From the war against oblivion to the struggle for life
January 1st is a date of great importance for Latin America and the Greater Caribbean. Not only does it celebrate the beginning of a new year, it is also an emblematic date for the struggles of our peoples.
On January 1, 1804, after 12 years of war, the people of Haiti won their independence. It was the first anti-colonial revolution to triumph on the continent. Almost a century and a half later, on January 1, 1959, also in the Greater Caribbean, the Cuban revolution triumphed, a movement that was born anti-imperialist and soon became socialist.
Later, on January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation declared war on the Mexican State and its oblivion. The Zapatista gamble soon took a clearer direction: without laying down their weapons, they opted to build schools, clinics, hospitals, to distribute the recovered lands, to self-management, self-government, and territorial self-determination. Autonomy is what they call this way of resisting and at the same time creating something new.
Over these 28 years, Zapatismo has built an alternative that combines the knowledge of the people and the knowledge of other resistances. Articulating from the local to the global, today the Zapatista resistance is recognized throughout the world for being an experience of government from below, of a to command by obeying which also embraces the flags of anti-capitalism, anti-patriarchy, anti-racism and which fights and alerts the world, as Fidel Castro did before, of the risks that socio-environmental collapse means for humanity.
As in the past, the beings of war and money do not tolerate anyone who dares to give an example that another world is possible. That is why, with paramilitaries and criminal groups, but also with the omission and guarantee of impunity offered by the three levels of government, today the Zapatista people continue to suffer the war.
Twenty-eight years have passed since the Zapatista Ya Basta resounded throughout the world. Today the Zapatista Mayan people themselves invite us to fight a crucial battle, the fight in defense of Life. The Cat-Dog already noted it in his notebook: "Either you are with the system or with nature. Either with death, or with life."