Cancun Dispatch: 9/7

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I have to leave early to run back for a direct action training -- to which no one shows up. Most of the internationals here are already experienced, and although many people say they want trainings, no one seems to be able to find the time to attend them when they are scheduled. I have truly begun to appreciate the virtues of hierarchy -- how sweet and simple to just be able to tell people what to do and have the entire backing of a society and its police power to make them do it! Especially if I'm the one giving the orders! In my next life I intend to be a benevolent but absolute monarch of some small, peaceable country -- but in this one, I shortly find myself back in another long, consensus meeting where 20 or 30 people are trying to reconcile their various ideas, opinions, and desires, struggling to respect each other no matter how intensely irritating they find each other, and sweating like pigs in a sauna.

We are once again called upon to change our vision of the action. Abram, one of the Mexican students, explains the political context and the latest thinking of the Zapatistas. "The system is like a many-headed serpent, and we have to strike at its vital organs, its center, not by throwing ourselves against its military power but by claiming our own, autonomous spaces and creating the world that we want there." And doing that in a way that confronts power, that makes clear the differences between them, that draws a boundary and establishes a frontier between the worlds. They are very smart, these students, and deeply influenced by the Zapatistas, who are now focused on building their own communities, providing their own services, re-envisioning their own lives. It's the same spirit that prompted us to build the eco-village, the same impulse that is driving the mad puppeteers to create intricate moving sculptures and flags stenciled with Mayan Gods.

The students' analysis relieves us from trying over and over again to figure out how to make an unarmed, nonviolent, mass assault on an island defended by the mass police and military forces of global power, and lets us think more creatively. Reporters keep asking me what has changed since Seattle. In Seattle, it was vitally important that we blocked the meeting, in part because it sent such a strong message to the world and the discontented delegates of the global south that there was massive popular opposition to the WTO. Now, popular opposition is endemic, the WTO is deconstructing from within, and the new cutting edge is to begin to build and realize our visions.

After the meeting I run back to the eco-village. The pump is up and running, the showers now drain into a beautiful swale packed with rocks that were just under the surface of the immaculate land but which are now hidden under mulch and leaves in case the city decides to remove more potential weapons. The campesinos are starting to arrive, busses rolling in. People come strolling up to the eco-village, staring at the installations and the posters. A small campesino is staring and staring at one of the pictures of our Sonoma county land that illustrates the concept of Agro-forestry. I go over and talk to him and he says that he recognizes the land because he has worked near there. He is one of the many, many economic refugees of the ongoing war on the poor who has made that long journey north to work in the fields and vineyards of our lands -- and now returned. We have walked the same hills, traveled the same roads, and have been in entirely different worlds while we did so: the world of the privileged landowner citizen, the world of the vulnerable, undocumented migrant worker. And now our worlds converge.

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