Images of Impossible Bridges: III A Letter

Ago302024

Images of Impossible Bridges: III A Letter

Images of Impossible Bridges:

III

A Letter.

August 2024.

Actually, the letter is very short. It arrived from Cauca, in the geography called Colombia, with a request from the brother Nasa indigenous people. I think it was at the end of 2022. Wait… yes, it arrived on October 31, 2022. The Nasa brothers asked that an article be spread on the Enlace Zapatista page, that is, that it be published there.

I read the text carefully, compared the data and thought: “if it is published on the page, no one will pay attention to it. And I think that what they want is not to have many “views”, but rather that what is said there is read and understood here, in the mountains of the Mexican Southeast. Then we are going to do something better than publish it on the Enlace Zapatista page: I am going to pass it on to the Zapatista political-organizational leadership. Let them be the ones who value it for what it is: an impossible bridge.” Why “impossible”? Now you will see:

In those days, the compañeras and compañeros bosses were already discussing and breaking down what, a year later, would be known as “El Común.”

The meetings were frequent, intense and exhausting. I know this because I peeked into several of them and because of what Subcommander Insurgent Moisés was telling me.

Since then “El Común” [The Common] already loomed on the horizon, but at that moment the questions were “What are we?”, “Where are we?”, “Where are we going?”

The impact that the so-called “Tour for Life. Chapter Europe” had had on Zapatismo was producing its effect. For weeks, in the meetings of the Committee and in the community assemblies, the different delegations, that visited the varied geographies of Europe below and to the left, reported, based on their notes.

With and through the delegations, Zapatismo had confirmed the destruction that “modernity” and “progress” produce in the “developed” territories, the so-called “Western civilization” – which, paradoxically, is to the east of us. And they had found similarities with those who were different in every way: resistance and rebellion against the Hydra, the capitalist system. The whole and the parts.

In the words of Subcommander Insurgent Moisés, coordinator of that chapter of the Tour for Life: “The situation is fucked, we have to hurry.”

The balance was worrying:

The accelerated process of destruction of the social fabric in Mexico;

the evident failures of the electoral left (the “progressivism”), not even in transforming the bases of a criminal system, also in managing it even if it were in a moderately mediocre way (establishing “corruption” as the source and cause of all evils , instead of seeing it for what it is: an effect… and also failing in the fight against it), the «seizing of Power» – in reality the arrival to government by any means— was nothing more than a replacement in the position of overseer (presumptuous, arrogant and authoritarian with the laborers, and docile and humble with the owner);

the increasingly stronger and more terrible protests by nature against Capital’s wars of conquest;

the coordinated advance of the so-called Organized Crime and the megaprojects;

migration and displaced populations (developed countries besieged by the effects of wars and policies of conquest in the so-called “peripheral” territories);

cruel and sadistic violence against women and ‘otroas’ [others] (the aggression against what is different as a new fanatical religion);

childhood converted into a scapegoat (the system sacrificing the future of humanity on the altar of profit);

the resurgence of wars with national-fascist arguments;

the normalization of the catastrophe; so collapse;

everything led to a terrifying conclusion: what we had predicted and warned decades before (and which was then the object of ridicule and scorn), was becoming real.

The future from then is already the present.

But you already know all this. To act accordingly, is another matter.

-*-

But returning to the letter from Cauca that requested spreading the text, I passed the letter to Subcommander Insurgent Moisés and drew his attention to one part.

The Subcommander read the text and the underlined part, looked up and asked me: “Did you tell them?” “Of course not,” I replied, “I don’t know those brothers.” SubMoy: “It’s as if they had been in the meetings.”

And the fact is that, in meetings in previous months, the committee, the Zapatista political-organizational leadership, had been discussing “isms.”

The underlined part of the text says:

Along the way we learned that the voice that teaches is Uma Kiwe, our Mother Earth; She indicates the path and the strategies… although there has been no shortage of those who want to act as advisors or try to lead the process. There was a moment, in 2016, when the process decided to open its doors to other struggles in order talk and to make them visible. From there all the isms began to arrive, and everyone wanted to establish their line or evangelize our process with their theoretical contents.

All these isms, environmentalism, anarchism, Marxism, feminism, Maoism, institutionalism, developmentalism are all constructions and legacy of the West, and even though in the territories they are woven with indigenous knowledge, they bear the seal of Western rationality. All isms have been very valuable in supporting and uniting with this process; some people have been respectful; others, colonialists. At the time it was necessary to say: «all isms are welcome, but here we are and will continue to be indigenous Nasa.» The liberation of Mother Earth goes beyond the sugarcane fields. Nasa knowledge, which comes from Uma Kiwe, is the sustenance of this struggle, and if we have contradictions it is precisely because of this battle that takes place in the heart between our Nasa being and the Western capitalist imposition.

Faced with the false dilemma between the institution or the revolution, the people propose alternative routes to inhabit this present; the coordinates of the debate overflow a Cartesian scheme, and show us, with their ways of living and organizing in the minga, the assembly, the celebration, the tulpas and rituals, other possible ways of life. When they ask us: “Rebellion? Revolution? Reform? [we say that] ours is wët wët fxi’zenxi”

-*-

In the meetings of the previous months, the committees had been recapitulating their history and, in it, the time of all the “isms” that were and will be, trying to give orders. None contributed anything worthwhile. And of course, there were and will be people who only came to get what they could. And they left when they could get no more. They were not “isms”, they were, and are, just scoundrels. And female scoundrels (don’t forget gender parity).

Okay. Good health and here, in addition to mud and dignity, what we have is a very different “ism”: Zapatismo.

From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.