On January 1, 2006, the Zapatistas proposed an initiative to tour all of Mexico in order to articulate broad networks of collaboration and solidarity among localized social movements “from the grassroots and the left”, putting into practice two central points of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle of June 2005. The tour around different Mexican states was baptized as “The Other Campaign,” a counter-reference to the presidential campaign that was beginning at that time. The objective of The Other Campaign wasn’t, however, to make electoral promises, but rather to listen to different voices of social and popular movements at the margin of the system, whose struggles necessarily leave them outside the framework of political parties and institutions. This first phase meant learning about other ways of struggling against the oppression of the social, economic and political system imposed from above.

By Melissa Mundt