Zapatista Insurgente

(Editor's Note: Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos is considered to be one of the main leaders of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation [EZLN] based in Chiapas, one of the poorest states of Mexico. In January 1994, Marcos led an army of Indian farmers and took over the eastern part of Chiapas, protesting the government's neglect of indigenous peoples. The Mexican government pushed the rebels back into Chiapas’ Lacandón Jungle. Since then, Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas have become international icons of the anti-corporate globalization movement and a model for grassroots organizing using modern technologies like satellite telephones and the internet to obtain support.

On New Year's Day, 2006, the Zapatista movement came out of the jungles and launched the Other Campaign aimed at influencing upcoming presidential elections in Mexico in the name of "all the exploited and dispossessed." Marcos is leading a nonviolent campaign to build a broad leftist movement to pressure politicians from the outside to support the rights of autonomous peoples, who comprise roughly one-third of the Chiapas region.

Free Speech Radio News Anchor Aura Bogado just returned from Mexico where she spoke with Subcomandante Marcos -- who recently changed his name to Delegado Zero -- at the Center for the Documentation for Son Jarocho. Bogado and Zero talked about the recent changes in Latin America, the Zapatista women's struggle and Latinos in the United States.)

Aura Bogado: Why the Other Campaign now -- for 2005 and 2006?

Delegado Zero: Well, because we, as Zapatistas, had to endure a process of preparation -- like the uprising in 1994, where we prepared for 10 years to realize it -- we also had to engage in a process of preparation for the Other Campaign.

The Other Campaign was actually born in 2001, when Mexico's three political parties -- the PRI, the PAN and the PRD -- denied the COCOPA initiative for indigenous cultural rights. So at that point, we evaluated that the path with the Mexican political class was exhausted -- we had to find another path. The options were: war, going back to fighting, or staying quiet in silence and waiting to see what would happen, or doing what we are doing now.

When we decided that we had to prepare for this possibility, we anticipated that it would be very likely that people who had supported us up until that point for indigenous cultural rights would take back their support at the hour we distanced ourselves from the political parties, especially from the so-called "institutional left": the PRD. But at the same time, we had to prepare ourselves against a surgical strike, a strike from the military or from the police -- under any pretext, that would attempt to behead the EZLN and without leave it without direction.

For us, the initiative of the Sixth Declaration is of the same magnitude, or maybe even greater, than our Declaration of War in 1994. We had to be prepared to lose our entire leadership. Because, according to our method, at the same time that we set out to do something, we have to put our leaders in front to set the example. We had to be ready to lose not only Marcos, but all of our known leadership, the ones that will be going out to do the political work: the comandantes, like Comandanta Esther, Comandante Tacho, Comandante David, Comandante Zebedeo, Comandanta Susana ... the ailing Comandanta Ramona was also going to come out, but unfortunately [she died] ... all of us who are more or less publicly known were planning to come out, so we had to prepare for that, and we had to make plans for the first exploratory tour, which has fallen on me, which we are doing now.

We specifically choose the electoral period, so that it would be clear that we want to do something else, and so that people could really see and could compare and contrast our political proposal. ... Always, since our birth, we've insisted on another way of doing politics. Now, we had the chance to do it without arms, but without stopping being Zapatistas, that's why we keep the masks on.