Uneven Development: Listening to the 'South', Listening to Vancouver

Address:

We’re in the mountains of Southeast Mexico in the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas and we want to use this medium with the help of the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico, to send a greeting to the Free the Media Conference that is taking place in New York, where there are brothers and sisters of independent communication media from the US and Canada.

At the Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism we said: A global decomposition is taking place, we call it the Fourth World War– neoliberalism: the global economic process to eliminate that multitude of people who are not useful to the powerful– the groups called “minorities” in the mathematics of power, but who happen to be the majority population in the world. We find ourselves in a world system of globalization willing to sacrifice millions of human beings.

The giant communication media: the great monsters of the television industry, the communication satellites, magazines, and newspapers seem determined to present a virtual world, created in the image of what the globalization process requires.

In this sense, the world of contemporary news is a world that exists for the VIP’s– the very important people. Their everyday lives are what is important: if they get married, if they divorce, if they eat, what clothes they wear, or what if they clothes they take off– these major movie stars and big politicians. But common people only appear for a moment– when they kill someone, or when they die. For the communication giants and the neoliberal powers, the others, the excluded, only exist when they are dead, or when they are in jail or court. This can’t go on. Sooner or later this virtual world clashes with the real world. And that is actually happening: this clash produces results of rebellion and war throughout the entire world, or what is left of the world to even have war.

We have a choice: we can have a cynical attitude in the face of the media, to say that nothing can be done about the dollar power that creates itself in images, words, digital communication, and computer systems that invades not just with an invasion of power, but with a way of seeing that world, of how they think the world should look. We could say, well, “that’s the way it is” and do nothing. Or we can simply assume incredulity: we can say that any communication by the media monopolies is a total lie. We can ignore it and go about our lives.

But there is a third option that is neither conformity, nor skepticism, nor distrust: that is to construct a different way– to show the world what is really happening– to have a critical world view and to become interested in the truth of what happens to the people who inhabit every corner of this world.

The work of independent media is to tell the history of social struggle in the world, and here in North America– the US, Canada and Mexico, independent media has, on occasion, been able to open spaces even within the mass media monopolies: to force them to acknowledge news of other social movements.

The problem is not only to know what is occurring in the world, but to understand it and to derive lessons from it– just as if we were studying history– a history not of the past, but a history of what is happening at any given moment in whatever part of the world. This is the way to learn who we are, what it is we want, who we can be and what we can do or not do.

By not having to answer to the monster media monopolies, the independent media has a life work, a political project and purpose: to let the truth be known. This is more and more important in the globalization process. This truth becomes a knot of resistance against the lie. It is our only possibility to save the truth, to maintain it, and distribute it, little by little, just as the books were saved in Fahrenheit 451–in which a group of people dedicated themselves to memorize books, to save them from being destroyed, so that the ideas would not be lost.

This same way, independent media tries to save history: the present history– saving it and trying to share it, so it will not disappear, moreover to distribute it to other places, so that this history is not limited to one country, to one region, to one city or social group. It is necessary not only for independent voices to exchange information and to broaden the channels, but to resist the spreading lies of the monopolies. The truth that we build in our groups, our cities, our regions, our countries, will reach full potential if we join with other truths and realize that what is occurring in other parts of the world also is part of human history.

In August 1996, we called for the creation of a network of independent media, a network of information. We mean a network to resist the power of the lie that sells us this war that we call the Fourth World War. We need this network not only as a tool for our social movements, but for our lives: this is a project of life, of humanity, humanity which has a right to critical and truthful information.

We greet all of you, recognizing the work you have done so that the struggle of indigenous people is known, and that other struggles are known, so that the great events of this world are seen in a critical form. We hope your meeting is a success and that it results in concrete plans for this network, these exchanges, this mutual support that should exist between cultural workers and independent media makers. We hope that one day we can personally attend your meeting, or perhaps that one day you can have your conference in our territory, so we can listen to your words and you can hear ours in person. For now, well, we take advantage of the help of the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico (NCDMUSA) to use this video to send a greeting. This section in English: I don’t know if my English is OK but good luck and so long. Cut.

Summary:

This is a video of Subcomandante Marcos, the de facto spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), in which he addressed the Freeing the Media Teach-In on January 31 and February 1, 1997. The Zapatista movement began around 1983 when a small group of Mexicans organized in the Lacandon Jungle with the aspiration of leading a national revolution. Here, they lived with the indigenous Mayan communities learning their ways of life until January 1, 1994 when thousands of armed indigenous people seized seven Chiapas towns and declared war on the Mexican government. The demands of the Zapatista’s were equality, democracy, liberty, justice, independence, employment, land, food, housing, health, education and peace.

Commentary:

This video and the Zapatista movement symbolize the idea of the subaltern trying to find a way to speak. Marcos, who is only seen wearing a balaclava and whose true identity remains unknown, is an advocate of non-violent protest, and was one of the first to use the internet to share his message. In his own words:

“We don’t want to impose our solutions by force, we want to create a democratic space. We don’t see armed struggle in the classic sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only all-powerful truth around which everything is organized. In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. We didn’t go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard.”
— Subcomandante Marcos

Subcomandante Marcos, further attempts to represent the subaltern by insisting that his black mask is a mirror, portraying him as “the gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.” These are all translations of who would represent the lowest rung in various social settings – or, the subaltern. Through this, Subcomandante Marcos seeks to empower his audience, urging that we only need to look into a mirror to see that we are the leader we have been looking for. That although we live in a grid of knowledge and power, it is socially produced and socially producing, and that it is our job to extend that grid outside the lines that we currently occupy.

Marcos, a libertarian socialist, aligns the Zapatista movement with the wider anti-globalization, anti-neoliberal social movement and seeks indigenous control over local resources. Described as the first “post-modern” revolution, the Zapatista’s represent an armed revolutionary group that has abstained from using weapons since 1994. Instead, the Zapatista’s have employed media to attract publicity for disenfranchisement in the global south. This has been used to gain the support of NGOs and solidarity groups. Awareness of the Zapatista Movement has also been raised due to support from various bands such as Rage Against the Machine. Here Marcos illustrates that the important thing is not the event but the spectacle that you create through the media. This has led to a shift in power from the media to the audience. Unfortunately, however, this is the extent of how far Marcos’ efforts can carry: the rest is up to us. Whether or not we, as the elite, can listen and how well his message is received depends on whether or not we carry it forward and the actions that it compels us to take.

Subcomandante Marcos also develops the idea of a “Fourth World War”, after labeling the Cold war as the “Third World War”. The “Fourth World War”, according to Marcos, describes current international affairs between large financial centers. He insists that policies, such as those carried out by the IMF and World Bank in the post-WWII period, impose death, terror and misery on the poor majority in the global south.  However, he also states that this neoliberalism is meeting pockets of resistance. He asserts that we have not become post-colonial, but that a new form of colonialism has arisen through subjecting poorer nations to financial dependence and urges us in the global North to become active listeners to the global south. Ultimately he hopes to create a space for the subaltern to speak, “in hope that one day we can personally attend your meeting, or perhaps that one day you can have your conference in our territory, so we can listen to your words and you can hear ours in person.” (Subcomandante Marcos) Until then we allow the subaltern to be lost in translation, not only due to language barriers, but because we prevent ourselves from experiencing or witnessing firsthand the life of the subaltern, allowing our western motives of profit and greed to convince ourselves that we are too small to make an actual difference.