Date: Thu, 2 Nov 1995 07:08:26 -0700 (MST)
Subject: INTERVIEW WITH SUBCOMMANDER MARCOS "BRECHA" (URUGUAY)10- (fwd)



Taken from Uruguay's "Brecha" newspaper:  http://chasque.apc.org/brecha
NEOLIBERALISM  THE ABOLITION OF FATHERLAND/MOTHERLAND AND PROPERTY

*PART ONE OF 6*

Subcommander Marcos spoke about neoliberalism when he analysed the land 
theme within the context of peasant struggles.

Samuel Blixen and Carlos Fazio

__In all of this there is a new phenomenon:  the Indigenous theme.  You 
explain how it has been decisive that there be a culture, a form of 
social relation of the Indigenous communities which determines the 
solution of the problem of growth and of the movement's own objectives.  
Is the land problem the determining factor of the entire struggle?

__It was the drop that spilled the water.  I point at three 
large causes:  the closing of political action with the 1988 fraud; the 
500 years (of America's conquest,)and the land problem. If one has a 
predominant role it is the land tenure problem.

__In Latin America the problem of land tenure is not exclusively an 
Indigenous problem...

__They see the land tenure problem not only as an individual problem, as 
a problem of small properties.  My plot of land, what I need to live.  
It's a matter of solving the collective problem.  In that sense, the 
"ejido" is more collective in the Indigenous communities than among the 
non-Indigenous farmers.  That is why, in the land struggle in the 
Indigenous communities, it is very difficult to solve problems through 
cooption.  The community keeps an iron fist control over the individual; 
it is very difficult to pretend, to be different.  In the community they 
know what you do and why you do it when they see you behaving 
differently.  Corruption is more difficult; not because they are better, 
more human or more honest, but because of the control of the collective 
over the individual.  Collective and not individual solutions are 
accepted.  That makes it more difficult for the Indigenous communities to 
solve the land tenure problems.  The question is not solved by giving 
land to some...When the possibility of the agrarian land grants is 
closed, a possibility which had always been a door for the farmer's 
movement in general and for the Indigenous population,frauds and 
despoiling of land buying and selling also increase.
When the "ejido" lands are privatized, the large landowners and cattle 
ranchers begin to monopolize (hoard)land.  Now not only extending their 
barb wire fences and their grazing lands or through murder, but by 
conducting frauds in the buying and selling of plots.  When that legal 
avenue is closed, the Chiapanecan Indigenous farmer, not only the one in 
the Canions ("Ca~adas"), faces his death sentence.  He says:  "they are 
going to kill me because they are going to deprive me of my land".  He is 
not even faced with the possibility that he may become part of the 
agricultural proletariat, or to emmigrate and become a seasonal worker.  
No.  "They are uprooting me from my history and my culture.  Not only 
from the place I need to survive".  The moment the agrarian land 
distribution is closed, the Indigenous farmer looses his means of 
production, but he also looses his history.  Add that to the reality of 
having an organized army handy.  Your armed body.  Then the "Ya basta!" 
("Enough already!")comes to maturity...
The Zapatista movement is marking the reiniciation and the reactivation 
of a problem.  The characteristics of the agrarian problem in Chiapas 
take on the revolutionary armed road because of this conjunction.  But 
in reality a problem is being pointed out:  the resurgence of the 
agrarian problem, at a national level, which neoliberalism has decided 
to sacrifice in the name of modernity.  That is to say:  to be modern 
and to become part of the First World is equal to stop being a farmer.  
In other words, to introduce the market economy, capitalism, into all and 
everyone of the social relationships.  To cancel land distribution, but 
not only that.  To privatize it, to open the doors to the 
agroindustrial companies, to a larger land concentration.  And what 
this is going to cause is that farmer movements will begin to spring, which 
will not necessarily follow the Zapatista line, but which will point 
out the problem of how finantial capital takes over the land.  
__Is the Zapatista rebellion showing a way?
__I believe so.  As if we were an index finger:  here there is a 
problem.  I think that around that problem, many experiences and 
manifestations are going to come up.  In 1993, before Zapatismo, land 
mobilizations took place in Ecuador; and there were those of the Indigenous 
people of the Brazilian Amazon basin, those in Paraguay  We say that 
neoliberalism is a process of the reconquering of the land.  They are 
the modern conquistadors.  For the Indigenous people it has acquired 
that connotation.  In reality they are the same conquerors as 500 years 
ago, against whom our forefathers rebelled.  That's how the problem of 
the "Ya Basta" and the weapons arises. Of course, the conquest of the 
land is not going to follow the process of the Spanish conquest.  It is 
going to follow the process of the conquest of the American West.  It 
implies the physical, historical, and cultural annihilation of the 
peasants.  The promise of capitalism as analysed by Marx:  the 
disappearance of the peasant force is now, in fact, being completed by 
neoliberalism in a brutal fashion. Today the blood is indigenous, but 
tomorrow it may be mixed ("mestiza".)  You are a nuisance.  Not 
only are you dispensable, your are also an obstacle to our progress.     




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