Zapatistas Dissolve Government to Survive Cartel War

Zapatistas in Chiapas:

In 2025-2026, Chiapas is a war zone. Cartel turf wars between Sinaloa and Jalisco, a militarized state response via the “Pakalis” special forces, and government mega-projects have created what analysts call a “criminal-state complex.” Yet within this inferno, Zapatista territories remain a “peace belt”—a bubble where disappearances and drug trafficking are virtually nonexistent. This is not coincidence; it is the result of a radical, ongoing experiment.

Facing the failure of their old centralized model, the EZLN dissolved its own government in late 2023. In its place, they built a decentralized “non-system” of Local Autonomous Governments (GALs) in every hamlet. Power now sits with the neighbors, not regional councils. The goal is resilience: you cannot decapitate a swarm.

Simultaneously, they reimagined land itself. Abandoning communal ownership, they now practice “non-property”—land for use, not possession. Crucially, they have opened it to non-Zapatista neighbors (partidistas), undermining the state’s strategy of pitting poor communities against each other over titles.

This is all in service of a 120-year horizon. Their decisions are made for Deni, a girl who will be born a century from now. This “sowing without reaping” mindset extends internally: women now run the economy, the radio, and the keys, having seized real power through their cooperatives.

The Zapatistas are not a relic of the 1990s. They are a political laboratory for the collapse we all sense, proving that when the state fails, you can build a world based on care, shared labor, and thinking in centuries—not election cycles.

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 0:00 Welcome back to the deep dive. Today we are attempting something that it feels a little bit like trying to read a map in the middle of a hurricane. That's a good way to put it. We are heading into the mountains of southeast Mexico, specifically into the state of Chiapas. And I have to be honest with you, looking at the stack of documents we have today. It is incredibly disorienting. Disorienting is probably the best word for it. Yeah, we've got reports from 2025 2026 Unknown Speaker 0:29 we have communiques from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, analysis from places like schools for Chiapas and ill will. And it all paints this picture where, you know, the official narrative and the reality on the ground aren't just different. They are practically inhabiting different dimensions, right? Because if you look at the mainstream headlines, or you know, the government reports coming out of Mexico in 2025 and 2026 Chiapas is a disaster zone, absolutely. I mean, the language they use is terrifying, brink of civil war. It's not just hyperbole. You have these massive cartel turf wars raging, you have the military deployed everywhere. You have spiraling violence. It sounds like a failed state. That is the dominant layer, yes, and the statistics on Unknown Speaker 1:13 displacement, disappearances and homicides, they all back that up. It is a very dark picture. But then, and this is the paradox that really hooked me. The reason we're doing this deep dive, you have this other layer buried in these same investigative reports is the description of these specific territories, the Zapatista zones, right? And they're being described as a Peace belt or a bubble. That's another word they use a bubble, a bubble where, amidst all this carnage, disappearances are virtually non existent. Drug trafficking is non existent. So you have a state that's literally on fire, and then these pockets of calm that seem to be operating under a completely different set of like physical laws. And that paradox is exactly where we need to start, because the story today isn't just Chiapas violent. No, the real story is about how a social movement that's over 40 years old, so Zapatistas is managing to survive in that fire and not just survive, not just survive. They are in the middle of a massive, I mean, a truly radical experiment to reinvent themselves. And when we say reinvent, we're not talking about, you know, a logo change or a new PR strategy. No, not at all. We were talking about dismantling their own government, their own government, turning their entire political structure upside down, rethinking the very definition of what it means to own land. It's huge, and this is the part that really blows my mind. They're planning for a future one. Years from now. 120 years, I mean, I can't even plan for next Tuesday, exactly. It is a survival strategy for what they call the storm. Okay, let's unpack this. Because to understand the solution, this 120 year plan, this whole restructuring, we have to understand the threat Absolutely. What is this storm they're talking about? Because looking at the sources, it really seems like 2024 2025 and 2026 have been a tipping point for Chiapas. They have been, without a doubt, to understand the storm, you have to understand the shift in the security landscape. Chiapas, for a long time, used to be considered one of the safer states in Mexico, relatively speaking, right? I remember that poor, but not necessarily violent, like the northern states, exactly. Poor, yes, yeah, deeply unequal, absolutely. But it was low on the homicide index compared to places like Sinaloa or Tijuana that is gone. So what changed? What happened? The sources all describe a criminal state complex basically taking over the entire region. It's a turf war. It's forward between who you have the two biggest players in Mexico, the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco new generation cartel, the cjng, the two heavyweights, and they are fighting viciously for control of the border with Guatemala. Okay, why that border? Specifically? What makes it so valuable? It's the Gateway. It's the primary entry point. If you control the Chiapas Guatemala border, you control the flow of drugs coming up from South America. You control the flow of weapons going south, and tragically, you control the flow of human beings, migrants moving north, who are incredibly vulnerable to extortion and trafficking. So it's a multi billion dollar logistics corridor. That's exactly what it is. It's pure business for them, but it's a business conducted with extreme brutality, yes, and it's not just the big two anymore. The reports mention a real fracturing of the landscape, how some got local groups popping up, like the chomula Cartel, which is rooted in a specific indigenous community, or Los AR Dios. It's become a kaleidoscope of armed groups all fighting for a piece of the pie. And usually in a situation like this, the official narrative is the criminals are bad, so the government sends in the police and the army to save the day, right? The cavalry arrives. But reading these reports, that is not what is happening here. Is it not even close? I mean, the. Unknown Speaker 5:00 Analysis from schools for Chiapas is very, very clear on this. You cannot draw a clean line between the criminals and the state. They're intertwined deeply. They operate in tandem. And that brings us to the pakalis. The pakalis, yeah, I saw this name pop up a few times in the documents. It sounds Well, it sounds almost mythological. It's meant to McCall refers to the famous Mayan ruler of Palenque. So they're co opting an indigenous symbol. Exactly. It's a very deliberate branding choice for a new special operations police force. This group was created by the governor of Chiapas, a guy named Eduardo Ramirez Aguilar. And the marketing for this group, I mean, describe it for us, because it's just wild. It's pure Hollywood action movie. They launched this force with huge billboards, slick social media campaigns. What did they look like? Men in Black masks, head to toe in heavy tactical gear, carrying high caliber weapons. The slogan was, zero tolerance. It looks like something out of a Rambo movie or, you know, a Call of Duty video game. That's the vibe. 100% the tough guys coming to clean up the state. But are they actually fighting the cartels? That's the million dollar question, because if I'm a villager and I see the cartel guys driving down the road in their pickup trucks, and then I see these pakalis guys, are they shooting at each other? The evidence on the ground suggests No. In fact, the analysis in these reports argues that the pecalis are a form of what they call lethal theater. Lethal theater. What does that mean? It means their deployment often focuses on areas of indigenous resistance, not cartel strongholds. So they're a show of force directed at social movements. Precisely, there are numerous reports of them, setting up checkpoints that seem specifically designed to harass the local population, like what, confiscating vehicles from farmers for no reason, demanding papers, creating a constant climate of fear and intimidation. So if I'm a Zapatista farmer or just any indigenous person trying to get my corn to the market. The pecalis are a threat to me, not to the guy moving 10 kilos of cocaine in the next truck. That's exactly right. And you have to ask the question, Why? Why would the state focus its most elite firepower on the communities rather than on the powerful cartels? Follow the money. Always follow the money. The experts writing in these sources argue it's all about clearing the way for mega project, okay? Like, what kind of project you have the San Cristobal plank, a superhighway, a massive infrastructure project, yeah, you have the Maya train, which is the President's signature project, right? And you have these new industrial corridors. These are all massive capitalist investments that require huge swaths of land, and the people living on that land, mostly indigenous communities, are in the way. They're an obstacle. So think about the logic, if the cartels destabilize a region with violence and the people are forced to flee, well, the land is clear for development, and if the pecalis harass the communities that resist and break their will to organize, the land is clear the violence, both from the cartels and the state, serves a single economic function. It clears the territory for investment. So it's a pincer movement. You get squeezed by the narcos on one side and the militarized police on the other, precisely. And I want to give you a very specific, very concrete example of this, because otherwise it just sounds like abstract political theory. Please do. There was an incident in April of 2025 involving two men, Jose baldemar, santias, Santis and Andres Manuel Santis Gomez, this story is incredible. I was reading about it. It plays out like a detective novel. Yeah, it really does. So these two men are Zapatista support bases. Okay, what does that mean? Exactly, it means they aren't the fighters, the insurgents with guns up in the mountains. They're the civilians. They live in, the communities. They farm the land. They're the foundation of the movement normal people, basically normal people, and they get kidnapped, right? But look at who took them. This is the crucial part. It wasn't a shadowy group of cartel hit men in an unmarked van. No. It was a full blown state operation, a joint operation. You have the Mexican army, the actual army, the army, the National Guard and the pecalis, this new special ops force, all working together. That is a massive use of state force to pick up two farmers. It is a completely disproportionate show of power. They grab them, take them away, and then the government issues a statement, and what do they say? They claim these two men are dangerous criminals. They say they were caught with a stash of drugs and illegal weapons, the classic plant. It's the oldest trick in the book to discredit activists. The standard narrative, oh, they aren't political prisoners. They're just common criminals, drug dealers, and in most parts of Mexico, that's the end of the story. The men disappear into the prison system for 20 years, or they just disappear period Exactly. But the Zapatistas didn't just issue a press release saying this is unfair. They did something I have never heard of a social movement doing before. It's amazing. They activated their own autonomous judicial system. So they have our own courts. They have a whole system. Unknown Speaker 10:00 The Zapatista truth and justice Commission launched a completely independent investigation. Imagine this for a second. You have a rebel group acting as the detective agency because the actual police are the kidnappers. So what did their investigation find? This is the best part. They didn't just find evidence to prove their members were innocent, that would have been enough. But they went further. They went out and found the actual criminals, the people who had committed the crimes the government was trying to pin on Jose and Andres. Hey, wait. They found the real guys. They found them. They investigated, they gathered evidence, and they apprehended the actual perpetrators themselves. That is fun. I mean, that is just deeply humiliating for the state. It is absolute competence porn, if you will. It's an incredible display. The Zapatistas secured a confession from the real criminals and then, and this is the key part that shows their sophistication. They didn't execute them, right? They didn't beat them up and leave them in a ditch, which is what often happens. They called in freba, the human rights organization based in Chiapas, yes, a very respected one. They handed the real criminals over to freba to ensure their human rights were respected, and then freba, in turn, handed them over to the official state authorities. So they basically did the police's job, but better, and followed human rights protocols more strictly than the state itself does exactly. And at that point, faced with the actual criminals and the public evidence, the government had no choice. The Lie was completely exposed. They had to release Jose and Andres. That is such a powerful story because it shows that this peace belt we talked about isn't just a vibe or a nice idea. It's a functioning system. They have a justice system that actually works even when or especially when the state is actively trying to crush it. But here's the rub, even with that kind of incredible success, the pressure is immense. The storm is getting worse, right? And the Zapatistas realized that their old way of organizing, the way they had done things for almost 30 years wasn't going to be enough to survive what was coming. And this brings us to what the sources are calling the great restructuring, because in late 2023 just as this violence is ramping up to these new levels, Unknown Speaker 12:18 the easy ln makes an announcement that shocked everyone who follows them. They dissolved their government. It was a bombshell, a complete bombshell. For 20 years, the symbol of Zapatista autonomy was the good government, councils, juntas, du Pung gobierno. I remember those, if you visited Zapatista territory, you went to a Caracol, one of their regional centers, and you met with the council. It was the face of the movement. It was the address for their government, and they just scrapped it gone, dissolved, along with the mares, which were the Zapatista, autonomous, Robo municipalities, the whole structure that had been in place since 2003 Yeah, gone. Why? I mean the old saying is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Was it broken? According to sub commandante Moises, who is their main spokesperson now, yes, Unknown Speaker 13:04 it was breaking, he issued a very harsh self criticism, which is rare. What did he say? He said the structure had become pyramidal, pyramidal, meaning top down exactly. Think about the geography. You have hundreds of remote villages scattered across the mountains and the jungle, and then you have the caracal, the regional center, where the council sits right for some of these villages, that Caracol might be a four or five hour drive away, or even a full day's walk. So if I have a problem in my village, a land dispute or something, I have to go all the way to the Capitol to get it sorted precisely. And what happens to the people who are chosen to sit on that council? Well, over time, they start to feel a bit like politicians, they get separated. They get separated from the daily reality of the cornfield of the community. They start making decisions for the people, instead of with the people. Moises was very blunt. He said the military structure of the easy ln, which is necessarily vertical top down, was contaminating the civilian government. Wow. So they were becoming the very thing they were fighting against, a bureaucracy in a way. Yes, yeah, a mini bureaucracy. So they decided to turn the pyramid upside down. They just blew up the old model and create a completely new structure to replace it. Okay, let's get into the mechanics of this, because the acronyms can get a little soupy if you're not careful. We have G, A L, C G, A Z, and a C G, A Z, right. Break this down for me. Let's imagine I'm a farmer in a Zapatista village. How does this change my actual life? Okay, in the old system, if you had a dispute, say, your neighbor's Pig got into your cornfield, you might have had to go to the mayor Z of the municipality, or even all the way to the good government council, a whole process. Now the power sits in the GAO, the Gobierno autonomous local, the local autonomous government. Where is the GL? It's right there in your village, maybe not even the village, but your specific Hamlet or settlement. Unknown Speaker 14:56 Every single community, no matter how small, has a. Unknown Speaker 15:00 G, A, l, so the government is literally my neighbors. It is your neighbors. The villagers are the government. It is the nucleus of all power now. So it's like a neighborhood assembly on steroids, exactly. It's the difference between calling City Hall and having a family meeting in your living room. They are empowered to handle almost everything at the most local level possible. But what if it's a bigger problem? What if, say, a river that flows through three or four villages gets polluted? My gal can't solve that alone. That's where the next level comes in. You go to the cgaz, the collectives of Zapatista, autonomous government. This is the regional level made up of representatives from the various gals. But here is the revolutionary catch, the CGA z cannot command the gal. Wait. Say that again. Usually the higher level tells the lower level what to do. The state tells the city. The federal government tells the state not here. It's inverted. The CGA Z exists only to serve the gal. They only convene when the local villages ask them to. So they're coordinators, not rulers. Precisely, they're on call coordinators. They have no independent authority to impose rules or make decisions for the communities they are answerable to the base always that is that sounds radically inefficient by Western standards of governance, because efficiency isn't the primary goal. Democracy is the goal. Democracy is the goal. But there is also a very hard nosed survival goal here. Remember the storm, right? The cartels and the pecalis. If you have a centralized good government council, a big building in a Caracol with 12 leaders sitting in it, what is that? It's a target, a big, visible target. It's a sitting duck. You can attack it. You can bomb it or and this is often more insidious. You can bribe those 12 people. You can co opt the head of the organization. But if you decentralize all that pressure into what hundreds or 1000s of tiny gals, you create a swarm. You create what the sources call a non system. There is no head to cut off. If the cartels attack one village or bribe one local assembly, the rest of the network survives intact. It makes the movement incredibly resilient to a war of attrition. It's like trying to punch water. You can't break it because it just flows around you. That is the strategic genius of it. It looks like chaos to an outsider who's used to pyramids and hierarchies, but it's actually a highly sophisticated defense mechanism. So they restructured their government to survive the physical threat. But they didn't stop there. No, they also completely re imagined their relationship with the one thing that's at the heart of all these conflicts, the land itself. Yes, and this is where my brain started to hurt a little bit, reading the sources, the common and non property, el commun Ilan non propidad. This is a heavy concept. It's not easy to grasp, yeah, because usually the fight is for ownership. You know, land to the tiller, private property, versus state property, or even communal property, which is a big tradition in indigenous Mexico, right? Which still implies ownership, the community owns it, and by definition, excludes others from it. That's the key in a traditional ijido, or communal land system in Mexico, the community holds the title. If you aren't part of that specific community, you can't touch that land. But the Zapatistas are now saying nobody owns it, nobody, not the individual farmer, not the state, and not even the collective as an abstract entity that can exclude others. It is non property. So what is it? Then? It is land for use, not for possession. Okay, that sounds like a nice philosophical slogan, the earth belongs to everyone. But how does that work? In practice? Who decides who gets to plant the corn? Where the gal decides? The local assembly figures out the logistics. But the truly revolutionary part, the part that is just so politically savvy, is that they have opened up this land to the partidistas. Okay, let's define that term really clearly. Partidistas. These are people who belong to the official political parties, right? The PRI I, the Morena party of the current president, yes, these are the neighbors who are not Zapatistas. In many cases, these might be people who actively dislike the Zapatistas, people who take the government handouts the social programs, people who have been historically used by the state as paramilitary forces to attack the Zapatistas. So let me get this straight. I'm a Zapatista. My neighbor is a part of Dista. He votes for the party that sends the pecalis to harass me, and I'm supposed to let him come over and farm on what used to be my community's land. Yes, that's exactly what's happening. The zapadistas are saying this land is non property. You need to eat. We need to eat. Come, come and work this land. We will share the labor. We will share the harvest. But there are rules. Ah, okay. What are the rules? The big ones are, you cannot sell the land. You cannot use it to grow illegal crops like opium or marijuana, and you cannot treat it as capital to be speculated on. It is for sustenance, for living period. Why on earth would they do that? Why invite your potential enemy to dinner to destroy the enemy's main strategy? Think about the government's most effective. Unknown Speaker 20:00 Weapon against them. It's not just guns. It's a vision pitting people against each other. Yes, the government goes to the poor partidistas and says, look at those Zapatistas. They are hoarding all that good land. You are poor. You should go take it. We'll even give you the official title if you kick them off. That's the sowing envy strategy we hear about in the sources. Exactly. It incites agrarian conflict. It turns neighbor against neighbor over a piece of paper, a property title. But if the zapadistas Just turn around and say, You don't have to fight us for the land. You could just use it here. Let's dig the furrows together. It completely pulls the rug out from under the government strategy. It does. You can't incite envy. If the resource is being actively shared, you can't promise something to someone that they already have access to precisely it turns a potential enemy back into a neighbor. It's shifts the entire relationship from one of competition over scarce resources to one of shared labor and mutual survival. It's incredibly pragmatic when you think about it that way, and at the same time, deeply philosophical, it reflects what the Berliner Gazette source calls a relational ontology. A relational ontology, it's the idea that things aren't defined by what they are, but by the relationships between them. Land isn't an object you hold in your hand. It's a relationship you maintain with the soil, the water, the community. And this connects to another phrase from the communicas that really stuck with me, sowing without reaping. Yes, it implies doing the hard work now for a harvest that you personally might never live to see. And that mindset, that long term vision isn't just about land, it's bleeding into the internal dynamics of the movement too, specifically when it comes to gender, oh, we absolutely have to talk about the cat dog notebooks we do. It's my favorite part of the source material, because I think a lot of people have this image of the Zapatistas as these super serious, stoic, masked revolutionaries, right? Always grim and determined. But these communiques, they are funny. They are weird and self deprecating. They are hilarious, and they use that humor to address very, very sensitive topics inside the communities. The cat dog notebooks feature these fictional dialogs between the commanders. In 2016 there was a great series between sub commandante Moises and the late sub commandante Galiano. And the dynamic is basically, Moises is the straight man, the wise, patient leader. Yeah, and Galiano plays this grumpy, old school, slightly out of touch guy who's complaining about everything. And in this particular dialog, they're discussing the economy, and Galiano is grumbling. He's realizing that the economic power in the Zapatista communities has completely shifted. The flips. The women, the companeros, are running the show now. They are. Over the last decade or so, Zapatista women organized their own collectives, coffee cooperatives, livestock projects, artisan stores, bakeries, and they were really good at it. They were better at it. Yeah, they managed the money more carefully than the men did. They reinvested the profits. They became the primary breadwinners. There is this great line where Galliano is grumbling about how the men are all broke. Yes. He says, the men now have to go to their wives to ask for money to buy hair gel and combs and new shirts because they want to look handsome. It's a total reversal of the traditional rural Mexican machismo, where the man holds all the cash and the woman has to beg for household money completely. And Galliano, in this fictional dialog, gets totally fed up with this new reality. He says, this is tyranny. I'm going to organize a men's rebellion, a men's rebellion, a men's rebellion. Laughs. He says, I'm going to take over the community radio station, and I'm going to play nothing but old ranchera songs about how men are the bosses and women should obey, a real macho playlist. And how does Moises respond to this threat? He just calmly looks at him and says, You can't. And Galliano asks, why not? I'm a sub commandante. And Moises says, because the women run the radio station too. They own the equipment. They have the keys to the building last checkmate, it's over. It's a joke, but it illustrates a profound structural reality. Unknown Speaker 24:04 The women have seized the means of production, so to speak, within the community, and because they control the economics, they have a different level of political voice in these new gal assemblies we talked about. It's not just tokenism, it's real power rooted in economic independence, exactly. It's fascinating how they use that humor to soften the blow of what is actually a massive cultural change. If you just went in and lectured the men on feminist theory, they might resist, but if you make fun of your own grumpy old man's self, it opens the door, lets people laugh at the change instead of fearing it. So we have the restructuring of government, the rethinking of land, the shifting gender dynamics. But there is one more piece of this puzzle that I think is the most mind bending of all, and that is the timeline they're operating on. You mentioned it earlier, the 120 year plan. Yes, most governments run on four year or six year election cycles. CEOs run on quarterly profit cycles. Who on earth plans for 120 Unknown Speaker 25:00 20 years, people who are facing extinction, people who understand that the storm isn't a temporary weather event, it's a climate change. It's not going to end next week. And this whole concept centers around a character, a symbolic girl. Her name is Denny. Tell us about Denis. Who is she? Denie is a symbol, but they talk about her as if she is a real person. She's a fictional mind girl. The core idea is that Denis will be born 120, years from now. Okay, so she doesn't exist yet? No. But every single decision they make today, dissolving the councils, implementing non property land, resisting the mega projects, is not for them, it's for Denis. They're making decisions for someone who won't be born for over a century. Yes, the question they ask in their assemblies is, what kind of world will deny inherit if we do this, that changes the entire calculus of decision making. It does completely. If you are planning for next year's election, you might take a bribe from the government to allow a new highway to be built because it creates a few temporary jobs, and it looks good now, but if you're planning for Denis, you realize that highway brings the cartels, it brings deforestation, it brings displacement, and in 120 Unknown Speaker 26:11 years, your community and its way of life will be gone. So you say no to the highway, even if it hurts in the short term, it's sowing without reaping. Taken to its most extreme conclusion, we will die so that she can live exactly. Sub Comandante a Moises was very clear and very moving about this. In one of the communiques, he said, we are going to suffer. We are going to endure the storm. We might even be destroyed, but we do it so that one day a girl can be born who is free, wow, who doesn't have to be a Zapatista soldier, who doesn't have to hide her face, who could just be that is incredibly powerful, and it also speaks to the generational shift that's happening inside the movement right now. Because the Zapatistas of 1994 the ones who rose up with wooden rifles and shocked the world, they're getting old. They are. They're in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and their children and grandchildren, the new generation born into autonomy, have different needs and different dreams. The reports highlight this very clearly. The youth want more education. They do. They want technology. They wanted doctors and engineers and scientists and artists. And this is the key. They don't want to leave the movement to do it right. They don't want the traditional path, which is to go to the State University in the city, get indoctrinated into the capitalist system and maybe never come back to your village. They want to build their own systems Exactly. They want to study biology in the lakandan jungle. They want to study medicine to serve the community, not to get rich in a private hospital. And this whole restructuring, this decentralization into the gals is partly to create the space for this new generation, to build those autonomous institutions from the ground up. So it's not just a defensive crouch. It's about creating the conditions for evolution, exactly, survival and evolution hand in hand. Now we can't have this conversation, but the Zapatistas without talking about the elephant in the room, the Mexican state, and specifically the current political climate. We have had AMLO Andres, Manuel, Lopez Obrador and now his successor, Claudia scheinbaum. These are framed internationally as leftist or progressive leaders, leaders of the fourth transformation, right? And traditionally, you think, oh, a leftist President, that must be good news for a leftist rebel group like the Zapatistas, but the sources we have suggest the exact opposite is true. This is a critical point that comes up again and again. The analysis, particularly from researchers like departed Gomez, who's quoted in these documents, is that these progressive governments have been far more dangerous to the Zapatistas and other social movements than the old, openly right wing governments ever were. That sounds completely counterintuitive. Why would that be the case? Because the right wing governments attacked with bullets. It was a clear frontal assault. It was obvious who the enemy was. Yes, it was clear. They are the enemy. We are the resistance. In a way, it solidified the movement the progressive governments on the other hand, attack with hugs and with money. Co optation, the most sophisticated kind we talked about, sowing envy earlier. The program is officially called some Brando Vita, sowing life sounds nice. It's a tree planting program. On paper, it sounds fantastic. The government pays poor farmers a monthly stipend to plant fruit trees and timber on their land. Reforestation. Who could be against that? But the devil is always in the details, always to get the money, and it is a significant amount of money for a poor farmer, enough to live on. You have to prove you own the land. You need an individual property title. And Zapatista land is communal, or now, as we discussed, non property exactly so to get that government grant, you have to break away from the collective you have to privatize your plot of land. It's a direct incentive to destroy community cohesion. It incentivizes individual greed over collective well being. And it gets worse. The sources report that because the program. Unknown Speaker 30:00 Pays you for planting new trees. People are actually cutting down existing, ancient jungle primary forests, just so they can plant the specific saplings the government pays for. That is perverse, so it's causing deforestation and social fragmentation all under the banner of a green social program, while letting the government go to international climate conferences and brag about being green and helping the poor. Yeah, it is a weaponized social program. It's designed to break the Zapatista social base from within. That is incredibly cynical. It's extremely effective counterinsurgency. And then you add the militarization on top of that, despite all the promises to send the army back to the barracks, the National Guard is everywhere, so the military presence hasn't decreased under the progressives. It's increased. The Zapatistas argue that the fourth transformation is just neoliberalism with a friendly populist face. They are still pushing the Maya train. They're still pushing the industrial corridors. They are still dispossessing indigenous people of their land. They just have much better PR and yet, despite the sowing envy programs, despite the pecalis, despite the cartels, we come back to that initial paradox, the peace belt, the model somehow is working. It is the ultimate counter argument to the state's narrative. You can listen to all the presidential speeches you want, but the reality is written on the map in the state controlled areas, high murder rates, femicides, disappearances, fear and in the Zapatista areas, safety, the sources are clear. They prohibit drug trafficking. They prohibit human trafficking. They've created a bubble of security amidst the chaos of the cartel wars. It's a functioning alternative. It proves that their security model, which is based on community cohesion and autonomous justice, not on more police firepower, actually works better, and they are trying to share that message and learn from others beyond Chiapas. In 2021 they did something that I think a lot of people missed at the time, but it was just fascinating. They got on a boat the journey for life. They sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. Yes, they called it the inverse conquest, a beautiful, poetic name, reversing the path of Columbus and the conquistadors, but with a critical twist, their communique said, we are not going to conquer you. We are going to listen to you. So they weren't going to meet with Emmanuel Macron or the king of Spain. Not at all. Who do they meet with? They called it unsubdued Europe. Who falls into that category? They met with the Sami people, the indigenous reindeer herders in the Arctic Circle. They met with anarchist squatters in Greece. They met with feminist collectives in Madrid. They met with migrant rights organizations in Italy. So they were building a network of the dispossessed, a network of what they call ontological struggles, people who are fighting not just for political rights, but for a different way of being in the world. They wanted to see if the storm was happening there too. And I assume the answer they found was yes, different forms, but the same storm, capitalism, displacement, environmental collapse, state violence, their international stance is also really interesting when it comes to the big headline grabbing wars, the sources mention their communiques on Ukraine and Gaza, they take a very hard, consistent humanist line, and it's a line that pisses a lot of people off. What is it neither Netanyahu nor Hamas, neither Zelensky nor Putin that does piss a lot of people off on both sides of those conflicts. It does because we're so used to picking a side. But their argument is consistent with their entire worldview. They say that wars between states are almost always wars for profit, wars for capital, wars for geopolitical control, and in those wars the people, the civilians, the poor, the ordinary families always provide the corpses. Their loyalty is to life, not to flags or to states. They refuse to pick a side in what they see as a battle between bad and worse. They side with the victims. Always it's a complete refusal to play the geopolitical game by its rules, because they are playing a different game entirely, the game of survival, the game of Denis. So bringing it all back home, we have covered a lot of ground here. We've looked at the criminal state complex, the pakalis, the great restructuring of the GLS, the non property land concept, the gender revolution, the 120 year plan. It is, it is a lot to process. It is. It's dense. But if you had to boil it all down for us, what is the big takeaway here? Why should someone listening to this deep dive, maybe sitting in traffic in Chicago or working in an office in London, care about what is happening in these remote mountains of Chiapas? I think the single biggest takeaway is that the Zapatistas are not a museum piece, right? They are just a cool photo from the 90s with the balaclava and sub commandante Marcos pipe. They are arguably the most advanced political laboratory on the planet right now, a laboratory for what, exactly for the collapse look. We all feel the storm in our own ways. Climate change, deep political polarization, the erosion of trust in. Unknown Speaker 35:00 All our institutions. It's happening everywhere. The Zapatistas are just living in the eye of that storm right now. The Mexican state is failing them in real time, and they are experimenting with incredible courage, with real world solutions, dismantling the state to save the community. Exactly. They are showing us that when the state fails, when the police become the kidnappers and the politicians become the looters. You don't have to just descend into mad, Max chaos. There's another way. You can build something else. You can build a system based on care, on mutual aid, on shared labor, on owning nothing. It really challenges our obsession with the short term, doesn't it? We are so focused on the next election, the next quarterly report, they are reminding us that real survival, true survival requires thinking about people who haven't even been born yet, and doing the hard, unglamorous, often painful work of building structures for them that's sowing without reaping. It leaves us with a pretty provocative final thought. We spend so much time and energy talking about smart cities and AI governance and all these techno utopias. But maybe, just maybe, the most advanced political innovation on Earth right now isn't happening in Silicon Valley. No, it might be happening in a mud hut in Chiapas, where a community looked at the storm coming and decided that the only way to survive the future is to turn the pyramid upside down, as their communique says, We exist. They have not conquered us in 120 years. Hopefully, Denis will be able to say the exact same thing on that note, we will leave you to think about what sowing without reaping might look like in your own life. Thanks for listening to the deep dive. We'll see you next time. Transcribed by https://otter.ai