zapatismo

On Sunday April 6th, Movement for Justice in El Barrio took the struggle against gentrification in NYC to an international level. Through the new International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio, Movement for Justice in El Barrio is organizing on a transnational level to combat displacement in El Barrio (East Harlem) by building a multi-national network to go after one of their main targets, the multi-national corporation Dawnay, Day Group at their central headquarters in London and on multiple continents where they hold property. Movement for Justice in El Barrio and their supporters from around the city and nation gathered on the steps of city hall to launch their “International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio.”

Written by Cory Fisher-Hoffman, Tessa Landreau-Grasmuck, Kaya Weidman, and Mandy Skinner collectively

Just after midnight on January 1st, was the 14th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising, and the caracol of La Garrucha was alive with celebration. From the top of a refurbished school bus we watched a mass of bodies dance to norteños below a vast sky littered with stars, and the occasional covering of fog that characterizes the mountains of the Mexican southeast.
This night marked the end of the third Encuentro [Gathering] of the Zapatistas with the People of the World, and the first Encuentro of Zapatista Women and the Women of the world. Why a women’s encounter? “Because it was time,” repeated the voices of the masked women speaking before a seated audience of women from Zapatista support bases across Chiapas, as well as from social movements in Mexico and the world.

by tessa landreau-grasmuck

“Those of us who have waged war know how to recognize the paths in which it nears and prepares itself. The signs of war on the horizon are clear. War, like fear, has a scent. And now you can begin to breathe its fetid odor in our lands.”
-Subcomandante Marcos on his last public appearance, December 2007.

Just 2 months after Marcos warned the world of the intensifying violence in Chiapas, the International Civil Commission for Human Rights Observation (CCIODH, Comisión Civil Internacional de Observación por los Derechos Humanos) announced their findings from their week in the southeast Mexican state. Chiapas remains in a state of profound inequality and exclusion, affecting a majority of the population, most gravely women and indigenous peoples, the Commission reported. Most communities have limited to no access to shelter, food, education or health care. Instead of responding to the basic needs of the state, the Commission said, the politics of Chiapas continues to implement programs which promote division and conflict in communities in Chiapas. Autonomous organizing, the only viable solution to the lack of basic necessities, continues to face severe military and paramilitary repression, while legal impunity for counter-insurgent violence remains the norm of the Chiapas justice system.