Translated by Kristin Bricker
Dear Subcomandante Marcos:
Many thanks for the lines you dedicate to the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity in your third letter to Don Luis Villoro. We have read them with the care of those who are open to listening. From that care and listening we want to thank you for your deep humility and solidarity with the Movement and to tell you that your dead, like Dionisio-Chiapas and Mariano, peacemaker, we carry with us with all of the pain in our hearts. We also want to tell you that even though you don’t understand us, even though that which is new–that ability to try to make peace even with our adversaries, because we believe that the mistakes of a human being are not the human being, but rather an alienation from his consciousness that must be transformed through the patience of love–puzzles you, we share the same yearning and hopes, those of “a world in which many wolds fit.”
Peace, dear Subcomandante, is, as Gandhi said, “the way,” a way that is only made with everyone. You, 17 years ago, alongside civil society, taught that to us not only when you visibilized and dignified our indigenous tradition’s negative and humiliating past, but also when, through listening and dialogue, you opened the debate to that which, in the midsts of an institutional crisis, could be a new hope of national reconstruction: autonomy.
Unfortunately, power, which is blind; interests, which do not hear history’s heartbeats, and selfishness, that ferocious form of “I” that breaks connections with others, did not listen to you–changing power’s heart is always long and painful. The consequence is the frightening national emergency that the country is currently experiencing, whose epicenter, like a irony of deafness, is in Juárez, on the country’s northern border.
Today the war has ripped apart the four parts of Mexico (north, south, east, and west), but also, in the visibilization of our pain–which are many and always increasing–of our faces, of our names and our histories, has united us–in the peace of love, which leads us to walk, embracing pain, and to dialogue, seeking to upset the consciousness of the powerful–to find that plural “I”, that “we,” that has captivated us. It alone has been able to be born from the heart, from solidarity and hope, that is, from the great moral reserve that still exists in the nation and from which you [the Zapatistas] form one of its most beautiful parts. Today, more than ever, we believe that only in the national unity of that reserve–which is not only below, but also above and to the sides, everywhere–we can stop the war and find in all of us the path to national refoundation.
Mexico, dear Subcomandante, is a body ripped to pieces, a broken ground, which must be put back together as a cured body and land in which–as with all bodies and all real land–each one of its parties, when they are harmonized and cultivated in good, are as necessary as they are important.
Walk, dialogue, embrace, and kiss–those four manners that we found in our history made from the indigenous world and the western world–are the forms that we assume not only to accompany one another, but also to find the lost path and make peace. Walk, is to go to meet others; dialogue is to undress, to tremble, to illuminate the truth–which stings at first, but then comforts–; to hug and kiss is not only to make peace, also to break with the differences that divide us and put us at odds.
A couple of years ago some friends and I founded a magazine–I hope that you have a couple of issues on hand–: “Conspiratio.” The name comes from the first Christian liturgy, where there were two high moments: the “conspiratio” and the “comestio.” The first is expressed through a kiss on the mouth. It was a co-breath, an exchange of breaths, a sharing of the spirit, which abolished differences and created a common atmosphere, a true democratic atmosphere–perhaps from there came the meaning that the word “conspiracy” has in our era; perhaps the Roman empire, an empire, as all empires are, frighteningly stratified, said, “Those who conspire and endanger power.” When we kiss and embrace we create a common atmosphere, an unstable atmosphere–it’s true about all atmospheres–that can quickly disappear, but that doesn’t make it false. It is a sign of that which we yearn for and which, suddenly, in love, appears full of gratuity and life. In that way, to walk, to dialogue, to embrace, and to kiss is to do it, from our pain, for our dead–to whom we forget to give that love–for our young people, our children, our indigenous, our migrants, our journalists, our human rights defenders, our men and women–that is, for everyone. It is, in a way, avoiding that our soul’s indolence, stupidity, and misery condemns us to death, corruption, and oblivion.
You put it well when you referred to the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity–a phrase that I have used for years in relation to the Zapatistas: “You can question the methods, but not the causes.” It is for them, those causes, that stopping the war is everyone’s task.
Let’s take charge of what is today Mexico, let’s take charge of the pain and the forgiveness, let’s take the path of peace and leave judgement to history.
See you in the south, dear Subcomandante. While we arrive with the slowness of walking and the pain we carry on our backs, we send you and the compas a great kiss, that kiss which which our heart does not cease to embrace.
From the Arch somewhere near the Vercors Mountains,
August 27, 2011, five months after the murder of Juanelo, Luis, Julio and Gabo.[1]
For the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity
Peace, Strength, and Pleasure,
Javier Sicilia
Translator’s Note:
1. Juanelo is Sicilia’s son, whose murder sparked the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity. Luis, Julio, and Gabo are Juanelo’s friends, who were murdered along with him.
El Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos dijo una vez que “decían que con el caracol se llamaba al colectivo para que la palabra fuera de uno a otro y naciera el acuerdo. Que el caracol era ayuda para que el oído escuchara incluso la palabra más lejana.”
Sin embargo, los pueblos zapatistas no sólo contienen la violencia con que se les quiere acabar sino continúan con su cotidiana lucha por la construcción de un modo autónomo y digno para vivir. Por ello para honrar un año más de autonomía, recuperar la esperenza recuperando la historia, recordamos:
