Aguascalientes, Chiapas, Mexico, 9 August 1994

by C. Albertani

Because we wanted to remember two people removed from history books: Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. We are commemorating the effort they made in a difficult time to come to an agreement with society at large. Therefore we have built a village inside the jungle and a tower we have named "hope's tower". In Mexico there are two opposite national projects, one looking for change at any cost, the other trying to delay it also at any cost. The Convention is a contribute to the research of a pacific way to give a new look to our country.

Are you satisfied with the results?

First of all we are happy of being alive. Here we are surrounded by 30.000 soldiers who would be glad to "interview" us. Second, we consider a victory having so many people to meet here, having them to come here and, above all, having reached a minimum of consensus. The Convention does not end today. We must go to the factories, neighborhoods, rural villages, we must speak to the people.

The EZLN has decided to submit to the Convention. In the unfortunate case that the PRI wins the elections, we will feel the nation's pulse and do what it decides.

We never said we will surrender our weapons, but we have said we are willing to open to a pacific transition. Now the government cannot say that they refuse to listen to a hood or a gun's voice. Here there are people with no hood or weapons that spoke with a louder voice than ours. They must listen to them.

We do not think we have caused the birth of a popular movement, because it already existed. I would rather say we have given a voice to the voiceless. In any case, we are not looking for power and we are not becoming a political party. We want to join our forces with those who want the same things we want, even if without weapons. The CND is the first step towards this scope. I repeat it: we do have neither will nor the capacity to govern the country. The people meeting here have the capacity of doing it.

The EZLN will use its ascendancy to explain to them what has happened here. The armies defining themselves as revolutionaries cannot rise against the people's will. And the people wants peace. We believe these groups are mature enough to understand that.

We are not interested in resurrecting extinct guerrilla warfare. We are interested in renewing the struggle for dignity. The great lies of the new international order, neo-free trade or social liberalism do not sell any more. Here in the mountains of southeastern Mexico a crevice opened and others are opening in the rest of the continent. The story is not over: it is at the beginning. And it is not favoring the powerful, but those that, till now, have not had yet the possibility to say: we have won.

by Araceli Buruete Cal y Mayor

The vast majority of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) fighters are Indigenous Maya Tojolabal, Tzeltal, Tzotzil and Chole peoples in addition to a smaller number of mestizos and other ethnic groups. Their demands are diverse, oscillating between those raised by the revolutionary class-oriented movements of Central America, classic Mexican campesino (peasant) demands, and the claims being made by the Indigenous movement. The EZLN has also incorporated into its positions a wide range of demands relating to the urban movement's struggles, the political parties, and to the demands for democracy voiced by the Mexican society in general. The Zapatista rebellion is embedded in the historic and geographic specificities of Chiapas. The conflict developed in the highland and border area. The highlands are the ancestral territory of the rebellion's principal actors, the Maya peoples. The border region, which includes the Lacandon rainforest, has received waves of migrant Indians fron the highlands over the last 30 years. It now constitutes the regional and social base of the Zapatista army.

Indian people have paid an extremely high price to maintain their identity. Indian rebellions have been as much a constant of Chiapas' history as has the exploitation and oppression which followed the conquest. During Mexico's first period of Liberal reforms in the 19th century, landholding families headed the counter-reform. Debt peonage was progressively eliminated in the rest of Mexico following the revolution of 1910. In Chiapas, however, several hundred Indigenous people continue, even today, to work as indebted peons on the large plantations. Just as the counter-reform gripped Chiapas in the 19th century, the state's landlords also won the 20th century's counter-revolution. The counter- revolutionaries threatened secession from the Union, and the federal government was forced to negotiate. The cost has been too high. The revolution's institutions which are ubiquitous in the rest of Mexico, never arrived in Chiapas. Due to its regressive agraria policy most of the state's arable land was concentrated in a few hands by 1940. At the same time, a significant proportion of the state corresponded to "National Lands", that is forest areas susceptible to colonization. Population growth and the exhaustion of the ancestral Indigenous territories, government support for forest colonization, the displacement resulting from construction of hydroelectric dams, the advent of oil exploitation, soil deterioration, political and religious persecution and violence between 1960 and 1980 led to accelerated colonization of the Lacandon. This region is characterized by steep slopes and extremely poor soils underlain by calcareous rock. These soils retain water poorly; making agriculture is very difficult. The region's physical harshness further sharpened social discontent. The Indigenous colonists adapted to life in the forest only after profound cultural, political and ideological changes. These strengthened their nascent campesino identity, substituting for their communal (indian) identity. The rainforest's new colonists and their young descendants are the protagonists of the conflict in Chiapas. Struggle for land in Chiapas has always been a radical process subject to violence from landlords. The federal government's general agrarian reform policy emphasized the ejido form of tenure (individual and sub-divided) in detriment to traditional communal tenure. In this way, Indigenous peopole partecipating in the struggle for land assumed a campesinista consciousness through which they demanded land to work rather than the autonomous territories which were stolen during the European invasion. This campesino-class consciousness has homogenized the struggle of the Indigenous peoples of Chiapas. The figure of Emiliano Zapata has been continuously invoked to support land struggles, whereas the indigenous struggles for recovery of Indian government were forgotten with the oral history of the traditional Indian communities.

The state's first Indigenous Encounter in October 1974, hosted by Catholic Bishop Ruiz, marked the beginning of the campesino and indigenous mobilization in the region. This process was accelerated with the arrival in these years of several political organizations with different ideological tendencies. A significant number of the members of these various organizations have presumably joined the ranks of the EZLN. The formation of Indigenous organizations that assume a humanitarian banner is a recent activity that has not been able to establish itself significantly in the consciousness of the Indigenous peoples. The Campesina and Zapatista tradition has until now subjugated Indianist efforts. The majority of the Indianist organization were formed by Indigenous activists that had experiences in the campesina struggle, but whom in a recent process of re-indianization have begun to base their claims and organization in their Indian identity. Some members of these organizations also joined the EZLN. The differences between the Campesinista Indigenous movement and the Indianist Indigenous movement are clear. The Zapatista demands arise from both these traditions which follow the campesinista line, but at the same time, identify in the Indianist demands possibilities for ending colonial oppression. This most recent indigenous uprising in Chiapas has given new air to the Indigenous movement in Mexico. Nevertheless, the most important thing is the hope that it has brought to the Indigenous movement worldwide. The sympathy which the EZLN provoked in the world shows that the Indigenous struggles have reason and justice on their side.

The Western Shoshone called themselves Newe (people); they lived and still live in the area of the Great Basin of the USA, a harsh and dry land that forced them to travel across a wide range of ecologic niches to fully exploit their resources seasonally. This harsh environment made them wander in small familiar groups and avoid armed clashed with more than one or two victims. This cultural trait made them be despised by the Plains Indians, who often sold them as slaves, and the Whites as well, who called them Diggers and often killed them for no reason. The colonization of the Far West meant disaster for their environmental resources and their way of life; forced to struggle they ended the conflict signing the Ruby Valley Treaty in 1863 and ratified by Congress in 1864. It was one of those standard treaties the US commissioners made the western tribes sign, full of clauses concerning passage rights for the railway posts and so on. It meant the end of the Newe's way of life. Things worsened in 1898, when the government began to label Newe's lands as state lands, even if nobody had sold them or ratified any cession. Citizenship in 1924 allowed the Newe to ask the respect of their treaty rights in front of a Congress commission, but the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 provoked a split between the "progressives" and the "Tradistionalists". After the creation of the Indian Claims Commission in 1946 a lawyer's firm, Wilkinson, Cragun and Barker, became trustees for the Western Shoshone in 1951 and, unbeknown to the Indians, they asked the ICC to grant an indemnity for the loss of their land even if only 10% of it had been occupied by the whites. In the same year the first atomic experiment was made in the Nevada Test Site, within Western Shoshone land, but the Indians were not warned of the danger. From that time the Newe have begun to struggle against nuclear fallout and the military's management of their territory; among the many battles we remember that against the infamous MX missile system. In 1962 the ICC stated that, even if there Western Shoshone had never been formally expropriated of their land, the whites' gradual squatting gave them a title of possession. The issue of the Newe's lands was "closed" by the firm naming 8 Indians willing to collaborate as tribal representatives, recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), while the ICC arbitrarily fixed the beginning of white occupation on July 1, 1872. Thanks to a new law in 1968 the Newe could see the documents of their case, while in 1974 the Dann case broke out. Dann vs. USA has become a symbol of the struggle of the traditionalists, that refused money compensation for the loss of their land and brought their case to the Fourth Russell Tribunal in Rotterdam in 1980. The Dann case had a violent conclusion, with the police assaulting their ranch and the State Land Management reducing their cattle, in spite of international support and the creation of the Dann Defense Project. In 1993 the Dann sisters received the Alternative Nobel Award and in 1994 the Secretary of the Interior received various delegations of Western Shoshone asking the respect of the Ruby Valley Treaty and the Western Shoshone Council asking for their recognition as the true Indian government, enfranchised from American guardianship. In July 1994 the Western Shoshone partecipated to the session on Indigenous populations in Geneva, Switzerland and, since there was also the Conference on Disarmament they intervened denouncing the dangers they are suffering in an area of nuclear weapons tests: The USA and Great Britain made explode 926 nuclear bombs and this can well be considered a genocidal war against the Newe. To worsen an already appalling situation the USA government is considering to enlarge its deposits in Newe land to stock commercial nucear waste, negotiating it with the elective tribal officiale and without consulting all the interested parts