Mexican State Is Terror Source, Says Zapatista Leader Sub-Comandante Marcos

The Mexican state itself is organised crime and the war against drug trafficking is a bloody failure, the Zapatista leader Sub-comandante Marcos told a gathering of Rabia Digna (Dignity in Rage) at San Cristobal, Mexico, on January 2.

“In our sad Mexico, (President) Felipe Calderón Hinojosa and the communication media that accompany him, each time fewer, are those who have taken the top spot in the use and abuse of the hackneyed term ‘violence’…

“Mr Calderón, a fan of strategic games in real time, decided to give the people violence in place of bread and circus… now that professional politicians already give them the circus and bread is very expensive…

“Calderón decided to support one band of drug traffickers in making war against another and, violating the Constitution, brought out the army to do the work of the police, the Public Ministry, court and executioner. Everyone other than his government knows that this war is being lost… that the death of his beloved (Interior Minister who died in a plane crash) was an assassination though no one prints it.”

He accused the “leftist” government of Mexico City of killing young people, “mostly adolescents”, before the silence of “ a section of progressive intellectuals”.

Participating in the gathering were 228 collectives and organisation of 22 states and 57 groups from 25 countries. Another Zapatista, Commander Moses, said the meeting was for the purpose of knowing the different forms of rage against neo-liberal capitalism. Ninety musical, dance, theatre and puppet theatre groups were present as were story-tellers and poets.

Hugo Blanco, legendary Peruvian peasant leader, said the all the people who had sprung up from the depths of Abya Yala (the profound Americas) were uniting not only for a just life but to save the human race.

He accused (Opposition leader) Andrés Lopez Obrador, “threatening to save Mexico”, of being intolerant, sectarian and hysterical and that the hysteria has “frankly become schizophrenic”. They think they are the only ones doing something for the country. If this was how they were without being in power, imagine what would they be like if they had taken the chair, he said.

The Mexico City government (led by Obrador’s party) was trying to take control of the capital’s dignified and angry youth and of neutralising movements that went against their interests, he said.

Marcos was not entirely swept away by pessimism. He commended the student movement that had defended the free and public university system in Mexico, the Bolivian peasant struggles, the Sandinistas and the 50 years of the Cuban revolution.

Back to Home Page