzas policiales chilenas. Exigimos que cese la represión y criminalización en contra de los pueblos mapuches que defienden sus territorios. Exigimos también que la muerte del comunero mapuche Camilo Catrillanca no quede impune. Al pueblo mapuche reiteramos nuestra respeto y solidaridad. Saludamos su digna lucha por la defensa de la vida y el territorio.

ATENTAMENTE
Noviembre de 2018
Por la reconstitución integral de nuestros pueblos.
Nunca más un México sin nosotros
Congreso Nacional Indígena – Concejo Indígena de Gobierno
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional.

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Los Subcomandantes Insurgentes Galeano y Moisés cuentan la “historia del cine en las montañas del sureste mexicano” durante el Festival de Cine Puy ta Cuxlejaltic, Caracol de Oventic, 3 de noviembre de 2018.

Escucha en audio: (Descarga aquí)  

Invitation to the 25th Anniversary Celebration of the Zapatista Uprising, and to a Gathering of Networks

ZAPATISTA ARMY FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION
MEXICO

November 17, 2018

To all of the individuals, groups, collectives, and organizations of the CIG Support Networks:
To the Networks of Resistance and Rebellion or whatever you call them:
To the National and International Sixth:

Given that:

It’s the middle of the night.

And that:

It’s cold out.

And that:

At this crux in time—when it is neither day nor night, neither inside nor outside, neither shadow nor light—you find yourself unable to sleep, in that uncomfortable state of insomnia that makes you vulnerable to memories: the piercing memories of all the things you did and didn’t do, the long list of your failures and the much shorter list of successes.

Given that:

You ask yourself, not without cause, what this is all about…

You’re still trying to grasp the meaning of that phrase, “Everything is impossible right up until it isn’t,” which you heard-read in that disconcerting nano-mini-micro short film at the so-called “cinema for reading.” That film (?) was kept tightly lidded for the last 30 years (literally, it was in a sardine can) and was presented at the impossible cinema by an equally disconcerting beetle dressed as a knight-errant. Its title (of the film, that is), “The 69^th Law of the Dialectic,” is hardly rational either. It’s a film consisting of a single phrase, without images or sounds, leaving everything else to the imagination of whoever attends its…showing?

In any case, everything is absurd here. Here? Where the hell are you? You don’t really have time to ponder that because somebody rushes you along: (Continuar leyendo…)

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Fuente: Enlace Zapatista

Comisión Sexta del EZLN.
México.

Octubre del 2018.

Programa de exhibiciones en el festival de cine “Puy ta Cuxlejaltic”

Atención: Por causas de fuerza menor, las fechas de este primer festival se extienden hasta el 9 de noviembre inclusive.

Se exhibirán los siguientes filmes (en su categoría respectiva):

Categoría Ah, ¿te cae?

Sección Especial: “Una colonia ciudadana en las montañas del sureste mexicano”.

Roma. Dirección: Alfonso Cuarón.

Categoría Caer y levantarse:

Bayoneta. Dirección: Kyzza Terrazas.

Rudo y Cursi. Dirección: Carlos Cuarón.

Batallas Íntimas. Dirección: Lucía Gajá.

No les pedimos un viaje a la luna. Dirección: María del Carmen de Lara.

(Continuar leyendo…)

Joint Communique from the CNI, CIG, and EZLN Rejecting the NAIM (New International Airport of Mexico) and Voicing Support for and Solidarity with Migrant Populations

October 26, 2018

To the People of Mexico:
To the People of the World:
To the National and International Sixth:
To the CIG Support Networks:

The peoples, nations, tribes, and barrios of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) respectfully address the Mexican people and the originary peoples and campesinos who wage dignified resistance against the death-driven megaproject called the New International Airport of Mexico (NAIM). These peoples have sustained hope without giving up, giving in, or selling out, and they are a light for all of us who dream of and work to build justice.

We also respectfully address those who have been forced to seek in other lands what was stolen from them in their own geographies; those who migrate in search of life, as well as those who, without self-interest and in their own ways, times, and means, support those migrants.

-*-

We have seen, lived, and closely followed the struggle of the peoples of the Texcoco Lake and the surrounding areas. We have witnessed their determination, dignity and pain, which have also been ours. We have not forgotten the repression in May 2006 which included sexual torture; the unjust imprisonment of compañeros and compañeras of the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (People’s Front in Defense of the Land) and of the national and international Sixth; and the murder of our compañero Ollin Alexis Benhumea and 14-year-old Francisco Javier Cortés Santiago. Vicente Fox and Enrique Peña Nieto gave the order for this repression with the full approval of the entire political spectrum from above, including those who today claim to represent “change.”

(Continuar leyendo…)

DECLARATION FROM THE SECOND NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE NATIONAL INDIGENOUS CONGRESS AND THE INDIGENOUS GOVERNING COUNCIL

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To the Support Networks
To the Indigenous Governing Council
To the National and International Sixth
To the peoples of Mexico and the world

Sisters, brothers:

From the Second Plenary Assembly of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Indigenous Governing Council (CIG), held October 11-14 at the CIDECI-UNITIERRA, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, we respectfully address the compañer@s of the CIG Support Networks as well as the peoples of this country and the world in order to discuss and together take new steps toward the construction of the new world that we all need.

We bring you this urgent message because as originary peoples our struggle against the profound sickness caused by capitalism means that we must weave life—this is the task given to us by our ancestors. With hope based in memory and in times to come, we sow and grow life everywhere we can, weaving ourselves collectively as a people and thereby weaving ourselves also as persons.

(Continuar leyendo…)

An invitation to: “The Impossible Movie Theater”
Sixth Commission of the EZLN, October 2018

 ZAPATISTA ARMY FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION
Sixth Commission of the EZLN
Mexico

October, 2018

To the persons, groups, collectives and organizations of the national and international Sixth:
To the support networks for the Indigenous Governing Council:
To those for whom cinema is a hobby, vice, or obsession:

Part I and only:

THE IMPOSSIBLE MOVIE THEATER.

(Opening scene: The Serpent Offers the Apple)

 You’re walking without a destination. You don’t know where you’re going, much less why. Behind you is the busy street which runs along the wall whose crumbling facade mocks the also deteriorating poster of the Happy Family. In the distance lies the monumental stadium and its impertinent question: “Who rules?” Anyway, right now you have no idea where you are and you’re starting to wonder if you should turn back…but you don’t know where or why you’d go in that direction either. So you stop, but only for a moment because a little girl grabs your hand and hurries you along: “Hurry up or we’ll be late to the movie.” You don’t have a chance to respond because you’re immediately faced with a colorful sign declaring: “All adults must be accompanied by a child [niño].” But someone has crossed out “un niño” and written “a girl [una niña].” Another anonymous hand has scratched that out to write “unoa niñoa.” Someone else crossed that out and wrote instead, “None of that matters here.”

Someone wearing a ski-mask stops you, but the little girl says to the masked face, “he’s with me.” The masked person allows you to pass. You walk down a slope partially covered in cement, through puddles, rocks, and mud. Off to the side there are multiple wood structures with tin roofs. The fog is heavy, so the humble structures appear and disappear with every step you take, like “fade in” and “fade out” scenes. You keep going without knowing where you’re headed. The atmosphere reminds you of an old mystery movie…or a horror film.

(Continuar leyendo…)

(Story read at the close of the “CompARTE for Life and Freedom 2018” arts festival in Morelia, Caracol “Whirlwind of our Words,” mountains of the Mexican Southeast.)

Listen here (in Spanish): (Descarga aquí)  

It may have been a string of random events, without any apparent relation between them, that brought about this tragedy.

It may have been merely a coincidence, a bit of bad luck, as if destiny decided to feed rumors of its existence by dropping pieces of a jigsaw puzzle onto the now-cracked open heads of humans and machines.

Or maybe the Storm itself (yes, that storm that Zapatismo insists on calling attention to and, like most things we say, no one else seems to notice) revealed a spoiler, a hint of what is coming. It was as if the incoherent software on which reality apparently runs suddenly flashed an urgent warning, an unexpected alert, a signal so subtle that it was only noticed by the most experienced lookouts, those who focus on examining horizons so distant that they don’t even appear as factors in the frenetic statistics of the global system. After all, statistics function to show tendencies deeper than the drama of the day-to-day. What’s one murdered woman? A number: one more statistic, one less woman. Statistically speaking, you’d need more, many more of these “gendered” murders to even suggest evidence of a tendency—which would be that of the system’s runaway gallop toward the abyss, skidding through blood, mud, ash, shit, and destruction. What’s on the horizon? War. What’s down the beaten path? War. In the capitalist system, war is the starting point, the ending point, and everything in between.

But maybe I’m just talking madness. After all, this is a story, and one has to be careful not to veer into biased reflections, dangerous ideas, morbid thoughts, idle musings, or provocations.

Those who had to suffer through watching a movie with the late SupMarcos can tell you that it was intolerable. The truth is he was intolerable in various respects, but for now I’m talking about watching movies. Any time a firearm appeared onscreen he’d hit pause and launch into a long and pointless discussion about trajectory, distance, force, firepower, and the various shorter or longer geometric curves a projectile could take en route to its “objective.” During that pause he didn’t care how the plot was going to play out, or if other viewers were anxious to know if the hero (or the heroine, musn’t forget gender equity) would be saved; he’d just delve into his hopelessly erudite explanations: “that one is a M-16 rifle, NATO 5.56-caliber—named as such to differentiate between munitions manufactured in countries belonging to NATO versus those of the Warsaw Pact, etc. etc.” The rest of the movie-watchers never knew what to do: if they showed interest, he might go on even longer; if they looked disengaged, he might think he hadn’t been sufficiently clear and thus expound further, always eventually ending up, of course, at the Cold War. At that point SupMarcos would always feel obliged to explain that the term “cold war” was an oxymoron, the system’s way to hide the death and destruction that characterized that period. From there he would delve into the “fourth world war” and on and on until the popcorn got cold and turned into mush with hot sauce.

(Continuar leyendo…)