Rev Left Radio - The Mexican Revolution and The Zapatistas

Episode Date: September 18, 2017

Alexander Avina is an assistant professor of history at ASU. His research focuses on twentieth-century Mexico, primarily the post-1940 period.  His first book, titled Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside is a political history of rural guerrilla movements led by schoolteachers that emerged in the state of Guerrero during the 1960s and 70s.  His next book project explores the links between counterinsurgency, state terror, and the development of a transnational narcotics economy in the southwestern Mexican highlands in the 1960s.   He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on modern Latin American and Mexican history, including more specialized history courses on global capitalism, drugs and narcotics, Latin American revolutions, and the Cold War in Latin America.  He sits down with Brett to discuss the Mexican Revolution, Zapatismo, the EZLN, and much more.  Our Outro Music is "Brick by Brick" by Justified Aggression which you can find here: https://justifiedaggression.bandcamp.com/track/brick-by-brick Please support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio and follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with the Nebraska Left Coalition: https://www.facebook.com/TheNebraskaLeftCoalition/ and the Omaha GDC: https://www.facebook.com/OmahaGDC/

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. 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 throwing 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, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn.

We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. That 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, people who don't want it to do it. 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 U.S. Empire doesn't give a fuck about anybody except the U.S. Empire and its interest. According to the legend, Sterner actually died due to a beastie. 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, dude? Are you kidding me?

there's one side inciting fascist violence. The other side saying give us free health care. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today we have on Alexander Avina 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. 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 that 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 on capitalism, on migration, on a bunch of those related themes. Awesome. Yeah, 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 listener's 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, I guess, by the end of our talk. But I'm definitely a sapatista. I am someone who's more on the libertarian socialist side with strong affinities with anarchism.

with the idea that those who work the land deserve to profit from that, from the labor 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 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 the end. of what one historian Adolfo Gilly 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 bell epoch 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 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, Porfido Diaz, take power in the mid-1870s and then rules up until the breakout of revolution at the end of 1910, early 1911. Now, Porfidio Diaz 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 proceeded, 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 agrarian, 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. forestry 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 before even the time of the Mexica or the Aztecs, right? So the little tiny village of Aninequilco

could trace its roots back seven, 800 years. And this is the small village from which Emiliano Zapato came from. So you have these asciendas essentially waging a war on long-standing agrarian communities. There was resistance throughout, but because these landed elites had someone in power like Porfirio Diaz who backed them up, you know,

most of these resistors faced either the wrath of local bandits-turned police chiefs called Rurales, or they faced the wrath of the federal army who could be rapidly transported to Morelo, 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 that 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 risk represented by Porfirio Diaz, because he stayed in power for more than three decades, but also this economic project that was really based on the power of land at elites, being able to absorb peasant lands and create these land at estates to produce exports for the global market. Things like sugar, heniken, tobacco, mahogany logging, things like that. Now, by the time we get to the late, by the time we get to like 1906, 1907, there's the economic crisis globally. There's famine in Mexico. A lot of the subsistence agriculture had been more or less destroyed by some of these land of the states.

So there was famine, people were starving. And you started to see political challenges to the rule of Porfirio 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 Porfirio Diaz a dictator. They actually managed to overthrow him relatively quickly. So by May of 1911, Porfirio Diaz is on a ship headed to Europe for exile. Francisco Madero is being considered as the 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 as 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 had allowed him to come to power in 1911. But the core of this peasant revolution that breaks out is. is the demand for the return of expropriated lands and the return of local but patriarchal democracy. Madero more or less messes up as 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 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 is introduce 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, but 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 of 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 Plana Vallalla, in more radical redefinitions of Mexican liberalism that have been around since the 1850s, right? 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 radicals. 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 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, Sapata is writing letters to the Russian Revolutionary. 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, and we want lands taken away from our class enemies. And we also want radical, direct. grassroots democracy. Now, Zapata reaches a height of his power in 1914 when he's able to create an alliance with the northern peasant revolutionary leader, Pancho Villa. They meet in Mexico City in December of 1914. And for the first time in Mexico and 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. So there's this really famous photograph from December of 1914 in which Pancho Villa is sitting in the presidential chair, having a good time laughing, and then seated right next to him at Zemiliano Zapata with his big mustache, his big sombrero, looking at the camera in a really suspicious way. And that's, 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 the population in Mexico, the peasantry, with all its different racial, regional, and local differences, nonetheless were occupied the seat of power and almost determined the outcome of the Mexican Revolution. Right. 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, it may be, 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 address to Lenin.

And he sent it to a Zapatista 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 to 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 their 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 then in 1918, you have Emiliano Zapata writing a letter to Lenin and talking about why the Russian Revolution is globally significant to a peasant revolution. movement in Mexico, which to me, I think crushes or bust 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. 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. They 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 that start to sympathize with sapata and sapatismo and start identifying the movement as anarchists In that sense aren't entirely accurate either The idea the state never goes away But there is this radical idea

In that the land belongs to those who work the land Yeah 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 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 um who

the most famous historical study on Sapata referred to these people as his urban secretary. 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, I mean, the very slogan that he ends up adopting, right, land and liberty, that's not entirely a Zapatista conception. He adopts that from an earlier anarchist group in Mexico. led by Ricardo Flores Magone, 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-sindicalist ideas. Flores Magone 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. He's places east. So he has this really interesting transnational. relationship with anarchists in the U.S., with anarcho-sindicalist 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 Magone, ends up being adopted by the Zapatistas. If you look at some of the Zapatista's 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 we so that's where some of the some of the anarchist influences comes to through Zapata but I think some of the there's something really idiosyncratic about Zapatismo as an ideology or as a revolutionary practice

that is also formed in the history the people the communal organization of Morelos and these are graying communities that have existed for centuries. So I think it's really difficult to categorize this initial expression of sapatismo 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, right? So 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 Magone and his people and his movement on the movement of Zapata and in Morelos. Yeah, that's fascinating stuff. So how did the revolution end? What was the events that led to it? What what ended it and then what happened directly after it ended so it by the time so as i mentioned before december 1914 is like the high point of the the the peasant the radical peasant revolutionary phase um after that this their their contending faction this this group called

the constitutionalists in many ways a continuance of of the madero the madero group um they defeat Pancho Villa militarily. They'd start defeating Zapatis militarily. But this faction led by this guy named Venustiano 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 vigistas 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. And 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 like killing some of these movements or at least slowly, or definitely slowing them down with the assassination of their leader. So Zapata is tricked and assassinated in April 1919, Pancho Villa, 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. us 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 of the Mexican Revolution, the cultural aspect of it, the consolidation of the revolution on an everyday level for people throughout Mexico, it takes much longer. But really, that a 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 rights to economic rights, social rights. It promises to nationalize all subsoil minerals belonging in Mexico, right? So this will be an issue later, but the issue of oil as national patrimony, not the exclusive province of transnational corporations. But that in the end, some of Zapatismo's ideas, at least its most important ones, on paper, seemed to be adopted into the Mexican constitution. You said that Emiliano Zapata got a 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 Zapatisos who were more, 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 a federal, that a 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 Venustiano Carranza, I mean, to make it believable, this colonel killed like dozens of his own men to prove to Zapata that he was really going to defect, right? So, I mean, it was a crazy draconian plan. This colonel invites Zapata to meet him at an asienda to go over his defection.

Zapata goes alone. as soon as he goes into this asienda with on top of his horse there's someone sounds the the bugle or makes a signal and he's you know soldiers pull out their weapons and kill sapata then the troops take his body and start to exhibit it throughout in the main city of quernabaca which is like the capital city in more so so peasants can go and see that their leader was dead. Yeah, that's... So there's some pretty

like macab like photographs. Although another aspect of this is that in certain local oral traditions is some people refuse to believe that he had died, right? So there's all these like stories about him escaping,

going to, there's one that says he went with his compadre to Saudi Arabia. But that's the displaying of his body, right? It's like a trophy. Yeah. Also impacted many of the

campesinos in Morelos. And that's, That's not unlike what they did to Che when 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 Kavanais later on, but they did the same thing to him in the 1970s, right? So it's just weird. It's interesting to think about how the bodies of these revolutionaries are being exhibited in these photographs,

but also publicly and 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 mixed son together. And there's a family sort of, it's never been proved, but it's like a family rumor that they're 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 that's true. Yeah, I would hope so too.

That would be great. What were the impacts, you know, down the line of the rest of the 20th century in Mexico and even beyond of this uprising of Mexican peasants? Like what was the legacy of that? I think so something that one of the most important things that this peasant revolution showed the new class that emerges in power is that they're a 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 under Porfirio Dias' long-running dictatorship, right? So 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, that you'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 as like the legitimate government that emerge from a revolution, right? And one of the figures that they try to co-opped 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, it's just really like weird, it's a really tight walk that they have to navigate between these two sides, or like a defanged, co-opted, subata. But that's not how the people necessarily read Sapata and his message and what he fought. for. So you have this dynamic throughout the rest of the post-revolutionary era in which the ruling party that emerges out of the revolution that will remain that eventually will become known as a PRI and will be in power from the late 1920s until the year 2000 when they lose the presidential elections.

You know, people used, one, the Constitution, but also, too, they would use the radical legacies of people like Sapata to challenge this post-eastern. revolutionary government that could never stop talking about itself as we are the legitimate government that emerge 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 know, 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, Ruben Haramillo, who's mixing Zapatista ideas with. with Marxist ideas, with anarchist ideas, with the example of the Cuban Revolution by the late 1950s.

So it's, Zapata lives on. His ideas, his struggle lives on, live on. And as we'll discuss a little later on, right? Like, it plays a part in the 1994 neo-Sapatistas that emerge in the state of Chiapas. Another movement that some of Zapata's and Zapatismo's ideas playing 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 Cabanias, and his group was called the Party of the Poor, the Partio of 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. This 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 nonviolent or constitutional means to protest to seek the redress of grievances. And Zapata's ideas find their way into this Cabanias-led movement. Indeed, some of Cabanas' 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 casiques, against landed elites, against even the Mexican military, and in the process, radicalize and develop into something more, right, into offering a different alternative to the Mexican nation, which is what the party of the poor try to do in the early 1970s, but they're brutally extinguished by the Mexican military. and in Guerrero we think that something like to 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 death flights so the Mexican state doesn't mess around when they see

or when they think they see a new sapata or a new incarnation of a sapatista type movement because I know that these movements tend to have popular support because at 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, you know, restaurant, bar and grill sort of situation. and their logo is a picture of Emiliano Zapata. It's just, 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, you know, commodification of it and the branding of it.

So I just thought that's fucking gross. Yeah. I mean, it's almost interchangeable with just this like longstanding idea of like the Mexican bandido. right, like, that's existed in the U.S. imaginary. I mean, if you've ever watched the movie about Zapata, the Elia Kazan-Darcted movie.

I never have, no. With Marlon Brando, and it's just, yeah, there's just this trope in the U.S. political imaginary and culture imaginary about the Mexican bandido. And sometimes Zapata is mobilized for that end, which is totally gross. Yeah, absolutely. But, yeah, in Mexico, it obviously had a much more political edge

I guess from the perspective of the ruling elites absolutely all right so moving on to the zapatistas this is I think a lot more you know American leftists are familiar with this movement and support it Marxist anarchist everybody seems to have a generally sympathetic view of it so let's go ahead and dive into that who are the Zapatistas why did they emerge and what are the connections between them and the Mexican revolutionaries in the early 20th century so there's I guess the neo-Sapatista movement, 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 the northern city of Monterrey. and, you know, Mexico in the 1970s has something like maybe 30 to 40 armed guerrilla groups, right? Like, they're not, the country of Mexico in that sense isn't different from other parts of Latin America in which you have the emergence of these armed guerrilla groups, both rural and urban. The FLN starts, gets this idea that they're going to form a guerrilla focal or a 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, and they're wiped out relatively quickly. I mean, some of the local communities review their location to the military, and the military comes in, disappears some of 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 Hank, a professor, on Sub-Corpsante. Marcos. So we think that by the late 70s, early 80s, this F-LAN 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 Subcominante-Marcos, this guy who had written his PhD dissertation on Foucault and Al-Tusser and Polansas. 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's 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 start to adopt a more liberation theology perspective and they appoint a bishop in Chiapas, this guy by the name of Samuel Riz, who later becomes known as the Red Bishop. So you have, by the early 80s, you have a young group of indigenous indigenous men and women who are becoming radicalized in these agrarian and political conflicts.

You also have a group of young indigenous catechists, 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 catechists, Catholic catechists, are going to be vital for the FLN when they arrive in Chiapas in the early 1980s to start. making connections to the indigenous community. So in other words, trying to avoid a repeat of the failure of the first FLN group in the early 1970s. But in the early 1980s, the first group of FLN guerrillas who go into the jungle, they work with preexisting organizations, agrarian organizations, and these catechists to create networks and inroads into the local indigenous

communities. So the liberation theology of the Catholic Church, the FLLN, the FLN, and these agrarian, these land movements that develop in Chiapas in the late 70s, early 80s, are all really vital to the formation of what ends up being known as the EGELN, or the new Zapatista army. Their 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 Sub-Cohenante-Marcos at that point emerges as a spokesperson for the group. But those are the three different origin points that go into forming this group.

And it's a group that 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 Zapatistas 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.

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, when they step onto the scene on January 1, 1994, they're entering a national political climate that's been rocked by a stolen presidential election in 1988 in which the PRI just unashamedly stole the election 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 an NT&5 earthquake. They were also, Zapatistas 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, right? And there's this famous, this guy by the name of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who was also known as the Chupa Cabras. But there's this, he goes on TV in the early 1990s. I forget if it was 91 or 92. in which he gives an address to the nation, in which he announces essentially the end of agrarian reform as it was enshrined in the Mexican Constitution.

And he does so. So he's announcing the end of agrarian 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 legalees 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. Wow. This is like a highly unpopular move. So Mexico had been going through neoliberal reforms since the early 1980s. And NAFTA is really like the culmination of it. And the end of a grain reform is 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 stepped. 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, that demands. And the Mexican army was caught off, you know, off balance. Salinas de Gortari, who was, you know, 1994 was going to be his last year in office, was caught off balance.

but they regrouped and you had this vicious counterattack 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 right? The Zapatistas in their first declaration of war first or second they announced that they were going to march all the way to Mexico

Mexico City, right? Which was 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, they executed Zapatistas that had already surrendered. But Mexican civil society forced the state to negotiate a peaceful end to the military hostility, which they did. And so from mid-January of 1994 to today, The sapatistas have been around. They've been a constant reminder to the people of Mexico of not just the legacy of sapata, but also some of those more radical ideas. But they've also brought visibility to the issue of indigenous people in Mexico, right? So Mexico, 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 sapatises had that wasn't as explained.

with the old sapatistas, 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. So from 1994 till today, the tapatistas 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 managed to reorganize themselves socially as well that we can talk about in a little bit.

But they're still here. And I think that shows something about the power of sapata's original ideas, but also how these sapatistas adopted, modified, and redeploy some of those ideas within a Chiapas and within a neoliberal Mexican context. Yeah, and this notion of the people. coming, the masses arising 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 so again and again you see that these revolutionary movements have mass support you know 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 Zapatista is 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? I think, 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, you know, they're still trying to negotiate a political end to the hostility in terms of forcing the Mexican state to recognize, and why the insurrection took place and then trying to force the Mexican state

to give them certain demands. In 1995, the new president, Ernesto Cedillo, he did another military offensive with the explicit goal of trying to fine and destroy Marcos. But again, he was forced by opposition politicians but also by certain sectors of Mexican civil society to step back from that military offensive

and to negotiate again with his sapatistas and you have this long two, three-year negotiating process that leads to a series of accords, this San Andreas Accords, but these things are never fully implemented. You know, there's this, 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, I think, pretty interesting. There's a Chase Manhattan memo in which the analyst says, look, the Mexican government has to completely destroy the Zapatistas in order to show that they own the political and the security situation in Mexico, right? So, again, the connection with neoliberalism, with a, with a, with the global capital in 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 in which this guy says, you know, in a really cold analytical way, like, 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 Zapatis 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 a, the PRI, the ruling party loses the presidential elections. You have this guy Vicente folks who's become part of the hashtag resistance now apparently, because he loves to talk shit about Trump, but, you know, I can't stand the guy.

You know, he invites Marcos and the Zapatistas to come to Mexico City. He's like, yes, come, present us your demands. You know, we'll take care of it. He famously said, I'll resolve the situation in 15 minutes. So you have it in 2000, 2001, you have this much celebrated Zapatur where the Zapatistas 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, with the ski mask and everything, to present their demands.

Now, to a certain extent, they were out, you know, excuse the pun, they're out-foxed in the sense that like, by them showing up to the Congress and presenting their demand, 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 like adopt any of it. Right. And it made, I think, to a certain extent, it made the Zapatistas look bad politically. What you described in terms of a more tactical retreat in trying to internally redefine what sapatismo 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 sapatista municipalities that exist in Chiapas, right? So there's a series of municipalities and communities that declared themselves autonomous from the Mexican state, and they adhere to Zapatista principles. They reorganize these into a broader regional organization called Caracoles, which is, I don't even know how to translate that effectively. I guess kind of like 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 caracoles are made up of these Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities.

These municipalities, in turn, are made up by dozens of communities that adhere to Zapatista principles. So that, 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, radically organized sapatista 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 Zapatista communities. So they're trying to create, you know, an alternative society internally based on the concepts of good governance, based on the concepts of mandar obedeciendo, 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 the context of a military encirclement, and they're doing this in a context of constant paramilitary attacks. So indeed, Sub-Coanante Marcos no longer exists, right? His name Sub-Coenante Galliano.

He took the name Galliano 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 Galliano in honor of Eduardo Galliano, the great Uruguayan leftist writer who has that brilliant trilogy. of 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, Carl 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 Caracolets 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 booths, draw 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. It's a radically grassroots democratic idea that has faced the threat of being extinguished by Mexican ruling elites since the first Zapata's incarnation 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 health care. They focus on beings 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 witness some of these things. But that's a, 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 a much more limited way, I think there's an attempt to make this manifest on the ground in certain Zapatista communities in the state of Chiapas. So they focus on things like education, right? They focus on being able to provide health care. one of the key issues that distinguishes the Zapatista communities from neighboring non-Sapatisa community is, and this is something that's been an obsession of the movement since 1994, is the 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 Zapatissa's website and you read some of their current writings, like they'll say that they've made progress in this regard, but this is an ongoing struggle.

You know, gender equity for indigenous women. In broader terms, though, I think what this, these Zapatista communities are trying to do, what they're trying to build is not just a world that's in an alternative one to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, 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-Sapatista communities. Now, the difficulty there is obviously that their 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, you know, 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 Zapatista 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 you know there's the issue of funding right they don't are they getting their funds from in NGOs are they getting they you know from civil society groups that that brings a host of other issues into play but you know 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 absolutely yeah and you know and that just that ties in So much of what we talk about on this show and so much of what people that are progressives and leftists and liberationists, you know, that we talk about and we think of, you know, 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. that rejects this sort of vampiric, amoral, you know, cannibalistic system of global capitalism. And it deserves all of our support. And we have to think about, you know, 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 Rojave and Kurds 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 blossominges of flowers in 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 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. I mean, to a certain extent, they're doing something amidst great difficulties and 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 like one of the first steps is like 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, right? I think these movements show us that something can be done. And there's an urgency to it. Like someone like Galliano or Marcos would say, if we don't do this, we're doomed, especially if some of the more ecologically minded folks on the left. Like 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 and that's that's the crossroads as a species that we're at so 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 uh look i think the sapatistas are going to do what sapatistas do man like they're not going away um i think so one of the interesting proposals that they're working on now is that they're working with the Concegeon Nacional 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 who's

working with the EZLN to offer an alternative to some of the politicians that are no doubt going to run for office in 2018. you know, there's a series of questions that is being debated right now within the Mexican left in terms of like 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 it 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. So the drug war, you know, the drug war that's been ravaging Mexico, I mean, the current reiteration of it in 2006, right, 200,000 people dead, 30,000 people disappeared. And then you, in certain regions, you have a culture of terror that's been just imbricated 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 toward similar ends. The issue is when you're going to have, you're going have an articulation of the different groups working together. And it'll be interesting to see if this, this, um, the CNI presidential candidate might be able to, to harness some of that power or whether, um, the more conventional center-left candidate Lopez-Obrador, Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador and his party, Morena will be able to do something. Um, but what I do know is that Mexico cannot continue in this way. Uh, it can, but it's only going to create to elevate the body counts.

And this is also transnational issues, right? So there's, you know, Mexico is definitely a narco state. But as a colleague of mine, Christy Thornton mentioned, you know, the U.S. is an arco 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, you know, follow me on Twitter, Alexander underscore Avina. I have some links up to some of my stuff there. If you want to keep up with some of the current events, you know, it's going, I know you had it's going down on recently. One of their writers that covers Mexico, Scott Campbell does an excellent job.

follow the Mexico Solidarity Network, follow the Chiapa support committee, go directly to the Easy NL website, the Enlse Zapatista 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. Thank you. Build a wall up of a lingerance and hate. Close our borders with a smile on your face. Then my brain will be the division of a soul.

Completing gang, you've got to fear, I'm going to fall. Brick by ripple, break you two. Young and angry revolution from every war downtown. The division that you agree will be your fault. Strong together, we fight all for one and one for all. Take family slithers live up in your reigns. We'll stand together strong against you day by day. You're getting tired and peace will be your faith.

Using terror as you're taught and passed the blame. Brick by brick will break you down. Young and angry revolution from every war downtown. The division that you breathe will be your fault. Together we fight off for one and one for all Burning bodies, burning bodies, bombing children while they lie in the beds

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