The New Zapatista Exodus and Its Critics
Luis Hernandez Navarro, La Jornada, January 25, 2006

The Zapatista’s “Other” campaign has developed outside of the channels of
institutional politics, to the side of, and against, the rules of the game that
regulates the competition between our elites for government office. This
campaign differentiates itself from the established political class, it moves
in accord with its own temporality and in response to it’s own agenda.
If the federal government has not tried to impede the Zapatistas from leaving
Chiapas it is not due to the fact that this tour allows the government to
counteract the number of votes in favor of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador
[“center-left” presidential candidate for the PRD], rather, it is more
likely due to the fact that the government has no choice. The EZLN has earned
the right to practice another form of politics within our national territory
without having to offer anything up in exchange. Simply put, to affirm that the
administration of Vicente Fox “looks favorably” upon the rebel voyage is to
assert an absurdity without any basis in fact.

The “Other” campaign prefigures the formation of a new political force that
explicitly considers itself leftist, anti-neoliberal and anti-capitalist, in
clear distinction from the legally recognized political parties that now exist.
It pushes forward a project that looks to refound this country and to elaborate
a new constitution, in sum, a national political pact which differs from the
one in force today. It involves a political strategy that weaves together the
strongholds of hope that already exist but have as yet remained dispersed. It
is a public action open to all sanction, critique, rumor and the ultimate
judgment of the multitude.

As a political initiative it renounces the illusion that in the struggle for the
transformation of a country one can find short cuts and miraculous solutions. It
rejects the notion that history is made by messiahs and charismatic leaders.
Unpredictable, and capable of giving birth to the new, adept in the
construction of alternatives, the Zapatista proposal looks to create a new
social and political movement. In this way it shatters the spell of inaction
and it overcomes the media blockade to which it has been subjected.
The “Other” Campaign gives continuity to Zapatista proposals announced over
three years ago and which can be found in “The Plan Readlidad-Tijuana.”
[Zapatista political initative announced to counteract the neoliberal
megaprojects aimed at Mexico and Central American known as the Plan
Puebla-Panama] This campaign is not a response to the immediate conjuncture,
and even less, as Emir Sader would like to think, as an action “in the face
of a military offensive by the Mexican Army undertaken with the pretext of
eliminating existing coca plantations in Chiapas to which the EZLN decided not
to resist militarily instead demobilizing it’s juntas of good governments.”
The Caracoles [Centers of Resistance and meeting place of the “Juntas of Good
Government”) have not demobilized. They are still open and running.
The Other campaign looks to create a non-state public sphere, by taking politics
outside the strict framework of governmental and parliamentary administration.
In this way it deepens the crisis of the State's monopoly over political
decisions, a tendency already described years ago by the theorist Carl Schmitt.
According to this German jurisprude “The Time of Statism has reached its
end...The State as a model of political unity, the State as title holder of the
most extraordinary of all monopolies, that is, of the monopoly of political
decision, is on the verge of being dethroned.”

In contrast to the hypocrisy of institutional politics, in which rivals refuse
to recognize that they have enemies, and who instead present themselves as
simple adversaries, all the while kicking each other under the table and
seeking nothing less than to annihilate each other, the other campaign calls
each thing by its proper name and thus it refuses to abandon the notion of
enmity. Within this campaign there are no false bows towards the established
powers and its men. “The Just” Marcos has said, “is that the people who
kill, humiliate and lie be imprisoned in the place of those who struggle to
change things for the benefit of all.”

Like all political initiatives generated from outside of the establishment, the
“Other” campaign has provoked a sense of insecurity and ill feeling: this
campaign has been accused of promoting electoral abstention when it has
explicitly stated that it is not abstentionist; it is demanded that it give
programmatic proposals when it has explained that it looks to listen to the
demands of the voiceless; it is said that the target of its criticism is Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador when it has been indefatigable in its criticism of the
political class as a whole; and it has been said that this campaign has not
“with even a rose petal.” This, despite the denunciations made against the
Governor for claiming to have a university title when in fact completed his
diploma and for unjustly detaining a number of schoolteachers.

The other campaign openly questions the existing powers that govern the country.
It looks to generate a new system of representation from outside the
institutional channels at a moment when, public opinion has recognized the
asphyxiating and exclusionary nature of our political system and the political
party system as a whole is judged quite severely for its subservience to the
mass media monopolies. In so doing it has forced other political actors to
change their course. Without going in to further detail it suffices to point
out that Lopez Obrador has seen it necessary to modify his prior rejection of
being presented as “a person of the left” due to the criticism coming from
the rebels.

In a moment in which reformism without reform, Lula style, has provoked new and
bitter disappointment, and in which a new hardline left, created outside of the
traditional political class and a stranger to “liberal socialism” has
emerged as an option in political power in a number of Latin American
countries, the Zapatista exodus is dedicated to creating a network of relations
of solidarity capable of creating new opportunities.

One can be in favor or against this campaign, but its' critics from the left
should at least judge it for what it is, and not for what they would like to
think it is, or wish it to be.