The Michigan General Defense Committee stands in solidarity with the autonomous communities of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the aftershock of the paramilitary attack on compañero Jorge López Santíz, and in the face of escalating violence at the hands of paramilitaries and cartels.
While direct armed conflict between the Mexican government and the Zapatistas has not occurred since the 1990s, the government and capitalists have supported paramilitary groups such as Jorge’s attackers, the Regional Organization of Coffee Growers of Ocosingo (ORCAO), as part of a counterinsurgency strategy against Zapatista communities.
Paramilitary organizations are not the only players at work in Chiapas. Cartels vying for influence in the region often target Zapatistas for violence. We recognize that capitalism and colonialism drive both of these attackers: drug cartels and coffee companies are two sides of the same coin. Hunger for profit motivates them to acquire, by any means necessary, cheap labor and control of the land. The EZLN continues to defy them, and fight an for autonomous, pro Indigenous, pro peasant, pro worker alternative to the capitalist system.
There is a great distance between us and our Zapatista comrades, and yet we see their struggle reflected in our lives and communities. Our market shelves flood with cheap commodities, including coffee, to distract us while we are forced from our homes by the landlord class’s greedy rent hikes, and as we mourn loved ones who died from cartel drugs.
We see the Zapatista struggle reflected in the Michigan National Guard’s fervent scramble for more Anishinaabe land to poison in the northern region of our state, so they may expand Camp Grayling and strengthen the tools of repression used by police and militaries abroad.
We see the Zapatista struggle reflected in the Weelaunee forest in Atlanta, where local government pushes for a cop training facility and the destruction of Atlanta’s precious forest. The same bullets that killed Manuel Terán are the same that wounded compañero Jorge. Cop City would only produce more war, repression, environmental destruction, and exploitation of the working and oppressed classes.
But we see another path forward, and we take inspiration from EZLN. Their strategies, organization, dignity, and spirit carry us forward and open our minds to the world we can make possible.
We support the EZLN demands:
- That the health of compañero Jorge be guaranteed, and that he be provided with all the medical attention necessary, for whatever time may be required.
- That the armed attack against the autonomous Zapatista community of Moisés Gandhi be stopped, and its autonomous territory be respected.
- That the material and intellectual authors of these paramilitary attacks be punished.
- That the armed groups, through which the war against the Zapatista communities continues to be active and growing, be dismantled.
In solidarity,
Michigan General Defense Committee
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