Subcomandante Marcos Says Mexican Reforms Will Be ‘Like An Atomic Bomb’ On Key Industries

La Jornada reported on Tuesday that, in a communique marking the 20th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising he led in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, Subcomandante Marcos referred to a recent series of reforms passed by lawmakers in the governing Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) and the conservative National Action Party (PAN). The new laws which seek to privatize and regulate the country’s petroleum and electricity industries and establish nationwide frameworks for educational content and teachers’ compensation, Marcos wrote, “will make everything more expensive, of worse quality, [and] scarcer."

The EZLN leader added that the reforms are part of the same economic plans which led the Zapatistas to take up arms in 1994, when they briefly captured the city of San Cristobal de las Casas. “The constitutional reform’s disguised plundering began to formalize itself with [former Mexican president] Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his reform of article 27,” he wrote. “The agrarian plundering was ‘covered up’ then by the same lies which now surround the so-called reforms. Before that and before these current reforms, the original peoples were and are stripped of their territories, which are also of the nation. The modern liquid gold -- water, not petroleum -- has been robbed without attracting the attention of the large-scale media.”

“The Mexican campo is completely destroyed, like a bunch of atomic bombs had been dropped on it,” he wrote. “The plundering is every day and everywhere. But it’s only now that it’s being said that the country was betrayed," referring to the charge aimed by lawmakers from a variety of leftist parties at the PRI-PAN coalition which passed the reforms. “It isn’t that they don’t have ideas and flags,” Marcos wrote of the opposition, “it’s just that they’re all worn out.”