AMY GOODMAN: On January 1st, 1994, eight years ago, Zapatistas staged an uprising in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The rebellion happened in the first hours of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. The uprising provided a tremendous boost and inspiration to the then-burgeoning movement against corporate globalization. Early last year, the Zapatistas caravanned from the jungles of Chiapas to the heart of Mexico City, retracing the steps of Emiliano Zapata. Today, in the post-September 11th world, the Zapatistas, like many groups and people across the globe, face a new reality.

As we enter this new year, people around the world are feeling the impact of the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror. As we’ve said often on this program, a man who was not elected president has declared war on the world. In addition to the carnage in Afghanistan that has seen thousands of civilians killed by cluster bombs and the Pentagon’s ill-titled 15,000-pound daisy cutter bombs, this war has given governments around the world virtual blank checks to smash dissent, restrict individual freedoms and, in some areas of the globe, to occupy countries and territories — all in the name of fighting terror. Here in the United States, the government has pushed through repressive laws and decrees aimed at quashing dissent, as well. The line between the government and corporate media is at its most invisible state perhaps ever.

But still, movements and peoples around the world remain determined to struggle for freedom. The Zapatistas are one such movement.

We turn now to a talk by author and journalist John Ross. He’s appeared frequently on this program, reporting from Mexico on the Zapatista movement, globalization, the so-called free trade agreements and their effects on poor and working people in Mexico. He has written several books about Mexico, among them The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles and Rebellion from the Roots. This is John Ross on the Zapatistas.

JOHN ROSS: You know, I’ve seen a transformation in this period of time in these last two months that I’ve been on tour. When I first set out, you know, people were still really shell-shocked about 9/11 and the war, and people were focused and outraged about the bombing and what to do, and were putting the issues that they’ve worked on for so long to one side. You know? We all have to focus our energies on the war, you know? I know in Madison at one point — Madison always the antiwar center of this country — a few people came out to hear what I had to say, because people were just too busy focusing on the war. And I think that’s been a motion that we’ve seen all around the country, you know?

But in the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that there’s been much more of an integration in those issues. We did a rally in New York City that was quite good on sweatshops, the day after Thanksgiving, to show that — you know, you go buy your Christmas gifts. You go buy all these goods that are manufactured, so to speak, in sweatshops in Central America and Mexico and other countries around the world. And that was a “No Sweatshop, No War” demonstration, and the connections were made. And I’ve seen that in recent rallies that I participated in that dealt with Indigenous rights, dealt with the preservation of forests.

Those issues that we’ve been working on for a long time, we can’t put those issues aside. We have to be able to figure out how they relate to the war, because they do relate to the war. This war is not a special circumstance. It’s the way the ruling class in this country operates, no? And we’ve got to be able to bring our constituencies and integrate our struggles, not sacrificing what we have to say but figuring out how we can bring them to the antiwar movement at the same time and bring people from the antiwar movement to our own constituencies and the issues that we’re working on.

And I think it provides us with a really important opportunity, a kind of window now to talk to people about how U.S., so to speak, foreign policy dominates the world, has disaffected the world. As the very conservative bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas said at Sunday night Mass not two months, not a month ago, Felipe Arizmendi, a person that is a conservative who was called in by the Vatican to replace Don Samuel Ruiz, said that, you know, maybe this will be an opportunity for the people of the U.S. to reflect upon why the world hates us so much. No? And this was a conservative bishop in San Cristóbal. And so, if they’re looking at it that way, you’d think that we can understand that this does present us with this opportunity to talk to folks about why things happen in the world the way they do. OK.

The pitch-black night suddenly came alive with darting shadows. The slap slap of rubber boots against slick pavement echoed throughout the hushed neighbors on the periphery of town. Sleepy chuchos stirred in their patios, stretched and bayed, the howling catching from block to block, barrio to barrio.

Across the narrow Puente Blanco, down the rutted Centenario Diagonal, up General Utrilla from the marketplace district, dark columns jogged in military cadence. With their features canceled behind ski-masks and bandanas that left their collective breath hanging in the still mountain air like vapors from a past many Mexicans do not wish to recognize as being very present, the ”sin rostros,” the “without faces,” of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation advanced on the center of the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the throne of the Mayan highlands of the state of Chiapas, Mexico’s most southern state, most impoverished state and arguably its most Indian state.

In the very first hour of that beacon of globalization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, January 1st, 1994, so it began, the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico.

Fast-forward a bit to all the January 1sts that have occurred since then and will occur again this January 1st, when we have gone to Chiapas to mark that first moment of the uprising so many years ago now, eight years this year. And we’ll go to Oventic in the highlands, a cultural center that the EZLN established many years ago, or down to the most public outpost of the EZLN in the jungle, that town with the haunting name of La Realidad, The Reality. And we’ll hear the comandante speak of la guerra contra el olvido, the war against olvido. You can translate olvido a number of ways. I think the most popular way is to say “forgetfulness.” But this is not the kind of forgetfulness that says, “I left my book in the cafe” or “my glasses in the classroom” or something behind tie a string around your finger. The olvido that the EZLN talks about, that the comandantes talk about, is an olvido that erases the past, that obliterates the past, that eliminates the history of the resistances of the peoples of these Americas because that history, those resistances are not very helpful to the people that have globalized this planet from the top down.

And so, they talk about an olvido that would obliterate memories of the Mexican Revolution, 1910 through 1919, that first great social uplift from the bottom, uprising from the bottom of Mexican society, landless Indigenous peasants on the move behind an Indian leader. His name? Emiliano Zapata. Emiliano Zapata was a Nahuatl Indian. The reason he was the leader in his pueblo is because he spoke both Spanish and Nahuatl, Nahuatl contemporary Aztec. The land grants for which he fought for his village, Anenecuilco, were written in Nahuatl, in an Indian language. The Mexican Revolution, that revolution which set the style, the pace for revolution in our hemisphere, in our Americas, was essentially an Indian revolution from the bottom. And it is the memory of that revolution that they would obliterate, that they want to eliminate, because, as I say, the rebellions of the peoples of this world are not helpful to those that want to dominate the planet, corporatize the planet from the top down, an oblivion that would obliterate the struggles of the Indigenous peoples of this continent for the last half-millennium.

You know, this past October 12th, we celebrated the — celebrated? — we marked the 509th anniversary of the so-called conquest of the Americas by the Europeans, by the people that came from without. Here we still, I think, call it Columbus Day, whatever, in honor of this gentleman that stumbled into the Americas. In Latin America, in Mexico in specific, it is the Day of Indigenous Resistance, and remains the Day of Indigenous Resistance, no?

An oblivion that would obliterate 57 distinct Indigenous nations in Mexico, 63 distinct Indigenous languages — languages, not dialects, not idioms, but complete language systems — that would obliterate those language systems. What happens when a language goes away, when it dies, when it is obliterated, when it is consigned to oblivion? We lose the way to name the divine and human things on this planet, no?

I read this poem this afternoon, and I love it, and I’m going to read it again, if I can find it. It’s a translation from the Aztec by the great translator of Aztec poetry, Miguel Léon-Portilla. And it’s what happens when a language dies. And this is really at the nub of what the Zapatista rebellion is all about, making sure that these are living languages, not preserving relics from the past but making sure that their languages can survive in the future. We forget the past, we are doomed to serve out the future. ”Cuando muere una lengua.” I’m going to read it first in Spanish, and then I’ll read it in English.

Cuando muere una lengua,
las cosas divinas,
estrellas, sol y luna,
las cosas humanas,
pensar y sentir,
no se reflejan en eso espejo.

When a language dies,
then many have died,
and many more will die soon,
mirrors forever broken,
shadows of voices
forever silenced,
humanity grows poorer
when a language dies.

Got to keep those languages alive, you know?

So, how does this relate to the war? No? How does this relate to 9/11? Let’s take a second to kind of talk about how 9/11 appeared in Chiapas. I was there not long, maybe three weeks after 9/11. And I was specifically concerned about: What did the men, for example, the Tzotzil men from San Juan Chamula, who come down to San Cristóbal every day and stand in front of the Elektra store on Insurgentes, the main drag in San Cristóbal, looking at 30 television sets, these banks of television sets — what were they seeing when they saw the planes plow into the buildings over and over and over again on Mexican television?

I think it’s a difficult question to ask what a people saw, what they think. In many communities, they saw different things. I think in the evangelical communities, they saw the end of the world coming. It’s interesting that the years 12 — 2010 through 2012 on the Mayan calendar mark the end of this Mayan world and the beginning of the next one, no? So maybe people saw that, as well. I think in many communities, such as Oventik and Aldama, which are autonomous municipalities, are part of the autonomous municipalities, seeing — where people were watching this on television, what they saw was that the giant, the colossus of the North, the Norte, El Norte, those powerful people, were not quite so powerful as they were before. I think all of the South, not just of Mexico but all over the world, people saw that indeed the giant, the U.S., was not invincible anymore.

What does that mean? I think they take that into account. There’s still a — according to a good friend, Gustavo Castro — maybe many of you know him. Gustavo, who runs a think tank in Chiapas, says that when they go into the communities now, the people ask them for a video of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, no? They’re assimilating those images, no? And what that means in terms of seeing the U.S. as no longer quite the dominating power that it was before, I think they’re weighing. They’re trying to figure out what that means, whether that benefits them or whether it doesn’t benefit them, no?

Let me read you a poem that I wrote after that visit to the San Cristóbal. This is a poem that — you know, the Zapatistas were bombed. In the first 12 days of their uprising back in January of 1994, bombs were dropped on Zapatista communities. We were up on the big mountain right outside of San Cristóbal, if any of you know the terrain, María Auxiliadora, when a U.S. missile crashed into the forest maybe 50 feet from where we were. You know, it’s an interesting moment that the women in the town were all crouched down in a ditch, and one of the women pulled out her voting card, you know, and she held it up to the sky, and she said, “¡Somos del PRI! ¡Somos del PRI!” “We’re from the PRI!” as if that could fend off the bombs, you know? But it was a U.S. missile, fired from a Swiss fighter, a pilotless plane. Down in the jungle, helicopters dropped bombs on communities and settlements in and around Altamirano, down around the Hilo Nuevo, San Carlos. Several people were killed. This had never happened before. So, that gives you some context for what I’m going to read here. The Zapatistas have been bombed before. They know what that means. This poem is called “In Tzotzil.” Tzotzil is the language and the peoples of the Highland Maya. Tzotz means “bat.” These are the people that were born in the white caves above Sakamch’en de los Pobres. It’s the San Andrés Larráinzar, the place where those peace talks took place for many years.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to John Ross. And we’re going to go to that poem in a minute, but we’re going to break for stations to identify themselves. John Ross is the author of The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles. The Zapatistas rose up eight years ago, on January 1st, 1994. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Zapatista Hymn,” written by one of the women comandantes, sung at protests and marches in Chiapas. You are listening to The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we go back to John Ross, author and journalist, author of The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles. He was about to recite a poem.

JOHN ROSS: … Pobres. It’s the San Andrés Larráinzar, the place where those peace talks took place for many years, a Tzotzil power spot. So, Tzotzil is a language as well as the people, the Tzotzil people, the People of the Bat.

On a green hillside south of Ocosingo
a campesino in rubber boots
aims his single shot 22 high
and curses the deep blue sky
that has taken his only son and daughter.
Together, the family had gone to cut the sweet cane
when the plane came back and dropped its death bombs.
The bultos hit the ground like an evil kiss
the concussion knocking him into mindless oblivion.
And when he awoke
Rosa was bubbling blood from her lips
and young Agustin was cradled limply in her lap
by the side of the Nuevo San Carlos River
where such a thing had never fallen
from the deep blue sky before.
It was his own Black Tuesday.
And in his broken heart
the seed of jihad germinated.

The corn is tall enough now to be bombed
the river full of secret germs.
The wind is salted with the worms of fear.
The Tzotziles have known war before
have tasted its rotting fruit
suffered its open wounds
picked up their children
and they were dead.
There is a fire in my heart
the mother said.
If I could reach the one who killed my son
I would eat him until he was dead
the mother said
The Palestinian mother said in Tzotzil.

“In Tzotzil.”

Let me tell you a bit about Mexico and the war. And I think I need to begin by saying this is not Mexico’s war. Mexico is a neutral country. Mexico does not involve itself in international conflicts until it is pushed to the utmost limit. Mexico operates on a diplomatic principle, the Estrada Doctrine, which says that they do not endorse intervention in any other country in the world. It’s a way that the government has used sometimes to keep human rights groups from probing into Mexican abuses of its own citizenry. But the guiding principle of Mexican diplomacy is the Estrada document, nonintervention. And by that sense, the Mexican people, most of their congresspeople — perhaps not their president and their foreign minister — don’t view this as being Mexico’s war. And I think it’s important to understand that when we look at how the South itself reacts to this war — the South, no? The South in terms of that contradiction, South-North. Most of the world seems to operate always on this East-West bias, no? No one takes a look or cares much about what the people of the South think about what is done in the North. But let’s be clear that this is not Mexico’s war.

Now, the U.S. does not love Mexico. George W., five days before 9/11, welcomed the Mexican president, Vicente Fox, formerly the president of Coca-Cola Corporation, to the White House, where he said, putting his arm around Vicente Fox, that “Mexico is our most important foreign relation.” Six days later, after 9/11, you couldn’t find Mexico on the map in the White House war room, for sure, no? I mean, Mexico — or, the U.S. does not love Mexico, but it certainly loves Mexican oil. And I think that that’s really what we have to look at in terms of what the outfall of this war and a protracted war against “terrorism” can bring to Mexico. Mr. Fox has begun to implement a plan that he calls the Puebla to Panama Plan. And we’re talking about Puebla. You know, it’s in Mexico. It goes to the Mexican border. Then it goes down a little bit further through Central America, takes us all the way to Panama. And presumably, after the Plan Puebla to Panama, the Plan Colombia kicks in, no? That takes care of the rest of what’s down there, except there might be some more territories down below Colombia, and then we can look at the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, the FTAA, as taking — they got it all planned out, no? Puebla to Panama, Plan Colombia, FTAA — that’s their plan for this hemisphere, no?

Now, the Plan Puebla to Panama, I don’t know about the Panama part, because I don’t know much about how the Central Americans have reacted to this imposition by the Mexican president upon their own economies and their own forests and their own natural resources. But within Mexico and southern Mexico, the idea is to bring transnational investment, specifically in the energy sectors, to the south of Mexico, the impoverished, resource-rich southern Mexico, a Mexico that is a heavily Indian enclave from Puebla all the way down to the Guatemala border. And I think it is the attempts to implement this, this plan to bring transnational capital into energy exploitation in the South, that we need to watch out for.

Wars need a lot of oil to fuel them. And that oil is going to be used for a long time, if these planes keep flying. Every plane that’s up there needs more oil, no? George W. has also announced that he wants to fill the U.S. strategic reserve, which Mexico usually is responsible for supplying, up to the brim. That’s never been done before, but filling out the U.S. strategic reserve. So, on these and the other aspect, I think, is trying to lessen dependence on the producers in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, in particular, about 13% of the U.S. oil basket. Between Mexico and Venezuela, about a quarter of the U.S. petroleum imports are generated, no? Venezuela is a problem for George W. Hugo Chávez has made a lot of noise about not supporting this war. And I think that we will see in the not so distant future the kind of attempts to destabilize the Chávez regime in Venezuela that has been such a benchmark of U.S. diplomacy in all of Latin America.

In Mexico, I think Mr. Bush and Mr. Fox have a certain — how do they say? — that chemistry together, you know? They both are fake ranchers. That’s one thing they have in common. George Bush is not a rancher. You know, George Bush had to buy ranch after he became Texas governor. It’s mandatory for the Texas governor to have a ranch. And Mr. Fox, the man with the cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, grows cauliflower and broccoli on his farms in the Bajío of Guanajuato. It’s not exactly “Git Along, Little Dogies,” you know, when you got — you’re exporting broccoli and cauliflower to the U.S., you know? And I don’t know about this broccoli thing, because George W.'s father always hated broccoli so. But there is this chemistry, you know, between those guys, that first time they ever met, you know, Vicente Fox brought a pair of boots, and he gave the boots to George Bush. Well, the boots were kind of the symbol of Vicente Fox's campaign. You know, he stomped through the country, stomping on the critters and the PRI and the varmints. And he didn’t mention, however, that the Fox brothers’ boot factory in León, Guanajuato, is one of the largest boot factories in Mexico, you know, so this is kind of a low-ball advertisement. This guy’s a marketer. He sold Coca-Cola to the Mexican people for 60 years. During the '60s and the ’70s, when Coca-Cola was considered throughout the world to be the most devastating symbol of U.S. imperialism, no? So, you know, let's be clear that what comes out of Vicente Fox’s mouth is pretty much selling Coca-Cola. Whether he calls it FTAA, whether he calls it Plan Panama, Puebla to Panama, whatever he calls it, he’s selling you Coca-Cola. He is a marketer. That’s how he became president of Mexico. He marketed himself to power.

So, there’s a lot of resource in southern Mexico. There’s a lot of oil. The most important land-based deposits are in the state of Tabasco and in certain parts of Chiapas. Along with the oil, there’s a lot of natural gas. In the Zapatista zone, I think that’s what we’re looking at more than anything else: natural gas. It’s a little bit high up to be down at the very bottom of the oil basin that runs into Guatemala along the border in the Petén, no? There’s a lot of mineral wealth underneath the soil, in the subsoil. Indian peoples and mestizo farmers on ejidos own 80% of forest lands in Mexico, 80% of the forests. They’ve lost their timber rights very often. Very often the timber is just stolen from them and cut down. But we’ve seen, since NAFTA was enacted in '94, many a transnational timber giant from the U.S. enter Mexico and start cutting down the trees, no? And we've just had an important battle in the state of Guerrero with the Boise Cascade corporation, who went home with their tails between their legs. But the — yeah, it’s good, but we can talk about that because there are some bad aspects to it, too. But that’s what the transnationals are looking at when they look at the PPP. They’re looking at what lies beneath Indian lands. And in a war, what lies between Indian lands is more needed than ever by those people that would wage war.

Now, the Zapatistas specifically have been battling for a long time for an Indian rights law that would indeed grant the Indian communities, the Indian nations in Mexico, 57 distinct Indigenous nations, autonomy. That means control over their own lands, control over their own agrarian policies, control over the exploitation of natural resources. The Indian rights law that the Zapatistas negotiated with the government in 1996 was a benchmark agreement, probably the most important agreement revising the relationship of Indigenous peoples to their government. It granted them autonomy. It meant that they could decide their own destiny. They could decide their own bilingual educational program. They could control their own justice system. They could elect their village officials by that principle that the Zapatistas hold so dear, mandar obediciendo, governing by obeying the will of the people, serving the people in the communities. And then those majority Indigenous counties could affiliate into autonomous regions that would elect candidate — or, would elect candidates to state and local congresses, no? A system that would grant the Indigenous peoples of Mexico territory, not just land. The international definition of what an Indigenous nation is is that it has territory, it has habitat, it is a nation, you know?

And that law has gone through a lot of changes. And sooner or later in this presentation, I’m going to show you a video about the march that the EZLN conducted last year up to Mexico City in defense of this Indigenous rights law — again, probably the most important landmark agreement between Indian peoples and their government that were ever enacted — or, ever negotiated in Latin America, because it was never enacted. President of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo, when he was president, vetoed the law, on the grounds that precisely this law would allow the Indian peoples to secede from Mexico, to take with them their oil, their natural gas and their timber. And the Zapatistas said, “Nothing could be further from the truth. We want to be Mexican citizens, first-class Mexican citizens, but on our own terms, our own terms being autonomy, nationhood, Indigenous nations within the Mexican context, not outside the Mexican context.” This battle has gone on for a long time.

The autonomy provisions of the Indian rights law would indeed allow all Indian peoples to deny transnational access to oil, to natural gas, to minerals in the subsoil, to the timberlands. It doesn’t necessarily say that they can’t — that the Mexican government can’t exploit that oil, but that the Indigenous communities will themselves have the final word as to whether or not they can enter into the communities and do this work. A lot of it has to do with mitigation funds. A lot of it has to do with the kind of compensation that Indigenous people would gain from allowing their lands to be exploited. But the autonomy provisions of the Indian rights law are definitely an impediment to the transnational exploitation of the south of Mexico, to getting at this oil that they’re going to need for their war. And the resistance that the Indigenous law, that the autonomy law, indicates has been challenged by the Mexican government. Congress refused to pass this law. We’ll show a video about the Zapatistas’ historic march last spring from Chiapas Highlands up to Mexico City, where they went before the Congress of the country and insisted that the Congress pass this law. And, of course, they were turned down. The law was gutted. All of those provisions I talked about, those autonomy provisions, were taken out of the law. That struggle still goes on. And when and if we get a legitimate Indigenous rights law in Mexico that allows the Indigenous nations this freedom to control their own destiny, we’re going to see this barrier thrown up to transnational exploitation.

Now, the Mexican government is not going to take that lying down. They have 30,000 troops — 36,000 troops within the conflict zone at this moment. And when Indigenous people begin to say, “No, you can’t get at our oil,” we’re going to see a lot more troops sent into these areas. We’re going to, in fact, I think, see the Zapatistas with their masks — no? — categorized as terrorists, as all social movements are being tarred these days, no? That, in fact, if you resist the powers that be, if you try and control your own destiny, all of a sudden you’re a terrorist now. That’s the way you’re painted. So I think those are, you know, a series of events that we can see following after 9/11, attempts to get at the oil in the Indigenous zones, resistance on the part of the Indian peoples, and the Mexican government in alliance with the U.S., taking orders from the White House, calling the Zapatistas terrorists and using that as a pretext to go in and take over the land and take over the oil.

AMY GOODMAN: John Ross, author and journalist. We’re going to come back to the speech he recently gave. Among his books, The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles and Rebellion from the Roots. If you’d like to get more information on the videotape of his speech, as long as the two — as well as the two that we’ll be playing in our second hour, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said — we’re putting them all together for a New Year’s special two-hour video — you can call 1-800-926-3921. That’s 1-800-926-3921. We’re going to a music break, a CD compiled by FZLN, the Zapatista civil front in Mexico.

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AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to The War and Peace Report. That music featured Subcomandante Marcos, as we go back to author and journalist John Ross on the Zapatistas.

JOHN ROSS: One other consequence, I think, of 9/11 is that it marginates the struggles of Indigenous peoples in the South. As I mentioned, the world has turned on, again, this East-West bias. News from the South is sparing. We don’t hear much. The Zapatista cause has only occasionally been news. And we can, I think, expect to see less news from th South, less news from the Indian struggles in the South, as this war on this East-West bias continues.

And that gives us a certain obligation to make sure that this rebellion doesn’t go away. There’s lots of ways in which we can support the Zapatista cause, get the word out and let people know that this struggle continues to exist. And just some of the ways that this can happen, I think, are in terms of getting the news out, finding out what’s going on in Chiapas, going to Chiapas yourself, learning about what this struggle is, all the way to buying fair trade coffee that comes from the Zapatista autonomous zone, that comes from Mut-vitz, where several Zapatista autonomías have come together to form a cooperative that is now selling fair trade coffee here in the U.S.

So, there’s lots of different ways that we can bring the Zapatista cause to the attention of folks who are totally focused on other issues at this moment, no? We’ve got to be able to give them a voice here, as much as we’ve got to be able to give the struggle for the forests, for the struggle of Indigenous rights, for the struggles against discrimination and for affirmative action here — all of those struggles that people have said, you know, “Put them aside. We can only focus on the war right now.” That’s not true. We have to focus on this wide range of issues that we’ve all been working on for a great number of years, and not let the war dominate what we have to say, but use this window of opportunity of this war to integrate our struggles with the antiwar movement, build that antiwar movement from the bottom.

And I think that — I take that from a guy that was, you know, the first guy that went to jail from the Bay Area, in San Francisco, back in 1964, when another war began, in the East of the world, in Vietnam. And they wrapped me up at several demonstrations and took me before the federal courts and said, “Well, you have torn up your draft card. You are going to jail.” And I spent a year in jail, getting to jail on the day that the Gulf of Tonkin invasion began, 1964, the first days of August, August 4th of 1964. I was a little bit ahead of the curve, but we saw that war coming. And I’m telling you guys out here there’s another big war out there, and it’s already underway, and we’re going to see more of this. We’ve got to be able to deal with the war, as well as live our lives and deal with the issues that we’ve been dealing with for a long time, no? So, getting the word out about the Zapatista struggle is, I think, important.

What do I want to say? I want to say that this is a struggle in Chiapas that deals very much with memory. I began by talking about what happens when a language dies. And this is a struggle that is about the past as much as it’s about the present as much as it’s about the future. This is a struggle in which we can’t eliminate the past. There was a world before 9/11, no? And maybe that world goes back a long ways, no? But maybe we can think about the world that existed before 9/11 on another 9/11, 18 [sic] years ago, in 1973, in Santiago, Chile, when the bombs dropped on the Moneda Palace, murdering Salvador Allende, the president of Chile, and taking with him 4,600 people disappeared and dead in Chile, engineered by the White House, engineered by Henry Kissinger, no? On another 9/11, as many people died in Chile as died in the World Trade Center. I don’t want to get into a pissing match about body counts, but there was a world before 9/11/2001, and we can just go back to that other 9/11 back there in 1973.

And there was a world before that, too. There was a world on August 6, 1946, when the U.S. dropped its death bombs on Hiroshima and later on Nagasaki, taking with it 300,000 people. The world changed for the Japanese people, just as the world changed for the people that were in the World Trade Center that day. The world changed for the Salvadoran people when 800 people were massacred at Mozote. The world changed for the Vietnamese people when 3 million Vietnamese died under U.S. bombs during the War in Vietnam, no? The world has changed for a lot of people.

And the world changed for the Indian peoples of the Americas — let’s take a date — Good Friday, 1519, when Hernán Cortés and 300 white guys showed up from Europe, met a band of Totonaco Indians on the beach at the mouth of the Cempoala River in Veracruz and proceeded to beat them and enslave them — the beginning of the struggle for Indian rights in Mexico. On that day, there were between 12.5 million and 25 million Indigenous peoples living in Mexico. When the first census was taken 160 years later, in 1680, there were less than a million Indians left. Twelve million people died in that holocaust, a holocaust twice the size of the European Holocaust and vastly more deadly and devastating than what happened at the WTC on 9/11. So, the world existed a long time before 9/11/2001. We can’t let those memories get away. We have to remember what happened in the past in order to know where we’re going in the future.

I want to read a poem, and then maybe we’ll show the video after that. Another poem I — it’s a poem that deals with this question of memory, no? And it’s the title poem to a new volume of poetry that I’ve just put out, Against Amnesia, of which there are precious few copies, unfortunately. Most of them are still in Mexico. This is a poem that takes its inspiration from the massacre of 46 Tzotzil Indians at Acteal, December 22nd, 1997, three days before Christmas, a massacre of Tzotzil Indians engineered, financed, armed by the Mexican military and the Mexican government. Paramilitary troops were trained all that summer to inflict terror upon the Zapatista bases, to so terrorize them that they would no longer affiliate with the EZLN. And on that terrible morning of December 22nd, 60 paramilitaries come down a hillside in the county of Chenalhó in the highlands of Chiapas and enter a community, a refugee community, named Acteal, where there are people known as Las Abejas, the Bees, honey gatherers and coffee growers. They have settled there because they’ve been burnt out of their communities by members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, the longest-ruling political dynasty in the known universe up until then, no? They are — these paramilitaries are Tzotzil Indians, too. It is the plan of the Mexican government to put Tzotzil Indians upon Tzotzil Indians, to have them kill each other. It was part of a counterinsurgency plan called the Chiapas Strategy Plan, promulgated by the Mexican military, the 7th Military Region in Chiapas, 1994, and carried out step by step by General Mario Renán Castillo, a graduate of the Center for Special Forces in Fort Bragg, North Carolina — no? — who graduated from the Center for Special Forces magna cum laude with a degree in counterinsurgency. This was an act of counterinsurgent terror, no? And they’re going to try and tell us it never happened, no? If what we’ve seen happen in the Southern Cone, where I worked for a number of years, is true, where they now have these commissions of oblivion, commissions of reconciliation, that grant amnesty to the generals that threw 30,000 Argentinians into the Atlantic Ocean, they have been amnestied, the generals there. It is against the law to remember now in the Southern Cone of Latin America.

So, I was coming down from Oventic, this cultural center in the highlands, with — I’m a reporter. I was coming down the hill with a photographer, a Chilean, who began to tell me how Pinochet’s fascists had killed his father. Began to think about what memory is, how he remembered, but how the rest of us don’t always remember these things. This poem is called “Against Amnesia.”

Coming down from the green muddy mountains
where the gringos had gone
to build with the Zapatistas
the autonomous rebel high school
shovel by shovel
and grain by grain,
the Chileno photographer began to tell me
how his father had been tortured too death
by Pinochet’s fascists,
how they had broken his own ribs, his legs,
hot wired his testicles
and touched him tenderly
with lighted cigarettes.
They learned their techniques
from the pinche Nazis,
he said matter-of-factly
whipping around the hairpin turns,
the dark spider of a storm
brooding over the valley of Jovel
like the memory of what was to come.

They will dig up the bones
and pound them down to powder
and lose the powder in the four winds
but like Juan Gelman, Samuel, the others,
the Indians will never give up,
will never abandon the memory of their dead,
never leave the past behind
because the past will never go away:
the past is like a boomerang.
It will always return,
it is always present,
it is always future,
it is the most fundamental human right,
memoria,
what belongs to us all.

Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: John Ross, author of The War Against Oblivion. If you’d like to order a cassette copy of this program, 1-800-926-3921. [inaudible] Democracy Now! is broadcasting in exile from the embattled studios of WBAI, the studios of the banned and the fired, the studios of our listeners. [inaudible]

[End of Hour 1]

AMY GOODMAN: From Ground Zero Radio, this is Democracy Now! in Exile.

EDWARD SAID: As the U.S. war against terrorism begins to spread, there’s almost certainly more unrest about to appear throughout the region. So, far from closing things down, U.S. power is likely, I think, to be stirring them up in ways that can’t always be contained.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Edward Said and Noam Chomsky usher in the new year for Democracy Now! in Exile All that and more, coming up.