Brother and Sisters
Compañeras and compañeros:

For me it is an enormous privilege and honor to be able to be here, together with you all in this territory—brown, simple and noble, like its people.

This privilege and honor would not have been possible without that enormous, dignified, enraged and collective effort by thousands of men, women, young people, children and elderly of my people, of our peoples, who don’t just make real history, but who also are the ones who write our history. It would no be possible to be here—nor could the EZLN be seen and felt today as a great example of dignity and hope—without that effort by our indigenous brothers and sisters, by our brothers and sisters from the cities, by our Mexican brothers and sisters.

Oscar Olivera, Sandinista commander Mónica Baltodano and the indigenous commanders of the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army)

Perhaps because of this, today I also feel that I am unworthy of being here next to you, with you.

Because of this, I wish to pay tribute to those men and women, young people, children and elderly people who over the course of our struggles were attacked and imprisoned, hurt and killed, so that life would continue reproducing, so that we would continue living.

If there is something that all of us here today in this summit have all felt, lived and suffered, it is fear, anguish, discrimination, racism, rejection, being forgotten and more than being forgotten, perhaps, being ignored.

But we have also been able to feel outraged, to find ourselves again, to organize ourselves, to talk, to mobilize ourselves, to be happy, to cry, to laugh, to love, to hate, to recover our capabilities, to trust in our strengths, to recover our VOICE, our words, but above all to also recover our ability to DECIDE.

And so it was in the April of the year 2000, eight years ago. We were rooted only in our own strengths, had face to face discussion, recognized ourselves as equals, united our strengths and weaknesses, making ourselves visible to the rich and the powerful—those who for years had dedicated themselves to putting our country, our lands, our businesses, our people at the disposal of transnational capital. Those who cynically and shamelessly plundered and stripped all that the Mother Earth, our Pachamama, has generously given us so that all of us who inhabit those lands can live with dignity, justice and well-being, just as our parents and grandparents did, and just as our children and grandchildren should.

Those who proclaim themselves rulers and administrators of the State privatized the water and went so far as to do the same for rainwater.

What all of us did together, in the face of so many years of dictatorship by transnational capital, of dictatorship by the political parties, of the leaders who were servants of the World Bank and the IMF, was—through our fight—put a stop to the bad governments, as you, brothers and sisters, call them. And we achieved, by forming hundreds of blockade points in the city and the countryside, the expulsion one of the most predatory transnational companies that exists—the Bechtel transnational company. We wiped away a law that was made behind the backs of the people. We got rid of everything that meant expropriation and commercialization of water. In that year we began to walk, as our Mexican sister Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar says, the path of our own self-emancipation.

To emancipate oneself, in the most classic meaning of the word, means, “to get rid of the master’s hand.” This we did with all of those organized in the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life (Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida): we began to get rid of the yoke of transnational capital, we broke away from our destiny of dispossession and misery that a few powerful people had designed to impose upon us as the only possible reality. We learned, through experience, that we were capable of leading ourselves. We began to see that we could change what is understood as politics, jointly reclaiming, in public meetings and face to face dialogue, decisions about the most important questions that concern us all: Public issue decisions stopped being the occupation and task of experts and politicians. Collectively, we recovered the Voice, our Words and the Decision. Meaning we did not just achieve the de-privatization of our water, but that we also achieved the de-privatization of politics, understanding this as “a way self-regulating our shared coexistence, of dialoging, evaluating, challenging, deciding and implementing.”

In those days we rose up on our own two feet, we looked each other in the eye, we deliberated what made the most sense, over and over, we reached agreements and we carried them out. That is what we did and that is what you did leading up to January 1, 1994. That is our strength—it should become our strength again and stay that way always.

In the long struggle to recover our rights, to recover what was stolen, to ensure that we ourselves control what is in our territories, we in Cochabamaba Bolivia, with what was called the Water Wars, were pioneers. We lit the way, but we were not in charge. That is what we wanted, that is what we were.

Eight years have passed since those events and other struggles have since taken place: for coca, for gas and oil. More years went by in which many compañeros and compañeras from the struggle have assumed government offices. Three years have passed since Evo Morales was put in the government because of those struggles, by the humble and hard-working people from the countryside and the city. They were put there not to administer government but to transform government—and for they themselves to be transformed as have been up to this point.

The years 2000 to 2005 were five years of struggle, of recovering our capacity to become indignant, to rebel, to occupy territorial spaces—with transparency, horizontality, respect, reciprocity, solidarity, equality, without hierarchies and without single leaders or bosses.

These struggles—big and small, national and mundane—were the spaces in which we experimented with real Democracy. That’s what made possible the public meetings and caucuses that took place in the plazas, in the streets, on the trails. We assigned each other tasks in those places. We completed those responsibilities with complete mysticism and commitment because they were “our tasks.” They were not imposed by anyone from “above,” they came from below.

Today, after those moments has passed, we should ask ourselves several things:

Have these governments fulfilled the fundamental obligations that their people defined with complete clarity? This united and strong social bloc fought with an absolutely clear collective horizon. It was the social recovery or re-appropriation of our patrimony – inherited from the struggles and efforts of our parents and grandparents –which consists of hydrocarbons, minerals, water, production and service companies and our biodiversity. That is to say, the recovery of our land—not just as a physical space, but also and above all as a space of social coexistence for us all, a land where we live together in harmony and as a part of nature and the Pachamama.

The other task was to build or re-build a “new institutionality,” based on our “traditions and customs,” for the social projects dreamed of by our ancestors, amautas and wise ones, which incorporates the values that allow us to build our present and our future.

The policies and strategies that this government has implemented—despite having been important in the effort to recover the sovereign capacity of our countries’ governments in light of capitalism—have, in practice, simply established new rules for the game that allow for the use of increased oil revenue or that give the State back their ability to “nationally” administer the “nationalized” companies. But they have not changed anything concerning the state as an institution that promotes corruption and the squandering of money and resources that comes from complete lack of social control and participation in decision-making in those companies.
The establishment of the Constituent Assembly and the election of the Prefects (governors) were the main mistakes of this government as it opened the possibility of a process of re-organization of the oligarchic, fascist, land-owning corporate right-wing.

The series of forums, referendums and “democratic” measures has, for all of those in the elite political class, obscured and ignored the serious economic consequences for the people which include both the global food crisis and the financial capitalist crisis. It would seem that today, numbers and statistics are more important than returning dignity and well-being to the population.
In short, there has been neither “nationalization” nor social re-appropriation of what has been expropriated. Nor has there been a Constituent Assembly “without partisan intervention to construct a country from below” as we have been demanding since the year 2000.

Some of the many other problems are the following:

The co-opting of the main social movements and their subordination to state politics.

The continuing presence of neo-liberalism’s main operators in the state apparatus.

The loss of the ability to establish and present an autonomous agenda to the government, as was done from 2000 to 2005, to dismantle that state structure that turns government members lazy and into thieves and liars. These were the fundamental objectives of our struggles; they gave energy to our mobilizations in that period, mobilizations in which many current government members participated.

But the most worrisome thing, from the point of view of ordinary people from some social sectors, especially those of us from the city like the working and middle-class, is that this government did not incorporate fundamental indigenous values such as humbleness, reciprocity and generosity into its daily practice. Several of our sectors that struggle alongside the campesinos and indigenous people are ignored and we feel excluded from this political process.

It is a process that does not take everyone into account and that has generated sadness, deception and feelings of powerlessness. But at the same time, it has shown us, with complete clarity, that methods of “doing politics” have not changed, that the relation of the command-obedience chain has not been modified and that some of those who spoke of “ruling by obeying [those from below]” are now in power and are scared of creating horizontal relationships of power and of returning power to its legitimate owner—the people—because they know that if they do that, they will lose their privileges. And those privileges are not just material, but above all, include the ability to be in control.

Those who are critical or, as before, are proactive in terms of deepening of a real process [of change] are rewarded by the State by being characterized as radicals or financed by the right-wing, in the same vein as past governments who characterized social protestors as drug traffickers and terrorists.

But today, just as before and in spite of our struggles and the fights being diffused, in spite of those sentiments and sufferings, we are coming together again in pubic meetings, trying, not without great difficulty, to re-build our spaces of meeting and deliberation, in order to re-build our agenda from below, to recover our voice. We do this so that no one speaking in our name or in the name of the social movements will ever again be able to decide what we should say or do.
Because of this, througout these past few months of struggle against the emboldened, racist and vengeful right-wing, many of us have found ourselves again in the streets, on the paths, in the mobilizations. Many men and women have also died in these fights, once again.

But in the almost forced silence, in the moments of helplessness, during the struggle and in the moments without hope we realize several things:

That our people are not ready to renounce the struggle, nor will they tolerate being deceived or betrayed, and that there is a firm decision to recover autonomy in order to continue fighting against the transnationals, against the power of capital that still remains in our country, against racism, against the neoliberal policies of this and other governments that continue to ignore us—governments that continue to forget us and employ revolutionary discourse even when they are not revolutionary. Revolution is transformation, not reform.

Many people, in generous and simple ways, have given their Lives for Life. We have had many people die.

This way of thinking and this way of taking action is the thread that runs through these rebellions of ours; a rebellion that cannot be reduced, as many believe, to the dispute over management of the state apparatus, to whites versus Indians. It can not be reduced to struggle for the management of a company or control of a shared resource like hydrocarbons, a fight to exercise sovereignty and/or to “nationalize,” to “develop” ourselves. No, it is not just that. The fights are for LIFE and with life, against death, because we are not interested in being like other “developed” countries.

Our fight is not to achieve the high consumer indexes reached—at our cost—by the residents of the most northern countries of the global north; our struggles are so that humanity will survive, so that our sons and daughters, our grandsons and granddaughters will not just be the extension of our bodies, but so that they will be above all the extension of our hopes and dreams…and in those spaces, it’s the unwavering decision to not live as slaves that drives us, that commits us, that becomes the most mundane aspect of our lives.

No one can defeat us, because we have lived the possibility of changing our lives, through the collective and dignified actions and will of our communities, of our people.

Today, in these times, it is perhaps not so much about revolt, but rather hope. The players from above are almost always the same and they are still trying to block our way.

At the same time, we cannot stop continuing to listen to our people—their daily suffering, the struggle to survive, their immense capacity for self-organization and for outrage when it comes to defending their rights. We have seen the obligation of staying with our base, to work alongside it.

If we do not organize ourselves, if we do not mobilize ourselves, we do not exist.
For our independence, self-government and autonomy as social movements.
Without machismo leaders or bosses, in order to say to the powerful and the governing that we DO exist. Towards this end we remain alive. And while we continue to live we cannot stop fighting for ourselves, for humanity, for our dreams.

Our struggles should be happy, transparent and in motion, just like water, just like life.

San Cristóbal, January 3, 2009 and the 15th year of the Zapatista uprising.

Listen to Oscar Olivera and the other participants his panel (Spanish language only.)

________

• Factory Worker and Spokesman for the_Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida._