BETWEEN THE LIGHT AND THE SHADE

BETWEEN THE LIGHT AND THE SHADE.

In La Realidad, Planet Earth.

May 2014.

Compañera, compañeroa, compañero:

Good evening, afternoon, morning in whatever may be your geography, your time, and your way.

Good pre-dawn.

I would like to ask the compañeras, compañeros, and compañeroas of the Sixth Declaration who come from other places, especially the free media compañeros, for their patience, tolerance, and comprehension for what I am going to say, because these will be my last words in public before ceasing to exist.

I address you and those who through you listen and watch.

Maybe in the beginning, or over the course of these words the sensation that something is out of place, that something does not square up, will go along growing in your heart, as if you were missing one or several pieces to give meaning to the puzzle which is being shown to you. As if, per se, what is missing is missing.

Maybe later, days, weeks, months, years, decades later what I tell you now will be understood.

My compañeras and compañeros of the EZLN in all your levels you do not worry me, because per se it is our way here: walking, struggling, knowing always that what is missing always is missing.

In addition to the fact that, may it not offend anyone, the intelligence of the Zapatista compas is well above average.

For the rest, we are made satisfied and proud that it is before compañeras, compañeros, and compañeroas, both from the EZLN and from the Sixth Declaration, that this collective decision is made known.

And a good thing it is that it will be for the free, autonomous, and independent media, that this archipelago of pain, rage, and dignified struggle which we call “the Sixth Declaration” will have knowledge of this which I will tell you, wherever you may be found.

If someone else is interested in knowing what happened this day they will have to go to the free media to find out.

Alright then. Welcome to the Zapatista reality.

I.- A Difficult Decision

When we erupted and interrupted in 1994 with blood and fire, the war did not begin for us the Zapatistas.

The war from above, with death and destruction, plunder and humiliation, exploitation and silence imposed upon the defeated, we were already suffering since centuries before.

What for us began in 1994 is one of the many moments of war of those from below against those from above, against their world.

That war of resistance which day to day is fought in the streets of whichever corner of the five continents, in their fields and in their mountains.

It was and is ours, like that of many from below, a war for humanity and against neoliberalism.

Against death, we demand life.

Against silence, we demand the word and respect.

Against oblivion, memory.

Against humiliation and plunder, dignity.

Against opression, rebellion.

Against slavery, freedom.

Against imposition, democracy.

Against crime, justice.

Who with a bit of humanity in their veins could or can question those demands?

And in that time many listened.

The war which we raise up gave us the privilege of arriving to alert and generous ears and hearts in geographies near and far.

What was missing was missing, and what is missing is missing, but we attained then the look of the other, its ear, its heart.

So we saw ourselves in the need to respond to a decisive question:

“What next?”

In the dismal accounts of the day before, the possibility did not enter of posing to ourselves a single question. So that question took us to others:

Prepare those who follow in the route of death?

Train more and better soldiers?

Invest efforts in bettering our battered machinery of war?

Simulate dialogues and disposition for peace, but continue preparing new blows?

Kill or be killed as our only fate?

Or must we reconstruct the path of life, that which had broken and continued breaking from above?

The path not only of the native peoples, also of workers, students, teachers, young people, peasants, in addition to all the differences which are celebrated above, and below are persecuted and punished.

Must we enlist our blood in the path which others direct toward Power or must we turn our heart and our look to those who we are and those who are what we are, that is to say the native peoples, guardians of the earth and memory?

Nobody listened to it then, but in the first stammers that were our words we warned that our dilemma was not between negotiating or fighting, but between dying or living.

Those who would have warned then that that early dilemma was not individual, maybe would have understood better what has happened in the Zapatista reality in the last 20 years.

But I told you that we came across that question and that dilemma.

And we chose.

And instead of dedicating ourselves to training guerilla warriors, soldiers, and squadrons, we prepared education and health promoters, and the bases of autonomy which today marvel the world went along lifting themselves up.

Instead of constructing barracks, bettering our armament, raising walls and trenches, schools were raised, hospitals and health centers were constructed, we improved our living conditions.

Instead of struggling to occupy a place in the Parthenon of individualized deaths from below, we chose to construct life.

This in the middle of a war that was not less lethal from being deaf.

Because, compas, one thing is shouting, “you are not alone,” and another confronting with only the body an armored column of federal troops, as occurred in the Highlands of Chiapas Zone, and to see if there is luck and someone finds out, and to see if there is a little bit more luck and the one who finds out is enraged, and another bit more luck and the one who is enraged does something.

In the meantime, the tanks are stopped by the Zapatista women, and in the absence of ammo it was with mothers’ insults and rocks that the steel serpent had to go back.

And in the Northern Zone of Chiapas, suffering the birth and development of the white guards, recycled then as paramilitaries, and in the Tztoz Choj Zone the continuous aggressions of peasant organizations that as “independent” sometimes do not even have as a name; and in the Tzetzal Jungle Zone the combination of paramilitaries and contras.

And one thing is to shout “we are all marcos” or “we are not all marcos,” according to the case or thing, and another the persecution with all the machinery of war, the invasion of the villages, the “combing” of the mountains, the use of trained dogs, the blades of the artillery helicopters rampaging the tufts of the ceibas, the “dead or alive” which was born in the first days of January 1994 and reached its most hysteric level in 1995 and the rest of the presidency of the one now employed in a transnational, and which this Frontier Jungle Zone suffered since 1995, and the one who joins afterward the same sequence of aggressions from peasant organizations, use of paramilitaries, militarization, harassment.

If there is a myth in all this it is not the balaclavas, but the lie which they repeat from those days, even retaken by people with high studies, that the war against the Zapatistas only lasted 12 days.

I will not make a detailed account. Someone with a little critical spirit and seriousness can reconstruct history, and add and subtract to get the account, and say if the reporters were and are more than the police and soldiers; if the flatteries were more than the threats and insults, if the price that was put was to see the balaclava man or to capture him “dead or alive.”

In those conditions, sometimes only with our force and others with the generous and unconditional support of good people from throughout the world, it went along advancing in the still unfinished construction, it is true, but already defined on what we are.

It is not then a phrase, fortunate or unfortunate, supposedly it is seen from above or from below, the one that goes “we the dead from forever are here, dying again, but now to live.” That is the reality.

And almost 20 years later…

On December 21^st, 2012, when politics and esoterism coincided, like other times, in predicting catastrophes which always are for the same ones as always, we from below, repeated the blow of the hand from January 1^st, ’94 and, without firing even a single shot, without weapons, with only our silence, we again overwhelmed the arrogance of the cities, cradle and nest of racism and contempt.

If January 1^st, 1994, thousands of faceless men and women attacked and surrounded the garrisons which protected the cities, on December 21^st they were tens of thousands who took without words the buildings from where our disappearance was celebrated.

The unquestionable fact alone that the EZLN not only had not weakened, much less disappeared, but rather had grown quantitatively and qualitatively would be enough for any moderately intelligent mind to realize that, in those 20 years, something had changed inside the EZLN and in the communities.

Maybe more than one thinks that we are mistaken when choosing, that an army cannot and should not engage itself in peace.

For many reasons, true, but the principal was and is because in that way we would finish by disappearing.

Maybe it is true. Maybe we are mistaken upon choosing to cultivate life instead of adoring death.

But we choose not to listen to those from outside. Not to those who always demand and call for a fight to death, while others provide the dead.

We choose looking at ourselves and listening to ourselves, being the collective Votán that we are.

We choose rebellion, that is to say, life.

That does not mean that we did not know that the war from above would try and tries to impose again its dominion over us.

We knew and we know that one and another time we are to defend what we are and how we are.

We knew and we know that there will continue to be death in order for there to be life.

We knew and we know that in order to live, we die.

II.- A Failure?

They say that out there we have not achieved anything for ourselves.

It does not cease to surprise that this position is handled with so much impudence.

They think that the sons and daughters of the comandantes and comandantas must enjoy trips abroad, of studies in private schools and then of high positions in business or politics. That instead of working the land to take out food with sweat and endeavor, they should show off on the social networks enjoying themselves in the clubs, exhibiting wealth.

Maybe the subcomandantes must procreate and pass on the positions to their descendants, the perks, the stages, as politicians from all spectrums do.

Maybe we should, as the leaders of the CIOAC-H and of other peasant organizations, receive privileges and payment in projects and support, keep the better part, and leave only a few crumbs for the bases, in exchange for fulfilling the criminal orders that come from high up.

But it is true, we have not achieved anything for ourselves.

Difficult to believe that, 20 years after that “nothing for us,” it turned out that it was not a saying, a good phrase for signs and songs, but a reality, the reality.

If being consequential is a failure, than inconsistency is the path of success, the route to Power.

But we do not want to go over there.

It does not interest us.

In those parameters we prefer to fail than to triumph.

III.- The Relay

In these 20 years there has been a multiple and complex relay in the EZLN.

Some have warned only the evident: the generational.

Now those who were small or who had not been born at the beginning of the uprising are making the struggle and directing the resistance.

But some studious ones have not noticed other relays:

That of class: from the enlightened middle-class origin, to the indigenous peasant.

That of race: from the mestizo leadership to the truly indigenous leadership.

And the most important: the relay of thought: from revolutionary vanguardism to lead by obeying; from the taking of Power from Above to the creation of power from below; from professional politics to everyday politics; from the leaders, to the peoples; from the marginalization of gender, to the direct participation of women; from the mocking of the other, to the celebration of difference.

I will not extend myself more on this, because the course “Freedom according to the Zapatistas” has precisely been the opportunity to confirm if in organized territory personality is worth more than the community.

In the personal aspect I do not understand why thinking people who affirm that the peoples make history, are so shocked in the face of a government of the people where the “specialists” do not appear in being government.

Why does it give them horror that the peoples are those who command, those who direct their own steps?

Why do they move their head with disapproval in the face of lead by obeying?

The cult toward individualism finds in the cult of vanguardism its most fanatic extreme.

And it has been precisely that, that the indigenous command and now an indigenous person is the spokesperson and leader, what terrifies them, pushes them away, and finally they go to keep looking for someone who requires vanguardists, bosses, and leaders. Because there too is racism in the left, above all in that which purports to be revolutionary.

The ee-zee-el-en is not of those. That is why not just anyone can be a Zapatista.

IV.- A Hologram Changing and in a Way. What Will Not Be.

Before the dawn of 1994, I spent 10 years in these mountains. I personally met and had dealings with some in whose death we all die a great deal. I know and have dealings since then with others and others more who today are here with us.

Many pre-dawn mornings I found myself trying to digest the stories that they told me, the worlds which they drew with silences, hands, and looks, their insistence on signaling something over there.

Was it a dream that world, so other, so far off, so foreign?

Sometimes I thought that they had advanced, that the words which guided us and guide us came from times for which there were still no calendars, lost as they were in imprecise geographies: always the dignified south omnipresent in all the cardinal points.

Then I knew that they did not speak to me of an inexact world and, therefore, improbable.

That world already walked with its step.

You, did you not see it? Do you not see it?

We have not cheated anyone from below. We do not hide that we are an army, with its pyramidal structure, its center of command, its decisions from above toward below. Not to curry favor with anarchists or for style do we deny what we are.

But anyone can see now if ours is an army which replaces or imposes.

And I must say this, that I have already requested authorization from Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés to do it:

Nothing that we have done, for better or for worse, would have been possible if an armed army, the zapatista army of national liberation, had not risen up against the evil government, exercising the right to legitimate violence. The violence from below in the face of the violence from above.

We are warriors and as such we know what is our role and our moment.

In the pre-dawn hours of the first day of the first month of the year 1994, an army of giants, that is to say, of indigenous rebels, went down to the cities to, with their step, jolt the world.

Just a few days later, with the blood of our fallen still fresh in the city streets, we realized that those from outside did not see us.

Accustomed to looking at the indigenous from above, they did not raise their view to look at us.

Accustomed to seeing us humiliated, their heart did not understand our dignified rebellion.

Their look had stopped on the only mestizo that they saw with a balaclava, that is to say, they did not look.

Our bosses told us then:

“They only see how small they are, let’s make someone as small as them, so they may see him and for him they may see us.”

Like so a complex maneuver of distraction began, a terrible and marvelous magic trick, a malicious play of the indigenous heart that we are, the indigenous knowledge challenged modernity in one of its bastions: the media.

The construction then began of the character called “Marcos.”

I ask you to continue in this reasoning:

Lets suppose that another form of neutralizing a criminal is possible. For example, creating his homicidal weapon, making him believe that it is effective, admonishing him to construct, based on that effectiveness, his whole plan, for, in the moment that he is prepared to fire, the “weapon” to become again what it always was: an illusion.

The entire system, but above all in its media, play to construct fames to later destroy them if they do not.

Its power resided (no longer, they have been displaced in that by the social networks) in deciding what and who existed in the moment in which they chose what they named and what they silenced.

In short, do not pay much attention to me, as has been demonstrated in these 20 years, I do not know anything about the mass media.

The point is that SupMarcos went from being a spokesperson to being a distracter.

If the path of war, that is to say, of death, had taken us 10 years; that of life took more time and required more effort, due to not talking about blood.

Because even if you do not believe it, it is easier to die than to live.

We needed time to be and to find those who knew how to see us like what we are.

We needed time to find those who saw us not facing up, not facing down, who saw us facing forward, who saw us with a compañero look.

I was saying that the construction of the character then began.

Marcos one day had blue eyes, another day had green eyes, or brown, or yellow, or black, all depending on who did the interview and took the photo. Like this he was a backup on soccer teams, employed in department stores, driver, philosopher, filmmaker, and the etceteras which can be found in the paid media of those calendars and in diverse geographies. There was a Marcos for every occasion, that is to say, for every interview. And it was not easy, believe me, there was not wikipedia then and if they came from Spain they had to investigate if El Corte Inglés, for example, was a typical suit cut from England, a convenience store, or a department store.

If you allow me to define Marcos the character then I would say without falter that he was a motley.

Let’s say that, so you understand me, Marcos was a Not-Free Media (careful: that is not the same as being paid media).

In the construction and maintenance of the character we had some errors.

“To err is human,” said the one who errs.

During the first year we finished, as they say, the repertoire of possible “Marcos”s. So for the beginnings of 1995 we were in trouble and the process of the peoples was in its first steps.

So in 1995 we did not yet know how to do it. But then is when Zedillo, with the PAN in hand, “discovered” Marcos with the same scientific method with which one finds skeletal remains, that is to say, through esoteric delation.

The story of the Tampiqueñan gave us air, although the subsequent fraud of Paca de Lozano made us fear that the paid press too would question the “daemasking” of Marcos and discover that it was but one fraud more. Fortunately it was not like this. Like that, the media continued swallowing other similar millwheels.

Sometime later the Tampiqueñan arrived to these lands. Together with Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, we spoke with him. We offered him then to give a joint conference, like so he would be able to liberate himself of persecution inasmuch as it would be evident that Marcos and him were not the same person. He did not want to. He came to live here. He went out a few times and his face can be found in the photographs of his parents’ vigils. If you want you may interview him. Now he lives in a community, in… Ah, he does not want you to know just where he lives. We will not say anything more so that he, if he so desires one day, can tell the story that he lived since February 9^th, 1995. For our part it only remains for us to thank him for having passed us information that each while we use to nourish the “certainty” that SupMarcos is not what he is in reality, that is to say, a motley or a hologram, but a university professor, native of the now painful Tamaulipas.

In the meantime we continued looking, looking for you, those who are now here and who are not here but are.

We launch one and another initiative to find the other, that which is other and compañero. Various initiatives, trying to find the look and the ear who we need and deserve.

In the meantime, the advance of the peoples continued and the relay about which much or little has been said, but which can be confirmed directly, without intermediaries.

In the search for what is other, we failed time and time again.

Who we found or who wanted to lead us or wanted us to lead them.

There were those who approached and did it with the eagerness of using us, or for looking backward, be it with anthropological nostalgia, be it with militant nostalgia.

So for some we were communists, for others Trotskyists, for others anarchists, for others Maoists, for others millenarians, and there I leave our various “ists” so that you may put what is in your knowledge.

It was like this until the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, the boldest and the most Zapatista of the initiatives that we have launched up to now.

With the Sixth Declaration at last we have found those who look at us facing forward and greet us and embrace us, and like so are greeted and embraced.

With the Sixth Declaration at last we found you.

Finally, someone who understood that we did not seek pastors to guide us, nor herds to lead to the promised land. Neither masters nor slaves. Neither bosses nor headless masses.

But it remained to be seen if it was possible for you to look at and listen to what, being, we are.

On the inside, the advance of the peoples has been impressive.

So came the course “Freedom according to the Zapatistas.”

In 3 rounds, we realized that there now was a generation that could look at us facing forward, that could listen to us and speak to us without awaiting guidance or leadership, nor profess submission or followership.

Marcos, the character, was no longer necessary.

The new stage in the Zapatista struggle was ready.

Then what happened, happened, and many of you, compañeras and compañeros of the Sixth Declaration, know it in a direct manner.

You will be able to say later that the matter of the character was pointless. But an honest review of those days will say how many turned to look at us, with pleasure or displeasure, for the misrepresentations of a motley.

So the relay of command is not given by illness or death, nor by internal displacement, purge, or purification.

It is given logically according to the internal changes that the EZLN has had and has.

I know that it does not square up with the quadrant diagrams which there are in the various above, but that is the truth that has us careless.

And if this ruins the indolent and poor elaboration of the rumorologists and zapatologists of Jovel, well no matter.

I am not nor have I been sick, and I am not nor have been dead.

Or yes, although they killed me so many times, I died so many times, and again I am here.

If we encourage those rumors it was because it suited us.

The last great hologram trick was to simulate a terminal illness, and including all the deaths that it has suffered.

Certainly, the “if his health permits it,” which Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés used in the communiqué announcing the exchange with the CNI, was the equivalent to “if the people ask for it” or “if the surveys favor me” or “if god gives me license” and their commonplace which have been the catch phrase in the political class in recent times.

If you allow me a piece of advice: you ought to cultivate a little sense of humor, not only for mental and physical health, also because without a sense of humor you are not going to understand Zapatismo. And he who does not understand, judges; and he who judges, condemns.

In reality that has been the simplest part of the character. To nourish the rumor it was only necessary to say to some people in specific: “I am going to tell you a secret but promise me that you are not going to tell anyone.”

Of course they told it.

The principal involuntary collaborators of the illness and death rumor have been the “Zapatology experts” who in arrogant Jovel and in chaotic Mexico City presume their closeness with Zapatismo and profound knowledge that they have of it, in addition, of course, of the police who are also paid as journalists, of the journalists who are paid as police, and of the journalists who are only paid, and poorly, as journalists.

Thanks to all of them. Thanks for their discretion. They did exactly as we thought they were going to do. The only bad thing about all this, is that I doubt that anyone will now confide in them but a single secret.

It is our conviction and our practice that to rebell and struggle neither leaders nor bosses nor messiahs nor saviors are necessary. To struggle all that is needed is a little shame, a bit of dignity, and a good deal of organization.

The rest, or serving the collective or not serving.

It has been particularly comical what the cult of the individual has provoked in the political analysts and pundits from above. Yesterday they said that the future of this Mexican people depended on the alliance of 2 personalities. The day before yesterday they said that Peña Nieto made himself independent of Salinas de Gortari, without realizing that, then if they criticized Peña Nieto, they put on one side Salinas de Gortari; and if they criticized the latter, they supported Peña Nieto. Now they say that it is necessary to opt for a camp in the politics of above for control of telecommunications, so you are with Slim or you are with Azcárranga-Salinas. And further above, with Obama or with Putin.

Those who yearn and look toward above may continue seeking their leader, may continue thinking that now the official electoral results are going to be respected; that now Slim is going to support the electoral option of the left; that now in Game of Thrones the dragons and the battles are going to appear; that know in the television series The Walking Dead, Kirkman is going adhere to the comic; that now the tools made in China are not going to break on the first go; that now soccer is going to be a sport and not a business.

And yes, it may be that in some of the cases they do hit the mark, but it must not be forgotten that in all of them they are mere spectators, that is to say, passive consumers.

Those who love and hate SupMarcos now know that they have hated and loved a hologram. Their loves and hates have been, well, useless, sterile, empty, hollow.

There will not be then a house-museum of metal plaques where I was born and died. Nor will there be someone who lives from having been subcomandante Marcos. Neither his name nor his title will be inherited. There will not be all-expenses-paid trips to give lectures abroad. There will not be transfer nor treatment in luxury hospitals. There will not be widows nor heirs. There will not be funerals, nor honors, nor statues, nor museums, nor prizes, nor none of what the system does to promote the cult of the individual and to undervalue the collective.

The character was created and now we its creators, the Zapatistas, destroy it.

If someone understands this lesson that our compañeras and compañeros give, they will have understood one of the fundaments of Zapatismo.

So in the last years what has happened, has happened.

So we saw that the motley, the character, the hologram that is, was no longer necessary.

Time and time again we planned, time and time again we awaited the indicated moment: the precise calendar and geography to show what we are in truth to those who are in truth.

So Galeano arrived with his death to show us the geography and the calendar: “here, in La Realidad; now: in the pain and the rage.”

V. The Pain and the Rage. Whispers and Shouts.

When we arrived to the Caracol here in La Realidad, without anyone telling us we began to speak with whispers.

Softly our pain spoke, very softly our rage spoke.

As if we tried to prevent the noise, the sounds which were foreign to Galeano, from chasing him off.

As if our voices and steps called him.

“Wait compa,” said our silence.

“Don’t go,” whispered the words.

But there are other pains and other rages.

Right now, in other corners of Mexico and the world, a man, a woman, an other, a boy, a girl, and elder, a memory, is beaten in cold blood, surrounded by the system made a voracious crime, is clubbed, macheted, shot, finished off, dragged among taunts, abandoned, recovered, and their body veiled, their life buried.

Only a few names:

Alexis Benhumea, murdered in Mexico State.
Francisco Javier Cortés, murdered in Mexico State.
Juan Vázquez Guzmán, murdered in Chiapas.
Juan Carlos Gómez Silvano, murdered in Chiapas.
El compa Kuy, murdered in Mexico City.
Carlo Giuliani, murdered in Italy.
Aléxis Grigoropoulos, murdered in Greece.
Wajih Wajdi al-Ramahi, murdered in a refugee camp in the Jordanian city of Ramallah. 14 years old, murdered with a shot in the back from an observation tower of the Israeli Army, there were no marches, nor protests, nor anything in the street.
Matías Valentín Catrileo Quezada, Mapuche murdered in Chile.
Teodulfo Torres Soriano, compa of the Sixth Declaration disappeared in Mexico City.
Guadalupe Jerónimo y Urbano Macías, Cherán commoners, murdered in Michoacán.
Francisco de Asís Manuel, disappeared in Santa María Ostula
Javier Martínes Robles, disappeared in Santa María Ostula
Gerardo Vera Orcino, disappeared in Santa María Ostula
Enrique Domínguez Macías, disappeared in Santa María Ostula
Martín Santos Luna, disappeared in Santa María Ostula
Pedro Leyva Domínguez, murdered in Santa María Ostula.
Diego Ramírez Domínguez, murdered in Santa María Ostula.
Trinidad de la Cruz Crisóstomo, murdered in Santa María Ostula.
Crisóforo Sánchez Reyes, murdered in Santa María Ostula.
Teódulo Santos Girón, disappeared in Santa María Ostula.
Longino Vicente Morales, disappeared in Guerrero.
Víctor Ayala Tapia, disappeared in Guerrero.
Jacinto López Díaz “El Jazi”, murdered in Puebla.
Bernardo Vázquez Sánchez, murdered in Oaxaca
Jorge Alexis Herrera, murdered in Guerrero.
Gabriel Echeverría, murdered in Guerrero.
Edmundo Reyes Amaya, disappeared in Oaxaca.
Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sánchez, disappeared in Oaxaca.
Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega, murdered in Morelos.
Ernesto Méndez Salinas, murdered in Morelos.
Alejandro Chao Barona, murdered in Morelos.
Sara Robledo, murdered in Morelos.
Juventina Villa Mojica, murdered in Guerrero.
Reynaldo Santana Villa, murdered in Guerrero.
Catarino Torres Pereda, murdered in Oaxaca.
Bety Cariño, murdered in Oaxaca.
Jyri Jaakkola, murdered in Oaxaca.
Sandra Luz Hernández, murdered in Sinaloa.
Marisela Escobedo Ortíz, murdered in Chihuahua.
Celedonio Monroy Prudencio, disappeared in Jalisco.
Nepomuceno Moreno Nuñez, murdered in Sonora.

The forcibly disappeared and probably murdered migrants in whichever corner of Mexican territory.

The prisoners who are wanted dead in life: Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, the Mapuche, Mario González, Juan Carlos Flores.

The continuous burial of voices who were life, silenced by the falling of the earth and the closing of the bars.

And the greatest mockery is that, in each shovel of earth which the henchman on-duty casts, the system goes along saying: “you are worthless, you do not matter, no one cries for you, no one is enraged by your death, no one follows your step, no one raises your life.”

And with the last shovel it sentences: “even if they catch and punish those of us who killed you, I will always find another, others, who again ambush you and repeat the macabre dance which finished your life.”

And it says, “Your small, pygmy, fabricated justices so that the paid media simulate and obtain a bit of calm to put brakes on the chaos which comes on top of them, does not frighten me, does not hurt me, does not punish me.”

What do we say to that cadaver to which, in any corner of the world of below, is buried in oblivion?

That only our pain and rage count?

That only our anger matters?

That while we whisper our history, we do not hear their shout, their howl?

Injustice has many names and the screams which it provokes are many.

But our pain and our rage does not prevent listening.

And our whispers are not only to lament the fall of our unjust dead.

They are to like so be able to listen to other pain, make other rages ours, and continue like so on the complicated, long, and torturous path of making from all that a howl which is transformed into a libratory struggle.

And not forget that, while someone whispers, someone screams.

And only the attentive ear can listen.

While we speak and listen now, someone screams with pain, with rage.

And just as it is necessary to learn to direct the look, the listen must find the path which makes it fertile.

Because while someone rests, there is someone who continues uphill.

To look at that endeavor, it is enough to lower the look and elevate the heart.

Can you?

Will you be able?

Small justice appears much like revenge. Small justice is that which hands out impunity, well upon punishing one, it absolves others.

The justice that we want, for which we struggle, does not finish with finding the murderers of compa Galeano and seeing that they receive their punishment (it will be so, may no one be deceived).

The patient and adamant search seeks the truth, not the relief of resignation.

Great justice has to do with the buried compañero Galeano.

Because we ask ourselves not what to do with his death, but what we must do with his life.

Pardon if I enter in the marshy terrain of commonplace, but that compañero did not deserve to die, not like that.

All his endeavor, his daily sacrifice, punctual and invisible for those who are not us, was for life.

And yes I can tell you that he was an extraordinary being and in addition, and this is what gives awe, there are thousands of compañeras and compañeros like him in the indigenous Zapatista communities, with the same endeavor, identical commitment, same clarity, and one sole destiny: freedom.

And making macabre accounts: if someone deserves death it is he who does not exist and has not existed, except in the fleetingness of the paid media.

And our compañero, leader and spokesperson of the EZLN, Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés has told us, that upon murdering Galeano, or any of the Zapatistas, those from above wanted to murder the EZLN.

Not as an army, but as a stupid rebel which constructs and raises up life where they, those from above, desire the wasteland of mining, oil, and touristic industries, the death of the land and of those who inhabit it and work it.

And he has said that we have come, as the General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, to dig up Galeano.

We think that it is necessary for one of us to die so that Galeano may live.

And for that impertinent one which is death to be satisfied, in the place of Galeano we put another name so that Galeano may live and death may carry not one life, but only a name, some letters empty of all meaning, without their own history, lifeless.

So we have decided that today Marcos ceases to exist.

The warrior and glimmer will take him by the shadow hand so that he does not get lost on the path, Don Durito will go with him, the same with Viejo Antonio.

The girls and boys who before got together to listen to his stories will not miss him, well they are now grown-up, they now have judgment, they now struggle like the one who struggles most for freedom, democracy, and justice, which are the task of any Zapatista.

The cat-dog, and not a swan, now will sound the goodbye song.

And at the end, those who understand, will know that the one who was never there does not go, nor does the one who has not lived die.

And death will leave cheated by an indigenous man with the name Galeano in-struggle, and in those rocks that they have placed on his tomb he will again walk and teach, to those who leave themselves be, the basics of Zapatismo, that is to say, not selling out, not giving up, not faltering.

Oh death! As if it were not evident that it frees those from above of all shared responsibility, beyond the funeral prayer, the gray homage, the sterile statue, the controlling museum.

Us? Well, death commits us for what it has of life.

So here we are, mocking death in the reality.

Compas:

The above stated, being 0208 on May 25^th, 2014 in the southeast combat front of the EZLN, I declare that the one known as Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the self-denominated “stainless steel subcomandante,” ceases to exist.

That is it.

Through my voice the voice of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation will no longer speak.

Vale. Cheers and hasta nunca… or hasta siempre, those who understood will know that it no longer matters, that it never has mattered.

From Zapatista reality.

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.

Mexico, May 24^th, 2014.

P.S.1.- “Game is over”?

P.S.2.- Check mate?

P.S.3.- Touche?

P.S.4.- There they are seen, folks, and send tobacco.

P.S.5.- Hmm… so this is hell… Piporro, Pedro, José Alfredo! How? For being 

            machistas? Nah, I don’t believe it, if I never.

P.S.6.- In other words as they say, without the motley, I can go around naked?

P.S.7.- Hey, it’s very dark here, I need a little light.

(…)

(a voice is heard off)

Have a good pre-dawn compañeras and compañeros. My name is Galeano, Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano.

Is anyone else named Galeano?

(voices and shouts are heard)

Ah, it follows that that’s why they told me that when I was reborn, I would do it in collective.

So be it then.

Have a good trip. Take care. Care for us.

From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.

Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano.

Mexico, May 2014.

Translated from Spanish by Henry Gales. Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Originally published on May 25^th, 2014.

Click here for Spanish text.