Best wishes to Council of Canadians activists and to all those in Vancouver who are starting 2014 well with a ’20 years of NAFTA, 20 years of resistance’ march at 2 pm PT today.
Aljazeera reports, “Twenty years ago (this morning), Mayan peasants in ski masks rose up to capture six towns (in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas), and with them world attention. …The Zapatistas decided a decade ago to go it alone… They seized land – some estimates are as high as 750,000 acres – and created their own schools and clinics, and rejected subsidies from the state. …Deep social changes have occurred in (these) 38 autonomous municipalities. …The murals declaring ‘dignity to women’ ring true, …(the) areas also post less crime and human rights abuses than in other parts of the state, …clinics are closer to where many indigenous peasants live and treatment is delivered in local languages, rather than Spanish as in most of the country, …(and) each community now has a school that delivers lessons in indigenous tongues, which was rare before.”
Further reading
Free trade’s tarnished silver anniversary by Bruce Campbell
NAFTA’s 20 Years of Unfulfilled Promises by Manuel Perez Rocha
