Zapatistas Announce May Day Labor Rally

Al Giordano

In Nezahualcoyotl, Marcos Announces that May 1 Labor March “Will Meet In
Front of the U.S. Embassy” in Mexico City...
Thousands of Workers in “Neza
York” Greet the Zapatista Subcomandante and Join with the Other Campaign

NEZAHUALCOYOTL, MEXICO STATE, APRIL 26, 2006: Zapatista Subcomandante
Marcos was received this afternoon by thousands of urban workers from the
rough-and-tumble metropolis of Nezahualcoyotl that borders Mexico City.
Street vendors, factory, retail and construction workers, laid off
meatpackers, taxi and bus drivers, teachers, immigrants from Oaxaca and
other Mexican states, and former immigrants that returned from working in
the United States, plus their sons and daughters from grade schools,
junior highs, and high schools – many who flocked directly from class to
the afternoon rally in front of City Hall still wearing their school
uniforms – gave “Delegate Zero” a warm and attentive welcome.

It was there that Marcos decided to drop an information bomb on two
governmental powers: the Mexican federal government and “the Yankee
Embassy” of Washington and Wall Street: The May Day workers march,
announced last February in Tlaxcala by the Zapatista spokesman, will
assemble in front of that United States Embassy, Monday, at noon, on ritzy
Paseo de la Reforma, on the very same day that Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans across the U.S. border will march and many will strike
from their jobs in protest of repressive measures against them up North.
The announcement came one day after Mexican Interior Minister Carlos
Abascal sought a meeting with the military commander of the Zapatista Army
of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish initials), which has shunned
any and all contact with the federal government for the past five years.
Abascal worried aloud during a meeting with Catholic bishops about Marcos’
daily vow that the national rebellion he is fomenting “will topple the
federal government.” Today, Marcos answered the top functionary of the
administration of president Vicente Fox, saying: “What we are proposing is
to defeat the evil governments.” Referring to Abascal’s apparent confusion
over what that means, he said: “I repeat: we will topple the municipal
mayors, the state governments and the government of the republic, put them
all in jail, kick the bankers, the big mall owners and capitalists out of
the country and defeat the capitalist system!”

“We are looking for you to rise up with us,” he told a multitude of
thousands. “We are looking for elders… for women… for independent
salespeople… for taxi drivers… for store employees… for young people… for
children… for people who think that the solution is not found above.” The
incendiary discourse grows sharper and more indignant each day of this
six-month tour of all of Mexico, as this voice behind a mask listens to
the grievances of people pushed to the limit by poverty and systemic
disrespect by the demands of government and commerce upon them.

Here, Marcos did not find a predominance of activists or political
organizers, but, rather, real people – “normal people” commented Rebeldía
magazine editor Sergio Ramírez Lascano to the Other Journalism – who
seemed as ready for the fight as the rebels of Chiapas have shown
themselves to be. Those in power are growing worried for good reason. What
is occurring along this Other Campaign road may be happening “under radar”
in the sense that the news is either boycotted or distorted by the
Commercial Media, but twice in recent days high officials from the Mexican
state – last week, Fox’s indigenous affairs secretary upset about the
Zapatista vow to go to war against a mega-energy project in the state of
Guerrero, this week his chief of staff trying to figure out what “topple
the government” means – have been unable to keep quiet about the source of
their growing discomfort. The nervous and sudden lack of silence from
above directly corresponds to the emboldened lack of silence from below
that the Other Campaign is unleashing.

Neza’s Story of Exploitation

This 43-year-old municipality and emblem of urban sprawl, named for the
prehispanic poet and philosopher Nezahualcoyotl (1402-1472), is commonly
referred to by its residents as “Neza” and often as “Neza York.” Some of
the 1.2 million residents of this city – who live in a population density
of more than 19,000 people per square kilometer, or more than 50,000 per
square mile – shared with the ski-masked rebel their city’s “story of
exploitation” from the violent repression by large landowners of
impoverished colonists in the 1950s, to the “deep drainage” of nearby Lake
Texcoco and corresponding eco-disaster in the 1960s from the construction
of hundreds of kilometers of drainage pipes (Mexico City is sinking today
precisely because of that engineering boondoggle), the repression against
and assassination of community leaders, and the modern-day displacement of
its street salespeople and other workers – including the elimination of
the last farm and ranch lands of the city – to make room for shopping
malls and the businesses of foreign companies.

“History has left its mark on Neza,” said a man named Carlos, one of two
city residents who made brief statements introducing Delegate Zero. “But
the reverse will soon happen. The people of the City of Nezahualcoyotl
will soon leave our mark upon this country.”

“This is a city of social fighters,” said Juan Miranda, a meatpacker fired
six weeks ago when the city government of the Democratic Revolution Party
(PRD) shut the doors of the municipal meat storage locker that 10,000
cattle raising families from the dwindling local ranchlands had depended
upon. “But today we can find those social fighters sniffing at the bones
of the government and the struggles are left behind.” He later told the
Other Journalism that the assault on the remaining ranchers and farmers
within the municipality was related to “the sale of the nation’s resources
to foreign interests” as farm and ranchland gives way to Wal-Marts and
other multinational shopping centers.

“The countryside is being exterminated,” he told the crowd as it waited
for Marcos to arrive, “and we will all have to go to the United States to
find work.”

Land and Liberty… and Water

The struggle for land – as the Zapatista testimony-taking tour through the
Mexican Southeast, South and Center since January 1 has revealed again and
again – goes hand in hand here, as elsewhere, with the struggle for water.
Related to the 1967 drainage of Lake Texcoco, water is scarce in the city,
and sometimes doesn’t arrive. “The water comes out dirty. It smells,” said
Luis León of Fuerza Cuidadano Pro-de la Supremacía del Poder Civil
(“Citizen Force in Favor of the Supremacy of Civil Power”), a nonprofit
organization, as he waited his turn at the microphone. “Many people here
have skin illnesses as a result.”

“In election seasons, such as now, the water just stops running.”
Explaining this paradox, León said: “The city government is PRD, the state
government is PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and the national
government is PAN (National Action Party). Each party does what it can to
discredit the other. So in this election year, the PRI that controls the
water just shuts it off to screw the PRD, but it’s the people of all the
parties that get screwed. We live under political anarchy. We have gone to
the state governor. We went to the World Water Forum in Mexico City. But
nobody pays attention to us.”

Over the course of the afternoon, as the crowd gathered to await the
arrival of Marcos, members of 36 families – women, men, children, elders,
infants – arrived en masse with banners defending “independent
salespeople,” what the media calls “ambulants” or street sellers. “We have
worked the same areas for fifteen years and the city government has
received the taxes we have paid each year for using our spaces,” explained
the group’s spokesman, Rafael Pluma. “The city is chasing us out of
business now because we refuse to join the political party in power.” He
said he hoped the Zapatista Other Campaign, which visits two Mexico City
barrios next week – Tepito and La Merced – that are major centers of
similar “independent commerce,” will help foster a national alliance of
similar workers being displaced throughout Mexico.

“Mexicans, to the cry of war!”

The interview with Pluma was interrupted, suddenly, when a dozen
Nezahualcoyotl Municipal Police marched in military formation to lower the
gigantic tri-color Mexican flag in front of City Hall. The crowd – now
having grown to more than 3,000, but still before the arrival of the guest
of honor – hushed silent. All that could be heard was the squeaking of the
thick metal cable that held the flag upon the pole, and the orders of the
captain guiding the lowering of the flag. Spontaneously, the Other
Campaign adherents, sympathizers and interested onlookers began to sing…
the national anthem:

Mexicans, to the cry of war

prepare your swords and your bridle;

and let the earth tremble at its center

at the cannon’s roar…

…And if a foreign enemy dares

to profane your soil beneath his feet

Think, oh, dear Homeland

that heaven gave you a soldier in each son.

It took eight men to lower and fold the gigantic flag. And thousands to
keep its meaning waving high over Nezahualcoyotl.

“To be indigenous, or to be from Neza, means the same thing to those from
above,” Marcos later told the multitude, which grew over the hours to
include more and more young people as local schools ended sessions at six
p.m. He spoke of how the wealthy refer to Nezahualcoyotl citizens as
“dirty” or “smelly” and compared that bigotry to the same treatment
received by the indigenous of Chiapas before they rose up in arms twelve
years ago. “Disrespect, beatings, rape and insult… the persecution of
young people for being young, for the clothes you wear, for your music,
you are treated as delinquents… Above, they tell you, ‘Neza, stay down!’”

“How much longer,” Marcos asked the assembled, “are we going to take
this?” He repeated, again, his call “to destroy the capitalist system from
below, and to create something else according to the agreements we reach
together.” As he invited the people of Nezahualcoyotle to “celebrate with
us” on International Workers Day, next Monday, May 1, in front of the U.S.
Embassy, and “march together” to the national palace in Mexico City,
Delegate Zero’s optimism grew once again. The national rebellion he is
constructing found new allies today in Nezahualcoyotl, on the verge of his
entrance, Friday, into Mexico City. “In Neza,” he said, “we have the best
people in this country.”