The atrocities of May 3 and 4 in San Salvador Atenco and Texcoco (and on the way to, and inside, the prisons of the state of Mexico) have ratcheted up the velocity of a movement, Zapatista - The Other Campaign
The Mexican State of Vicente Fox and his foreign sponsors (and here) attacked a concentration of Other Campaign adherents with every weapon and power in their hands. Three weeks later, they have failed:
The forces “from below and to the left” have won the battle over defining the story in what has been an apocalyptic media war (a Netwar, or Cyberwar, say the Pentagon analysts over at the Rand Corporation that study things “from above and to the right”).
The corporate media — the upper class’ most powerful weapon in the “class struggle” that is waged daily from above — deployed all the arms at their disposal.
From the desks of the media bosses they wrote a script and repeated it all day and night.
But the forces from above made the same mistake they have made so many times before: they lied. They claimed that it had been a protestor’s firecracker that killed a 14-year-old boy.
Atenco — a single word — now stands, in public opinion, for the return of Mexico’s authoritarian state, after almost three weeks of netwar, Atenco stands, in the hearts and minds of public opinion, for rape.
The horizontal flow of suppressed information has not been successfully blockaded, despite all the best efforts of those above who fancy themselves as controlling it.
The true facts regarding Atenco have sprung up from a thousand corners, and flown toward various epicenters of resistance, and sent it hurtling throughout Mexico and, in many languages, across the world
Forcing even many Commercial Media to begin to report what previously had been hushed.
The system lost another netwar, embolden and strengthen the Zapatista Other Campaign and related movements from below, turning tables on the very motives — conjuring “the fear vote” — that the repressive State had for unleashing the Dirty War of the 21st Century in Atenco.
The Zapatista Other Campaign took steps from the beginning of the Other Campaign to ensure the horizontal flow of key information.
When the Other Campaign began to take form last summer, another communications path had to be constructed for the Other Campaign.
The Other Campaign, finally, comes to take the corporate media machine — all that state-of-the art equipment, privileged access to the public airwaves, distribution systems; even their helicopters — back into public hands.
The first tasks of the Other Campaign was to open new channels of communication between the EZLN and others, and to create new flows of information and communication between all the different sectors of adherents
The Zapatistas began with the most historically difficult and divided sectors first: the “political organizations of the left” and brings them around the same table
The absolute rejection of the institutional political parties (those that, by law, can field candidates) and its resistance to any efforts, specifically, by the center-left PRD (Democratic Revolution Party) to co-opt or make electoral hay of La Otra.
Marcos and the Zapatistas came to two other conclusions that,
First, they showed zero enthusiasm for proposals that an “alternative candidacy” be mounted for president
also rejected many proposals to promote voter abstention
Looking, instead, below, to the people who, Marcos says, will topple any government that protects an illegitimate economic system.
The pushing of political parties to the sidelines gave Marcos and the Zapatistas an unfettered path to converse
But what Marcos has achieved is he’s gotten them all to walk together on a common path. A platform that is essentially anarcho-indigenist. He convinced them to embrace a useful heresy, and one that, ironically, is in their self-interest if they are serious about bringing down capitalism
And this new kind of unity through diversity played an important role during the past three weeks in turning the Atenco story around.
From this was constructed a massive, up-to-date, national email list that showed its real muscle in the days after the Atenco atrocity.
We have to learn to name our prisoners and name the repressions against us. And this is exactly what occurred this month when Other Campaign adherents were arrested, beaten, raped and imprisoned during the conflicts in Atenco and Texcoco.
The frequent infusions of such “one for all, all for one” talk have been an effort to remove historic vices of bureaucracy and exclusion
This challenge - insistence on absolute mutual respect and the creation of national, horizontal, communications systems,
no longer having to look upwards instead, look to each other, below and to the left.
Value was placed on each adherent — organization or individual — for taking autonomous initiative
By May of 2006, in the aftermath of Atenco, the results can be seen
The communication between the sectors is instant: people from diverse sectors know each other, are familiar with each other, exchange cell phone calls and text messages. Important information spreads like lightning in many directions all at once. It facilitates a kind of instant “top sight” for communicators of different tendencies and organizations.
They have a weblog. It posts audio and photos from Other Campaign events. It has links to some of the very busy Other Media sites, to videos that adherents and others post to YouTube, to photos that anybody can publish on Flickr, to Technorati’s search engine on the latest mention of La Otra Campaña by any weblog in Spanish. And so the Other Campaign communications system has become a multi-headed monster in the eyes of those who would try to silence and censor it: a nightmare for those who seek to control information flow.
Texcoco and Atenco, the networks jumped into action. In a little more than two weeks, they changed the focus of the story from what the mass media and State wanted it to be and brought public opinion to the story’s authentic essence: the atrocities committed by a repressive regime, and the human face of those who that State victimized and raped.
Within the horizontal networks, there are all kinds of organizations and individuals. mobile units war machines outside the State, termed Deleuze and Guattari — they move, many sets of feet, eyes, ears and tongues, as a unit, with speed and precision. They have, many of them, achieved “top sight.”
On the morning of May 4, in Atenco, the Mexican State set out to dismember the Other Campaign networks.And the State failed
These are excerpts from an article which can be found and read here.
corporate media Atenco Dick Morris Televisa TV Azteca Zapatistas Al Giordano
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