Declaration by Organizations and Collectives from Below and to the Left

1.- On January 12^th, 1994, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans took to the street to proclaim that we were not willing to allow the neoliberal government of the murderer Carlos Salinas de Gortari to continue indiscriminately bombarding the Zapatista indigenous.

2.- The Mexican left was an essential element of that great popular mobilization. With that action we recovered the old tradition, born from the very heart of its conception as the left, to elevate well-oriented solidarity as the principal leader.

3.- Since that moment, with different nuances, we were involved in various Zapatista initiatives. We would be doing wrong if we were to give the impression that we speak in the name of all the Mexican left. No, one portion preferred to have as the only path the institutional sphere and has been a key element in the maintenance of the powerful’s control. Another portion decided to rid itself of the first to travel… the same path, calling always on its followers to resolve gigantic tasks without ever making it known how. Finally, the rest, preferred to have a vegetative existence which, being contemplative, laments the Mexican people’s inability to understand them.

4.- We were constructing a not always simple relationship with Zapatismo. Nonetheless, we always had a point of support which allowed us to remain at the side of our Zapatista brethren: they did not ask us to become what we are not, nor did we ask them to become what they are not. In this way, we did not have to sacrifice our theory or our practice, we did not have to dress up as what we are not.

5.- In that long walk together, without a doubt it was the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle which allowed those meetings and failures-to-meet to turn into something new and different. The Sixth Declaration allowed us to have a common anticapitalist framework. An accurate conception about the meaning of the struggle against the four wheels of capitalism: exploitation, plunder, contempt, and repression.

6.- It was equally fundamental to locate the space where this struggle acquires all of its dimensions: below and to the left. This has allowed us to work in various ways under a common geography. That vision from below and to the left seeks, before all else, to generate spaces in order to construct another form of doing politics, based on the idea that it is possible to construct new social relations without asking permission of the government nor of the institutional parties (existing or aspiring).

7.- So, we decided to wager all our activist, political, and organizational baggage to try an unprecedented path: struggle against domination without the need to look for a leader, providential man, or boss, who supposedly would be predestined to do what really is the duty of all of us. We prefer to work with the Zapatista compañeros and compañeras in the construction of an alternative which modifies in a definitive way the relationship of control, in which those from below build new social relations, solidary and fraternal. In which the laws of the market are not those which determine human beings’ behavior form.

8.- We are their compañer@s, those who from different corners of the Mexico of below seek to generate new social processes, in which the mechanisms of auto-organization are the base of expression for new forms of political-social action.

9.- We who, without hiding our origin, have learned with our Zapatista compañer@s that it is in diversity where we can find the best organizational forms which allow us here and now to develop a new way of doing politics.

10.- We who have learned in the various sessions of the first grade of the Escuelita Zapatista “Freedom according to the Zapatistas” that the EZLN is not only its military leaders and spokespersons, that nor is it only its General Command, nor only its Juntas de Buen Gobierno. That, before all else, its peoples and communities are those who are constructing daily the most unprecedented way of doing politics.

11.- A new way of doing politics which does not require the construction of a political caste or class. In which income differences do not exist between those who govern and those who do not. One in which all are government. And with which things have been achieved that, some years ago, in the traditional left were considered heretical and utopian.

12.- Today, when it appears that it is already crystal clear that above there is nothing to do aside from acting as jester who jumps around, apparently likeably, wishing to feign an opposition…When, in a lasting way, they have created the bases for the sale, piece by piece of our homeland…

13.- Today, on this January 12^th, 2014, twenty years later, we do not tell our compañer@s what in 1994 we cried: “you are not alone,” but rather we tell them: here we are, we are with you, we do not give up, nor sell out, nor give in. We are a part of that torrent which has been constructed from The Other Campaign and now in the Sexta.

¡Viva El EZLN!

¡Viva la Sexta!

¡Vivan las organizaciones y colectivos de abajo y a la izquierda!

Asamblea Nacional de Braceros.

Brigada Callejera de Apoyo a la Mujer “Elisa Martínez”

Brújula Roja

Colectivo Feminista Cihuatlahtolli

Colectivo de Profesores con la Sexta

Consejo Nacional Urbano y Campesino

Coordinadora de la Sociedad Civil de la Región Orizaba

Enlace Urbano de Dignidad

Frente del Pueblo (Resistencia Organizada)

Frente Popular Francisco Villa Independiente (UNOPII)

Juventud Comunista de México

Movimiento Insumis@ Zapatista

Nodo de Derechos Humanos

Partido de los Comunistas

Resistencias Enlazando Dignidad, Movimiento y Corazón Zapatista

Unidad Popular Apizaquence Democrática e Independiente

Unidad Obrera y Socialista

Unión de Vecinos 19 de septiembre

Unidad Nacional de Organizaciones Populares de Izquierda Independiente

Mexico, January 12^th, 2014

Translated from Spanish by Henry Gales

Click here for original Spanish text