What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Blood Diamonds:
the Inside Story
An amazing
expose by T.R. Naylor: How the "Blood" or "Conflict
Diamonds" Myth peddled by NGOs Helped a Vicious Mining Company
Shore Up Its Monopoly, Made a Pile of Money for A Washington
Post Reporter and Leonardo di Caprio, Served As A Propaganda
Myth in the "War on Terror" and had Nothing to Do With
Osama Bin Laden. Pinochet
is gone, and the world is a cleaner place. JoAnn Wypijewski recalls
1988 in Santiago, when Chile lost its fear. And yes, here they
are in charge of Congress again, ready to facilitate a troop
hike in Iraq. Alexander
Cockburn re-introduces an old acquaintance: the Democrats--Party
of War. Remember, we are funded solely
by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a
subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you
won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the
cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
To purloin a bit of Brecht, this is
indeed a dark age. The war grinds on like an unbending migraine.
While the vultures chow down on the bones of Iraq, Bush grows
more surly with each new massacre and the democrats, despite
their constituents' disgust with this carnage that brought the
party pyrrhic victory in November, vote up fresh billions to
feed the American murder machine.
Meanness rules this bleak Christmas
- Homeland Security's Dia de Guadalupe raids on western meatpacking
plants decimated whole families just as the ice storms blew in
from the Arctic. 92 homeless Americans have died on the streets
of Seattle so far this year. Deck the Halls with their frozen
corpses.
I have retreated home to Mexico.
While I've been on the road, the new regime here crafted cruel
repression, crushing the Oaxaca Commune and shipping hundreds
of political prisoners to prisons in the north just as in the
days of Porfirian dictatorship. Calderon seems determined to
govern the nation on television with the military in the street,
a depressing prospect.
My back aches from hauling
too many books around, the Willie Loman of the Zapatista Army
of National Liberation. My marriage blew up in Istanbul. Sometimes
it feels like I am deep in the bowels of the drainage tunnels
that twist and turn beneath Nogales Sonora and Nogales Arizona
where, they say, it is so pitch black that the Migra and the
migrantes brush past each other in the dark - popular legend
has it that the Mexicans have intuitive built-in flashlights
that enables them to elude capture down there.
I thought of that tunnel often
as I crawled up the left coast of North America all the way to
Vancouver BC hawking my "making another world possibles"
and a highly subversive chapbook "Bomba!" and trying
to listen hard to what my mostly young audiences had to tell
me instead of talking all the time, my own private "Other
Campaign." Like "La Otra", the idea is (I think)
to weave the little resistances down below into a tapestry of
defiance right here inside the belly of the beast. As Marcos
once instructed us in the first months of the rebellion "haces
el Zapatismo donde vives", that is, be a Zapatista where
you are.
It has taken a decade for this
interpretation of Zapatismo to take root. The solidarity movement
used to send their old shoes to Chiapas and host delegations
of victimized Indians. Now it confronts power locally, working
on a nucleus of issues that bring together new constituencies
in a very Zapatista way.
The carpeted lecture hall at
Cal State Los Angeles is packed. Up on the hill above East L.A.,
Cal State is where the Chicano student movement was cradled in
the late 1960s and successive generations have kept the flame
alive - I
often meet young people who have heard me speak there in Chiapas
or on the barricades in Mexico City.
Tonight the talk is fixated
on the stealing of the Mexican election, the listeners hungrily
digesting every arcane detail. They become particularly animated
when I speak of the civil insurrection led by Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador in the wake of the July 2nd fraud and how, along with
popular upsurge in Oaxaca and the on-going rebellion in Chiapas,
the beans of a new Mexican revolution are boiling on the stove.
1810! 1910! 2010! Amidst the fervor, one young woman meekly raises
her hand and, Rodney King-like, asks why we all can't just get
along? The room erupts in chants of "No Justice! No Peace!"
Cal State activists joined
forces with Mexican farmers and Anglo anarchists in the struggle
to keep South Central Farm from being bulldozed by "Mexican"
mayor Antonio Villaraigoza to make way for a mammoth Wal-Mart
warehouse. The farm, covering several city blocks in a warehouse
zone of the megalopolis, fed hundreds of poor immigrant families
with its bounty. Those who worked the land grew the crops of
their home countries: yucca and nopal, fragrant cilantro and
epizote, braided rows of maize grown from pure Zapatista organic
seed smuggled in from the highlands of Chiapas, still uncontaminated
by transgenic mutilation.
South Central was, in fact,
a kind of Zapatista street piece, an autonomous space run collectively
by and for the community, a way of getting off the mal gobierno's
grid and, in the end, the mal gobierno had to snuff out this
anarchist germ that had dug its way into the stomach wall of
the belly of the beast.
The defenders of South Central
stood strong on the land confronting the bulldozers for days
until the robo cops dragged them off, cut down the trees, paved
over the fields, and imprisoned the property. Jordan C., a transplant
from Tupelo Mississippi who caught the Zapatista bug at Humboldt
State and helped organize the U.C. Santa Barbara compas on the
line, blames the eviction on tactical errors - the L.A. anarchists
got up too late to stop the bulldozers. What would Rachel Corrie
have said?
Santa Barbara is a peculiar
point of illumination in this terrible darkness. UCSB is an unlikely
Chicano Mecca - MECHA was founded there in 1975 and the papers
of Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Brown Buffalo, who vanished into thin
air at a crucial moment in the awakening of Aztlan consciousness,
are housed at the University. Being Zapatistas where they are,
the Santa Barbarians take on immigration rights issues in one
of the wealthiest enclaves in the California firmament where
the only good Mexican slaves in the kitchen. Roberto Hernandez,
who is writing his thesis on indigenous Mexico's migration north,
grew up right on the border down Dairy Mart road in San Ysidro
and once organized volley ball games over the rusting border
wall. "I have to be near a border" he confesses, "no
place else feels right."
Up in Fresno, I speak at an
anarchist café over on the west side. Anarchos and Chicano
activists chop vegetables together and talk about being Zapatistas
where they live. Last spring, the anarchists and the Chicanos
joined with church groups and labor unions to put together the
May 1st march for immigration reform. 20,000 took to the streets
of this Central Valley agribiz nexus, the largest political demonstration
in recent memory. The myriad and massive marches all over the
U.S. that day also celebrated the 120th anniversary of the first
May 1st in Chicago led by other immigrant workers - many of them
anarchists too - for the eight hour day.
At a forum up at CSU Fresno
before a hundred or so activistas of all stripes and hues, we
hashed over the resistance to electoral fraud in Mexico and what
that translates to north of the Rio Bravo where Bushwa stole
two straight presidential elections with barely a whimper from
the citizenry. The debate zeroed in on taking it to the streets.
"I have waited for this meeting for 25 years," rejoiced
Dr. Manuel Figueroa with whom I shared the podium.
Seeking out common ground on
local issues characterizes the new Zapatismo I encountered in
California and the Northwest in the autumn of 2006. At Humboldt
State University in far northern California, I spoke on the "coyuntura"
(the coming together) of revolutionary forces down south in Mexico.
The next night, Accion Zapatistas was part of a coalition that
sponsored a Dialogue on Racism. Angela Davis was next up at the
mic to denounce the prison-industrial complex.
At Evergreen up in Olympia
Washington - Rachel Corrie U. - folksinger-activist Jim Page
opened the session with his ballad to the school's most lamented
dropout, "I'd Rather Be Dancing", and there wasn't
a dry eye in the house. Peter Bohmer's class on movement building
which draws deeply from the Zapatista experience was gearing
up for a public meeting on homelessness that night - the Olympia
City Council recently passed an ordinance making it a crime to
loiter on the sidewalk.
After class, Evergreen activists
invited myself and Cecilia Santiago, a Zapatista activista from
Chiapas with whom I kept crossing paths as we brought our mutual
visions of Zapatismo to the Pacific Northwest, to hear what the
kids inside a state juvenile prison had to say. Be a Zapatista
on the inside.
The resistance in Oaxaca was
raging as I traveled the left coast this fall and in many locales,
Oaxaca was a local issue. Oaxacans, first the Mixtecos and then
the Zapotecos and Triquis, are the most peripatetic of indigenous
migrant workers, having long ago established communities in the
San Joaquin Valley and as far north as the vineyards of Sonoma
and Napa, following the fruit-tramp trail into Oregon and Washington
and political exile in British Columbia. Now they are in New
York City and Nome Alaska. The Oaxacans have their own newspapers
and radio stations that broadcast in their mother tongues. They
are organized farm labor unions and marching for immigration
rights and when the shit hit the fan back home, they were a lightning
rod for local action.
The uprising and repression
in Oaxaca brought together Mexican nationals, undocumented workers,
Chicano movement people, and the Zapatista solidarity network.
Each Sunday in San Francisco's
Mission District where the Caracol de la Mision is headquartered
at the perpetually-buzzing Café Boheme, Oaxacan painters
Calixto Robles and Arnaldo Garcia unfurled their banners and
posters at Plaza Sandino i.e. the Bart Plaza on 24th. "Oaxaca
Vive! La Lucha Sigue!" The murder of Indymedia journalist
Brad Will on the barricades October 27th just outside Oaxaca
city, brought the anarchists on board. Adrian Zanini had Brad's
picture up on the big screen when I spoke at New College that
night within an hour of the killing and 50 supporters showed
up at a City Hall wake the next day. By Tuesday, hundreds were
marching on the Mexican consulate, which had been daubed blood
red by unseen hands for the occasion. Protests were staged outside
Mexican diplomatic sites in over 30 cities - in New York. consular
officials had 11 of Brad's comrades busted when they locked down
at the front door. Demonstrators marched for weeks from San Diego
to Vancouver.
Up in Portland, the protest
at the consulate was led by companeros from Juxlahuaca in the
Mixteca, delegates from the Organization of Oaxacan Indigenous
Communities in Oregon (OCIMO) who demanded, among other items,
the dropping of charges against two anarchists who had been busted
the previous week at the Mexican offices.
The anarchists had gathered
the night before the demo at the IWW Liberty Hall to commemorate
the 91st anniversary of the execution of that fearless old wobbly
Joe Hill - a band called General Strike supplied the tunes -
and the march was slated to leave Pioneer Square, a venue that
that troublemaking troubadour often played. But the Portland
police quickly descended on the milling swarm handing out warnings
that Pioneer Square was not a free speech area. In an aberrant
display of solidarity, the warnings were issued on red paper
edged in black, anarchist colors.
Nonetheless, the Oaxacans -
the anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon murdered at Leavenworth prison
in 1924, was a native son - were not to be shushed and jumped
up on the nearest balustrade to tell their story in no uncertain
terms. Oaxaca Oaxaca No Es Cuartel! Fuera El Ejercito de El!"
(Oaxaca is not a barracks. The army must leave.)
Oaxaca was a live wire issue
on the other side of the other border up in Vancouver, a city
where Mexican political exiles have taken refuge - the daughter
of Gloria Arenas, an imprisoned leader of a Guerrero-based guerilla
band lives in Vancouver and the corrupt chieftain of the Mexican
miners union is said to be in hiding there - and because it is
an exile community coming from many distinct left skews, the
fracture lines are seismic. There are two Other Campaigns, one
spurred by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Stalinists from Mexico City's
National Autonomous University. The other Other is a loosely
coiled amalgam of anarchists but the two Others have come together
around Oaxaca, protesting frequently at the local consulate -
such actions have been galvanized by the arrival of Mixtec activist-poet
Raul Gatica. "As long as we are moving together, there are
no quarrels," observes a friend codenamed Demapaz who was
one of the first Mexican activists to win asylum in this damp
town. Demapaz is leading a delegation of First Nation peoples
to the Zapatista "Intergalactica" set for the end of
December in Oventik to mark the 13th anniversary of the rebellion.
The map of resistance is being
redrawn up and down the left coast. I spoke in Portland on the
eve of the first northwest regional SDS conclave since that acronym
was resurrected. The Green Scare anti-enviro terror attacks of
the Bush regime and invariably the war were on the top of the
agenda. There is a new Brown Beret brigade down in heroic Watsonville
where the first Mexican field hands migrated in the 1870s, and
the new Black Panther Party chaired by Fred Hampton Jr. is moving
in Oakland. While the handles are on the retro tick, they do
signify de facto recognition of what came before that is sometimes
difficult for younger activists to acknowledge. Be a Zapatista
no matter how old you are.
The darkness of the hollow
days swaddles a haunted USA with fear and loathing, the meanness
encapsulated in the death rattle that emanates from Fox News.
Stuck in the gleaming snowdrifts up in northern Washington that
had whited out four straight presentations, I punched the remote
and paused to study the Weather Channel. The forecast was for
continued shit storms broken up by scattered clearings. Yes,
the light is dim at the end of the tunnel of hate but it is definitely
down there. Keep on keeping on - another year is possible!
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
