Originally published in Spanish by the EZLN
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Translated by irlandesa



AUGUST: North-Pacific Region, the Eighth Stele

(The Indian Peoples Teach Governance and Govern Themselves)


From rebel and dignified Italy, the cloud makes a complicated detour in order to return. For reasons of wind and current history, she is trapped by an eddy of stones and Indian airs. At times they are the skies of Chihuahua and Durango, then the lands of Zacatecas and San Luis Potosí, later it is Sonora, then Colima. Suddenly, the mountains of Jalisco and Nayarit, and, further along, the roads of Michoacán.

It might appear as if there is nothing which binds all these states together, but it so happens that below there are underground paths and histories which know nothing of political divisions. More than 20 million Mexicans are living in these lands. And more than half a million indigenous are constructing an experience which has much to teach about the nature of good government. Did I say “constructing?” Well, I should have said “reconstructing,” because it is by looking to the past and thinking of the future that these Indian peoples are linking resistance with autonomy…and with other struggles.

There is Sonora and the bridge to North American Arizona which is extended by the Tohono O’odham (previously known as “Pápagos”). If there are any examples of the useless and artificial nature of borders, then here is one: the Tohono O’odham Nation is recognized as a people which are divided by the international USA-Mexico border, but joined by their history and culture. To such a degree that, at the time of the March of the Color of the Earth, this Indian people called on Presidents Bush and Fox, and both houses of Congress, to fulfill the San Andrés Accords (which took place seven years ago this February 16).

Further along are the Mayos or Yoremes of Cohuirimpo (one of the eight peoples of the Mayo tribe), with a wisdom which would put any postmodern philosopher to shame. And so they say: “Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to the truth,” “taking the land away from you is like taking bread and peace away from you, liberty and joy, the air, the sun and the rain…whoever seizes from you that portion of the earth which belongs to you, is in some way seizing your essence…destroy such a monstrous aberration, make the land for everyone, like the atmosphere and the sea, because, without land, you shall continue to be wretched and enslaved.” “Truth lightens and does not rend, and it always swims above the lie, like oil above water.” Reflecting on the indigenous rebellions which appear every so often, they say: “A thorn is a forest of warnings” (Extracts appeared in Ojarasca, La Jornada supplement. 2002).

In Northern Baja California, the Kiliwa indigenous, the children of the wind, lose their lives when they lose the land. There are now only eight indigenous remaining from this people, who were plundered by landowners, governments, Protestant religious persons, ranchers, INI bureaucrats and by Agrarian Reform, and who sing their history to new generations (Cfr. Los Kiliwa. The Last Nine, Juan Cristián Gutiérrez).

A wind carries the cloud to Chihuahua, where they are experiencing and suffering the disaster of areas of Mexico being turned into states in the American Union. The PRI, as well as its odd partner, the PAN, have demonstrated that, when it comes to doing the ridiculous, their North American counterparts have nothing on them.

The assassination of women in Ciudad Juárez is a perfect demonstration of the government’s indifference: frivolity and irresponsibility make up the primary focus of government policies in response to this problem. And it is not only a racist, macho and classist attitude. Yes, the Chihuahua government has no reason to be concerned about what is going on in Ciudad Juárez. After all, the ones who are being killed are only women, workers, young and poor. It would appear, however, that there is more being covered up. As if the assassin, or assassins, were part of that small group of powerful who determine who lives and how they live in the North, and who dies and how they die. The horror of the sacrificed women in Ciudad Juárez renders any movie about serial killers akin to the Sunday comics. Nothing, neither public outcry, nor reports by the local and national press, nor demonstrations, nor denuncias, have moved the various governments. More than irresponsibility, their incompetence is suggestive of complicity (for more information on this subject, see the web page of “Comunicación e Información sobre la Mujeres.” Cimac. www.cimacnoticias.com).

But, in the Tarahumara sierra, the Rarámuri are seeking another door in order to leave the alley of death and misery. And so they cross hands and eyes with the O’odham and Tepehuano of Chihuahua and Durango and with the Tohono O’odham and Pápago in Sonora. Their resistance work is the reclamation of their religiousness, their community and their rights to the forest and the land.

Ricardo Robles SJ, perhaps the person who best knows the reality of the Tarahumara sierra, recounts how the Rarámuri, who work with their hearts in the community, recently delivered a heavy blow to government subterfuge. They managed to hold a consulta (which was able to be extended throughout the spread out ranches which dot the canyons of the Tarahumara sierra), resulting in the rejection of the Cevallos-Bartlett-Ortega counter-reform. Because the Rarámuri, Rarómari and Odani are happy examples of the struggle for the word. In May of 2001, they wrote to the Congress of Chihuahua: “We are not in accord with what was agreed to…the autonomy was not recognized of our rights to be different indigenous peoples, but not different from being Mexican citizens…we are asking them to give us a space to speak our word, our thoughts…we have always, in fact, existed without respect for our rights and indigenous culture.”

The politicians, as was to be expected, did not listen. They treated them with contempt, racism and arrogance, that is, in the manner of professional politicians. They told them that there was no money to hold a consulta with the peoples. The indigenous responded: we will do it ourselves. And, as the indigenous, unlike politicians, honor their word, they held the consulta. For six months, without any resources other than their dignified heart, they covered the Tarahumara sierra and accomplished the broadest and most reliable consulta that had ever been held in these lands. Six municipalities, 64 communities and 4567 written and electronic signatures, which said “NO” to the Cevallos-Bartlett-Ortega law. When they took the results to the Chihuahua congress, they told them: “You don’t know anything!”

One might certainly reflect on the Power’s incapacity for listening, but the issue here is in noting the capacity of the Indian peoples for engaging in dialogue, the word. And it is through the path of the word that they find themselves, their history, their culture, their sorrows, their hopes. And they also find the other…

For example, the Tepehuano in Durango and Zacatecas. Yes, in the Zacatecas of the candidate for the Presidency of Mexico, Monreal, where there is no route for indigenous and non-indigenous women other than that of prostitution. Where the largest black market in dollars in Mexico exists. Where suicide rates, even among children, are increasing. Where maquiladoras and migration to the United States are proliferating.

And, in Durango, the Indian peoples of the North of Mexico are finding the hand and eyes of the Wixaritari. The Huicholes are thus becoming a bridge which unites what the evil and cruel logic of capital separates: indigenous resistance.

In what is called the Central-Pacific region (but which, in reality, is also interwoven with the North, the South, the Gulf and the Southeast of Mexico), several meetings of doctors have been held. They have been engaged against bioprospecting, against the certification of doctors and against the INI’s spurious consultas. Some of the peoples are fighting through protection orders against the constitutional reform, and others through objections, but always through their everyday construction of autonomy, of indigenous self-government.

If these peoples have anything in common, in addition to the color they are of the earth, it is that their voices are raised in protest as communities, and they give weight to commissioners, to traditional authorities and to comuneros and comuneras.

In Jalisco and Nayarit, the Wixaritari are committed to continuing to win judgments against the invaders, but, at the same time, they are seeking to strengthen the edges of their land, so that they are not invaded again. They are suffering from the effects of the introduction of electricity and highways, from possible contamination of transgenetic maize, and they are insisting on their own curricula in education. They are implementing a variety of concrete actions. On the one hand, communal and traditional authorities (in Huichola, both words walk in accord) from San Sebastián and Santa Catarina (two of the great agrarian-religious Huichol communities) undertook a 15 day trek - each on one side, but in accord - around their community, along the border line of their lands. They passed over lands which had been invaded by caciques, drug traffickers, whatever, in order to now, yes, paint their line and to state that, from now on, no one was going to put them out, and, on the contrary, they themselves would be putting out those who were invading them. In order to accomplish this, they went about opening, with topiles, a three meter wide trail marking the real borders of their community. They made readjustments in lands which had already been recovered, and they took the cows, bulls, mules and horses to their corrals so that the mestizos could come and pick them up, prior to paying fines which they imposed upon them.

But “modernity” also subverts itself. Groups of indigenous, equipped with global positioning systems, corrected the trail lines in accordance with plans. Along the way they were gathering histories of threats, the invaders’ mistreatment of those families who lived along the line (and who are entrusted with living there in order to defend the border). In one place, two Huicholes were detained who were known to have been assassins hired six months ago by narcos to kill a Huichol family. They had burned their house and hung two members of that family. San Sebastián authorities then, with the force of the topiles, apprehended and tied up the assassins, and they decided that they were not going to turn them over to Public Ministry. They stated that they were not going to kill them, but that they would keep them in jail and try them and impose community work sentences.

The narcos and caciques knew that they had taken away two people who could inform on them and blow the whistle on the Army and the Judicial Police. They combed the area for several days, but they did not find anyone, and no one gave them any information.

The accord between communal and traditional authorities in the Huichola is also another accord: the one between young people and old ones.

The Wixaritari, as they say from time to time, are not alone. Along with the Jalisco Association of Support to Indigenous Groups (AJAGI), they are starting, with great success, to get several community warehouses running which are buying those goods which the communities need from the outside at wholesale prices. They are then selling them cooperatively, much more cheaply than in the shops in the region. They are also initiating a very innovative program, which, though workshops, is educating young people to be careful in preventing fires, to not cut wood, that no one should loot natural resources, that garbage should not be left, and many other environmentally protective actions.

Just a minute! Could it be that the indigenous are organizing themselves to prevent fires, to prohibit the cutting down of the forests and to protecting natural resources?

So, yes, television lies. The Indian peoples are not only defending the land and caring for it, they are also defending and caring for solidarity among human beings. In the sierra, far from the television Telethons, a network is being constructed, through actions, by people in the communities who are in communication with each other, in order to lend a hand in emergencies, in map reading exercises, in putting out fires. This has had such an impact that now almost nothing happens in the Huichola without the entire community finding out, despite its being so spread out. They are the ones who investigate what is going on and spread the word. In sum, they are making progress, rapidly, in the creation of a community civil security system, not just for crimes, but for all kinds of emergencies, which is completely autonomous, sans “Plan DN-11.”

Several weeks ago almost two thousand comuneros met in a ravine in the Huichola, after having walked for up to two days. While the Kawitero (who officiated at the ceremonies) sang in Wixaritari fashion, the assembly discussed and reached agreement on the paths of good government…and of solidarity with other brothers. In attendance at this meeting were indigenous from Morelos, Michoacán, Colima, Nayarit, Jalisco and Durango, as were all the Huichol base indigenous who were able, exerting strong pressure against the famous INI consulta. The result was an aggressive document which forestalled the consulta prior to its taking place and which discouraged them from participating. The document, among other issues, insisted on joining in silence with the zapatista indigenous of the Mexican southeast. Days previously, in Bajíos del Tule, there had been an international encuentro of indigenous peoples. Present there were the Samis of Finland, Miskitos, Garifunas, Kunas, Amuzgos from Xochistlahuaca, Nahuas from Jalisco and Wixaritaris.

The Huichol Sierra. A blue deer appears and the cloud lifts up in flight towards the skies of the Wixaritari, while a violin begins a tune: “The horizon can already be seen…”

And, appearing on the horizon, are the skies of Michoacán, the one which shall now provide shelter and learning for the cloud-stone.

Michoacán is the land of the so-called “Corunda Power” of the National Action Party, formed by the Calderon family. On one side is the former coordinator of PAN deputies, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. Felipillo, who has been dreaming of working in Bucareli for three years, will be sent to Banobras shortly (Senor Calderón has been accused of mismanaging finances in the PAN parliamentary wing, thus providing him with “experience” for managing a bank). A bureaucratic position for someone who has never stopped being a bureaucrat.

Felipe Calderón, who dreams of emulating La Coyota Fernández de Cevallos, decided not to run for governor of Michoacán against Cárdenas Batel when he found out that part of the Friends of Fox organization in that state was supporting the PRD candidate.

Senator María Luisa Calderón is also from the “Corunda Power.” La Calderona, famous, as zapatistas and non-zapatistas know, for her despotic attitude and her whorish language, is one of the most incompetent and ignorant senators (which, in the case of the Senate, is saying quite a bit). La Calderona is also notorious for her lack of intelligence. A few months ago she hired one Mario Maqueo, who presented himself to the idiots in the Senate and the Fox cabinet as someone who “was seeking to break the inertia of the lack of dialogue between zapatismo and the government.” Senor Maqueo was selling an old tale: there were differences in the EZLN, and there was a possibility that a wing of zapatismo would want to renew dialogue. The dream of the government and the political parties! The EZLN divided! The story was undoubtedly sold quite dearly, because the government likes to buy lies (and, of course, also, to sell them). Among the absurdities which Senor Maqueo sold was that he knew the “EZLN’s Human Rights lawyer (!!!!)” who worked in…Comitán, Chiapas! Senor Maqueo went from serving that specimen of gentility and refinement which is La Calderona, into the service of another genteel and delicate person (and one with the same IQ): Santiago Creel.

Also in Michoacán are: one of the most aggressive sections of the teachers union, Section 18; the “Lenin” Students House; the students from the Tiripetío Normal School; INEGI workers; the employees union of Michoacán University; Uruapan civil society; street vendors; El Barzón; the CNPA, and others.

Many people in Michoacán sense that there has been no change. The local government has been making alliances with business and PRI groups. And the government’s actions have been the same as the PRI’s, not even the words have changed.

In response to the indigenous movement, the Michoacán government is carrying out the same strategy as the federal government: it has devoted itself to trying to break up the organizations, pushing all of them towards government positions through the mirage of government aid. And some of them have taken the bait. The one who isn’t a deputy has government jobs, and government funds are injected along with international foundations. “The government wants to dilute the resistance,” they say. “There is much co-optation.” A little while ago they even tried to co-opt some Purhépecha leaders, trying to sell them on the idea of an indigenous university.

But the government of the one who first betrayed his principles, and then betrayed the truth, and later betrayed his friends, accusing them of lying (the only thing he is missing in order to be a consummate “politician” is ordering repression), has not been able to assemble a base of his own in the communities, neither in the meseta, nor on the edges of the Lago, and even less among the Nahuas of the Michoacán coast.

There, for example, the Emiliano Zapata Union of Comuneros (UCEZ). The UCEZ’ work has been quite consistent, it does not have any links with the government, and it continues on its path of being an agrarian defender among the comuneros of Meseta and Lago, especially among those in the area around Pátzcuaro Lake.

In the lands of Michoacán, the campesinos and indigenous of the UCEZ are the ones who are the combative ones, the constant ones, the loud ones, the ones they always want to imprison. They are in resistance, then, in Pátzcuaro, Zirahuén (where comuneros have been incarcerated) and in Caltzontzin.

There is also a movement which is trying to recover communality, and even autonomy, throughout the Purhépecha Meseta, primarily encompassing the municipalities of Paracho, Cherán Carapan, Charapan, Nahuatzen and Zacapu, although Caltzontzin is also included. They have been most visible in the movement for the defense of traditional medicine.

In just a year communities and organizations have joined in their discussion, and their demands include issues of a common nature: defense of the mother earth, protection of communal lands, demand for the constitutional recognition of the rights of the Indian peoples, resounding rejection of bio-piracy, of the introduction of transgenetic maize and of official policies prohibiting the use of plants or arbitrarily reducing the practice of traditional medicine, with the clear intent of favoring transnational companies.

It is the genesis of a movement with multiple faces, political but non-party, which is spread across many geographical areas, and which, added to other movements, is the expression of a collective and individual, still invisible, resistance.

Participating in this drive have been: the Purhépecha Community of Caltzontzin with its Development Center for Traditional Indigenous Medicine of Caltzontzin and the Traditional Doctors of the Purhépecha Community of Caltzontzin, the Purhépecha Community of Cherán and its Kurikua Ka Irekuarikua Group of Traditional Doctors, the Emiliano Zapata Comuneros Union and the Purhépecha Legacy Organization. Also participating have been comuneros from the Purhépecha community of Zopoco and a group of traditional doctors from the Nahua communities of the Michoacán coast. Among their positions, for which they have been most visible, is a statement, the declaration of Caltzontzin (June of 2002), of which we have transcribed some parts:

“We are opposed to all the above mentioned government policies, to the prohibition decreed by the federal government on December 7, 1999, and to any other prohibition against the use of our medicinal plants and against the free exercise of traditional medicine by the people of Mexico. (…)

“The signatories are declaring ourselves to be in just and legitimate rebellion against all existing prohibitions, or any which might be declared in the future, in the use of our medicinal plants and in the free exercise of traditional medicine. (…) We are denouncing the National Migration Institute’s illegally refusing the admission of five delegates from the Tawantinsuyu Indigenous Movement of Peru into the country for the purpose of attending this Second Encuentro. We are asking national and international civil society if there really is a democratic transition in this country.”

At the level of community assembly self-government, the entire Meseta is active. But they are, except for the above mentioned meetings, quite self-contained.

The communities which stand out the most are Cherán, Nurío, Angahuan, Caltzontzin and Santa Ana Zirosto – which has been fighting for years to defend more than 5000 hectares of the best land in the meseta, always through peaceful and legal means. Despite that fact, they have had more than 187 arrest warrants issued against them and nine charges filed against the Communal Council, dating back to the 90s.

Also asserting themselves, and without anyone taking note, are the Nahua of the Nahua strip of Michoacán, which takes in the sierra and coast of Guagua to the Boca de Apiza, at the border with Colima, and whose principle enclaves are in Cohuayana, Ostula, Aquila, Pómaro and Coíre. They have many problems, given that they are surrounded by narcos, and they are sitting on top of minerals which are varied and strange, making them quite coveted.

The cloud frees herself from the eddy which taught her a part of the twofold history which walks in Indian lands: that of the looting whose accomplices are politicians and businessmen, nationals and foreigners, deafness and arrogance, racism and repression, but also that of the Indian word which seeks and is sought, that which speaks and listens, that which comes from afar and hints at the future, that of resistance and rebellion…

From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast


Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

Mexico, January of 2003.