Today’s Disappeared
Pink Frosting and Social Prison
There are more Zacatecos in the US than in Zacatecas
Indignation and Dignidad
The University of Mediocrity
Punks and Communists
Great Movements Don’t Start Big
Urban Laboratory of Neoliberal Policy
The North

Today's Disappeared
From the Mothers of the Disappeared in Chihuahua: “There is one Doña, very loved among us, adored, she is a great testimony... Doña Coral of Ciudad Juarez. She has two sons, one is disappeared, the other the system grabbed and murdered. But despite this, I have never seen this Doña discouraged...she is always thinking about this process of liberation, of struggle, despite the fact that she can hardly move anymore, can barely walk, She continues to be this... great example for us.”

Today people keep disappearing, another mother says later, but today in the form of the misogyny and violence, especially that which is happening in Ciudad Juarez—464 dead since 1993, over 600 more disappeared, according to reported data. The majority of women found in what is now called a femicide—sexual torture and murder of women—are found raped, mutilated, strangled, with cuts on their breasts and lips, “X” drawn or cut on their arms or backs. Since 1993, almost 500 women have been murdered in this way. The indifference of the authorities is incredible, outrageous. And what may be immunity or impunity of the police forces even more appalling. I have a friend who worked for America’s Most Wanted, that television show of the late 90’s where they dramatize real crime cases and open a hotline for citizens to call in with tips. Its was an over-exaggerated, over-hyped investigative police show, but real people called in with what was sometimes real information. My friend fielded the calls in Spanish, and the night they covered the Juarez murders the phones rang off the hook with Spanish-speaking women calling: “the police,” they all said. “Somebody has to investigate the police.”

In Ciudad Juarez one of the ex-political prisoners of Santiaguito taken in Atenco speaks. Italia, she was one of the first to denounce the rape and sexual assault she and other suffered at the hands of the police in the transfer from Atenco to the prison at Santiaguito. We were raped, we were...forced to ride naked, piled on top of each other, while the police walked all over us. They did what they wanted with us. Italia points out that men were raped and sexually assaulted to, something that came out right at the beginning and was never mentioned after that. And after suffering all this, she reminds, our compañeros are still prisoners!

The Delegate Zero in Charcas (paraphrased): what is equally in crisis, as much as the expropriation and destruction of the land, and the hijacking of politics by politicians, is the deterioration of social relations, personal and communal, both in terms of the effects of immigration and poverty on families as well as the corroding of the relation between men and women, which is pushing violence to new limits. This is no longer just a relation of domination, as damaging as that may be in itself, but a relationship of violence that reaches assassination. Here Juarez is emblematic, where the number of women assassinated continues to grow, where the women are attacked, hurt, not just as victims but as women victims.

Pink Frosting
In a highschool, “Prepa 2,” in Fresnillo, San Luis Potosi, there are girls, 14 and 15-year olds, who remind me of 80’s barbie dolls, or a look I can’t identify exactly, somewhere between street corner and golf course. There’s one girl in particular that I’m fascinated by, I can’t stop looking at her. She’s petite and skinny and cute, pink jeans, pink Mary Janes, pink camisole under a pink cardigan, pink rhinestone-studded sunglasses on top of her head, pink phone in her front pocket, and, icing on the pink cake, pink sparkly eye shadow. When she moves her frosted hair feathered back on both sides doesn’t. She stands there, half listening, checking her phone every couple minutes with the kind of flaunting self-consciousness of junior high girls discovering their style and their power at the same time. In his speech at the high school Delegate Zero talks about the social destiny of women in society, condemned to be judged by their appearance, measured by their measurements, promoted by their willingness to grant sexual favors. And I keep looking at this girl and thinking, she’s already in her own social prison, she’s already completely controlled by this, she’s already desperate to achieve, maintain, demonstrate that look above all other priorities in life. That is the other prison that capital-directed social relations maintains.

There are more Zacatecos living in the US then in Zacatecas: 1 million 400 thousand in the state of Zacatecas, and 2 million in the US., making Zacatecas the state with the highest level of migration in the country. A majority of municipalities in the state show negative population growth as a result of migration. One municipality in particular, Saucito, is the origin of 11 of every 19 migrants leaving state territory. These towns are essentially forced to export their own population; residents report that their primary merchandise and export product as a state is their labor force. Many stories are sad: one woman’s son left at 16 years old, went to work in Atlanta, and returned at 23 years of age, in a coffin. A woman later on in La Huasteca, San Luis Potosi, cries as she tells the Delegate Zeros that her son in Houston, an undocumented worker, was incarcerated and accused of homicide, kept incommunicado, represented by a publicly appointed lawyer who instead of defending him is urging him to sign a guilty plea. “Van a buscar la vida y encuentra la muerte,” a man says in Zacatecas, they go to look for life and they find death.”

In another meeting, Delegate Zero, referring to the wall being built on the US-Mexico border: what we saw in the border and the rest of the country...what the United States government is doing is converting our country into a pressure cooker, because if the only economic escape valve of the nation closes, the people here will not have any options. They’re treating migrants as terrorists, but really they’re sustaining both economies. If they make this wall they will have created the biggest prison on the continent.

Indignation and Dignidad
San Pedro, San Luis Potosi is a ghost town, completely destroyed by a mining industry that took what it could from the mountain and when that was gone, left and left the community abandoned. But the small mountain of San Pedro, next to the ghost town, is a sacred spot in the area, declared a protected monument zone by UNESCO. Now a Canadian company Metallica Resources Incorporated, here known as Minera San Xavier, is putting in a new gold and silver mine which will escavate the sacred San Pedro. The process of extraction consists of exploding 25 tons daily of explosives, resulting in the fall of 80,000 tons of materials. 40% of this material is transferred to an extraction area dug out of the same land, where it is mixed with 16 tons of sodium cianuro and 32 million liters of water.They show us the black tarp that lines the hole where the minerals will be processed; one worker who has already worked to repair a leak, mocks it. The process will take out approximately one kilometer of mountain and leave a crater one kilometer in diameter and 300 meters deep. According to Metallica Resources's own environ ental report, 8 million leters of water will be converted, through evaporation and carried by the dominant east-west winds, into clouds of cianhidrico acid over the city of San Luis Potosi, 12 miles downwind.The mine's environmental report also states that it will contaminate the local water reserve, this in an area where there is already a major shortage of potable water for the population. Similar projects in the "first world" have been outlawed precisely becuase of these effects, which is why such projects are now moved to the "third world." There is currently a petition before UNESCO to declare San Pedro patrimony of humanity, but the project has the support of the local government. A citizens' referendum was held in October of last year, in which 19, 050 of 19,608 people voted against the project.

In La Tesorera, Zacatecas, the community name, literally “The Treasure” takes tangible form. La Tesorera sits on a bank of rich minerals, including a bank of gold and silver. Several years ago they were fighting an asphalt plant that produced such serious pollutants that the houses were crumbling from toxic gases, twelve children were diagnosed with toxic poisoning. “We were at the point of leaving,” they way, “our community does not have a tradition of struggle.” But they decided to fight. They closed the road to the plant for 12 days and nights, sitting in front of the machines. When the police tried to remove the protesters, one woman from the community grabbed a police sergeant and sits down in front of the bulldozers, saying, “If I have to stay here you have to stay here too,” at which point the sergeant fainted. After a long fight the community won the battle and the plant was closed in December 2004. But at this meeting with the EZLN, they report that they have just learned that there are to be six more mines built on their land. The struggle stretches out in front of them again. This is what capitalism does, one community member says, it destroys a place and then reorganized it, expelling its people and then repopulating it with agricultural workers, migrants themselves from other places. And what’s more, capitalism is ruling the politicians. Those who govern are merely managers of the interests of big business.

In Vicente Guerrero, Durango, we hear one of the most repeated stories: the people tried to resist the privatization of communal lands, [Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution protected all communally held lands from privatization and thus sale, expropriation through debt, or forced eviction. Under Salinas Article 27 was modified to allow for the privatization and thus exploitation of these lands, usually by foreign direct investment) promoted through the government programs PROCEDE and PROCECOM. But somehow, a list of signatures of the communal landholders was delivered to local authorities and the privatization of the land begun. In these cases, as we have heard over and over, companies or local governments interested in the land buy off one landowner who falsifies the names of the others. Or the list is full of names are of people who have been dead for years. Or poor campesinos have been paid for their signatures, without realizing what they are signing.

Gomez Palacios Laguna, Coahuila. Home to the Mexican milk giant, Lala. It takes 1,000 liters of water to produce one liter milk. Lala makes 5 million liters of milk a day, plus the water used to irrigate the alfalfa fields used to feed the milkcows, and is running a deficit of approximately 5 million cubic meters of water; that is the difference between what Lala uses from the reservoir and the speed at which that can be replaced is a deficit of 5 million cubic meters. There is a serious potable water shortage in the surrounding communities, as well as contamination of the existing water supply by arsenic and other heavy metals by the industry.

In Torreon, Coahuila, a local doctor, Victor Rodriguez explains that the population is suffering from serious led poisoning. It started with 100 poisoned children, then 36,000 diagnosed (the government has settled on the number 11,000). And that’s clinically diagnosed, not counting those without medical services. Lead has a 33 year half life. A satellite study in the area by the University of Barcelona says that in any given area there shouldn’t be higher than 30 parts lead per million and here there are 13,000 parts per million. The long term effects: mental deficiencies, lupus, degenerative illnesses, allergies, asthma, hearing loss, cancer.
In Lequieto, a small community close to Torreon, “come to my neighborhood and see, we don’t have a drop of water, not a drop, pure dirt we’re supposed to drink, because that’s what comes in the rain.

In Mesa de Palmira, a small town high in the mountains of Zacatecas: we have a great shortage of potable water, there are water sources but we have no way to transport it. The government keeps saying they will pipe it in but they never come. Our land will produce, it is good soil, it will produce corn, beans, potato, peas, but we can’t plant because we don’t have money even for starting materials. We are so tired of asking for things! So there is no government, there is no money, there is no water, there isn’t anything!

When the woman from Lequieto breaks into tears of frustration, the Delegate Zero speaks: What we’ve heard here is what we heard all over the country, in the below all over the country. The woman who cried here out of rage, that rage and indignation we all feel. when we feel there is nothing we can do. In Hidalgo there was a woman who cried just like that because she saw [President] Fox on television saying he has helped the indigenous people in her community, and had taken a photo there with the people that they put on TV. And this woman cried, outraged, because she says Fox had never come to their community, she didn’t know where they took that photo, in his backyard or something.

Listen, the EZ said there and in other places: 100 years ago it seemed impossible to overturn the massive fraud committed to get Porfirio into office. And maybe somebody said, let’s try it, And they did, with the Mexican Revolution. 200 years ago it seemed impossible to defeat the most powerful army in the world at the time, the Spanish army, and maybe somebody said, let’s try it. And there was the War of Independence. 12 years ago it looked like Salinas was the most powerful man in the country, and the day he was celebrating the passage of NAFTA, January 1, 1994, what would permit him to sell off the country, they called him that morning and said, a bunch of Indians just rose up in Chiapas.” That was us. And in a few days all of his power dissolved. But that wasn’t enough, because that was only part of the country and it was armed struggle and that doesn’t include everyone. The Other Campaign is saying now, let’s try it.

University of Mediocrity
In Torreon, at the Political Science Faculty, one student says, this might get me into trouble, but the teachers here are, well, a bunch of mediocres.
In Monterrey, a student: “what school is preparing us for is to be part of the mediocre middle class.
A student from several states ago, in Aguascalientes: we fight for free and public education, but we don’t just want free and public education, because the education we’re receiving is capitalist training. We don’t want free capitalist training! And in Oaxaca, “we are fighting the exploitation of the only thing we have, “our bodies and their ideas.”

Labor force training, mediocrity, expense, research funded by and directed toward the interests of large companies looking for new profitable products, this is repeated over and over in the schools the Other Campaign visits.

The EZLN message many times over in the Universities: What school is doing to you is disciplining, not educating. And it is training you to be individuals: your tests, your grades, all of this is training to individualize. And it is training for getting a job, preparation for entering the work-world. But not even this will work, because even with all the effort you put out for that test will mean nothing because the people who will get the jobs are the ones who had connections to get there, or are the relatives of someone powerful. As students you have to unite your struggle with others because it doesn’t matter how high your ambition, how good your preparation or education, it won’t matter. This absurd society is run with political leverage, not ability. You think Fox could pass one of your exams?

And on the place of students and knowledge-producers in the Other Campaign:
The Other Campaign is a great movement of young people and students, it is a place where you can fight your struggle. You confront your exams individualized, your grades individualized. Join the Other Campaign and make organizations, not just for scholarly issues but for culture, economy, sports, everything. Abandon the individual position school puts you in and make collectives! Contact each other all over the country, talk without mediation, support other struggles, of teachers, workers, kids, indigenous, elderly. Mix your books and your reality; bring your stories of immigration and repression to school, so in the classroom we learn these things. [...] The Other Campaign should be a space for political discussion, theory, debate, it should be a real agitation. Yes in practice, but part of this political agitation is also theoretical discussion and debate. “The Compañeros that work with ideas should open this space and maintain it, if not what’s going to happen is that the Other Campaign is going to turn into an anti-intellectual movement. And an anti-intellectual movement, anti- theoretical reflection, becomes a spontaneous movement. It can be really big, even really radical, but it will sow defeat after defeat.”

From the Mothers of the Disappeared of Chihuahua “Where are we? We are in the middle of a very aggressive environment, very difficult... Compañero, the patria is in shreds, it has to be reconstructed. How are you going to reconstruct it, how am I going to construct it, if I don’t know how to analyze the context in which I’m living? So you’re going to work at the level of gossip and I am too. So it’s not just that we need the impulse and desire to transform, we have to study Compañeros! We have to discuss, we have to analyze, we have to see, in what context are we living in every day? Why? To be able to give an appropriate response....”

Great Movements don’t start big
An adherent in Zacatecas: “I’m from a very small collective, In fact, if it got any smaller it wouldn’t be a collective anymore. There are two of us, my wife and I. By collective agreement I was chosen to speak at this meeting on our behalf.”

The EZLN says repeatedly, great movements don’t start big. Great movements start with 4, 5, 6 people who say, enough! In this phase of the Other Campaign we’re just getting to know each other. And we’re not looking for any people who live badly, we’re looking for people who want to struggle. In the Other Campaign we’re not looking for followers or masses, we’re looking compañeros.

We’ve started a movement without knowing who it will end. We know what we don’t want: political parties, the same mistakes, speaking without listening, and at the moment when we have to say what we want, this we have to answer among all of us, as a collective answer [...] It’s as if they were pushing everyone to the edge of the table until there was nothing left but to fall, and all of a sudden there appears a bridge, we’re making a bridge.

There are four axes here, of the national problematic:
1. Tierra: land, water, air, wildlife, soil and the legalized plunder of these resources.

2. The politics of democracy: politics have been hijacked, you can only participate if you’re a registered political party, with determinate characteristics. Citizens can participate every 3-6 years, but the can’t choose who they want, they just choose among these that are already candidates. The citizen can’t say, I don’t want any of these. They can’t say, this one isn’t doing a good job, take him/her out. And the vote is an individual thing, you can’t organize collectively in electoral politics. They choose between a few and even that isn’t respected! [referring to the fraud of the 2006 presidential elections] And this with the mass media complicity.

3. Community and personal relations: the relation between men and women has reached limits of violence, the murders of women are reaching new heights. The forced immigration means families are broken up, communities are broken up. If before a community would organized its celebrations for events significant to them, now a company organizes the party and the people become mere spectators. Even what we eat, coke and potato chips, something as simple as what’s on the table, tears the community fabric.

4. War: it is escalating everywhere. People are displaced from their lands, which are now worked by Central Americans. Young people, instead of fighting this war of displacement, have to leave home to look for work. It is another conquest. There are places of resistance, barricades, trenches, nuclei, we have those everywhere, but they are separated. So the Other Campaign is finding them. And like the intelligence services signal with red dots the trouble spots of the country, what we’ve found is that the whole country is red.

And in Monterrey: If there is not an alternative [to the crisis above], those above are going to rearrange and repair themselves. We have to respond to a fundamental question, not “how are we going to survive,” but “how are we going to live better?” And in that question, we are going to have problems but they’ll be other problems, not anymore if we survive or not, but rather how should we organize ourselves?

"This country has to save itself all together, or it doesn’t save itself. And when it does, it won’t be power that makes you rich, but rather work. And without arms. All of us, at the same time. And now it won’t be, I’m doing this for someone else, no, this is for me..."

Punks and Communists
In Saltillo and Monclova, Coahuila, we get one of the most interesting combinations in the Other Campaign: libertarian punks and the Communist Party. The Punks are young, camouflage or cargo pants, piercings, purple and red streaked hair, lips all sewn up with barbells and hoops, girls with eyes painted in charcoal and guys in che-style hats. Dinner with the libertarian punks is textured soy protein. They are organized with the big, tall, boot-wearing, cowboy-hat sporting, mustached, rancher-looking communists from the north. They serve hearty red meat dishes.

Poem read in Saltillo, at an adherents meeting hosted by the libertarian punks:
POEM

From the punks: we don’t want to be emancipated by the dominant institutions, we want to liberate ourselves from them. We reject the censorship of the university, using science to promote capitalism. And another: I was eight years old when the Zapatista uprising happened, all of my life has been formed by this. That poem he just read, that was the story of my life. The unemployment centers here are full of young people, not because we like to be there but out of necessity, and because we have desire to improve ourselves, to move forward! We as young people, we want to organize with other organizations, alone we can’t do anything...

Adherents in Monterrey call themselves an “urban laboratory of neoliberal politics.” Monterrey has the richest neighborhood in all of Latin America, San Pedro Garcia, which is surrounded by multiple belts of poverty—40% of the population lives in poverty. It is the 8th most polluted city in the world, as of 1985. There is a high mortality rate from respiratory diseases. Monterrey is the center of money laundering in the country. The neoliberal attack on the environment is accompanied by the “intoxication” of humans with ritalin and psychiatric medicines, the people report, to cure the social ills created by the neoliberal society. One health worker explains Monterrey has the highest percentage of caesarean in the world, nearly 90% of births are via caesarean. An average would be 15%. Midwives are no longer allowed to attend to births. A university professor: I teach at the best state university in the country. I have a postgraduate professional degree. I have 200 students per week. And I earn 600 pesos (USD$52) every 2 weeks. Minimum wage would be 400 pesos (USD$35). We don’t tell the students how much we earn, it would be embarrassing, we’d have to allow tips and that would probably double our salary. Another adherent: Your two primary options for work here are small-scale drug scales or immigration. This is the absolute putrification of the productive life.

The North: The same story always: there is no water. Either the reservoir is dry (due to over-exploitation), the source is contaminated (usually by transnational industry), the well
is now owned and controlled by a rich family or foreign company (having been privatized by neoliberal government policy), it has been privatized and the price has skyrocketed. They are losing their land to PROCEDE/ PROCECOM, government privatization programs and debt. The forests are being cut down and the wood taken out in an endless train of trucks loaded heavily with the thick trunks, but the local communities, usually indigenous, are fined or jailed for cutting wood for their homefires for cooking. Communities that have lived for hundreds of years by fishing on the coast, now prohibited from taking out their small boats to fish while industrial fishing operations haul masses of fish and shrimp from the same seas. Contamination and pollution of air, water, and land from nationally and internationally owned industrial plants—the incredible cancer rates, primarily in women in these communities, the number of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood, the nauseas in kids and adults, and these are the people in the community; the workers of the plants are walking poison. The lack or violation of regulations on chemical use in the fields results in workers with serious skin and organ diseases.

Corruption: the narco-politico mafia and complicity between the PAN in particular and the cartels in the North. The common perspective on politicians: “it doesn’t have to be someone good, just someone who steals less.”

And finally, everywhere, without fail, immigration. The stream of young people mostly, but other too, out of Mexican communities in every state to the US is incredible. There is no other way to survive. There are more Zacatecos in the US than in Zacatecas. Remittances sent from Mexican workers in the US to Mexico is the highest source of income in the country, having recently surpassed tourism and petroleum.

"There came a moment when each of these older adults understood that they to stop complaining in order to start organizing themselves. That to be complaining was part of the process of their submission, that which their sons and daughters had fought against, and which capital encourages to keep us in its project of death. So they said, enough, we are not going to complain anymore but neither are we going to be submissive. We are going to be insubmissive and rebellious! And so with much pride they say, my guerilla son or daughter taught me!” —Mothers of the Disappeared of Chihuahua