"WE ARE PREPARING OUR NEXT STEPS"

Words of the Sixth Comission of the EZLN for the Second Indigenous Gathering of the Yucatan Peninsula

By Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos The Other Mexico

August 29, 2006

SECOND PENINSULAR INDIGENOUS REUNION
Candelaria, Campeche, Mexico

August 2006

...Our cause as Indian peoples is alive and present, thanks to, among other things, our friends from the National Indigenous Congress, especially the Indian peoples of the Central-Pacific region.

With them, we have begun a new step which seeks a new way of doing politics, anti-capitalist and of the left, to raise a national program of struggle and a new constitution, and which we call the Other Campaign.

In this movement we are learning to call compañero and compañera ..., the many people who are stripped, exploited, unappreciated, and repressed by a system that has made money its law and fakery its doctrine.

As different as we are, we have found equal ground when we searched for and found the party responsible for our pains: the capitalist system.

Freedom which has been taken from our friends the prisoners of Atenco, and from the hundreds of political prisoners, disappeared, and persecuted in our country.

Justice which is now denied to the Oaxacan people who, in the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, demand the exit of the bad governor Ulises Ruiz.

Democracy which was converted into fraud and shameless mockery in the past presidential elections, and which is at the point of converting itself into the fall of the electoral process.

We know that towards that end we must destroy the capitalist system and search, together, for an other country.

Along the way, we also have to construct our space as different kinds of people, defending our identity and history.

As the Indian peoples that we are, this construction cannot be set aside nor subordinated.

With that cordial thought we are preparing our next steps.

And here is our word.

In these times of noise and confusion, the word comes back to finding ourselves among those that are like us.

Up there above they offer us a road....

But that road doesn’t lead to where we want to go.

The place where our march will find liberty, justice, and democracy, doesn’t exist.

We have to create it.

And so it is, for example, with the thinking that says only one man or one woman matters, that the collective isn’t worth anything, doesn’t count, that individual well-being is what we should seek out, even at the cost of ending up with collective evil.

And this is the thought that’s right now in charge and is our government and truth imposed on our Indian lands.

And this is the thought that seeks to exterminate us as we are and try to convert our history, our culture, our land, our dignity to commodities.

But there was and still there is another way of thinking.

The thinking that knows that the one who lives up above off our blood and the one who lives below making the world go round with his labor are not equal.

And here we say:

A tomorrow of freedom, justice, and democracy which we need and deserve will be our color, the color of the earth, or it will not be at all.

Compañeros and compañeros, accept our, the smallest thing in the world that right now is just a thought and a step in shadows, but which is beginning to peek through into the wee hours of a new day, one which will strip the morning of fear and shame.

With the Indian peoples!

Freedom for the prisoners of Atenco!

Justice for the people of Oaxaca!

Democracy for the Mexico from below!