The EZLN: The LA Times and the Failure of Political Imagination

by Znet (reposted)

Fri, Feb 17, 2006 8:42PM

The Los Angeles Times article “Masked Marxist, With Marimbas” (January 23, 2006) describes the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign like a bizarre provincial circus. By excluding information, using delegitimizing descriptive terms, and creating inaccurate and false characterizations, the Los Angeles Times reporters and editors strip the politics from the Other Campaign and convert it into a cartoonish spectacle.

The distortion begins with the headline. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) is not a Marxist army; it is a Zapatista army. The Zapatistas use some of the analytical tools of Marxism, but they take them in other directions, as Zapatista thought stems from and seeks to address the particular affronts—racism, economic, cultural and linguistic exclusion, land and water expropriations—that indigenous communities face in Chiapas and across Mexico. After twelve years of producing reams of declarations and communiqués developing their political and social thought, there is no excuse for this mistake. Reporters call Marcos a Marxist to discredit him in the mainstream, to say that his ideas are outdated and unrealistic.

More
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=59&ItemID=9722

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