Image @ Soldepando.com
On 17 November, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), also known as El Sup or Sup Marcos, made public a new communique for the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the EZLN.
The communique, entitled “Rebobine 3,” seeks to bring light to the “way in which, taking advantage of our anniversary, el Sup seeks to explain how the Zapatistas see their own history–without succeeding in this.”
Two of the concepts addressed in the document are fanaticism and freedom. With regard to the former, Marcos declares that “the fanatics of race, color, creed, gender, politics, sports, etc., are in the end fans of themselves. And all share the same fear of what is different. They encage the entire world in the box of exclusionary options: ‘if you are not this way, then you are the opposite.” His explanation with regard to his views on fanaticism is tied into the idea that the Zapatistas have of freedom and their form of autonomy, given that they must “evade the trap that says that freedom is the ability to choose between two imposed options… There are not only two paths, and similarly there are not only two colors, two sexes, two beliefs. Thus, neither here nor there. It is better to make a new path that leads to where one wants to go.”
The text also mentions the next Escuelita of December-January, as organized by the EZLN: “Those who come to be with us to watch us watch ourselves, to listen to us, to learn in the escuelita, you will discover that, in each photo, we Zapatistas have added an image that is not easily perceivable. It is as though the apparent movement of images would hide the particular thing each photo contains. That which is not seen in the everyday decanting is what we will be. And there is nothing that can capture such images. Only a very large heart can appreciate them.”
In this document there can also be found a criticism of mass media with regard to the way of life of the Zapatistas: “For the commercial mass media, it is they who are the modern ones, and we the archaic ones. They are the civilized, while we are the barbarians. They are the workers, we the lazy. They are the ‘respectable people,’ we the pariahs. They are the wise ones, we the ignorant ones. They are clean, but we are dirty. They are pretty, but we are ugly. They are good, yet we are the bad ones.” And he continues with this idea: “They forget the most important thing: this is our history, our way of seeing it and seeing ourselves, our manner of thinking, and of making our own path. It is ours, with our errors, our falls, our colors, our lives, our deaths. It is our freedom. That is our history.”
As a final comment, el Sup mentions the anniversary that the EZLN remembers: “Health, and that we celebrate very happily, that is to say, in struggle.”
For more information (in Spanish):
Rebobinar 3 (Enlace Zapatista, 17 de noviembre de 2013)
For more information from SIPAZ (in English):
Chiapas: EZLN criticizes structural reforms (13 November 2013)
Chiapas: EZLN denounces nocturnal military overflights above Zapatista caracoles (21 August 2013)
Chiapas: Celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Zapatista caracoles(21 August 2013)
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