The Mexican Revolution and The Zapatistas

"Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com/revleftradio. Please follow us on Twitter @revleftradio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach." "Workers of the world, unite!" "We were educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're going to throw them right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up." "So we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned." "And what we don't have. " "But you want to lose our goal." "We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes, kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined." "People want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. Like, this is not my fault." "And I think that's part of the distancing from, like, we don't want it to be different." "Because that's always how our imperial war machine justifies itself. It's always under the context of liberating the Libyan people. Liberating the Iraqi people, the US Empire doesn't give a fuck about anybody except the US Empire and its interests." "According to the legend, Sturder actually died due to a beastage. So the ultimate individualist was actually killed by the ultimate collectivist." "Both sides are responsible for the violence. What the fuck are you talking about here? Are you kidding me? There's one side inciting fascist violence. The other side is saying, "Give us free healthcare." "Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host Anne Comrade, Bred O'Shea. And today we have on Alexander Ovena to talk about Mexican Revolution, the Zapatistas, and much more. Alex, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background?" "Hi. Thanks for the introduction and for the opportunity to be here. I am a son of Mexican immigrants to the United States. My parents were undocumented workers from Mexico. They came to this country in the late 70s. I am now a associate professor of history at Arizona State University, where I teach classes on Latin American revolutions, on the history of Mexico, on capitalism, on migration, on a bunch of those related themes." I'm really excited to talk to you. We've been planning this for probably about four weeks now, so I'm glad that we finally get a chance to do this. Before we get into the questions, would you maybe just for the listeners sake give a little bit background about how you identify politically or how you think of yourself politically? Sure. And this will make more sense by the end of our talk, but I'm definitely a Zapatista. I am someone who's more on the libertarian socialist side with strong affinity with anarchism, with the idea that those who work the land deserve to profit from the labor of that they produce on that land. So something that's very Zapatista, both the 1910 version of Zapatismo, but also the more recent neo-Sapatista incarnation. Awesome. Yeah, so we're going to go ahead and start with the Mexican revolution, and then we'll work our way up historically to the Zapatistas and Mexico today. So go ahead and just starting with the Mexican revolution. Can you go ahead and give us some historical background on the Mexican revolution, starting in 1910, what led to it, who were the key figures, and how did it end? Sure. So the Mexican revolution of 1910, I think, is probably the most understudied of the great social revolutions of the 20th century, but it's, I think it's really important, and it's not a biased thing just because I'm a historian of Mexico, but this is a really important revolution because it really marks the end of what one historian, Adolfo Julie, called the end of bourgeois peace, right? This long period that began really with the defeat of the Paris Commune, all the way up to the breakout of World War I, which several people referred to as like the Bella Puck of liberal capitalism of that era, right? So globally, you have the expansion of imperial relationships throughout the world. It's almost like a new imperialist wave. One anecdote that I think demonstrates this is the Berlin conference of the mid 1880s in which the major European powers of the day met and pretty much carved up Africa for a new wave of colonization and plunder, a similar process occurred to China around the same time, right? So there's this period of unfettered bourgeois peace, and really other than the 1905 Russian Revolution, it's the Mexican Revolution of 1910, which is a broad, peasant social revolution that challenges that period of bourgeois peace and helps bring about its end. So the more specific national context for the breakout of the revolution really begins in the last quarter century of the 19th century in which you have a leader in Mexico, Portfidio DS, take power in the mid 1870s and then rules up until the breakout of revolution at the end of 1910 or early 1911. Portfidio DS is an interesting guy because he had been, he's part of the Mexican military. He was a wartime hero who had fought against Mexican conservatives. He had fought against French interventionists who had arrived in Mexico in the 1860s. When he takes power and he's elected president, he is someone who has popular support, but as a decades preceded and as he continued to not want to leave office, and as he continued to spur a classic liberal economic project in the country, popular resentment increased in the state of Morelos, which is a small state immediately south of Mexico City. You had a constant conflict in the last part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century between a small agrarian communities and these broad landed estates called Asiendas who were expanding voraciously because they were producing sugar for the global market and the expansion of these Asiendas was predicated on the usurpation of peasant lands and peasant access to forced resources to water. So in the state of Morelos, you have these massively increasing Asiendas absorbing agrarian communities, some of which could trace back to origins to before even the time of the Mishika or the Aztecs. So the little tiny village of Anenequico could trace its roots back 7, 800 years and this is the small village from which Emiliano Zapato came from. So you have these Asiendas essentially waging a war on long-standing agrarian communities. There was resistance throughout, but because these landed elites had someone in power like Porfidio Diaz who backed them up, most of these resistors faced either the wrath of local bandits turned police chiefs called ruralis, or they faced the wrath of the federal army who could be rapidly transported to Morelos on relatively new railroads. And this is also the period that saw the expansion of the railroads throughout Mexico which allowed these commodities that were produced for export to get to market, but they'd also allowed the rapid transportation of the federal army to put down all these localized peasant rebellions that were breaking out in large part due to their resistance to both the political authoritarian represented by Porfidio Diaz because he stayed in power for more than three decades. But also this economic project that was really based on the power of landed elites being able to absorb peasant lands and create these landed estates to produce exports for the global market. Like sugar, Hennican, tobacco, Mahogany logging, things like that. By the time we get to the late, by the time we get to like 1906, 1907, there's economic crisis globally. There's famine in Mexico, a lot of the subsistence agriculture had been more or less destroyed by some of these landed estates, so there was famine, people were starving. And you started to see political challenges to the rule of Porfidio Diaz. In the state of Morelos, you had some opposition political clubs being formed in which we now know that Emiliano Zapata was participating with these opposition political clubs. The leader that was organizing or the leader who was inspiring some of these opposition political clubs was a northern Mexican landowner that went by the name of Francisco Madero. And Francisco Madero ends up being the first leader of the Mexican revolution of 1910. So when the revolution breaks out in Mexico in 1910, late 1910, early 1911, Francisco Madero, which is really this eccentric, short spiritualist, vegetarian landed elite from northern Mexico, ends up becoming head of a regional, a series of regional revolts against Porfidio Diaz, a dictator. They actually managed to overthrow him relatively quickly, so by May of 1911, Porfidio Diaz is on a ship headed to Europe for exile. Francisco Madero is being considered as a bringer of democracy to Mexico, but the fundamental issue that prompted these peasant communities to take up arms and overthrow a long serving dictator, this question of land, and this question of local democracy remained unresolved. Madero was a bourgeois leader. He thought that instituting some sort of political democratic program in the country was going to be enough to mitigate the peasant revolt that allowed him to come to power in 1911. But the core of this peasant revolution that breaks out is the demand for the return of expropriated lands and the return of local but patriarchal democracy. Madero, more or less, messes up his president. By 1913, he's out. There's a military coup. He's executed. His vice president is executed. And you have a new military dictatorship under the guy named Victoriano Huerta, and that really begins the onset of the more radical phase of the Mexican revolution, which will eventually morph into this class of a war between leaders who are more of the Madero mindset, and more bourgeois in the sense that they think all we need to do to improve Mexico has introduced some sort of political democracy, but leaving in place a highly exploitative economic system. But then you also have these peasant leaders with mass popular support who are advocating something much more radical. And of those leaders, Emiliano Zapata, from which the term Zapatista comes from, is the leader of the southern peasant revolution that begins in the state of Morelos spreads throughout the region. And he offers a plan that demands the return of lands taken by landed elites from present communities from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. And he also demands the return of, or the imposition, re-imposition of local patriarchal democracy. When this movement starts, they're basing a lot of their ideas encapsulated in something called the planavallela, in more radical redefinitions of Mexican liberalism that have been around since the 1850s. So they're basing some of their radical ideas on a peasant reading of a pre-existing Mexican political institution and constitution. But in the process of revolution, their ideas radicalize. And this is something that makes it difficult to both study and then teach to my students what Zapatismo as a political ideology movement actually means, because it's really difficult to capture a movement that's dynamic in process and radicalizing according to time to outside fact. To outside factors and to internal demands. So what begins as a movement that's calling for just the return of expropriated lands by the end of the Mexican revolution, you know, Zapat does writing letters to the Russian revolutionaries, he's writing letters to Vladimir Lenin. They're arguing for the nationalization of lands that belong to enemies of the revolution, so the land of elites. They're calling for the right of peasant women to divorce and trying to initiate a conversation of gender equality, but the core of their message never goes away. And the core of the message is we want land and liberty, we want the return of lands, we want lands taken away from our class enemies, and we also want radical direct grassroots democracy. Now, reaches a high of his power in 1914, when he's able to create an alliance with the Northern peasant revolutionary leader, Banchovilla, they meet in Mexico City in December of 1914. And for the first time in Mexico in history, you have two peasant leaders with little to no formal schooling at the heads of peasant armies occupying the seat of political and economic power. Because it's really famous photograph from December of 1914, in which Banchovilla is sitting in the presidential chair, having a good time laughing, and then seated right next to him at Zemilyano Sabata with his big mustache, his big sombrero looking at the camera in a really suspicious way. That was the high point of the radical peasant revolution phase of the broader Mexican revolution. From then on out, they're going to lose to a Northern landowner who was more in the mold of Francisco Madero. But this is still something that captures the imagination of at least me as a historian, and many of my students who've been in my classes. This idea that in December of 1914, there was this really radical historical possibility that Mexico did not follow through, but the potential of that moment says something and continues to inspire. A moment in which the vast majority of the population in Mexico, the peasantry, with all its different racial, regional, local differences, nonetheless were occupied the seat of power and almost determined the outcome of the Mexican revolution. Yeah, when you said that through the process of revolution, things become radicalized. It kind of harkens back to episodes that we've done on Venezuela and on Cuba, where the initial revolutions were just an attempt by the people to regain control of their own lives. But in the process of that, they became radicalized and they became more explicitly whatever, maybe socialist, communist, whatever. And you also mentioned that Zapata talked to Lenin. Can you go a little bit deeper? I don't know how deep that discussion went, but what were they talking about Zapata and Lenin? So as far as I know, it wasn't really a conversation. It's based on one letter that Zapata wrote addressed to Lenin. He sent it to this asapatista representative, who was based in Cuba, who was responsible for sending the letter out. But we don't know, I mean, there was no conversation. We don't know in terms of, at least I don't know, if it was received by Lenin or if it was received by some of the Russian revolutionaries who at that time had their own particular things that they had deal with. In 1918, but one of the reasons why that letter stands out to me is that a lot of the scholarship and the perspective that comes later on Zapata, they tend to adopt both from the left and the right. They adopt a very infantilizing discourse towards Zapata and the peasant movement that he led, right? This traditional conception of peasant politics being parochial, localized, they have no conception of politics beyond the village borders. But in 1918, you have, and me and Zapata writing a letter to Lenin and talking about why the Russian revolution is globally significant to a peasant revolutionary movement in Mexico, which to me, I think, crushes or busts some of these myths about the limits of peasant politics. And in that process of radicalization that occurs throughout the 1910s, we see that as well, right? So, the Zapatistas end up advocating for a system of power that's based at the level of the village, at the level of the peasant village. We never get to the point where they're advocating for the abolition of the state, even though in practice some other ideas probably would have led to that. I think they had an idea that was more, they, it's some sort of confederated state in which the regions and the localities had more power over a centralized state located in Mexico City, which makes sense because their experience with that type of state had led to them losing their lands and suffering all sorts of brutal military repression. So, in that sense, some of the people that come afterwards start to sympathize with Zapata and Zapata in start identifying the movement as anarchists, in that sense aren't entirely accurate either. The idea of the state never goes away, but there is this radical idea in that the land belongs to those who work the land. The democracy, a true democracy that expands into the spheres of everyday lives, right, besides this bourgeois political sphere, is to be determined by the people on the ground. You mentioned anarchism, and there's lots of nuance there, there always is when we're talking about these issues, but certainly Zapata was influenced by anarchism. So, if you could go into what influence that had on Zapata and how did that play out in sort of the political theory and practice of the leaders of the revolution? I think so, he had a group of, the most famous historical stadiums Zapata referred to these people as his urban secretaries. So, he had a group of urban-based anarchists who did work with him, who wrote some of his manifestos, some of the day-to-day written work that dealt with governance. But the very slogan that he ends up adopting, right, land and liberty, that's not entirely a Zapata conception. He adopts that from an earlier anarchist group in Mexico led by Ricardo Flores Magón, who ends up coming into the political scene in the early 1900s as part of the liberal Mexican party. Eventually, that his section of the Mexican liberal party ends up adopting anarcho-syndicalist ideas. Flores Magón ends up being a really fascinating guy because he spends a lot, he has to leave Mexico before the revolution and then during the revolution. So, he's in places like Los Angeles writing letters. So, he has his really interesting transnational relationship with anarchists in the US with anarcho-syndicalist groups. He has relationships with the IWW. And it seems like some of his writings and ideas did filter back down to the Zapatista movement to the point where they land in liberty as a slogan, which begins with Flores Magón, ends up being adopted by the Zapatistas. If you look at some of the Zapatistas' earliest correspondence, their initial slogans are a lot more in line with this traditional call in Mexican history, which is like death to bad government. We want liberty, justice, and land, stuff like that. So, that's where some of the anarchist influences comes through Zapata. But I think there's something really idiosyncratic about Zapatismo as an ideology or as a revolutionary practice that is also formed in the history of the people, the communal organization of Morelos. And these are great communities that have existed for centuries. So, I think it's really difficult to categorize this initial expression of Zapatismo in any singular political, ideological way. It has a lot of different pieces from different things, but it's also just a really original peasant-based project that develops in the state of Morelos. It begins, it's communally organized at the village level, and it begins as an insurrection against all forms of oppression. In that sense, it does have an affinity with certain understandings of anarchism. And there is some cross-fertilization, so it's just difficult to tease out where. But definitely, at some moment, there is the influence from Ricardo Flores Magon and his people and his movement on the movement of Zapata in Morelos. So, how did the revolution end? What was the events that led to it, what ended it, and then what happened directly after it ended? So, as I mentioned before, December 1914 is like the high point of the radical peasant revolutionary phase. After that, there are contending factions, this group called the Constitutionalists. In many ways, the continuance of the Madero group. They defeat Pancho Villa militarily, they'd start defeating Zapatistas militarily. But this faction led by this guy named Vendustiano Carranza, and it's more especially some of the junior military officers and some of his senior military officers, they recognize that this conflict was not going to end if they did not address the fundamental core or the fundamental issue that led to the outbreak of revolution to begin with. So, by 1916, by 1917, even though the Zapatistas and the Viestas are on the run militarily, their enemies realize that they have to rewrite the Mexican Constitution and include some of the demands that these radical peasant groups had articulated for six, seven years. So, what you get is in 1917 is you have the rewriting of a new Mexican Constitution in which the principle of a grain reform or the redistribution of lands to peasant communities becomes enshrined. The concept or the idea of local municipal or local democracy is also becomes enshrined in the 1917 Constitution. In many ways, that's what diffuses some of the more radical peasant movements or the impulses for some of these radical peasant movements. Of course, in the end, what ends up killing some of these movements or at least slowing them down with the assassination of their leaders. So Zapata is tricked and assassinated in April 1919. Banchovia, this fascinating northern peasant revolutionary who at one point was ahead of a 40,000 strong peasant army. He gets ambushed and killed in the early 1920s. So, really, it's the Mexican Constitution of 1917 that promises to address on paper some of the demands by the Zapatistas that helps resolve this revolutionary conflict. So, really, by 1920, especially after the assassination of Zapata, we tend to say that it's the end of the military conflict in the Mexican Revolution, the cultural aspect of it, the consolidation of the revolution on an everyday level for people throughout Mexico takes much longer. But really, that social democratic constitution that gets written and enshrined in law in 1917 goes a long way to ending the Mexican Revolution. For its time, for that moment, it is probably the most radical constitution in the Western hemisphere. It contains economic rights, social rights, it promises to nationalize all subsoil minerals belonging in Mexico. So, this will be an issue later, but the issue of oil as national patrimony, not the exclusive province of transnational corporations. But in the end, some of Zapatismo's ideas, at least the most important ones, on paper seemed to be adopted into the Mexican Constitution. You said that Emiliano Zapata got tricked and then he was assassinated. Can you go ahead and flesh that out a little bit? What exactly happened there? So, by 1919, the military situation for the Zapatistas, they had managed to expand their struggle beyond the borders of Morelos, but they were then reduced again to back into their original homeland. He was trying to seek a way to re-expand the military conflict. He receives word that an army colonel from the opposing side was willing to switch sides and go with the Zapatistas, promising to bring many of his troops with him. In reality, this was an elaborate ruse, probably concocted by Venoztiano Carranza. To make it believable, this colonel killed dozens of his own men to prove to Zapata that he was really going to defect. I mean, it was a crazy draconian plan. This colonel invites Zapata to meet him at Anasienda to go over his defection. Zapata goes alone. As soon as he goes into this Asienda with on top of this horse, there's someone sounds the bugle or makes a signal. And he's, soldiers pull out their weapons and kill Zapata. Then the troops take his body and start to exhibit it throughout in the main city of Cuernauaca, which is like the capital city in Morelos. So peasants can go and see that their leader was dead. So there's some pretty like macabre photographs. Another aspect of this is that in certain local oral traditions, some people refuse to believe that he had died. So there's all these stories about him escaping going to, there's one that says he went with his compadre de Saudi Arabia. But that's the displaying of his body as like a trophy also impacted many of the campesinos in Morelos. And that's not unlike what they did to Che when they finally, they finally killed him. There's a macabre sort of display of his corpse as if it's like a trophy for the victory of the right. Yeah, it's really weird. I mean, we'll talk about Lucio Cavanias later on, but they did the same thing to him in the 1970s. So it's just weird. It's interesting to think about how these, the bodies of these revolutionaries are being exhibited in these photographs, but also publicly. And what, what the political message is behind that. Yeah, absolutely. And I have a personal fascination with Emiliano Zapata, because my fiance is Mexican or family's Mexican. We have a, we have a mixed son together. And there's a family sort of, it's never been proved, but it's like a family rumor that their descendants of Emiliano Zapata. So I don't know if that's like a common thing because he was such a hero or what, but a small part of me really hopes that's true. Yeah, I would hope so too. I'm sorry. What were the, the impacts, you know, down the down the line of the rest of the 20th century in Mexico and even beyond of this, of this uprising of Mexican peasants? Like what, what was the legacy of that? I think, so something that one of the most important things that, that this peasant revolution showed the new class that emerges in power is that there are political force to be reckoned with and that they have to be, they could no longer be ignored, they can no longer just be exploited. In an unfettered fashion like had occurred on their portfolio, the S is long running dictatorship, right? So they, the fact that they managed to force something like agrarian reform into the Magna Carta of the post revolutionary Mexican state showed that, you know, they're not going to be able to ignore these people. And then when you early on in the 1920s, this post revolutionary government starts to co-opt certain images and symbols to legitimize themselves is like the legitimate government that emerged from a revolution, right? And one of the figures that they try to co-opt early on is Emiliano Zapata, but there's a double-edged sword quality to that, right? Because so on the one hand, these elites are using the image of Zapata to try to get popular legitimacy, they're trying to use it to get support from the peasants of Morelos and from southern Mexico. But Zapata is also a reminder of something extremely radical, right? Like this guy took up arms against a state and promised and fought to institute a new form of state, maybe it's a communal state, right? It was his revolution was about resisting and trying to overthrow all forms of oppression. It was definitely an anti-capitalist revolutionary process. So if you're an elite, you know, this is really like weird. It's like it's a really tight walk that they have to navigate between these two sides or like a defanged co-opted Zapata, but that's not how the people necessarily read Zapata and his message and what he fought for. So you have this dynamics throughout the rest of the post-revolutionary era in which the ruling party that emerges out of the revolution that will remain, eventually will become known as a PRI and will be in power, you know, from the late 1920s until the year 2000 when they lose the presidential elections. People used one the constitution, but also two they would use the radical legacies of people like Zapata to challenge this post-revolutionary government that could never stop talking about itself as we are the legitimate government that emerged from a popular revolution. So the memory of Zapata becomes something really important in the political cultures and the political ideas of many peasant groups throughout Mexico. So even though you do have an official defang Zapata that is on the license plates of cars in Morelos, you also have people who are immobilizing his ideas, his memories, and his struggle for much more radical ends throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s. So really, after 1940, the first major or an important rebellion against the Mexican state that at that point has become closer to the United States, it's adopting a rapid industrialization model based on the unfettered exploitation of the countryside. The first movement that emerges against it was led by an ex-Sapatista, Rubén Jaramillo, who's mixing zapatista ideas with Marxist ideas, with anarchist ideas, with the example of the Cuban revolution by the late 1950s. So Zapata lives on, his ideas, his struggle lives on, and as we'll discuss a little later on, it plays a part in the 1994 neo-Sapatistas that emerge in the state of Chiapas. Another movement that some of Zapatas and Zapatismo's ideas play an influential role in, are in these guerrilla movements that emerge in the state of Guerrero in the 1960s and '70s. Particularly one movement led by a rural school teacher, Lucio Cabañas, and his group was called the Party of the Poor, El Partido de los Pobres. This was a movement that begins in the late 1960s. By the early 1970s, it becomes a guerrilla force of about two to three hundred, the high estimate is about two to three hundred. Fighters, full-time and part-time fighters, who start to launch ambushes against the Mexican military. The movement was born from a lot of local grievances against these terrible boss politics and boss politicians who ruthlessly exploited and oppressed the people of Guerrero when these people try to use non-violent or constitutional means to protest, to seek the redress of grievances. And Zapatas' ideas find their way into this Cabañas-led movement. Indeed, some of Cabañas' great uncles apparently were Zapatista fighters in the Mexican Revolution. So there's this line of continuity of radical, peasant-based movements that are willing to adopt armed self-defense against casicas, against landed elites, against even the Mexican military. And in the process, radicalizing, developing into something more, right, into offering a different alternative to the Mexican nation, which is what the Party of the Poor tried to do in the early 1970s. But they're brutally extinguished by the Mexican military. And in Guerrero, we think there's something like, so the tune of six to seven hundred people are disappeared. There's mass tortures, there's rapes, there's the use of planes to dump people into the Pacific Ocean, these things called deathflights. So the Mexican state doesn't mess around when they see or when they think they see a new Zapata or a new incarnation of a Zapatista-type movement. Because I know that these movements tend to have popular support, because that bottom, these are movements that are true insurrections against all forms of oppression. Absolutely. Yeah, that's extremely fascinating. And we're going to follow that continuity right now up into the Zapatistas currently. But before we do, you talked about this notion of using his image and trying to gain legitimacy through co-opting and defanging, you know, Emiliano Zapata and what he stood for. I just have to say it because it's totally gross, but we have a restaurant downtown Omaha called Rojo. And it's just a Mexican restaurant bar and grill sort of situation. And their logo is a picture of Emiliano Zapata. There's no context. There's not even his name. It's just his image. And that is on the front of the restaurant and that is on the front of the menu. And it's just like this weird capitalist co-opting of a revolutionary image just for the, just for the, you know, commodification of it and the branding of it. So I just thought that's fucking gross. I mean, it's almost interchangeable with just this like longstanding idea of like the Mexican Bandito, right? Like that's existed in the US imaginary. I mean, if you ever watched the movie about Zapata, the Elia Cazan directed movie, I never have no, with Marlon Brando. And it's just, yeah, there's just this trope in the US political imaginary and culture imaginary about the Mexican Bandito. And many and sometimes Zapata is mobilized for that end, which is just totally gross. But yeah, in Mexico, it's obviously had a much more political attitude, I guess, from the perspective of the ruling elites. Absolutely. All right. So moving on to the Zapataistas. This is, I think, a lot more, you know, American leftists are familiar with this movement and supported Marxist anarchist. Everybody seems to have a generally sympathetic view of it. So let's go ahead and dive into that. Who are the Zapataistas? Why did they emerge? And what are the connections between them and the Mexican revolutionaries in the early 20th century? So this, I guess the Zapata, the neo-Sapatista movement is, it has several different origin points. So one of these origin points is located in the early 1970s when this revolutionary clandestine group called the forces of national liberation start to organize in several Mexican cities. They're in Mexico City. They're in cities outside of Mexico City. They're in northern city of Monterey. And you know, Mexico in the 1970s has something like maybe 30 to 40 armed guerrilla groups, right? Like it's, they're not the country of Mexico in that sense isn't different from other parts of Latin America, which you have the emergence of these armed guerrilla groups, both rural and urban. The FLN starts, it gets this idea that they're going to form a guerrilla focal or guerrilla group and implanted in Chiapas in 1973, 1974, which they do. But the small group of outsiders ends up not being able to speak the local language, not being able to connect with the local indigenous population. They're wiped out relatively quickly. I mean, there are some of the local communities review their location to the military and the military comes in, disappears, disappears. Some of these, these members of the FLN, the urban FLN is also smashed to a certain extent. And there's a small group of survivors. This group will end up reconstituting itself in the late 70s and early 80s. We think based on, there's a couple of good books by a guy named Nick Hanck, professor on Suco and Ante Marcos. So we think that by the late 70s, early 80s, this FLN starts to recruit a charismatic young philosophy professor in Mexico City to be part of the group. And this is the guy who ends up becoming known as Suco and Ante Marcos, this guy who had written his PhD dissertation on Foucault and Altusair and Polanzas. So that's one origin point. The other origin point is a type of really intense agrarian conflict to start to break out in Chiapas during the late 1970s and 80s. You have a ruthless, pretty even by Chiapas standards, a pretty ruthless governor throughout the 80s, who is willing to use violence and coercion to smash a burgeoning agrarian movement that's requesting and demanding the redistribution of lands. Chiapas in many ways at that moment, maybe even today, is a province of landed elites, particularly those who are cattle ranchers, livestock ranchers. You also have another origin point in the Catholic Church that in the 70s, at least in Chiapas, partly motivated by the competition that they're facing by evangelical missionaries. They are to adopt a more liberation theology perspective and they appoint a bishop in Chiapas. This guy by the name of some wild Reese who later becomes known as the red bishop. So you have, by the early 80s, you have a group, a young group of indigenous men and women who are becoming radicalized in these agrarian and political conflicts. You also have a group of young indigenous catacas, right? So these religious, they're attached to the Catholic Church, they're learning this liberation theology, but they're also doing outreach to indigenous communities in Chiapas. And a lot of these young catacas, Catholic catacas, are going to be vital for the FLN when they arrive in Chiapas in the early 1980s to start making connections to the indigenous communities. In other words, trying to avoid a repeat of the failure of the first FLN group in the early 1970s, but by the in the early 1980s, the first group of FLN gorillas who go into the jungle, they work with preexisting organizations, and the agrarian organizations and these catacas to create networks and inroads into the local indigenous communities. So the liberation theology of the Catholic Church, the FLN, and these agrarian, these land movements that develop in Chiapas in the late 70s and early 80s are all really vital to the formation of what ends up being known as the easy land. Or this up at the new Sapatista Army. They're official founding date is November of 1983. They obviously become globally famous on January 1st, 1994, when 3,000 of them start to take over several cities in Chiapas and start speaking to the media and Subco and Antdemar goes at that point emerges as a spokesperson for the group. So those are the three different like origin points that go into forming this group. And it's a group that in the late in the early 90s comes together and based on the consultation with local indigenous communities, vote to go to war with the Mexican state, hence the uprising on January 1st, 1994. And how does that play out when they emerge, you know, kind of out of the forests and try to take on the Mexican state? How does that play out? And what does that result as far as tactics for the Sapatistas after that? So it's this group had been so there's evidence that the Mexican state knew that this group was that this group existed and was training militarily from the early 90s. And for some reason decided not to do anything about it, most likely because they were in the process of negotiating NAFTA. And they didn't want to give any sort of semblance that there was political instability in Mexico, which would have affected the negotiations of NAFTA. But this group, when they erupt, when they step onto the scene on January 1st, 1994, they're entering a national political climate that's been rocked by a stolen presidential election in 1988 in which the three just unashamedly stole the election from from an opposition politician. They're stepping into a political situation in which the ruling party lost a lot of legitimacy, which the way that they handled this massive earthquake in Mexico City in 1985, in which they could not get help to the people who most needed it. And it was really neighborhoods themselves who organized and provided a lot of the assistance and the food to the people who died and who suffered injury, who lost their homes in the 19th and 25 earthquake. They were also, San Patistas were also stepping into a political situation in which the president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994 was the guy who pushed through the negotiations of NAFTA. And there's this famous, this guy by the name of Carlos Salinas de Gortarri, who was also known as the Chupacabras. But there's this, there's, he goes on TV in the early 1990s, I forgive those 91 or 92, in which he gives an address to the nation in which he announces essentially the end of a grain reform. As it wasn't trying in the Mexican Constitution, and he does so, so he's announcing the end of a grain reform using a lot of this neoliberal language about how this is going to like empower communities and allow them to enter the market and enrich themselves. He's using that neoliberal legalee at the same time that there's an image of Zapata behind them and he's saying, you know, like Zapata would have been for this. This is like a highly unpopular move. So Mexico had been going through neoliberal reform since the early 1980s and NAFTA is really like the culmination of it and the end of a grain reform. This president was hitting at one of the centerpieces of the legacies of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. So it was a highly combustible political situation into which the Zapatista step. And, you know, for 12 days in January of 1994, they occupied and held several cities. They're communicating to the world what their message is about. They have their manifestos, they have a declaration of war. They announced the principles in terms of what they want, the demands. And the Mexican army was caught off balance. Salinas de Hortadi, who was, you know, 1994 was going to be his last year and office was caught off balance. But they regrouped and you had this vicious counter attacked by the Mexican military, which threatened to wipe out the Zapatistas. Like militarily, a Zapatistas would have been wiped out by the military. But at that point, Mexican civil society stepped in and more or less forced the Mexican government to negotiate a peaceful end to the military hostilities. The Zapatistas in their first declaration of war, first or second, they announced that they were going to march all the way to Mexico City, right? This is kind of like a tongue-in-cheek thing, I think, in retrospect. But, you know, the Mexican military took that seriously and they tried to wipe them out. And, indeed, they did execute people after they executed Zapatistas that had already surrendered. But Mexican civil society forced the state to negotiate a peaceful end to the military hostility. And which they did. So, from mid-January of 1994 to today, the Zapatistas have been around. They've been a constant reminder to the people of Mexico of not just the legacy of Zapata, but also of some of its more radical ideas. But they've also brought visibility to the issue of indigenous people in Mexico, right? So, in terms of having a political culture imaginary that glorifies the Aztecs or the Mexica, tend to treat their actually existing indigenous people like shit. So, that's the one component that the new Zapatistas had that wasn't as explicit with the old Zapatistas, putting the issue of indigenous peoples, their cultures or traditions or histories at the center of this revolutionary movement, which really distinguishes it from other movements. From 1994 to today, the Zapatistas have survived. They have proven creatively in terms of in political terms. They've made political mistakes. They've made political calculations. They've managed to reproduce themselves generationally, which is always difficult for any Latin American guerrilla movement or insurgent movement. And they've managed to reorganize themselves socially as well. We can talk about it in a little bit. But they're still here. And I think that shows something about the power of Zapata's original ideas, but also how these Zapatistas adopted, modified and redeployed some of those ideas within a Chiapas and within a neoliberal Mexican context. Yeah, and this notion of the people coming, the masses are rising and defending the Zapatistas and forcing the Mexican state into negotiations with them is interesting. And I'm always trying to find connections to other revolutionary movements. And in 2002 in Venezuela, when there was a right wing military coup attempting to overthrow Hugo Chavez, it was the masses that rose up and beat back that coup. Again and again, you see that these revolutionary movements have mass support. They have people in the general population that support them and will defend them when push comes to shove. But if my understanding is correct, after this initial military engagement with the Mexican state, the Zapatistas basically tactically retreated. And the idea, as you hinted at or explicitly said, was that if they were to engage with them militarily, they would be crushed and they realized this. And so is it fair to say that they kind of tactically retreated and then just started to build up their own society in Chiapas as opposed to trying to continually aggressively engage with the Mexican state? So I think what happens first before the process that you described in terms of, so they definitely, there's a tactical retreat. But I think throughout the rest of the 90s, they're still engaged with the national political scene in Mexico. They're still trying to negotiate a political end to the hostility in terms of forcing the Mexican state to recognize why the insurrection took place. And then trying to force the Mexican state to give them certain demands. In 1995, the new president, Ernesto Cereo, he did another military offensive with the explicit goal of trying to find and destroy marcos. But again, he was forced by opposition politicians, but also by certain sectors of the Mexican civil society to step back from that military offensive. And to negotiate, again, with the San Patistas, and you have this long two, three year negotiating process that leads to a series of accords, but these things are never fully implemented. One of the things that was most interesting to me from this time period of 1995, 1996 is that there's a memo, and I think some people have discussed it, and it's pretty interesting. There's a Chase Manhattan memo in which the analyst says, look, the Mexican government has to completely destroy the San Patistas in order to show that they own the political and security situation in Mexico. So again, the connection with neoliberalism, with the global capital, and what they see, and how they interpret the political situation in Mexico, and how that has economic ramifications, is all encapsulated in this one Chase Manhattan memo, which this guy says in a really cold, analytical way. Well, no, the Mexican state just has to get rid of them. But they can't. They can't because there are civil society support for them, because they have support in Chiapas, and because the San Patistas are engaging with the political situation on a national level, and on an international level throughout the 90s. To a certain extent, that leads to a certain political miscalculation. So in 2000, you have the PRI, the ruling party, loses the presidential elections, you have this guy, he sent the folks who's become part of the hashtag resistance now apparently, because he loves to talk shit about Trump, but I can't stand the guy. He invites, he invites Marco and the San Patistas to come to Mexico City, he's like, yes, come, present us your demands, we'll take care of it. He famously said, I'll resolve the situation in 15 minutes. So in 2001, you have this much celebrated San Patur, where the San Patistas travel throughout historically significant cities and sites throughout Mexico before they reach Mexico City, and before they enter the Congress in their regalia with their ski mask and everything to present their demands. Now to a certain extent, they were out, excuse the pun, they're outfoxed in the sense that by them showing up to the Congress and presenting their demands, this guy could come back and say, look, I am the bringer of Mexican democracy, I allowed this group to present their demands. Of course, the Congress didn't adopt any of it, and it made, I think to a certain extent, it made the San Patistas look bad politically. What you described in terms of a more tactical retreat and trying to internally redefine what San Patismo in practice would look like really starts in 2003, when there's a serious issue in terms of the relationship between the EZLN as a military political organization and the indigenous communities that support them. So that's when they start to talk about reorganizing these autonomous San Patista municipalities that exist in Chiapas. So there's a series of municipalities and communities that declare themselves autonomous from the Mexican state, and they adhere to San Patista principles. They reorganize these into a broader regional organization called Caracolis, which is, I don't even know how to translate that effectively, I guess kind of like the, if you think of the shell of a snail, right, where you have the line that starts in the center and works his way out. The caracol, that's the form is the caracol and it's a regional organization, but it's these five caracolis are made up of these San Patista autonomous municipalities. These municipalities in turn are made up by dozens of communities that adhere to San Patista principles. So that process really begins in 2003 and it exists to this day, this idea that they're trying to redefine internal social political economic relations on this direct grassroots democratic, even anarchistic fashion and trying to redefine the relationship between the EZLN as an insurgent army and these direct grassroots radical democratically organized. San Patista communities, right, and the whole time they're doing this, they've been suffering a low intensity war that in the 90s took the form of both the Mexican military and local paramilitary groups, these groups that have names like peace and justice, right, like these groups that will attack San Patista communities. So they're trying to create an alternative society internally based on the concepts of good governance based on the concepts of mandaro, which is the idea that those who rule, rule by listening, by obeying the people at the bottom. But they're doing this in a context of extreme poverty, they're doing this in a context of a military encirclement and they're doing this in a context of constant paramilitary attacks. So indeed, Subco Anante Marcos no longer exists, right, his name is Subco Anante Galiano, he took the name, Galiano from a teacher who lived in one of these autonomous communities who was killed in a paramilitary attack. This teacher's name, the name that he had adopted was Galiano in honor of Eduardo Galiano, the great Uruguayan leftist writer who has that brilliant trilogy of, was the memory of fire trilogy of the history of Latin America. So they're trying to do this really interesting alternative social model internally within this caracol model, but they're facing extreme extreme attacks from the outside and they've been suffering these attacks since the moment that they declared themselves as insurrectionary against the Mexican state. So I do, we're bumping up against 60 minutes here, but I do want to get more into, you know, we've explored the history, I want to get more into the ideas of the zapatistas currently. There's this old Marx quote that you mentioned in our back and forth before we started the interview where he's talking about Karl Marx is talking about the Paris commune and he uses the phrase self-government of the producers. So in what way does that kind of, you know, attach itself to the ideas of the zapatistas and why does this history from Marx all the way up to the zapatistas, why does that history matter? So I think these caracolists and these councils of good government and these autonomous zapatista communities, I think what they are trying to create amidst terrible strife and against great odds is exactly what Karl Marx used to describe the Paris commune, right? What he calls that tantalizing sphinx of the bourgeois mind is this idea that the producers, the workers should be able to govern every aspect of their life, right? This idea that the people who work the land should own the land and should own the products of that land, right? It's a radically grassroots democratic idea that has faced the threat of being extinguished by Mexican Ruin elite since the first step at this day in carnation of these ideas. So in these autonomous municipalities, they try, I think, to follow this idea of self-government of the producers. They focus on providing healthcare, they focus on being economically sufficient based on what they produce internally. Political and economic decisions are based on consensus decision making, which makes some of these processes extremely tedious, right? Especially from someone in the outside going to win some of these things. But to me, at least, this is a Mexican version of the self-government of the producers. It existed in Morelos during the Mexican revolution and in much more limited way, I think there's an attempt to make this manifest on the ground in certain sub-at-east communities in the state of Chiapas. So they focus on things like education, right? They focus on being able to provide healthcare. One of the key issues that distinguishes these sub-at-east communities from neighboring non-sub-at-east community is, and this is something that's been an obsession of the movement since 1994. It's a treatment of women and having gender equity and gender rights and being able to actually practice those things beyond including it in a manifesto or a statement, but actually changing gender relations in an everyday way and an everyday form on the ground inside these communities. And this is if you read some of the, if you go on like the sub-at-east's website and you read some of their current writings, they'll say that they've made progress in this regard, but this is an ongoing struggle, gender equity for indigenous women. In broader terms, though, I think with these sub-at-east communities are trying to do what they're trying to build is not just a world that's an alternative one to the one dominated by global capital, by empire, whatever, but I think the impact of what they're doing has an effect on those communities locally who are different from them, right? So the idea at least, partially I think, is to spread some of these concepts that are actually being practiced and implemented in an everyday way to non-sub-at-east communities. Now the difficulty there is obviously that there, Chiapas has a ton of military checkpoints, there's many military bases, and you have these paramilitary groups. But in a Mexico that's been ravaged by this drug war that since 2006 has killed 200,000 people, 30,000 people disappeared. If you try to look for alternatives within the country, these sub-at-east's communities are one of the few to the horror show that is Mexico today because of this drug war. So to me at least there is, with all their defects, with all their problems, there's the issue of funding, are they getting their funds from NGOs, or they get it from civil society groups, that brings a host of other issues into play. But they're trying to do something so radical, and at least they're offering an alternative to a country that's just been ravaged since 2006. Yeah, and that ties in so much of what we talk about on the show, and so much of what people that are progressives, and leftists, and liberationists, that we talk about, and we think of, from Rojava to Cuba to Chiapas to Venezuela to Palestine, these are people, human beings, in the belly of globalized capitalism, late capitalism, the brutality of neoliberalism, trying their hardest surrounded by wolves to create a society. That is fair, that is just, that is equal, and that rejects this sort of vampiric, amoral, cannibalistic system of global capitalism, and it deserves all of our support. And we have to think about people all over the world doing their best to build a different world, and we have to support them, and support them critically of course, but what they're doing with regards to gender equality, as you mentioned, is really a beautiful thing. And it also teaches the lesson that just altering the economic base of a society doesn't do away with these problems of racism or sexism, that requires more work, and the zapatistas, and to some extent the Rojava incurs, are both doing this cultural attempt to overcome those centuries of patriarchal cultural conditioning. And so it's a beautiful thing, and it's the blossoming in the desert. I see these movements as beautiful blossoming of flowers, and a otherwise pretty barren desert of global capitalism. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think part of the issue for us is there's a difficulty even in imagining an alternative to the system that you just described, right? Like just at the level of a political imagination, we face a severe difficulty based on the terrible situation that you can call neoliberalism, global capital, whatever. These movements offer something different, right? So in a sense, they spark our political imagination, and I think in a really productive way, and they start to force the rest of us to interrogate and to ask critical questions and to organize and to do stuff. So certain extent, they're doing something amidst great difficulties in hardship, right? And I think in that sense, they're inspirational to me, but at the level of imagination, they show us that it can be done. And I think that's one of the first steps. We have to get beyond this idea that we can't do anything that we're powerless, and that we can't affect any sort of change. I think these movements show us that something can be done, and there's an urgency to it. Like someone like Galeano or Marcos would say, if we don't do this, we're doomed, right? If you, especially if some of the more ecologically minded folks on the left, like we adopting that perspective also gives us something else to think about. And I always say this, I'm like, capitalism won't be around in the 22nd century. The question is, will human beings? That's the crossroads, that's the species that we're at. So last question, just to sum it up, in your opinion, what is the future of the zapatistas, and what is the future of Mexico broadly? Oh, the easy question. Look, I think the zapatistas are going to do what zapatistas do, man, they're not going away. I think so one of the interesting proposals that they're working on now is that they're working with the Consejo Nacional, the Indigenas, or the National Council of Indigenous Peoples, and they're putting forth an Indigenous woman as a presidential candidate for next year's 2018 presidential elections. A Nawa woman who is working with the CNI and is working with the EZLN to offer an alternative to some of the politicians that are no doubt going to run for office in 2018. There's a series of questions that is being debated right now within the Mexican left in terms of the utility of this. But to me, it's still such a powerful statement. And it's really interesting to see what's going to become of this. But this also shows that the zapatistas have managed to survive some of the worst times in their history since 1994. And they've been able to reproduce themselves generationally, like younger people have grown up as zapatistas in these alternative spaces where they learn a different type of history, a different type of economics, a different type of politics. So, and I know this sounds overly romantic, but if you see what is happening in Mexico right now, you need some of that romanticism. Because the future of Mexico right now is bleak, unless the masses emerge once again in a pivotal way. The drug war that's been ravaging Mexico, the current iteration of it in 2006, 200,000 people that 30,000 people disappeared. And then in certain regions you have a culture of terror that's been just immigrated into those regions because people are rightly scared of pushing back against some of these narcos and their friends in the Mexican state. So, the future of Mexico is one of continued struggle and you have a lot of groups working towards similar ends. The issue is when you're going to have an articulation of the different groups working together. And it'll be interesting to see if this CNI presidential candidate might be able to harness some of that power or whether the more conventional center left candidate, and his party more and I will be able to do something. But what I do know is that Mexico cannot continue in this way. It can, but it's only going to create to elevate the body counts. And this is also transnational issues, right? So, Mexico is definitely a narco state, but as a colleague of mine, Chris E. Thornton mentioned, the U.S. is a narco state as well, and that's fueling the conflict in Mexico. So, this is definitely a transnational issue that has to be addressed on this side of the border. Absolutely. Well said. And thank you so much for coming on. But before we end, can you please point listeners to where they can find your work and maybe give a recommendation or two that you would offer anyone who wants to learn more about anything that you've discussed today? So my work, follow me on Twitter, Alexander_Avina, I have some links up to some of my stuff there. If you want to keep up with some of the current events, I know you had it's going down on recently. Fortunately, one of their writers that covers Mexico, Scott Campbell does an excellent job, follow the Mexico Solidarity Network, follow the Chiapas Support Committee, go directly to the EZNL website and last is Hepatista website to keep up with the situation in Mexico. All right, brother. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate your time. No, thank you. This was great. I really appreciate it. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC]