A Light in the Darkness

The pain covers us. It is not alleviated by the anaesthesia applied by the authorities. Their war of attrition causes fatigue and exasperation, but not paralysis. It feeds the fury.

Why Ayotzinapa? In the face of all the dead, all the disappeared, all the massacres we suffered earlier, why didn't we wake up before? Many responses have been offered. Two of them appear increasingly relevant.

Ayotzinapa was the first public and indisputable evidence that there is no way to distinguish between drug traffickers and "police" or between criminals and civil servants. The phrase "It Was the State," strewn throughout the Zócalo of Mexico City, marked the moment of awakening. Everyone knew for certain what had been until then a mere suspicion or open secret. Now it is no longer possible to deny it. It is them.

Another answer goes further: it refers to the way in which public awareness has matured over the years. In 2011 we had a similar awakening when we made our own Javier Sicilia's "We've Had It Up to Here," and we took on the accusations and demands of his letter to politicians and criminals. On May 8 he stood his ground in the Zócalo, with many thousands rallying around him, and he proposed a pact between civil society and the political classes.

On May 28, 2012, at the Castle of Chapultepec, he then repeated to the presidential candidates that the elections would not be accepted unless the political parties, all of them,"cleansed their ranks of those who, masked in legality, are in collusion with crime, and have the State coopted and impotent."

Javier Sicilia took this position via caravans across the length and breadth of the country. Those who believed the pact possible and thought that the parties and the government would undertake a serious effort to clean their house now know, three years later, that nothing like that has happened. Ayotzinapa demonstrated that any agreement with them turns out to be illusory and counterproductive.

Many thousands, perhaps millions now recognize that we are in a war waged by those above against those below, a war without quarter on all fronts, as years ago the Zapatistas warned us. Many [people], or few—no one knows—are carefully reading the words that the General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), in the voice of Subcomandante Moisés [English translation], directed to the parents and Ayotzinapa normal school students when they visited in Oventic on November 15 (Link: Zapatista [Click: English translation]).

The EZLN expressed their gratitude for their visit, their commitment, their stubbornness. The EZLN recalled that "the entire political system is rotten. It is not that it has links to organized crime, drug trafficking, with the harassment, aggression, rapes, beatings, prisons, disappearances, murders, but that all this is already part of its essence.

"Because no one can speak now of the political class and differentiate it from the nightmares endured and suffered by millions on these soils ... Corruption, impunity, authoritarianism, crime organized or disorganized, are already in the emblems, the statutes, the declarations of principles and the practice of the entire Mexican political class."

The EZLN made them see that they are not alone. With them are the relatives of the children killed in the ABC DayCare, the disappeared in Coahuila, the countless daily victims who know, in all corners of the country, that the constant abuse of authority comes from the authority, "sometimes with clothing of organized crime and sometimes as a legally constituted government." Also with them are the "indigenous peoples (...) who possess the wisdom to resist, and there is no one who knows the pain and anger more than they." Also with them are and will be the Yaqui, Nahuatl, the Ñahtó...

The EZLN told them that their word is strong because in it "millions have seen their reflections. The few are only few until they discover and meet the others. Then something terrible and wonderful happens. Those who thought they were few, and alone, discover that in every sense we are the majority. And that those above are truly the few." After the meeting, it will be possible to "overturn" the world that we have.

According to the EZLN "it will be a profound change, a real transformation on this and other pained soils in the world. Not one, but many revolutions will shake the entire planet. But the result will not be a change of names and labels where those above remain above at the expense of those below. The real transformation will not be a change of government, but of a relationship, one where the people order and the government obeys (...) where being the government is not a business (...) where terror and death will not prevail (...) and neither will there be bossy ones nor errand people, neither shepherds nor flocks."

This is what the Zapatistas told the Ayotzinapa parents and surviving normal students. And, I believe, they told all of us, men and women, young and old.

ENDS

© Scoop Media