United States of America - Mario Galván

Interview Details

• PGA Affiliation: Zapatista Solidarity Coalition, Sacramento California, US

• Region: North America

• Language: English

• Interviewee: Mario Galván

• Interviewer: Lesley Wood

• Date: September 4, 2024

• Bio: Mario Galván was an active member of the Zapatista Solidarity Coalition, Sacramento California.

Transcript

Lesley: Okay, so this is Lesley talking to Mario Galvan on September 14th, 2024. We’re doing this by zoom. So how did you hear about or get involved in Peoples Global Action? What’s the story?

Mario: [00:00:46] Well, I first heard about it through my work with the Zapatista movement. I had been involved with the Zapatistas since January 1994, and my understanding of the origin of PGA is from a meeting that took place in Barcelona, where some people from the Zapatistas, I never knew who traveled to Europe. I’ve never seen any report or other information about that meeting, but understood that people from around Europe came and met with the Zapatistas there, and that was the inspiration for the beginning of the Peoples Global Action.

Lesley: [00:01:26] No, I think that’s the story I’ve heard. But now, were you at that meeting?

Mario: [00:01:30] No, I’ve never been to Europe.

Lesley: [00:01:32] Okay, okay.

Mario: [00:01:34] That’s why I missed the first meeting in Geneva. Okay, I thought, “Oh, heck yeah, right. Me? Go to Europe for a meeting? Give me a break!”

Lesley: [00:01:43] Totally reasonable.

Mario: [00:01:44]. Well, that was back in the day. I don’t think I had ever even been to New York, to the other side of North America. Yeah. Right. I’m going to go to Europe? No way! Then, of course, the second meeting was in Bangalore, India, OK? And I thought, well, if I didn’t go to Europe, I’m sure as heck not going all the way to India. But I saw that the process was continuing. So when the third meeting was announced in Cochabamba, Bolivia, that’s when I thought, “This bears looking into.” But again, I wasn’t just going to go on my own.
Luckily, there was a group of people, activists from different parts of California that were also following this. I live in Sacramento, but there’s a lot of activism in the Bay area, Los Angeles, San Diego, etc.. So there was actually a meeting of people who were interested in electing representatives to go. I went to that meeting and somehow got elected. I got some contributions to the expenses of the trip, but ended up paying the majority of it myself. Of course, I was delighted to get to go. I don’t remember why there were no others selected, or if there were others at all, but they weren’t able to make the trip.

Mario: [00:03:14] I do enjoy traveling. It’s not like I didn’t want to go to Europe, I really couldn’t have afforded it. In today’s context, I’m not sure I do want to go to Europe. I’m pretty fed up with Europe these days because of their role in the Ukraine war.
In any case, on my trip to Cochabamba I flew out of San Francisco International Airport at midnight, on September 9/11 of 2001. I flew to Lima instead of directly to Bolivia because the cost of flying directly to Bolivia was around $900, and the cost of flying to Lima was $450. They’re right next door to each other, so I thought, “Oh, I’ll save some money, and get to see some of the countryside as I travel from Peru to Bolivia. Everything about the trip from Lima to Cochbamba was interesting. But I don’t know how much detail you want me to go into about that. Just know, I mean.

Lesley: [00:04:47] I’m super curious. I haven’t heard too much first person about Cochabamba.

Mario: [00:04:52] Okay, well, I’ll just say a bit about arriving in Lima right now. And of course, I’m arriving there on September 11th. There was no announcement on the airplane, so imagine my shock when I walked into the terminal, and saw every television in the terminal showing the towers falling in New York City over and over again. And I thought, oh my goodness! From the moment I saw those images, I said to myself, “Those buildings are being blown up.” I’d seen lots of videos of old buildings being demolished with explosives, and saw how they all fell straight down. Of course, I missed all of the panic and whatever went on in the United States, because it took me like a month to get back home. Later, in the central plaza of Cochabamba, I remember seeing a big sign that someone put up that said, “America reaps what it sows.” Yeah. I mean, do you want me to talk a little bit about the trip from Lima to Cochabamba, or shall I just carry on?

Lesley: [00:05:52] I’m curious. Why don’t why don’t why don’t we put a pause on that for a second? Because I want to go back a little bit, because my understanding is that you were also involved in the caravan. The PGA caravan. The one that came before Seattle.

Mario: [00:06:07] No,I wasn’t in Seattle. And I hadn’t heard of a PGA caravan before Seattle.

Lesley: [00:06:11] Okay. So, so well just to get a bit of a background when you say you were working with the Zapatistas and the Zapatistas inspired the PGA, did you get a sense of how that connection happened?

Mario: [00:06:28] No, I have no idea.

Lesley: [00:06:29] Okay, okay. I mean, I have heard that it was at the Encuentro in Chiapas and that then it was this idea that we needed.

Mario: [00:06:38] Which meeting was that? Was that the “intergalactica?” And no, I didn’t hear anything about it at that point. I was at that event, whose official title was the “First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. Someone started joking that even aliens were invited so people started saying it was an “intergalactic” event. There were thousands of people there, and for the first few days the attendees were divided into sub-meetings in around 5 different Zapatista communities before finally all coming together in La Realidad. No one person could possibly have known what went all at all of the meetings that took place in all those different places, so if the idea of the People’s Global Action being raised there, I have no way to confirm or deny it. But it does fit into the “intercontinental” theme of the event. But that was in 1966, so maybe you’re right in suggesting that the idea for the PGA may have been born there. I don’t recall the date of the meeting in Barcelona, or the meetings in Geneva or Bangalore. But my trip to Cochambamba in 2001 was 35 years after the “Intergalactica,” which gives plenty of time for organizing and planning all of the meetings between 1966 and 2001.

Lesley: [00:06:47] Okay. Well, let’s hear about what happened at Cochabamba then. Like, what did you see? What did you notice? What? What? Yeah. Describe what happened there.

Mario: [00:06:56] Cochabamba is a large city, about 4,000 feet above sea level. It’s in the tropics, but the elevation takes it out of the tropical heat. I heard it called “the land of eternal spring.” I’m trying to remember the actual edifice or the structure we were in, but it was a large compound with several structures. I can’t remember the details, as we were there for at least four or five days, but it was an extraordinary meeting. I’ve described it as a people’s United Nations. There were people from so many countries! The European delegation, who had flown to Colombia and rented a bus to travel to Peru, were not even allowed to enter the country. They had to leave their bus at the border and travel in from there. But besides Europe there were people from many Latin American countries, several African countries, a Kurdish group, and there might have been somebody there from Japan. I don’t have a list. I feel a little guilty that I haven’t gone back looking through for notes from that trip, but I’ve made so many trips to Zapatista meetings that they all seem to run together!

Lesley: No worries.

Mario: But, as you said, we can always add things later. But it was an extraordinary meeting. Much like Zapatista meetings, whoever spoke had to be translated into several other languages. I served as a translator since I’m bilingual in Spanish and English, but there were many other languages as well. There were a series of meetings over a number of days, addressing all kinds of issues. Social injustices around the world and people’s ideas of how to address them. One of the outstanding things was that there were local people there too, and that’s probably why the meeting was held in Cochabamba.

Mario: [00:08:41] I don’t know if you know about the “water war” in Cochabamba. Yes. So the people there weren’t just hosting and supporting us. Some of them attended our meetings, but we also went to a special meeting with local activists to learn about that whole historical event that took place there when the government sold all of the water rights of Cochabamba to Bechtel, an American corporation. Bechtel immediately raised the fees for water, to the dismay and anger of the people. According to the terms of the contract, even the rain that fell belonged to them. (There’s a great movie about this event called “Even The Rain.”) The people rose up, blocking the roads with stones and other things, completely disrupting business as usual. The military was sent in to put them down, and at least one young man was shot and killed by a sniper during a protest. The protests went on for a month or more, both in and around Cochabamba, and the local government finally caved and canceled the contract. Flashing back to the Zapatista “Intergalactica” “against neoliberalism,” one of the primary tactics of neoliberalism is the privatization of public services. This is just what happened with the water in Cochabamba, so the people there had actually won a major victory against neoliberalism. A few years later, some of the folks from Cochabamba came to San Francisco to take part in a protest held in front of Bechtel’s corporate headquarters. I was happy to be able to be there to support them.

Another one of the interesting things for me was that we got a lot of support from Evo Morales, who was then a senator in the Congress. He let us use his office for press conferences and other things. I only went there once or twice, but other people evidently used his office to do other work. I wasn’t one of the organizers, of course. One of the most memorable highlights regarding Evo Morales was when he invited us to visit his hometown. To get there, we drove up over the crest of the Andes, and down into the Amazon basin - up over snow-covered peaks, and down into tropical jungle. As I said before, Cochabamba is only around 4000 ft elevation. When I rode a bus from Peru to Bolivia, we started out south along the Pacific coast, which is the Atacama desert. It was amazing to see a desert right next to the ocean! When we turned inland, we had to go up over the crest of the Andes at 12,000 feet, then come down into the interior of the country. At the highest point, I experienced the high altitude headache I had read about in the travel guide. I just loved seeing the geography and many amazing things, including seeing my first llamas as we got up high in the mountains!

The name of the town Evo took us to is Chapare, spelled c h a p a r e. I don’t really remember how large the town itself was, as we didn’t see it all. It wasn’t a big city, with tall buildings. It had a small, kind of rural feeling; not modern. I don’t know if it was a county seat or something like that, but when we got there, the streets were packed with thousands of people. There was obviously something special going on, which may have been our visit!

Mario: [00:11:46] There could easily have been between five and ten thousand people there. There seemed to be a meeting going on and I thought we had been invited to that. So I didn’t think at first that it was specially for us, but it probably was because later, there was a big dinner, at which honorary certificates were given to each country in our group. Even before that, as we arrived we got a special reception, and each of us got to speak to the crowd. I remember that even as we got off the bus at a building where we were going to speak to the multitude, the microphones and the speaker’s platform had been set up on the roof of the building. The building was surrounded and all the streets were full in every direction.

As we got off the bus and came into the building, they were sprinkling something like flowers on us. Like it was Hawaii, or something. I was wearing a hat, and the greeter actually took my hat off my head and sprinkled flowers on my head, then put my hat back on my head. From there we entered a big hall that was pretty much empty, but there were people standing around the edges and down at the far side.

Mario: [00:13:09] There was a small tree at the far side, and we were taken over to it. It seemed to me like a Christmas tree, but didn’t have lights on it or any decorations. It was a coca plant or tree, whatever it’s called. And there was a ceremony where they gave us each a handful of coca leaves. We had already been instructed on how to properly receive the coca leaves, with our cupped hands held out forward. You don’t just reach out and grab it. As we got closer, I realized that there was like a whole pile of leaves around the base of the tree. From a distance, I had thought it was like a platform or something holding it up, but when we approached it, I realized it was just a big pile of coca leaves. They were picking them up from there and giving them to us. They were telling us how to chew them, and to just keep a wad on the side of your mouth so that the juice could mix with your saliva. I thought this was supposed to get me high or something. “Wow! The great grandpa of cocaine.” But to my disappointment, I never really felt a buzz or any alteration.

Lesley: [00:14:23] Despite its reputation and the policing of it.

Mario: [00:14:25] Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, of course I’m not that physically active. And I wasn’t doing any strenuous work, I was just walking. And so I really got no effect. But I thought, well, that’s not to say it has no effect. Even beyond its physical properties, it has a spiritual meaning. I mean, if it’s used ceremonially to greet people and to accept them into the group, that too is an effect. But I haven’t studied the cultural aspects of coca in any depth. I probably know more about the fumigation efforts by the US to destroy it, etc. I heard a lot more about that from the people in Colombia.

After the meeting in Cochabamba, I began my return trip with the European group. They invited anyone who wanted to go back with them to join their group. They had arrived in Bogota, Colombia, and so they were going back there before flying to Europe. There was room on their bus, so they said, “…for $100 you can ride with us back to Bogota. We’re going to be visiting indigenous communities along the way. Labor unions, and different community organizations too.” So I called my airline, and asked if I could change my return flight from Lima to Bogota. They said, yes, but when I got there, they said “Sorry, you have to buy a new ticket.” But that’s another story. Even though it ended up costing me more, I’m so glad I was able to ride with them on the bus back north through Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.

Lesley: [00:16:25] Sound in some ways more powerful than meetings.

Mario: [00:16:29] It was. Yeah, in a way, it was just an extension of the meeting in Cochabamba. Their bus was kind of like a tourist bus. It had a sound system, where a tour guide could be standing at the front with a microphone. So as we were driving from place to place, we took turns talking about what was going on in our different countries. So it was like a whole new education.
Okay, I want to go back to our visit to Chapare. There are some things I just have to share about our time there. The first is that once we got up on the roof and were being introduced to the crowd in the streets below, each one of us got to speak briefly. We had people there from Cuba and many other countries, and as each of the people from all these different countries speak, everyone gets a warm welcome, with a big rah, rah, rah, and tremendous applause afterward. But when I’m introduced as “Mario Galvan from the United States,” there’s dead silence as I walk up to the mic. I wasn’t really surprised, but sighed inwardly and thought, “Oh well, how can I make the best of this?” I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it started off with “There’s a big difference between the government of the United States and the people of the United States.” I highlighted the fact that the people there, mostly small farmers, were currently engaged in a big tiff with their own government over a new law saying that they all had to show that they had title to their own land, most of which had been in their families for generations. So, I did get a modest applause at the end of my talk, but nothing like all the other people. In addition, I’m not a fiery speaker, a “heat up the crowd” type. In retrospect, most of these people were probably farmers, many of whom were coca growers, and having to deal with US promoted anti-coca fumigation that ended up killing most of their other crops as well.
Later in Colombia, I learned that 70% of the food supply there is imported, so that local farmers have a hard time making a living with regular crops. That’s why many turn to growing coca for sale to drug cartels. It’s the only real cash crop they have. I don’t doubt that’s true in Bolivia and other countries as well.

Mario: [00:18:09] After our speaking to the crowd, there was this other event again. It was a big dinner where again, there were hundreds of people there. It was a big hall full of other guests. Not just us, but, you know, people from the community, I’m sure from different organizations. I don’t know how many. I can’t really remember all the introductions.
After the dinner, a member of our group from each country went up front to be given a certificate of appreciation for their travel to Cochabamba and their participation. Each certificate was given by a different person from the table at the head of the room. Since I was the only one from the United States, I went up and to my surprise and delight I got my certificate from Evo Morales himself. Evo greeted me, shook my hand and gave me a hug and my certificate. It was a great dinner, a very, you know, spirited event.
Another one of my memories is as we were coming out of the event to go back to the bus, there was an elderly woman outside of the hall selling handmade Wiphalas. Do you know what the Wiphala is? It’s a checkered flag made up of different colored squares. I’m looking up as we speak, because I have one of them hanging on the wall in front of me.

Mario: [00:20:13] I’m sitting at my computer, looking up at the Whipala on the wall above it. A diagonal band of white squares run from the top to bottom corners. Below that, four parallel bands go down to the bottom left corner from yellow to orange, red, purple, and blue. Above the central white band, it goes green, blue, violet, red, and yellow up to the top right hand corner. So it’s like a rainbow each way. Yeah. That’s the emblem of the coca growers, but it’s also an official flag of Bolivia, along with the national flag. Several other Andean nations also use the Whipala, so it’s actually a transnational symbol. Anyway I bought a couple. My marching days are dwindling as I age, but I still think about carrying it as a banner in a march some day. I think I mentioned in my introduction to you that I had polio as a child, so I’m physically handicapped. I wear a brace on my left leg to be able to walk. Even in my youth, marching was a challenge. I’m amazed that I’ve been able to travel as far as I have.

Lesley: [00:21:24] What did you take away from that event? What struck you?

Mario: [00:21:31] The internationalism. I had already gotten from the Zapatistas the consciousness that the social struggle is global. It’s not just in our country. I had already been involved in, in the United States, you know, working on social justice movements such as the Chicano movement. I became aware, and then politically active, in my college years, which were the late 60’s and early 70s. I graduated from high school in 1965, just as the US was stepping up its escalation in Vietnam. I knew it was happening, but it was “out there” somewhere, not a real part of my life.
In high school, I was active in student government, but I wasn’t, you know, really aware of national politics, much less international politics. I was aware, in an unfocused way, because having been born in 1947, just two years after the end of World War two. I grew up in an era saturated in war hysteria and memorabilia. For example, even the comic books that I read a lot when I was growing up had Nazis and Japanese as villains. I learned to draw partly from comic books. I’ve been involved in art for most of my life. I worked as an artist while in college, and had my own business for a while after dropping out of graduate school. I taught art history for a while at the junior college level when I was in my Master’s program, and finally ended up teaching art at high school level. But coming back to internationalism, and those childhood comic books and their Japanese and Nazis the bad guys (Later they became Communists.), I knew in a general way that they were dealing with something international, but not in terms of “internationalism.”
I have to confess, I got the war bug. I’d go to the movies to watch Tarzan and the Lone Ranger or whatever, and in the newsreel I’d see the Korean war going on. As kids, whenever we went to the movies, we’d come home and “play it back” amongst ourselves, whether it was Tarzan, the wolfman, or war. I had seven brothers and two sisters, and of course us guys were always, you know, fascinated with guns. We played with cap guns as children, BB guns later, then on to .22 rifles when we were older.
We lived on the edge of town in Roseville, California, a small town about 20 miles from Sacramento. We lived on Fifth Street, and Sixth Street was the edge of town. A quarter of a mile past that, probably even less than a quarter of a mile, there was a creek that ran along a big field where there were trees and everything. When we came home from the Tarzan movie, we’d go play Tarzan at the creek, or we’d go on safari. You know, some of the guys would go out and hide, pretending to be wild animals, and we’d hunt them down. After a war movie, we’d split up into rival armies and battle each other. You can imagine a bunch of kids loose in their own little wilderness.
I know I’m totally distracted from what we’re supposed to be talking about. Where were we?

Lesley: [00:25:22] Well, I’m really curious about how this childhood and youth leads to Zapatista solidarity.

Mario: [00:25:30] Okay, I remember we were talking about how I got politically involved, and one thing led to another. So, transitioning from the creek to internationalism and political awareness, the key to that was my father. He was born in Mexico, and though he only had three years of formal education, was a self-taught student of Mexican history. He had a hard life, born ten days after the beginning of the Mexican revolution of 1910. He grew up in the Revolution. His family was burned out of the ranch they were living at, and tried to escape to the United States to live with relatives in Colorado. But they didn’t make it and they ended up stranded in a northern city called Torreón, in the state of Coahuila. It’s a large state, on the border of the United States. The city of Torreón, which is about 12 hours from the US border, was the scene of three battles during the time my father was a child there.
What he told me about it was that he was running around with a group of little kids, who would hang around just like a block or two behind where the fighting was going on. When bullets would come flying over and hit the walls of the buildings behind them and fall to the ground, the kids would all run over to see who could get the bullet. He said that the bullets were so hot, they would have to wait a bit to pick it up. the bullet. So that’s a part of my father’s childhood, in addition to being burned out of their home before coming to Torreón. The government that came out of the revolution - with the support of the U.S., was corrupt, and instituted a dictatorship disguised as a democracy that lasted seventy years. He told me that the corruption and social injustice in México was one of the main reasons that the family came to the U.S.
I used to ask him, “Well, if things are so bad in México, why don’t the people rebel again?” He would say things like, “People are afraid of change. They prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know, who may be even worse.” There’s always the fear of reprisal from the government when you speak out or rise up against it. There had even been several minor isolated uprisings in Mexico even before the revolution of 1910.
But finally, one day my father said to me, “You know, Mario, I think there is going to be a revolution in Mexico.” I think he must have read in the news about an incident when a Mexican Army unit blundered onto a Zapatista camp, and there was a brief firefight. The Zapatistas had been organizing for ten years in secret before the actual uprising on January 1st, 1994. So there was this one conflict, one battle, if you want to call it that, before January 1st. I don’t know the details of it, but people saw that there was something going on there, and my father must have heard about it. And he almost lived to see it. He died on the 18th of December, two weeks before the Zapatista uprising started on January 1st.
Well anyway, that’s how my family’s history in the Mexican revolution prepared me in advance of the Zapatista rebellion. It’s also a big part of my introduction into issues of social justice, injustice, revolutionary struggle and so on. So the seed was already in me, and when the Zapatista rose up, it seemed like supporting them was the right thing to do.
And speaking of social injustice, I recognized as I grew up, you know, that the United States itself is a racist and unjust society.

Mario: [00:30:38] You know, we never really talked about it, but there was definitely a class line in Roseville, where I grew up. Even in elementary school, the white kids would play together, and the Mexican kids would play together. At the railroad, where my father worked, most of the management and the guys who drove the trains were white, while most laborers were Mexicans, like my father. Most of the dentists, lawyers, and other professional and business people in Roseville were also white.
Roseville was a small town, built around the railroad. Its original name was “Junction,” because two rail lines crossed there. When I graduated from high school, the population was only 5000; today it’s over 120,000. In the middle of my senior year of high school, we moved out of Roseville into the country. My dad’s brother came to live with us, and he and my dad bought a place in the country. After graduation, I attended a local junior college about two miles from our house. After two years there, I transferred to San Jose State University to finish my college degree. It was quite a change, moving from our house in the country to a big city. Having grown up in a town of 5000, it was a big jump to be attending a college with a student body of 25,000!

Mario: [00:32:14] San Jose was where I got more into political activism. I joined the Chicano movement, and started calling myself a Chicano, as opposed to being a Mexican American, Latino, or Hispanic. It basically means choosing to honor the indigenous root in our mixed heritage, instead of the European one. It was the 60’s so there was a lot of new stuff going on. I took part in extra-curricular activities such as sensitivity training, encounter groups, non-verbal communication. I was an art student, so I got involved in a Chicano art center downtown, as well as a smaller one out on the east side of San Jose. Of course, I got more involved in anti-Vietnam War activism there too. I attended an anti-war rally in San Francisco that brought 250,000 people into Golden Gate Park. That was the biggest crowd I’ve ever been in, until maybe years later in some of the Zapatista events in Mexico. I was beginning to see the history of US intervention around the world. Even, for example, learning about US interventions in the Mexican Revolution. When the revolution first started in Mexico, the people rose up. I probably shouldn’t go into that in too much detail.

Lesley: [00:34:00] Maybe bracket that for a minute. But yeah.

Mario: [00:34:02] But anyway, one of the major leaders who came out of the Mexican revolution was Emiliano Zapata, whose name was taken by the current Zapatista rebellion. The “…ista” ending they add to his name means “a follower of.” Another example is that the followers of Pancho Villa were called “Villistas.”
Zapata was chosen as the role model for the modern Zapatista movement because he was an indigenous person, born in a small village just south of México City. His rise to leadership and fame began when he was chosen by his community to be what North American Indian tribes called a “war chief.” There was also a “peace” chief, who ran things most of the time, but when trouble came up, they would turn to the “war” chief, even if it wasn’t what we think of as a full-scale war. Zapata was elected to the post in time of peace, but when the revolution began, he was the one to whom the community turned and asked “What should we do now?” His answer was that they should go and take back the land that had been stolen from them by the rich landowners to plant fields of sugar cane. When people from other communities saw what they were doing, many men came to join them. At one point, Zapata led around 30,000 men, one of the three rebel armies that drove Porfirio Diaz, a dictator for 30 years, into exile. Today, he’s considered one of México’s most famous national heroes.
The revolution was actually started by an intellectual, Francisco Madero, who was living in exile in Texas while calling for change and helping organize it. He’s the one who said, “Ok everyone, on November 10th, 1910, we’re all going to rise up against the government.” And to everyone’s amazement, people did.

Lesley: [00:34:43] And we say those things all the time. And most of the time it doesn’t happen.

Mario: [00:34:48] Yeah. So it actually happened. I guess the pressure in Mexico was so built up at that time. But I want to share two interesting points about the revolution.The first is about the extent of US intervention in it, which is similar to what the US is still doing today. They supplied weapons, shifting the flow from one side to another as the fortunes of war changed (or maybe to actually change them). They also used US railroad lines to help move Mexican troops rapidly along the border from one front to another. And in the final stages, when the three armies that had defeated Diaz had a falling out and started fighting each other, the US backed the side tied to big landowners, and helped them defeat the other two. The assassination of Zapata in 2019 was probably the last straw; the revolution ended in 1920.
The other thing I just learned recently is that, you know, there were other people alongside Madero to promote the revolution. The Magon brothers were anarchists who, like Madero, were also working out of Texas. The US government set up a special unit to track them down. That special unit was the origin of the FBI.

Lesley: [00:35:26] I did not know that.

Mario: [00:35:28] Yeah, that’s in a book called Dirty Mexicans, that a friend gave me. But anyway, what I was getting back to, in my roundabout way, is what happened after the revolution toppled the Diaz government. As I mentioned before, there were three major leaders of the revolutionary forces. Pancho Villa and Carranza in the north, and Emiliano Zapata in the south. After they had triumphed, they met in the city of Aguascalientes to form a new government. But there was a problem. Pancho Villa and Zapata were in favor of giving stolen land back to the communities. But Venustiano Carranza, the third leader, was a big landowner, and didn’t want to give land back to the people. He wasn’t buying into the deal, so one night - in the middle of the night - his army packed up and slipped away. I don’t know the whole story, but he was probably already in touch with US agents.

Mario: [00:37:13] Carranza took his army down to Veracruz on the coast, where he could get supplies, money and guns from the Americans by ship. They wouldn’t have to travel overland to get him supplies, so the flow of support couldn’t be cut off by his adversaries. So a counter revolution (civil war?) breaks out, and it’s now Pancho Villa and Zapata against Carranza, their former ally. Of course, with the support of the US, Carranza wins. He establishes the party that becomes the PRI (in English, that’s the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governs Mexico for the next 70 years. My father told me that was the beginning of a tradition of political corruption in México. He said the name of Carranza became a synonym for robbery. People would say, for example, “He Carranció (stole) the money.”

Lesley: [00:39:05] Can I jump back a little bit to PGA? You talk about the internationalism that you saw in Cochabamba. Was that the internationalism that you felt the Zapatistas were advocating?

Mario: [00:39:23] Yes. We organized the Zapatista Solidarity Coalition as soon as we heard about their uprising on January 1st, 1994. Our group was formed on January 3rd. There was a preliminary meeting that day before, on January 2nd, in downtown Sacramento. But it must have been a small group (I lived out of town, so didn’t even hear about it.), so they decided to have another meeting and invite more people. they realized there were more people who wanted to be involved. And so they called another meeting for January 3rd. There were around one hundred people at the meeting. So some of them, some of them are still my best friends. When we started, we were focused on supporting the Zapatistas in Chiapas, because they were being attacked by the Mexican army. But we quickly learned that the Zapatistas weren’t just out for themselves. When the fighting had been halted by mass protests around the world, and the Zapatistas first negotiated with the government, they were offered “peace treaty” which included new roads, schools, and medical clinics. Most of them lived in remote mountain areas with poor roads and few services. After taking the offer back to consult with all of their supporting communities (which took three months!) the Zapatistas rejected the offer, saying that they had not risen up for their own benefit, but on behalf of everyone in Mexico. A few years later, in their Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, they extended that to the whole world. But even before that, there had been a river of support for them from many countries around the world. Attending any of their events in Chiapas was always an international experience.
The Zapatista Solidarity Coalition kind of ran out of gas last year, fading gradually over the years, as the situation in Chiapas became less urgent, but we lasted for almost 30 years. In our last days, we started networking with a new network that has sprung up in the US called Sexta Grietas del Norte. I’m still involved with that group today. The name is a bit complicated, and I wish it was shorter, but again, I wasn’t there when the group got started. I’ll explain it later if you want me to, but I just want to point out that the “Sexta” in our name is a reference to the Sixth Declaration that I mentioned a minute ago, in which the Zapatistas made a public declaration of their international ambitions. Their latest action along that line was a recent trip they made to Europe a few years ago, a kind of “reverse discovery” of the European by indigenous people from the Americas. A small part of their delegation crossed the ocean by ship (a larger group arrived later by air), and landing on the coast of Europe gave it a new name. On the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec capital, they held a commemorative event in Madrid, the capital of Spain.

Lesley: [00:42:19] So when you came back to the States through your roundabout route from Cochabamba, what happened? How was there a way to share that knowledge?

Mario: [00:42:35] I always feel that I should have done more to share all of the experiences I’ve had in my work with the Zapatistas, including the trip to Cochabamba, which, though not specifically Zapatista, was in the Zapatista spirit. Though my memory is getting a bit problematic, I do remember that after returning I made a trip across the US, speaking about it. I belong to Peace Action, a national anti-war organization, so I visited a number of their chapters in various states. I vaguely recall a couple of guest appearances on radio shows too. I wish I had written articles for publication, that would have preserved my memories while they were fresh. Talking about all of this with you is bringing back a flood of memories, and maybe I’ll start putting some of them down for posterity.
I guess what I’m trying to share also is that it was my work with Zapatismo that brought me into Peace Action. We were tabling at a public event in 1994 when I first met a member of Peace Action. I was tabling with a friend named Victor, who I’d met at that meeting on January 3rd. He was one of the hard core members of the group, hanging with me and a few others until the very end. We were handing out literature, and this woman and her daughter came to the table. As we talked, she told me that she was a member of Peace Action. They had some grant money that she said we could use to create some literature on how the US was supplying weapons to the government of Mexico to fight the Zapatistas. So I started working with her on that, and eventually joined Peace Action. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them.

Lesley: [00:44:03] Yeah, I think so.

Mario: [00:44:11] They’re a national organization, in about half of the states. They have an office in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC. So they’re concentrating on the capital, lobbying Congress and so on. I notice that I’m saying “they” instead of “we.” I guess that, as a Zapatista, I have no faith in political parties and the “bad government” they run. Sadly, I feel like Peace Action is just banging their heads against the wall of the sham of a democracy we have.

Lesley: [00:44:32] It feels like there’s a little bit of a revitalization of anti war stuff right now because of the Gaza situation.

Mario: [00:44:38] I’m really disappointed. I don’t think there is; I don’t feel it. A lot of people are saying, especially after all the wars the US has waged, after Iraq, after Afghanistan, after Libya, “Where is the peace movement?” You know? I’m about ready to give up on Peace Action, because they’re not going down to the grassroots, to the people. Instead, they’re appealing to the “bad government” to make the changes we want.
We can compare it with how people in Mexico plead with their government. “Please, we need this! Please, we need that.” On and on, to a system that isn’t even listening. this is the same thing the people in Chiapas did before the appearance of the Zapatistas. They appealed to the government. There was a mass march before the uprising from Chiapas all the way to Mexico City, over one thousand kilometers, to talk to the government about their pressing needs. Chiapas had a 75% infant mortality rate, and the average educational level in the state was third grade (Interestingly, that’s the same as my father, who only had a third grade education, even up northern México near the US border!) Yeah, it’s a sinister system of injustice, based on neglect of basic human needs.

[Short discussion of solidarity with Zapatistas]

Mario: [00:45:58] There’s been an amazing amount of help in the communities of different people from all over the world. Some of the meetings I’ve gone to down there, you know, I lost count of the number of meetings, you know, because you know, but I would see groups of 200 Italians get off their buses and come in to an event, as well as Germans and other Europeans. I’ve seen people from Morocco, Japan, and many different countries of South America. So I’ve been at huge gatherings and just seen the global support.
Going back to the January 1st Zapatista rebellion, I’d like to highlight one of the main things that got the Mexican government to stop attacking the Zapatistas. Everyone knows that when the Zapatistas rose up, they captured several cities, attacked a prison to release the prisoners, and even attacked an army base. The Mexican government’s immediate response was to send the army. They didn’t send someone to say, “Hey, what’s going on here?” or whatever. The army arrived with guns blazing.
It was international protests around the world that made them stop bombing every village in the area, and strafing roads. They were getting bad publicity all around the world. In the age of the internet, words and images flashed around the world. Some members of our group did the first translation into English of the Zapatista’s First Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, and sent it out on the internet. A friend of mine wrote an article titled “The New Indian Wars” that was circulated widely. This relatively small war in Chiapas was front page news around the world.
The Mexican government must have felt like the US in Vietnam. They were fighting a local indigenous rebellion, but who was the real enemy here? They didn’t know, and were attacking indiscriminately, killing a lot of non-Zapatistas. In the city of Ocosingo, they attacked a public marketplace because there were some Zapatistas in it, killing hundreds of people. Machine gun fire from the air left holes in the corrugated metal roofs of the market stalls, where the gunners couldn’t possibly have seen who they were killing. A delegation from our group was able to visit Ocosingo, and could see how the government was frantically trying to patch up all the bullet holes to clean up the scene of the crime.
Although the Zapatistas were careful to have their troops wear uniforms, so that they could easily be distinguished from civilians, there were pictures of Zapatistas taken prisoner, with their hands tied behind their back, who had been executed by Mexican troops. The Zapatista were following the Geneva Convention’s rules of war by having all of their soldiers be in uniform. They also wanted to make it clear that they were not a bunch of bandits or some kind of rabble. The Mexican army should have easily been able to tell who was a Zapatista and who wasn’t.
We learned later that they had been organizing for ten years before the uprising, training and drilling their troops, many of whom were women, for years in secret. Even so, it was a completely uneven battle, a home-grown army of poor indigenous people, some of whom battle without even having a gun, against a modern military with trained regular soldiers, armored vehicles, helicopters and other aircraft. Even as the short two-week fighting was going on, the US was already sending them more weapons and helicopters, as I mentioned before in my work with Peace Action.

Lesley: [00:48:06] So, in terms of like some of these stories that you’re telling around the international participation, was that under the auspices of PGA or was that was PGA like, what was PGA?

Mario: [00:48:23] I can’t really remember the first time I heard of PGA. I tell you the truth. I think the first time I heard about it must have been when I read about the PGA meeting in Geneva, OK? I mean, because that was just about the time when I got my first computer and first got on the internet. It was the beginning of the internet for me. I would log on to bulletin boards by phone, even before I got on the internet. And most of it was on DOS! I had a dot matrix printer that made such a racket. It’s amazing how far computers have come in just thirty years!

Lesley: [00:48:51] I remember I remember.

Mario: [00:48:53] My first computer was an Amiga 1000. It didn’t even have a hard drive. When you started it up from a floppy disk, it created an artificial hard drive, a virtual hard drive on its own, on itself. It was like magic! I thought, “Gee, I wish I could do that!” I’d create some new virtual legs for myself. But, of course, I’m not inside the computer, like the virtual hard drive.
So anyway, got most of our news from the internet. For a while, we tried to track everything that came out about the Zapatistas. We were printing it out and putting it in binders and everything. So that’s how I first heard about the PGA through email from someone that said, oh, there was a meeting here and there’s this group over there and I can’t remember what year. Do you remember? Do you know what year Geneva was?

Lesley: [00:49:41] 1997? [actually 1998]

Mario: [00:49:44] Yeah. ‘97. So yeah, that’s when I was probably, I think it was in 97, I was down in Chiapas, helping build a school down there in, in the Caracol of Oventik. Amazing.

Lesley: [00:49:58] So, I mean, one of the questions that we ask is, what did this PGA do? Well. And what did the PGA not do well?

Mario: [00:50:10] I don’t know a lot about PGA. But what PGA has done well, as far as I can tell, are those three meetings. I was really impressed to see the delegation that came from Europe. You know, what’s his name? Olivier. I still remember him.

Lesley: [00:50:33] He’s still kicking.

Mario: [00:50:33] I always had visions of going over to Europe to visit. Of course, I’m not well off. I grew up in a poor family. My dad worked at the railroad, and he was just a laborer. He wasn’t an engineer or a mechanic or anything like that. And he had ten kids and his mother living with us.
But I’ve always liked traveling. I got hooked on all of our family trips to México. As soon as I got my driver’s license, I’d always volunteer to be my dad’s relief driver. He had driven it alone for many years.
The first time I traveled across the US was when the president of Mexico came to Washington, D.C. Our support network in the United States mobilized, calling for us to gather in there for a protest. I took the train which runs through Roseville, which is, as I said before, a railroad town. It took the train three days to reach Washington, D.C. that’s the first time I had been on the East Coast. Before that, the east coast had always been like a distant, far away land, though of course I know it was part of the US. But in my mind, it seemed as far away as Europe, just somewhere far from the world in which I lived my own life.

Lesley: [00:51:39] Well, it’s a long trip. So, I mean, it was intended to be set up as a decentralized way of coordinating grassroots movements that were challenging the global system.

Mario: [00:52:02] I would just ask if there are still active elements other than you guys doing this oral history.

Lesley: [00:52:09] The activists are still going but they’re not necessarily as the PGA.
And I actually think that one of the reasons that we wanted to do this project is because we feel like there’s been a decline of internationalism, despite the fact that the internet exists and there’s connections, like people don’t talk about global systems or global levels. And so we wanted to see what could be learned from a period where there was a real attempt for movements to get together and strategize together.
The stories that you tell about Cochabamba align with the ones I’ve seen from others. They say it’s really challenging if you have a squatter from Amsterdam and somebody who’s from a Bangladesh fishers movement, which represents a million people, to find some common ground.
But there was a sense of a common opponent or a system that was causing problems everywhere. And we don’t seem to be having that these days.

Mario: [00:53:17] That hasn’t changed, has it?

Lesley: [00:53:19] No, the system hasn’t changed. But the movements, the international coordination, I’m not sure if they’re there in the same way. So what do you think?

Mario: [00:53:30] I think that the struggle to create them is still there. I recently joined DiEM25, a movement for democracy in Europe. Living in the US, I guess I’m an outlying member, but one of the founding members was Bernie Sanders, so there’s got to be a bit of the international in it as well. Are you familiar with DiEM25? Are you familiar with Yanis Varoufakis? He’s one of the founders, and one of their main spokespersons.

Lesley**:** [00:53:54] No. Sounds Greek.

Mario: [00:53:56] Yes. He was the Finance Minister of the Syriza government that came to power in Greece in resistance to some economic deal with the European Central Bank. I don’t know all the gory details, but when the new Syriza President caved in to the Central Bank, Yanis resigned in protest.

Lesley: [00:54:02] I remember that. Okay.

Mario: [00:54:03] Yeah. So he’s one of the founders of this new movement. It’s a pan-European political movement. Right now they’re running in the European Union elections. I think Yanis himself has a seat in the European Parliament, as well as a few others, but not enough to have any real clout. But they’ve also created another organization called the Progressive International. I’ve joined that as well. So there are some new international movements forming.

Mario: [00:55:30] Have you heard about Jackson, Mississippi? Their project is called Cooperation Jackson. Their story, in a nutshell, is that white flight left Jackson, the state capitol, with a black majority that has taken over the city government. So the capitol of the state is a Black island of resistance in a white-controlled state. I’d been reading about them, and actually stopped by to visit one day when I was traveling cross-country. I forget which trip I was on then, but I got to talk to the sister of Kali Akuno, one of the leaders there. I called their office, hoping to go to one of their meetings or something. I’m not remembering her name, but she took time out of her day to come meet me and talk. I interviewed her, got it on tape, and was surprised to learn that they had gone down to Chiapas to talk with the Zapatistas. They run their city by community assemblies, as do the Zapatistas. I wasn’t able to stay to see one of their assemblies in action, and haven’t been following them closely lately, so I don’t really know how they’re doing these days.

Lesley: [00:56:28] I think the PGA logic in Canada and the US, it’s more of a way of doing politics than it was the name PGA like in Europe. There was like PGA branded events more than in, in the US, which was very much more, I think, connected to Zapatista solidarity and thinking about. Is that your sense as well or.

Mario: [00:56:50] Well, in the past there was a national network of Zapatista support groups in the US called the National Commission for Democracy in México. It came about, at least partly (I may not know the whole story), because there were a lot of fly-by-night people coming around in early January saying, “We’re raising money for the Zapatistas.” They’d take up collections and then disappear. Where did they go? Where’s the money? And then like, where’d they go? Where did the money go? So we went to Chiapas to ask the Zapatistas to name an official representative in the US. That was myy first trip to Chiapas, in January of 1994. Wow! It blew my mind in a couple of ways.

Lesley: [00:57:43] What was that like?

Mario: [00:57:45] Oh, it was an amazing, eye-opening experience for me. I went with some Mexican lawyers from Tijuana. We actually met with Subcomandante Marcos and several other Zapatista in a small village called La Garrucha, which later became one of the Zapatista Caracoles, the centers of government. Among the other things we talked about with them was that we needed someone, an official representative in the United States. So they did name a person a little while later, named Cecilia Rodriguez, a woman from El Paso, Texas. She came around to visit all the different groups, and coordinated the formation of the National Commission for Democracy in México (NCDM). That organization lasted about, I want to say about ten or 15 years, before it kind of fell apart. Just as I think you were saying earlier about the PGA, there are such a diversity of groups and individuals working on different things in different places, it was hard to hold it all together. The Zapatistas were always telling us that it was more important for us to work in our own communities than to come down to work with them. I recall that being the theme of our last national meeting; we were all going back to our own geographies. But to bring Zapatismo from Chiapas to the US was a big challenge. Instead of a small village in the jungle, our communities are big and very diverse. For example, in Sacramento, the metropolitan area includes close to a million people.

Mario: [00:59:24] In Chiapas, they’re often working in villages where, when they call a meeting, everyone in town can be there. They all know each other. They can have a talk, discuss things, and make a decision on the spot. Everyone can speak, and if someone in charge of doing some particular task is not doing it right, the group can replace them with someone else right then, no formal recall or election required. and business is done. Although, they’re networked as well.
One of the things I often share with people, that really got to me, that really sold me on the Zapatistas, was that decisions were made at the bottom, not at the top. When the fighting first stopped, and negotiations were held in San Cristobal de las Casas, the government offered the Zapatista a settlement. They offered to build new schools, roads, and medical clinics. There were villages up in the mountains that no road reached. Where people with a sick person in their family had to carry them over the mountains down to where there was a road, so they could get a ride into town. But the point I want to make is that, when the Zapatista negotiators got this offer from the government, they told the government that they couldn’t reply to it. They had to take it back to all of the different Zapatista communities, so that everyone could read it, debate it, and decide whether or not to accept it. It took them three months to complete that and return to the negotiations, where they rejected the government’s offer. That’s real grassroots democracy!
Today, the leader of some movement or armed group in a negotiation, would probably say, “OK, I’ll make the deal.” And then expect the people below him to follow his orders. Well, the Zapatistas didn’t do that. They said that their orders came from the people. In my own work today, in Peace Action or wherever I’m doing, I’m trying to operate by the principles of the Zapatistas. Their major concept is, in Spanish, “Mandar obedeciendo.” It means, “lead by obeying.” Which is to say, you’re not up there as a leader to tell people what to do; you’re up there as a leader to do what the people tell you to do.
That’s the problem with our government. They don’t listen to us. They tell us what we’re supposed to think, and what we’re supposed to do. And if you disagree with them, you’d better start watching your back.

Lesley: [01:02:18] I have a Companero whose works with schools for Chiapas. He brings students down.

Mario: [01:02:28] I worked on that school construction project in Oventik with Schools for Chiapas. I think it was in 1997. It’s hard for me to keep all the dates straight. I should have kept a diary!

Lesley: [01:02:35] Okay. I don’t know if you have ever met Stuart Schuessler. But he’s been very interested in how the zapatismo lessons have translated into the North American context. So he’s followed up with a lot of the students who went to the to visit and spend some time and learn and then see how do they apply it when they go back to Chicago, when they go back to Seattle or wherever? How can they use the logic of like, follow by lead by following. And it’s hard, right? It’s hard to translate to the different context for sure.

Mario: [01:03:14] Yeah. That’s what I was trying to say a little ways back, referring to the variety of people who were in Cochabamba, from local farmers to people from Africa, Europe, and North America. Even people from the same country can be living in different contexts, such as a farmer vs a city dweller. And even cities vary in size and geography. It’s a challenge to get people from all these different contexts (or worlds) to come together in a common framework or world view.
That’s what happened to our group in Sacramento when the Zapatistas told us to work in our own community. There were many different communities within “our” community! We’re not a homogenous community. We’ve got students, we’ve got workers, we’ve got business people. Were we supposed to focus on just one part of the community, or all of it at once? Our communities are fragmented, diverse. We were at a loss. Maybe that’s where our group lost its way.
I mean, how do you apply Zapatismo if you’re not living in a community where people go out to communal fields and work together? Or live in a place that’s so small that everyone knows everyone? I don’t think many people live in real community in the US any more. We live in apartment buildings, and don’t even know most of our neighbors. In the suburban area where I live, I only know a few of the people on my block. When I walk around the block, I see a few people outside their homes and say hello, but most are indoors most of the time. But our neighborhood, our “community,” is too big. It was designed as a housing tract, not a community. Better yet, a bedroom community. People live there, but they go outside of it to work and live most of their lives with people outside of the community.
Still, there have been several meetings here of people who want to start local grassroots meetings, community assemblies, as in the Murray Bookchin concept of social ecology. I think that’s an important project, and I’m thinking about how it might become the basis for a new alternative political movement that could free us from the grip of the political parties. There are all kinds of groups working for social change, but they all want to approach it from different angles. Police brutality. Homelessness. Climate change. Gay rights. The list goes on and on. The question is, how do we start working together in a coordinated way? That is to say, as a community, however diverse we may be.

Lesley: [01:05:16] Well, sometimes I feel optimistic about it infusing all sorts of projects, and sometimes I don’t. But just to go back and finish up the Cochabamba thing. Did you stay in contact with anybody that you met at those meetings?

Mario: [01:05:35] I don’t think so. By the time I returned to the US, the group that had elected me to go was no longer meeting. I contacted a few individuals, but saw that the group was no longer hanging together. One group in Los Angeles is still active, and I receive their post to the PGA-NA list, but no others.

Lesley: [01:05:37] And do you think it shaped any of the ways that you move forward in your organizing afterwards?

Mario: [01:05:46] I think my own work was intensified. I mean, because everyone down there was already inspired by the Zapatistas. So it helped me realize the scope and importance of Zapatismo and the concepts which, as the Zapatistas themselves said, are universal. They’re struggling for humanity, for everyone, not just for themselves. Yeah. And that’s the pivotal point of this whole thing. We live in a society that’s based on, “what can I get for me?” As opposed to what can I do to make the world better?

Lesley: [01:06:44] Now I’m going to cry. I mean, it’s like it feels far, but if there are lessons from that period that we should be communicating to current generations of activists?

Mario: [01:07:01] I think the one of the most important things is just to be able to hear directly from people from countries around the world. And to see what’s really going on “over there.” We really live in a fog of misinformation and deceit. Outright lies. Just to give one example, I was horrified to hear from the South Africans on the bus traveling north that the rise of Nelson Mandela to the presidency in South Africa was a stunt designed to cut off all of the young leaders that had been rising up in his absence while he was in prison.

Lesley: [01:07:55] I hadn’t heard that.

Mario: [01:07:56] Yeah. It’s like… (Sorry, I can’t remember what I said here. The transcript didn’t catch it.)

Lesley: [01:08:00] I guess that makes sense.

Mario: [01:08:02] Yeah.

Mario: [01:08:03] So, and to… and to learn, just for example, this is just another South African horror story. That they (the government) were bringing water out to the different neighborhoods and so on. But get a load of this, the water meter on your house, you have to drop money into it to get water.

Speaker3: [01:08:27] I think you can.

Lesley: [01:08:28] Jimmy it. I think I’ve heard a story that you can sort of like.

Mario: [01:08:32] Get it right.

Speaker3: [01:08:32] The water is a right. It’s part of the. Yeah.

Mario: [01:08:35] That’s what the whole water war Cochabamba was about. They completely privatized the water there. Have you ever seen the movie “Even the Rain?”

Lesley: [01:08:46] No. It’s good.

Mario: [01:08:48] You should check it out. It’s excellent.

Speaker3: [01:08:50] I will check it out.

Mario: [01:08:52] It’s also available in Spanish, titled “Hasta la lluvia.” The title refers to the fact that the contract that the Bolivian government signed… I think it was with Bechtel Corporation from the United States… granted them the water rights in the city, (to which they immediately raised the rates!) and it even covered rainfall. Even the rain that fell belonged to Bechtel! This is what’s going on with water around the world, and it’s only going to get worse. In México recently, the government passed a law on water rights. That is, they tried to pass it, but got beaten back by the public outcry. The law they tried to pass would have allowed corporations or other businesses to buy rivers or lakes.

Speaker3: [01:09:39] , no, it’s it’s.

Mario: [01:09:41] When there’s a corporate world government, they’ll be saying, okay, who wants to buy the Pacific Ocean? Obviously it’s not a fair fight. The people struggling against the corporations are doing it out of their own pocket, while corporate agents are all on salary, with retirement benefits, vacation time and all that stuff. So it’s not a fair fight at all.

Lesley: [01:13:00] No, no. That’s true. Are there things that, like if we were to try and understand the PGA or global networks at that period. Other things I should be talking about or asking about or people I should be talking to.

Mario: [01:13:16] I think one of our big weaknesses is we are more prone to create new organizations than to unify forces by merging together. So the first thing that comes to mind here, as we’re talking, is if there are still people in PGA, the People’sGlobal Action network, they might look to, if they could, connect with the Progressive International, another international organization. There’s things like the World Peace Council, which is an ally of Peace Action, a national organization in the US.
So again, there’s people all around the world, working for all the same things, but independently of each other. Coming back to what we were talking about earlier, and as I said, kind of cynically, “Oh well, the situation hasn’t changed.” We’re still being ripped off because the levers of power are above us, out of reach, so we have no voice in decisions being made that affect our lives.
There is one major change that has happened in the world, and I don’t think most people have grasped it. I’m just getting wind of it myself. The power of transnational capital has surpassed the power of nation states.

Lesley: [01:14:41] Yes. So, yeah, that’s true.

Mario: [01:14:45] , I mean, we thought we thought we were just struggling against our governments, but we’re not. We’re struggling against a global entity that I would say has taken control of most governments in the world. Most democratically elected governments in the world run… are controlled by… elections which run on money. Yeah.

Mario: [01:15:09] So we don’t really have a voice in our own political system. In the United States our elections are coming up, and we only have a choice between two corporate candidates. Of course, we have Jill Stein as well, who is not a corporate candidate, who I’m going to vote for. If I hadn’t learned about her, I would have voted for Cornell West.

Lesley: [01:15:34] Mhm.

Mario: [01:15:35] Who’s from Sacramento, by the way.

Lesley: [01:15:36] I did not know that. That’s cool.

Mario: [01:15:38] Yeah. He’s a hometown boy. You should see the reception he gets when he comes here.

Lesley: [01:15:42] I bet. I mean, one of the things that was interesting about PGA is the hallmark said that nobody could speak for the PGA. So it was a non-organization. It was more just like that. There are hallmarks that any organization could align with. But there were no resources. Nobody could say they were PGA. Some people did still say they were PGA, and there was a bit of European dominance with that, which was a problem.

Mario: [01:16:04] European dominance has been a problem for a long time.

Lesley: [01:16:07] It sure as hell has. Yeah. So in some ways it’s not surprising that it didn’t, like last as a thing because it was trying not to be a thing.

Mario: [01:16:20] That’s exactly the position of our Zapatista network, that I think comes out of Zapatismo as well. In our organizational agreements, it says that no one can speak for the group unless authorized by the Assembly. That is, to speak as a delegate to some conference or other meeting, and to say “This is the word of the network.” Which I think is correct. We can go to meetings and identify ourselves as members of the organization, but we can’t speak for the organization.

Lesley: [01:16:53] That’s right. That’s the same with PGA.

Mario: [01:16:55] Yeah. And just before we run out of time…

Speaker3: [01:17:00] Yeah I.

Lesley: [01:17:00] Don’t even know what time it.

Speaker3: [01:17:01] Is.

Mario: [01:17:01] I think we’re an hour and a half here.

Lesley: [01:17:04] Oh okay. Yes. Okay. We got to close soon. Yeah.

Mario: [01:17:08] I’m not saying that, but I do know that we’ve got to close sometime. What I want to say is I admire the Zapatistas and I follow their line. I’m a Zapatista. One of the things that they’ve said all along was you don’t have to live in the mountains of Chiapas to be a Zapatista. You don’t have to live in the jungle. You don’t have to have a rifle. You can be a housewife, you can be a doctor, you can be a homeless person. You can be anybody. But… Oh, God! What was I going to say? Maybe I need another cup of coffee.

Lesley: [01:17:52] No, I hear you. I feel like it was going to be really, really good, though. .

Mario: [01:17:57] What are we talking about? Before that?

Lesley: [01:18:00] , well, we were talking about speaking for the organization.

Mario: [01:18:06] Got it! Thank you so much. It’s about the Zapatistas, and what I think is their big mistake. And I think that it goes all the way back to Emiliano Zapata himself, in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. When they defeated the Diaz government, and occupied Mexico City, he and Pancho Villa had their photo taken in the presidential chair in the capital. They could have seized control of the government, but didn’t. Have you seen the movie “Viva Zapata” with Marlon Brando as Zapata?

Lesley: [01:18:44] Yeah.

Mario: [01:18:45] Villa was saying to Zapata “You should be the president.” And Zapata said, “No, I can’t be president. I’m not educated. I’m not… et cetera. He didn’t have the self-confidence to rise to the occasion, and take power. Maybe because it was the power he had just been fighting against. Who can really say why, since he was killed and never got to write a memoir.
I’ve been wanting to write an article about the Zapatista unwillingness to take political power, or to even participate in the political process. Maybe it’s because they recognize the corruption of the system, and don’t want to be a part of it. They’re trying to create a movement that is outside of the state, and outside of the political system. But I think that, if we don’t participate politically, we’re just leaving a power vacuum that’s going to be filled by the others, whose motives are not guided by what’s best for all of the people.

Mario: [01:19:35] If we’re just going to be anarchists or separatists, and to say, “Oh, we’re just going to have our own little thing…” we leave the political stage, and the levers of power, to others.
We’ve had a lengthy discussion in our network on the concept of autonomy, a term that the Zapatistas use a lot. We think that’s a really important concept, because autonomy means you’re independent. It’s another way of saying you’re self-governing. We found that we have a number of different ideas of what autonomy means to us, so the question of exactly what autonomy is still open.
But if we don’t have autonomy, we’re not really in control of ourselves, or of the laws that govern our lives. As I said before, in a political system that runs on money, the poor - the vast majority of the population - have no real voice.
In terms of gaining political autonomy, one of the things I’m asking people to do nowadays is to change their voter registration, and quit the Democratic or Republican parties. In California, I’m registered as NPP (No Party Preference), but it’s different in other states. In terms of having them hear your voice, that’s the only thing you can do that’s going to count. That’s going to hit them harder than 10,000 letters to the President or to your congressman. When they see that people start to quit the party, they’re goig to freak out.
That’s something I learned from the trip to Cochabamba. After the conference there ended, and the bus we were riding back to Colombia was passing through Ecuador, we met people from the Pachakutik movement. Do you know that organization?

Lesley: [01:20:32] No, I don’t think I do.

Mario: [01:20:34] In Ecuador, they had a system of two parties, liberal and conservative. I don’t remember the names exactly, but they were the two dominant parties, just like in the US. So they were a democracy, but these two parties just traded off their hold on power, again, just like in the US. So the people were thinking, well, whichever one we vote for, we’re screwed. So what did they do? They started a campaign to delegitimize the two controlling parties. Their campaign started to tell everybody “We’re all going to quit the parties.” And the people did. They created their own movement, Pachakutik, and were able to take control of the government.

Lesley: [01:21:15] Okay. That is a great story to like. Give us a close.

Mario: [01:21:21] I tell that story over and over again. I said, we complain about the government and then turn around and vote the same people back into power. The only way out of the trap is to stop voting for them!

Mario: [01:21:31] That is the crux of our powerlessness. And I’m not the only one saying this. I think it was Alice Walker that said “The problem with most people being powerless is that they don’t actually realize they actually do have power.” Yes, we hand our power away to others. I’m writing a letter on this right now to the Peace Action national affiliate network. I’m still a member of Peace Action, and actually served on the national board for a few years. They keep trying to change things through the current political system, lobbying and trying to “hold our elected officials accountable.” To my mind, there’s no way that’s going to happen, because our system is sold out to big money.

Lesley: [01:22:42] Sometimes the transcript doesn’t notice that. . Listen, Mario, thank you so much. I’m gonna create the transcript, clean it up, and I’m going to send it to you and then, like, let’s check in and see what you think. And if there’s if you like it, if you want to take anything out or add anything. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. I feel like we could talk for a lot longer.

Mario: [01:23:05] I’m sure. Well, the subject, as we say, is global, universal, and multicultural. But just to end on a positive note, there is something hopeful happening in the world today. I mean what’s going on with the BRICs. Do you follow that at all? The BRICs, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and some other groups?

Lesley: [01:23:47] Can you send me something?

Mario: [01:24:54] Yeah, but in a nutshell, they’re creating a new system that’s breaking the monopoly of power that Europe imposed on the world through Imperial colonization. The American government is still eurocentric, even though now we’re dominating Europe, and trying to run the rest of the world as well. But still on the European colonial model. Look at what’s going on in the Middle East right now. The US and Europe have created Israel, a European colony in the Middle East to control the Arabs and other ethnicities. It’s the last gasp of colonialism.

Lesley: [01:26:01] I feel that. Yeah.

Mario: [01:26:03] So, anyway, I just wanted to end on a hopeful note.

Speaker3: [01:26:07] Thank you. Change.

Mario: [01:26:08] The change is coming!

Speaker3: [01:26:10] There is there there is. Absolutely.

Lesley: [01:27:03] Thank you for reminding me about this. I need to look back into it. I knew I was paying attention a few years ago, but I kind of stopped looking. So it’s really.

Mario: [01:27:12] Anyway, it’s been a pleasure, Lesley.

Lesley: [01:27:19] It has been such a pleasure. Mario, I really.

Mario: [01:27:20] I really appreciate all you’re doing. If I can be of help in any way, please let me know.

Lesley: [01:27:26] Well, we’re all in this together. Thank you so much.

Lesley: [01:28:27] Take care. Bye. Bye bye.