New Zapatista “Caracol” Created in Mexico

November 17, 2005
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Dear Colleague,

Throughout August and September, Narco News brought you the most
continuous, in-depth coverage of beginning of the grassroots political
process underway in Mexico, let by the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation and known as the "Other Campaign." All of us here in the
Narco Newsroom, and Narco News founder Al Giordano in particular, put
so much effort into these reports because the Other Campaign
represents a major historical turning point in Mexico's struggle
against imposition from above, with the potential to finally,
concretely, unite the struggle of Chiapas' indigenous Zapatista rebels
with the rest of Mexico.

The seed planted in those long August and September meetings is
beginning to bear fruit. As first-time Narco News correspondent Juan
Trujillo Limones reports from Mexico City, a new "caracol," or
Zapatista base community, has been declared in the historic
southeastern Xochimilco area of that sprawling megalopolis. It is an
inter-generational effort, with a council of grandmothers at the lead
discussing how best to educate the youth in their own history of
resistance.

The centerpiece of Trujillo's report is a conversation with the
inauguration ceremony's star attendant, José Félix Serdán Nájera. Born
just two years before Zapata's death in 1919, don Félix has struggled
all his 88 years for Zapata's ideals, fighting alongside original
Zapatista leader Rubén Jaramillo in that revolutionary's decades-long
fight for justice in the state of Morelos.

"I was born a few years before General Zapata died," don Félix tells
Trujillo, "but I can tell you what my parents would tell me... It had
a certain similarity [to the caracol], because Zapata's ideals were
always on the side of the humble people; this is the same thing that's
happening now. Zapatismo, represented at a national level by the
Chiapas revolutionaries, has the same ideal..."

...

"Right now, we unfortunately have the problem that we are governed by
the corrupt, by those that don't aspire to serve the people, but
rather to be served by the people! To enrich themselves or at least
raise their own economic status at the cost of the people's hunger.
So, my view is that this caracol could be the beginning of a more
concrete struggle in favor of the oppressed."

Read the full story, here, in The Narco News Bulletin:

http://www.narconews.com

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com
webmaster [at] narconews.com

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