The Zapatistas and the Other Campaign

The Pedestrians of History, Part IV
Two Pedestrians on Different Paths...and with Different Destinations

El Kilombo Intergaláctico

1. The “ways” of a leader. The rejection of Lopez Obrador by the “presidential couple” grew along with the candidacy of the Tabasqueño. With his morning conferences (and the broad coverage afforded him by the mass media, today declared enemies of the perredista), the mayor of Mexico City went about making the agenda for Los Pinos...and for the rest of the political class. One could be in the most remote corner of the country and would still know what Fox had said (well, when he managed to articulate something comprehensible), what AMLO had said, and at the end of the day, what the rest of the cast of Mexican politics said about what was said…by what was said by the mayor of Mexico City. For Fox this didn’t seem to be a problem...for awhile. In one television program, Lopez Obrador mentioned he was disconcerted by the sudden hostility of “Mr. President” (remember that part about “you have to protect the presidential office”). “Yes he was my friend, I don’t know what happened to him,” AMLO said. Well, what happened is that the “presidential office” was now a couple: that formed by Vicente Fox and Martha Sahagún. And “Mrs. Martha” as her husband calls her, wanted, and wants, not to be the Mrs. of the president, but to be Mrs. President.

If it sounds something out of the theater, that’s no accident. In the daily comedy that Los Pinos represents, Mrs. Sahagún always had the starring role (although not always the most fortunate, one can’t be demanding). Mrs. Martha launched her long, and for now stunted, career for the presidential seat very early on—precisely when only Lopez Obrador appeared on the scene as the strongest aspirant. But, while she went about ridding the cabinet and Fox’s inner circle of those uncomfortable (for her) personalities, Martha looked with desperation on the fact that AMLO maintained position. One didn’t have to have much sense (and they didn’t in fact have much) to realize that who would be Martha’s rival if she became candidate for the PAN.

The work of the “video scandals” was the first indication of a serious struggle to try to take AMLO out of the presidential race. The struggle was raised to the category of battle with the attempt to strip him of immunity and remove him from office. If in the videos you could see the hand of the Fox government, in the “desafuero” [like “impeachment”] their nerve was unparalleled. A growing citizen mobilization (that Lopez Obrador himself de-activated) promised Fox a crushing defeat. But in politics there are no final battles.

Meanwhile, Lopez Obrador was constructing a candidacy, that is, an image. Of course in order to achieve it the privileged balcony of the Mexico City government would not be enough; in the PRD the figure of Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas Solorzano still carried a lot of weight. But the Mexico City government was not only an opportunity to be in the media spotlight, it also meant money, lots of money. And this tune had a lot of “rating,” among the political class as a whole, not to mention in the perredista leadership. With discrete agility, AMLO began “winning” the sympathy of (and control over) the apparatus of the Revolutionary Democratic Party...and an important sector of intellectuals, artists, and scientists. For the former, a budget. For the latter, engagement and special attention.

In summary, everything was going well.

It was then that some of the informational media released its first bait, which lopeobradorismo swallowed happily: the first polls. As in these polls he appeared with a scandalous advantage over the other hopefuls, AMLO gave them credibility and backing. Favored and adored by the press at that point, Lopez Obrador forgot a basic rule of the puddled territory of the media: the fleeting and the instantaneous. The media make heroes (“and heroines, Martha adds enthusiastically—I’ll leave it up to you if the diminutive has an “h”) and villains (“and [female] villains adds Elba Esther Gordillo), not just in soap operas, but also on the political scene. But just as they make them, they unmake them. The “mature,” “prudent,” and “responsible” head of government Lopez Obrador was at the beginning later became the “irresponsible,” “messianic,” and “provocateur” politician, and the polls that had put him ahead, now put him behind.

In the mobilization against the “impeachment,” one could see the first indications of Lopez Obrador’s “ways.” Although it was evident that not a few of those who mobilized did so against the injustice, not because they supported him, AMLO used this movement to openly launch his campaign for the Mexican presidency. When the mobilization began to convert itself into a movement (in some groups there appeared a restlessness to talk about deeper problems such as the place of science, art, culture, and above all, political goings on) and the Fox government recoiled, Lopez Obrador sent the people home.

The objective—to stop the “impeachment” and put AMLO and the top of the wave—had been achieved and AMLO had pledged to stop the mobilizations. And he did.

Lopez Obrador’s message to the rest of the political class (of which he is a part, don’t forget) and the gentlemen (and ladies) of money was clear: “I have the capacity not only to convoke a huge mobilization, but also to direct it, control it, measure it out...and stop it.”

2. AMLO’s intellectuals. From one part of the progressive intellectual sector began to arise, as of then, what we know as “cultured lopezobradorismo.” This tendency would initiate the construction of a new classification to locate those who moved within or hang around political Mexico, a classification which can be divided in two: the good (those that are with AMLO, that is, the “nice” and “popular”), and the bad (those that are not with AMLO, that is, the envious, according to Elenita). Whatever criticism or questioning directed at Lopez Obrador, even if they were lukewarm and harmless, was catalogued as a conspiracy, as coming from Carlos Salinas de Gortari, from the dark forces of the far right, from the Yunque, from a hidden conservatism. Now that they are somewhat “tolerant,” the criticisms of lopezobradorismo are labeled “sectarian,” “marginal,” “ultra,” or “infantile.”
With a stagnation worthy of a better cause, this sector began constructing a sectarian, intolerant, despotic, and petty thought. And it did this so effectively that this thinking is what guided Lopez Obrador’s intellectual “mirrors” in the electoral campaign, later in the resistance movement against the fraud, and now in AMLO’s CND.

When the Mexican newspaper La Jornada headlined one of its August 2005 editions (on the occasion of the first preparatory meeting of the Other Campaign): “they’re either with us or against us” (something like that), they were both mistaken and not. Marcos didn’t say it. But the phrase was said then and continues to be said since by the “cultured lopezoradorismo.”

This thinking (that began to be consolidated by ignoring the PRD’s support for the indigenous counterreform) encouraged the closing of eyes and ears when the perredistas from Zinacantan, in the Altos of Chiapas, attacked Zapatista support bases; when it was permitted that the assassinations of human rights defender Digna Ochoa y Placido, as well as the young student Pavel Gonzalez, were managed by the perredista government of Mexico City with a corruption that later would become routine. In the cases of Digna and Pavel, with the additional crime of humiliating the death of social strugglers, honest voices kept silent...”in order not to play to the right.” “Cultured lopezobradorismo” had then its first triumph, illegitimate just like all those that followed.

If the PRD leaders, sympathizers, and militants, this intellectual sector and AMLO himself were silent then, it could only be expected that they would say nothing when the assassins of perredista militants occupied candidacies under the yellow and black flag.
And that’s what happened.

When someone is silent faced with something like that, they will be quiet in the face of anything. The phantasm of the “unnameable” Carlos Salinas de Gortari lurked on all sides and anything against him was considered valid; everything, even recycling those discontinued salinistas...in the PRD and the inner circle of Lopez Obrador.

With this autochthonous modality of “unique thought” came a new system of evaluation, a new standard of measure: the same thing was judged differently depending on who did it or proposed it. If AMLO or one of his sympathizers did or proposed it, then the act or project acquired every imaginable virtue; but if it was someone who criticized AMLO, then it was a project of the “dark forces” of the ultra-right.

When we pointed out (in “The Impossible Geometry of Power”) that AMLO’s project was salinista, the intellectuals screamed to high heaven (they’re still up there, hysterical). But when the head of the of the lopezobradorista economic plan (Mr. Ramirez de la O, political economic advisor who, according to some, would have been Secretary of State if AMLO won the presidency) declared, a few days before the elections, that his proposal would be for a “social liberalism” similar to that of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, these intellectuals looked away.

Meanwhile, the actually existing right-wing continued triumphal. Some of their thought and proposals had already been incorporated into the perredista line: Vicente Fox’s bad, and badly executed, Plan Puebla Panama would find its “purification” in AMLO’s Project Transitsmico; the approval of the “Televisa law” by the perredista bench in the lower house was a “tactical error”; the minor laws and regulations also approved by this party which legalized the dispossession of indigenous lands, were not “so serious”; the promiscuous relationship between Lopez Obrador and businessman Carlos Slim was “high politics”; the privatization of the Historic Center of Mexico City was “modernity”; the colossal investment in the second floor of the freeway that connects to one of the riches zones of DF at the same time that the public transport budget was cut was an example of “good government” (and not an omission of that “ first the poor”); the repression of the popular urban movement was “establishing order”...and the political patronage that was generated and cultivated...“the emergence of a new leadership.”

Without any indication whatsoever of what this meant, Lopez Obrador decreed that he was leftist because...because...well, because he said so (well, sometimes, sometimes not, depending on who he was talking to).

The calendar arrived at May 3rd and 4th, and pain and death arrived at San Salvador Atenco and Texcoco, in Mexico State. The polls said one had to support the repression or stay quiet. Fecal [Felipe Calderon] said good, magnificent, that this is what had to be done. Madrazo appeared weaker and weaker. On the “left,” the perredista contingent in the Mexican congress applauded the police action and supported Peña Nieto. For his part, Lopez Obrador...remained silent. Atenco would be useful if it worked to influence the elections, but the “mediations” of the media signaled the contrary. “Cultured lopezobradorismo” complained a little, without the slightest conviction, for this or what was to follow.

It has also been forgotten that, during the entire trajectory of his candidacy, AMLO made an effort to be friendly to the business sector. If you review his pre-campaign and electoral campaign discourses and declarations, they have nothing to do with what has come out after July 2nd. Time and time again he insisted to politicians that “there would be no revenge” And to the business sector he said, word for word, “don’t be scared of me.” That is, “I will not affect your properties, nor your profits, nor the habits and customs of the political class.

To not see this you would have to have a very serious myopia. But to see it and not say anything, you would have to have a cynicism that doesn’t cease to haunt us.

A time later, now in the mobilization against the fraud, Lopez Obrador said, in the Zocalo of Mexico City, that the victory of Juan Sabines in Chiapas had detained....“the advance of the right!” That AMLO promoted this conclusion which “purified” (and made leftist) those who supported him—take note and continue—after all, he created it. But that “cultured lopezobradorism” applauded enthusiastically a stupidity of this degree was incomprehensible...or else a palpable demonstration of the degree of cretinism it had achieved. This “detaining the advance of the right in Chiapas” had meant recycling Croquetas Albores and the author of that famous phrase that “in Chiapas a chicken is worth more than an Indian” (Constantino Kanter).

Anyone who could swallow this would swallow anything. And if anything was abundant in “cultured lopezobradorismo” it was “windmills” of this size.
In this “healthy” environment of discussion and “high” level of analysis, the July 1st arrived with “cultured lopezobradorism” elaborating not just a progressive program of citizen participation (that is, fighting with the political parties over political terrain), nor a novel proposal for art, culture, and science, but rather a slogan full of pride and arrogance: “smile, we’re going to win.” No, they didn’t call for the detainment of the right-wing (of course now they will say that they did). They called for preparations to celebrate their triumph (this of course, with moderation and maturity).

Ah! It was all going to be so easy, so without mobilizations, so without repression, so without clashes, so without political and ideological confrontations, so without debate, so without internal struggles, so peaceful, so calm, so stable, so balanced, so without radicalism, so without the flight of capital, so without a fall in the stock market, so without international pressure, so without anybody realizing anything, so without class struggle, so...so.
Repression? Well that would belong to the Other Campaign, Atenco, to these, yes, these “vulgar plebes.” And nothing of this blocking of main highways, even if it was for a legitimate demand for liberty and justice for the prisoners of Atenco. When the Other Campaign blocked streets in solidarity with our compañer@s, the Mexico City police attacked in order to “assure free transit.” Dozens of young people, majority students of the ENAH and the CCH Sur, were beaten and gassed on the Periferico Sur, and pursued even inside the installations of the National School of Anthropology and History.

“Cultured lopezobradorismo” said good, bravo, that the street, the cars, the gang number 13 (expedited by AMLO when he was mayor), the free circulation, that the “ultras,” that order, that stability. After all this, it was just a few kids (and probably they wouldn’t vote anyway and didn’t even have electoral credentials). That is, as Alaska and Thalia would say, “who cares.”

A while later, the mobilization against the fraud, making use of the legitimate right to free expression, blocked the Avenue Reforma (I think that’s what it’s called). When the businessmen and the “good people” protested (despite monetary backing), and demanded the head of the mayor of Mexico City, Elenita Poniatowska interviewed mayor Alejandro Encinas. He declared that one had to respect and protect the right to protest.

Perhaps moved by Encinas’ suffering, Elenita “forgot” to ask him why these freedoms were worthy and respected when carried out by AMLO sympathizers and not when carried by the Other Campaign, or by the movement of those rejected from higher education, or by those movements that resort to these actions in order to be seen and heard. In the “forgotten” of the interviewer and interviewee you could hear clearly: “there is one law for some (those that are with me) and another law for the others (who do not support/follow/obey me).”

But the night of June 1st, “cultured lopezobradorismo” dreamt that, by just going to a ballot box, the country would change. And they tolerated with modesty, how generous of them, the grateful manifestations of the poor (“look little one, there goes the doctor, he gave classes to Mr. President and his son; and there go those we saw on stage, wave to them because they are going to direct our liberation”), of the indigenous (not of the Zapatistas, because it is well known that they are ungrateful), of the workers, of the peasants, of the women, of the young people, of the elderly, of Mexico. And internationally there would be conferences and round tables. And “cultured lopezobradorismo,” these ones yes, with modesty and self-control, would tell what they had done for Mexico... all that was missing was for them to have said it from centerstage.

But July 2nd arrived, and with it, Gordillo. And with her...fraud.


3. The mobilization against the fraud. But, after the initial disconcert and now that the stage had been set to annihilate Marcos, the EZLN, the Other Campaign, and all those that resisted to being “purified,” these intellectuals realized that what had happened had happened. AMLO demonstrated, once again, that he is more intuitive and more intelligent than the “cultured lopezobradorismo.” He knew how to play a mobilization against fraud so that it depended on what he said and did, and indeed he said and did. And so arose a popular movement—authentic, legitimate, and just: the mobilization against the fraud, and consequently against the imposition of Felipe Calderon.

It has been said that the mobilization was not and is not what it’s said to be. They talk of a disgrace, of the blatant and impertinent meddling of the Mexico City government and the PRD structure, that they were not and are not what they said they were. That could be. What is without doubt, at least for us as Zapatistas, is that there was and are honest people in this mobilization, who were and are there by conviction and on principal. These people deserve and have our respect, but their path leads to a place we don’t want to go.

We share with them neither path nor destination.

And our form of respecting them is not joining their mobilization, not to dispute with AMLO the indisputable leadership he has there, not to sabotage it, nor to take advantage of the situation, nor in order to “enlighten” the masses (which are some of the arguments and reasons for which some organizations and groups are there, although they aren’t in agreements with the leadership of the movement).

The honest people who are there, we understand, think that it is possible to convert the mobilization into a movement (with the CND), and that this does not depend on a leader or the structure of control that was imposed on those that attended the convention. That could be. We don’t think so, and what’s more we think that it wouldn’t be ethical to “join up” or “take advantage of” a mobilization for which we haven’t done anything, except maintain a critical skepticism.

That said, about the mobilization against the fraud and the attempt to convert it into a movement via the CND, we say the following:

1) The “conscience” of AMLO with respect to the illegitimacy of the institutions appears because his electoral victory was covered over by fraud. It would be another story if it had been recognized that he won the presidency.

2) The National Democratic Convention was not part of lopezobradorista thinking at the beginning of the mobilization. If it had been, the sit-in would have taken the opportunity to analyze, discuss, and debate the different proposals that later would be voted on by acclamation September 16th, 2006. The CND was and is a form of providing an “out” for the sit-in, and a legitimate form for beginning to construct a movement in order to gain the presidency in 2012...or before, if Fecal falls.

3) In the CND a leadership was imposed that, more than directing the movement, was designed to control it. There is not even a seed of democratic participation in the discussions and the making of decisions, much less of self-organization. The leadership has its own interests and commitments (although the CND agreed on the boycott of some business and products, some of its leaders declared that they would not comply—see what Federico Arreola wrote in Milenio Diario, the day after the CND).

4) The movement in formation of lopezobradorismo does not attest to a crisis of the institutions (those that aided and abetted the fraud). If that was the case, they would have decided not to accept any of the positions they acquired in the elections, which would have provoked a rupture difficult to control. The CND does not seek autonomy or independence. On the contrary, it continues subject to the old political class (today converted into the “left”).

5) The majority, not all, of those in the CND leadership stand out for their corruption, opportunism, and tendency toward shady dealings.
If on one hand they sent the fraudulent institutions “to hell,” on the other hand they participate (money included) in them. The negotiations are the order of the day and there are important ones still to come: the federal budget and the budget of Mexico City.

6)“Cultured lopezobradorismo” is directing its attacks now at itself, against those who previously supported AMLO but now criticize him. The internal disqualifications and purges will keep growing.

7) The mobilization had and has unquestionable sparkle and shine: for example, the creativity and genius of the denunciation actions against some of the businesses complicit in the fraud (banks, Walmart, etc); the committed participation of people from below; the just and legitimate rage against the power of the PAN and the Fox government, as well as the insulting contempt that some electronic media (Televisa, TV Azteca, and the large radio networks) show toward those that were and continue participating in the mobilization.

4. Below...And meanwhile, in the Mexico of below...The honest people. The large part of those that participated in the mobilizations against the electoral fraud are found “below”: those that wanted AMLO to be president because they voted for him and he won; those that defend the right to democratically choose their government; those that don’t want another 1988; those that had and have a healthy distrust of the party apparatus of the Coalition; those that challenge existing power and want a change in the neoliberal system that has been destroying the social fabric and abandoning the country.

Oaxaca. The “below” also erupted in Oaxaca and took shape and path with the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). The veto capacity of this movement has been worthy of taking it into account It does not matter whether those that participate voted or not (or if they did whether it was for the Coalition or whatever other partisan force). This is not what matters, but rather that they had faith in forces that went beyond the leaders and their allies. This trust has permitted them, up until now, to decide for themselves their tactics without ceding to external pressures or to the advice of the “good consciences.” As the EZLN we support his movement and try to see and learn through the compañer@s of the Other Campaign that struggle there. Our support does not go beyond that for two reasons: one is that it is a complex movement; a more direct support could provoke “noise,” confusion, and distrust; the other reason is that several times the Oaxacan movement has been accused of having links to armed groups, and our direct presence could increase the media campaign that they already have against them.

The Others. Apart from the gossip and backscratching of the politics of above, another rebellion has been constructing itself at the deepest part of society: among the indigenous peoples, among young people abused by the powers that be (including the PRD), among the maquila workers, the sex workers, among those unsubmissive women that live with the anxiety that their husbands will migrate north, in the political organizations of the left that are convinced that something beyond capital and representative democracy exists, among all those that comprise the Other Campaign, which exists in all parts of the country and is organizing and inventing another form of doing politics and of relating to their equal-differents.

The Other Campaign is not what has come out in the mass media, nor is it what some of its participants say about it, and well, neither is it what the Sixth Commission of the EZLN has said about it. It is much more than all of this. It is a torrent that continues below, that does not yet express itself completely, that exists and reproduces itself in the basement of Mexico.

But also below exist millions, the majority, who do not vote; who do not believe in the elections (many of them, like we the Zapatistas, have never voted upon conviction). Those that form part of that Mexico which is scorned and humiliated (and now “cultured lopezobradorismo” wants to scorn and humiliate them more, blaming them for the defeat). Many of them are part of the Mexico of the indigenous peoples, that just a few years ago were held up for their willingness to struggle and resist.

With the latter, with those that don’t look above, are the Zapatistas. And we think that it is with them that the Other Campaign should be.

Because some of those from below, those of us who are in the Other Campaign, already identify our pain and the enemy that causes it: capitalism.
And we know two central things: one, that in order to free this struggle we need the construction of a social-political movement that is autonomous and independent. And the other, that above there is no real solution for the economic and social problems that plague the people of Mexico, nor for the hijacking that the political class has committed against the participation and organization of the people.

We, the Zapatistas of the EZLN, as of one year ago opted for launching a national anticapitalist movement, below and to the left, that would pass over the electoral conjuncture, where one could be independently of what one decided about the elections. Now we have seen and learned many things. From those from above, from the Other Campaign, from we ourselves.

We think that, whether one is in agreement or not with the legitimacy and popularity of the movement headed by Andres Manual Lopez Obrador, this is not the path of the Other Campaign, and, above all, it des not have the same destination of those of us who are compañer@s of the Other Campaign.

We, the Other Campaign, do not look for who will rule us, nor who we can rule. And we don’t look to obtain from above what is constructed below.

And it is you, our compañeras and compañeros of the Other, to whom we want to make a proposal...

(to be continued...)

For the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee—General Command of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation.
Sixth Commission

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

Mexico

September 2006