“Hey, it’s very dark here, I need a little
light.” Then he stopped talking and straightened the papers on the table. The
lights went out. In the penumbra, illuminated just by the faint light of a
video camera, he stood up. He walked a few steps toward the rear part of the
stage, with a slow step, crossed the threshold. He began to go down the wood
stairs.
And his figure slowly faded away into the darkness.
And he ceased to exist.
So the silence was heard charged with gratitude
and so many other things from thousands of hands which applauded in unison, and
the faces containing the tears, and the hearts repeating: Goodbye,
Subcomandante. “One, two, three,” the voice of Comandante Tacho was heard
talking on the radio. The lights were turned on once again. And Subcomandante
Insurgente Moisés, military leader and now also spokesperson of the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation: “Compañeros, compañeras, we are going to listen to
the voice of another compañero.”
From the speakers came the voice which until
some minutes ago, since twenty years ago, belonged to Subcomandante Marcos, now
coming to life anew, mocking death. “Have a good pre-dawn, compañeras and
compañeros. My name is Galeano. Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano. Is anyone
else named Galeano?”
Thousands of men and women responded together:
“My name is Galeano!” “We all are Galeano!”
“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.”
***
Exactly one hour ago, when the then
Subcomandante Marcos began to speak, we heard these words:
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.
We were almost one thousand women and men,
adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle from many parts of
Mexico and from other geographies, who after long travesties came to La
Realidad to attend the homage organized by the EZLN in honor of compañero José
Luís Solís López, maestro Galeano, murdered with inconceivable cruelty on May 2nd
in a paramilitary attack executed by members of the supposedly peasant
organization CIOAC-H, members of the Green Party and the PAN in that community,
and orchestrated from the core of the Chiapas government. There were almost
three thousand Zapatista support bases who, with impressive organization, went
from the five zones of widespread Zapatista territory. We arrived, all of us,
charged with the pain and the rage and seeking, with the grammar of wrath and
the calligraphy of dignity, the precise expression of true justice.
But what form would that justice take? How to
conjugate justice without its verbal form (in Spanish: “ajusticiar,” to execute)
acquiring the tonalities of revenge? It is clear that the juridical systems of
our “democracies” have nothing to do with justice, nor are they concerned about
it in the least. And it is more than clear that, in Mexico as in many other
places, said juridical systems are at the service of abuse and plunder. But
then, what is justice?
Over the course of that memorable May 24th,
Subcomandante Moisés announced that the Zapatista investigation had already
identified the material authors of the crime. He also detailed the ties between
the leadership of the CIOAC-H and the various levels of state and federal
government. And he also affirmed that justice would be done, but he asked us
not to direct our dignified and justifiable rage against those who, in their
blindness and avarice, turn into murderers at the service of the powers of capital.
It is necessary to direct that rage against the system, he said.
In the crossroads of questions, the last words
of Subcomandante Marcos before ceasing to exist tried to illuminate that indecisive
space between the light and the shade. In 1994, he said, the Zapatistas rose up
exercising the right to the legitimate violence of those from below in the face
of the violence from above. “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.” In a way that, the first combats behind, instead of
strengthening the guerilla army, the Zapatistas dedicated themselves to life,
constructing education, health, dignity, justice, hope, autonomy, and a
government of the people which leads by obeying. And in all this, resisting the
violence of above without arms, with the body, head held high and saying: “we the dead from forever are here, dying
again, but now to live.”
In the path, something fundamental was changing
inside the EZLN, relays which for many people passed unnoticed:
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 mocking the other, to the celebration of difference.
In this path, who was Marcos? There is something
which does not cease to surprise those of us to whom the Zapatista walk has
taught how to see the world in another way: the fact that, for the great
majority of people, outside of the Zapatista communities, the EZLN is only
Marcos; the inability of the majority of people to see the indigenous.
Just
a few days later [after the uprising], with the blood of our fallen still fresh in
the city streets, we realized that those from outside did not see us.
Accustomed
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 who 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.”
The character served to make known a movement
which struggled and struggles for life. But it served, also, as a “distracter,”
in a way that, while those from above and the mass media focused on
constructing and destroying the character, the Zapatistas continued their walk
in the construction of life.
In that walk Zapatismo always sought the other,
through the pathways which seek life not only for the indigenous Zapatista
communities. And in that search, they failed time and time again: “Who we found
or who wanted to lead us or wanted us to lead them.”
It
was like this until the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, the boldest
and 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.
Then 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.
And so we return to that question of justice. Of
the pain and the rage, of the grammar of wrath and the calligraphy of dignity.
Because the General Command and the military leadership of the EZLN came to La
Realidad with that pain and that rage, with that cry for justice. But, as
Subcomandante Marcos well said, there are other pains and other rages in so
many other geographies:
Right
now, in other corners of Mexico and the world, a man, a woman, an other, a boy,
a girl, an elder, a memory, is beaten in cold blood, surrounded by a system
made a voracious crime, is clubbed, macheted, shot, finished off, dragged among
taunts, abandoned, recovered, and their body veiled, their life buried.
And as if it were not enough, “the greatest
mockery” is the pantomime of “justice” which never threatens nor punishes nor
harms the power which buries and tramples life. In the face of this, what do we
say to our dead? Is the impotent whisper of pain and rage sufficient? “Our
whispers,” said Marcos, “are not only to lament the fall of our unjust dead.
They are to like so be able to listen to other pains, 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.”
Small
justice appears a bit 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.
From early that day, the General Command of the
EZLN said that they had arrived to dig up maestro Galeano. But for Galeano to
live, said Marcos, it is necessary for another to die.
And better for it to be someone who per se never
has existed, and for that impertinent one
which is death to remain satisfied, in the place of Galeano we put another name
so that Galeano may live and death may carry not a life, but only a name, some
letters emptied of all meaning, without their own history, lifeless.
So
we have decided that today Marcos ceases to exist.
***
When the voice of the now Subcomandante
Insurgente Galeano ceased to be heard and the applauses were dying out in that
indecisive space between the light and the shade, under the drizzle of that
pre-dawn morning in Zapatista reality, we were overrun by a silence impregnated
by the certainty that something “terrible and marvelous” had just happened. Something
which we still did not understand, which perhaps would take days, months,
years, our whole life, to understand. Something that would be, for us, those
who had the fortune to witness, the perpetuous source of search and the
conviction to never falter.
By Alejandro Reyes
Translated from Spanish by Henry Gales.
Translated from Spanish by Henry Gales.
Originally published
on May 26th, 2014.
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