Interview with Subcomandante Marcos
Our arms are not negociable
Dialogue with the state has proved opposition has failed to mobilise sufficient forces to take over the
For the time being, Marcos argues, a return to the armed struggle is the best way to galvanise public opinion and rebuild the opposition.
International Viewpoint #263 February 1995 impossible, and the political leadership of the struggle. Is your recent declaration a declaration of war? Marcos: The current situation is the result of government inactivity, not our military action. In his speeches Mr Zedillo talks of dialogue and negotiation as a solution, but he follows the same policy as before [that of ex-president Salinas who all through 1994 tried to let the contlict get bogged down. They claim that the problems have been solved when they haven't and behave as if none of this year's events actually took place. Of course, the conflict isn't passing into the background, but on the contrary is becoming more acute by In January, during the hottest points of the war, we started to construct a very basic bridge between the two sides opposed on the battlefield. But by not tackling the problem and its real causes, and by letting time slip by, the other side let our bridge retract. This has weakened the possibility of reaching a negotiated solution. We are not refusing to come to an agreement, but we don't want a secret dialogue. We don't want agreements linking us to the government to appear after negotiations in which were not present. We must look for some kind of arbitration, not in the strict sense of the word, but we should have someone to testify to the fact that there are two opposing forces sitting at the same table and that they must find a way to solve their differences in a civilised way, and not by confrontation. But don't Zedillo's latest pronouncements show a different approach to that of his predecessor ? Zedillo recognises that the effects of poverty underlie the movement, ie that this phenomenon which could appear elsewhere. But as we learnt in February and March 1994, and in the San Cristobal de las Casas talks, the Mexican government can be very radical in its discussions and very reactionary in its actions. At the foundation of the National Democratic Convention (CND) you claimed that the EZLN could not impose the war on the population. Isn't the last EZLN declaration in fact a decision to impose war on the population? You have to analyse the situation in the country. At the time of the August Convention, Mexican society mobilised. There was a politically active cIVil society, made up of people who carried with them hope for change, characterised by powerful mobilisations, and committed to the process of passive and civil resistance in order to bring about a democratic transformation. In such circumstances, putting forward a military solution would have been counter to the wishes of the nation. But now, in December 1994, the situation is different. Certain sections of society are clearly waiting for someone to attract attention to them again, and to revive those social forces which are currently lying dormant, impotent and frustrated. We are not declaring war, we are simply pointing out that a deadline has expired -the deadline announced on 17 November, when the Secret Committee [supreme leadership of the EZLN] transferred control to the military leadership. This was as if to say: the situation is getting tighter, so again we must resort to the only course of action that is left to us. We are making a last desperate appeal to the government to indicate clearly whether it is really looking for a political solution. We are making an equally desperate appeal to the civilian population to commit itself to rallying together and recovering the space it occupied before 21st August and has since lost. We don't see, and I say this in all sincerity, that anybody else is ready to throw open the doors - to mobilise civil society in peaceful struggles. However other sectors, the most dispossessed, those I call the "basement' of the country, show us that our time has come again. We can't accept that after our deaths, after all that has happened, history will begin repeating itself. The time of a return to 31 December 1993 is nearing. And as I have often explained, on 31 December 1993 we were on the verge of dispair, and our action of 1 January 1994 was a desperate measure. Civil action is on the decline and we are called to military mobilisation; this is how we read the situation Almost 6,000 people came from all over the country to the foundation of the CND. Recently, the number is closer to 400. Isn't this collapse in numbers also the collapse of the project itself? This decline is first and foremost a crisis of the forms of organisation. It reflects the fact that the democratic movement in Mexico has outgrown its old ways of operating. I am talking about the whole spectrum: the far left, the left, and those sections of the centre who declare themselves in favour of democratic change.
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International Viewpoint #263 February 1995
The democratic movement has increased the number of meetings and mobilisations, without injecting a concrete project that would incorporate the particular mobilisation of any given moment. The problem with one-off or single issue mobilisations is establishing what can bring the greatest number of people together. Single issues always affect some people and not others. The only issue that really affects everybody is the war. That is what led to the big rallies in January and I hope it will have some Of course, this shows the lack of any new political force which is both national and modern and thus able to put forward claims that express points of common interest, connect all [progresive] sectors and above all define new ways of working and organising. We still think that the National Democratic Convention can succeed in playing this role. If not, then another type of movement will take up this But what military or political successes can you hope to grain from this return to the armed struggle?
Since January we have been driven back militarily but not politically. Unfortunately if we are also being hounded politically today it is not by the government but as a result of the crisis in other social sectors which had previously given us a voice not so much as interlocuters but in taking up our claims and putting them into practice. When they begin to ebb we can only hold on to what we have. If people are receptive to the political effects of us having arms and of us showing them without using them we will do it. But if none of that happens we naturally reach the conclusion that arms will give us the space to manoeuver again and open hostilities to put us back in the political arena.
We are now in a more tense military situation than in January 1994, less balanced in our favour. We no longer have the element of suprise and the enemy can see ways of wiping us out. I must stress that in these conditions we can not resort to guerilla warfare because the very conception of our army is deeply rooted in our people. We can not take soldiers away from their families and leave them defenceless. We should either leave, taking the families, or stay with them.
The Zapatist military forces have been driven back, but Zapatism extends throughout the Chiapas territory in practically all the rural areas and in certain urban areas. It is these Zapatista areas that are suffering the most disappearances and repression whether it is done by the government or random acts of federal soldiers assassinations by the 'white guards', brutal evacuations and the cruelty meted out by the justice police and the public security services. In fact the whole peaceful civil movement is suffering a growing and increasingly violent repression and is telling us that the moment has come. Our comrades everywhere are telling us: if the ceasefire is broken why should we respect it? You have your armed men and your army is ours, you must defend us, you must do something; if not why have you taken up arms? You wouldn't talk to Camacho, you wouldn't negotiate with Madrazo, and now you won't negotiate with Zedillo. So who are you willing to negotiate with?
In the course of talks we must see a willingness to try and resolve the conflict by other means ie be ready to make profound changes to the social structures of south east Mexico.
I don't think the State will be open to this because one of two parties will have to be sacrificed: either an indiginous movement with no structure that would allow it to take a share in the national economy in other words an indiginous sector which is not profitable not even as a labour force; or a sector that is not profitable in the plans to modernise the economy of Mexico, the sector of large scale farmers and landowners - even from the point of view of their production methods - which in political terms represents a major obstacle to any reform In August you said the elections could result in a peaceful transition to democracy. Did the PRI victory make this impossible?
We don't think so. The structure of the PRI goes beyond a party structure and is closer to the structure of a political system. To carry off a victory or gain a position the PRI is making a lot of compromises and is paying out a lot of bribes. In concrete terms in the state of Chiapas it is making compromises with indiginous village chiefs, the big farmers and wholesale merchants. How can there be any form of democracy with structures that harbour anti-democracy at the regional and national level throughout the country? What gives rise to the power to dominate at a federal level is also what gives rise to domination at a local and regional level.
A process of democratisation implies sweeping away the system of the Party State, and that means sweeping away the party that embodies it. Can Zapatism develop a political wing, separate from the military struggle ?
The problem of Zapatism today, in military terms, is that it is cornered in one part of the country and that politically it is running up against many obstacles with its interlocuters. It is armed and therefore illegal. We are disguised - in other words we have no identity. So the role of Zapatism is limited to appeals which it can make "from the mountains of south east Mexico" as we say, urging other sectors to mobilise and take action.
We think there could be an unarmed Zapatism that could launch the same appeals as us but from a legal base. But as Tacho said when he entrusted the Convention (CND) with this task, you can't offer the people new wine in old bottles, a new man in the body of an old man. We call ourselves something new, but we are part of the past, of a past which led to a failure. We nourished the scepticism and frustration which led to the creation of a guerilla army. Because the the EZLN responsibility of the opposition political parties and organisations, which failed to offer a convincing alternative to certain
The demands of the EZLN are the same as those of the opposition. Why does the one provokes so much fear and the other so much scepticism.
In January 1994 everything was very simple. There were the good guys - us, and the bad guys - the others. But after the cease fire, the world became more political and less military. In entering politics we had again stepped into an area that we did not know and again we made mistakes. But we still have the possibility to take a step back; after our failure in the towns we managed to win back our mountains. If we suffered a defeat in politics we can always fall back to the armed struggle.
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