Book: The Fire and the Word: a history of the EZLN

Four years after its publication in Mexico, the book The Fire and the Word, written by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, is released in the United States in an updated version and in two separate editions, in English and Spanish, both of them published by City Lights.

The original edition, inevitably incomplete, draws a landscape composed of pieces of the history of the Zapatista movement from its creation, in November 1988, to the birth of the Good Government Boards in August 2003. The introduction and the prologue were written by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, military chief and spokesman of the EZLN, who in an extensive interview also evaluates the first decade of Zapatista struggle and resistance. The English and Spanish U.S. editions of The Fire and the Word have an additional text that brings the book up to date.

The new epilogue to the US editions was written by the book’s author and by Hermann Bellinghausen, renowned Mexican writer and journalist who has been covering the war in Chiapas since its beginnings. Bellinghausen is undoubtedly among the journalists who most thoroughly knows and understands Mexico’s indigenous movements.

The epilogue deals with the current stage of the Zapatista movement, set forth in the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, published in June 2005. Its national component initiated a tour through “deep Mexico”—Mexico from below and on the left. The objective was to develop a national plan of struggle and a new Constitution. This initiative, which was called The Other Campaign, spanned Mexico and crossed the northern border to reinvent the map, creating what the Zapatistas call The Other Geography—one without walls, which has become a new territory where Mexicans and Chicanos encounter one another across artificially imposed barriers. This Other Geography finds echoes around the globe because, by refusing to recognize borders, it recognizes systemic problems that affect all who struggle from below for justice and dignity in any country of the world. This is basis of the international component of the Sixth Declaration, better known as the Zezta Internazional, which is delineated in this epilogue through its recent initiatives.

Since its first Mexican edition, the book The Fire and the Word has traveled the world. It has been translated into French, Italian, German, Turkish, Persian, and Greek, and published in separate Spanish-language editions in Spain, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. It is also currently being translated for publication in Russian, Portuguese, and Japanese.

In the last four years The Fire and the Word has been presented in approximately 180 cities of Spain, Greece, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Turkey, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and the US.