TWENTY-FIVE
“Nations and People of Earth,”
The Amok World Almanac and Book of Weird Facts
2010
(Electrostraca #: A/GR-010-367-582-2376)
The Mixtecan and Mayapan Liberated Territories are currently negotiating peace in a decade long war of secession that removed close to 260 thousand square miles and 20 million people in southern Mexico from Mexican central government control as well as from the North American Trade Zone. Combined US/Mexican forces still uneasily occupy a third of the Liberated Territories, and the US military continues a limited air war and partial naval blockade of the Zapatista revolution. But the tenacity of this libertarian society and its poor peasant peoples seems to be winning it the independence for which the Zapata liberation Front (ZLF) has fought so hard to attain.
The ZLF organized the Mixtecan and Mayapan Liberated Territories out of the countrywide August 2000 Uprisings, defending it up to the present under the US aerial holocaust and against the incursions of the combined US/Mexican/Guatemalan armed forces. The ZLF holds ground from the region where the Sierra Madre Oriental and Del Sur merge, around Oaxaca, through the Istmo De Tehuantepec to the Yucatan. This vast swath of self governing territory is run by village and town councils, workers collectives and syndicates, and peasant coops and communes. A half dozen libertarian labor unions, plus two socialist ones, form the Confederación del Trabajo. With several political parties—the Magonist Liberty Party, the conventional Mexican Social Democracy Party, a minuscule Communist Party, and a larger, weirder hybrid Trotskyist/Maoist amalgam called the Revolutionary Movement of the Left—the CT fronted the popular circle of southern Mexico’s liberation struggles; the grassroots level to the ZLF.
The actual running of the Liberated Territories is done in an extremely decentralized fashion, even in the small socialist zones. In the larger villages, and in towns and cities, factories were taken over by their workers. The workers in turn elected both technical and administrative management, all subject to recall at any time, and entirely accountable to the workers’ assembly. Problems beyond the scope of one factory are handled by local/regional economic and industrial councils. Close to 80% of the industry in the Territories is worker run.
The communal traditions of Mexico’s peasant life in the south are augmented by those still extant pre-Columbian native cultural institutions into a solid social base. As a consequence, collectivization came easily. Expropriated lands were taken over by the peasants, who pool not only their land, but tools, animals, grain, fertilizer and harvested crops, modestly in cooperatives and more radically in communes. Perhaps 7,900 agrarian cooperatives and communes carry out the bulk of the farming in the Liberated Territories.
Between twelve and fifteen million people participate in southern Mexico’s revolution in this manner, as well as through their village and town councils. In the larger towns and in the cities, neighborhood councils coordinate through a metropolitan council. These latter organs of self-government are broader and more volatile, for while much of the regions workers and peasants belong to the CT through one or another of its independent unions, “independents” and “individualists” flourish in the various village, town and metropolitan councils. Small farmers who do not wish to join a cooperative or commune are called “individualists,” and small shop owners who do not want to unionize are labeled “independents.” Both are permitted to continue, the one working the land and the other operating a business or industry, often as families as they are not permitted to hire labor. As a consequence a modest, better off sector of extended family farms and enterprises prospers. Not subject to competition from large landowners, industrialists, and other capitalists, domestic or foreign, as all have long ago fled, they are also protected by the Territories popular militias as far as is possible from the US/Mexican military assault.
The CT and its affiliated unions, the LP and the MSDP, are all run from the bottom up through conventions and congresses, ultimately coalescing in the sometimes unwieldy but always democratic federation that is the ZLF. Only the CP and the RML practice versions of tight, Leninist, democratic centralism and because of their relative lack of influence, they are tolerated as members of the ZLF.
Intersecting the ZLF, overlapping it in a number of areas, the Federación Anarchista Olmecan (FAO) is a network of groupos de afinidad most closely associated with the libertarian unions of the CT. They are more purely ideological within their respective unions at the same time they field the fighting groups and carry out atentados against military and ruling classes in those gray, boundary areas of the Territories. The FAO, together with the peasant and workers militias formed into columns, constitute the guerrilla Popular Revolutionary Forces (PRF), which defend the Liberated Territories through the strategy of a self-organized, armed people.
Sparked by the widespread corruption, intimidation and fraud of the PRI in the 1998 Presidential elections, and backed against the wall by the brutal failure of the 1999 country-wide General Strike, the 2000 August Uprisings, also called the August Revolution in the Territories, forged both the ZLF and the Territories, all in 20 breathtaking days of successful insurrection. Both the ZLF and the Territories have weathered years of US/Mexican government and military counter-insurgency, this revolutionary society basically intact despite all that reaction and imperialism can throw at it. US strategy against the secessionist south of Mexico involves unrelenting air war, smart weaponry, high tech special forces, and combined US/Mexican ground forces. US counterinsurgency escalated quickly from covert aid in 2001 through advisors in 2003 to troops in 2005. The Combined Forces draw a line from Acapulco to Vera Cruz, digging in behind it as well as along the eastern stretch of the Yucatan peninsula around Cancun. US military bases in western and northern Guatemala coordinate with the brutal Guatemalan military to secure the border and make occasional anti-guerrilla incursions. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff at first predicted a swift, surgical intervention of overwhelming US technologies linked to a sepoy army trained from the start in gung-ho, American-style warfare. Yet the US/Mexican war against the Mixtecan and Mayapan Liberated Territories has dragged on for years, with little success in converting areas sympathetic to the revolution let alone in defeating the revolution’s core areas.
Physically, on the ground, the US military does far better in holding territory and minimizing casualties than was the case during Vietnam. Spiritually, the US does little better in winning the “hearts and minds” of the populace than was the case in IndoChina. Now that the US and Mexican governments are tacitly acknowledging the Zapatista revolution by holding multilateral peace talks with the Mixtecan and Mayapan Liberated Territories in Paris, it is no longer that difficult to enter or travel about in southern Mexico...