And what we did was, well, propose a path to cross the storm and reach the other side safely. And not to take that path alone as Zapatistas, but together as the indigenous peoples that we are. Of course, more will come out about this proposal: about health, about education, about justice, about government, about life. Let’s say that we see this as necessary to be able to face the storm.(…) Because those at the top preach death because that gives them profits. Those at the top want things to change, but for their benefit, although it is getting worse and worse. That is why it is those below who are going to fight and are already fighting for life. If the system is one of death, then the fight for life is the fight against the system.
EZLN Twentieth and Last Part: The Common and Non-Property
Join us for Ten Days of Struggle for Freedom
in the Skouries Forest, July 16–26, 2026
They come with chainsaws, bulldozers, excavators, drills, and monstrous machines. They annihilate primeval forests and gut the earth, leaving behind a legacy of enormous, barren craters. They scar the earth with kilometers of oil and gas pipelines, and networks of paved industrial roads. They erect colossal ‘renewable energy’ industrial parks and electricity storage and transmission networks on mountains, in areas of pristine natural beauty and rich biodiversity, on fertile, arable land that could nourish and meet the real needs of our communities. All of this is done against the needs of society, either for direct profit or to meet the increased energy demands of data centers and artificial intelligence, which are predominantly used for the military-industrial complex and social repression everywhere.
They divert or drain the rivers; they steal land and water. With their industrial fish farms, oil drilling platforms, desalination plants, and LNG facilities, they fill the sea with all kinds of trash and chemical waste. They pollute everywhere, burn trash and fill the air with dioxins and carcinogens, promote the so-called “best” metallurgical methods using banned chemicals, continue to spray glyphosate (Roundup) on the fields, introduce new genetic engineering technologies and new genetically modified organisms, all the while claiming that their concern is to eradicate world hunger—even as they throw away one-third of the world’s food production every single day. And, even though they are building massive facilities to generate 32 Gigawatt of electricity from renewable energy sources by 2035—enough to cover the country’s maximum energy needs three times —they are imposing energy poverty on the people and promoting the construction of nuclear power plants.
Whatever remains after the destruction of industrial-chemical agriculture and the onslaught of “green growth” is cleared away to make way for the monoculture of mass tourism. And whatever cannot be cleared away right now is abandoned and exposed to summer wildfires so it can cleared away and built upon in the future. And then they want even more…
They want new minerals and rare earth elements, land to build war industry factories on and military bases, landfills; they want to do away with our water resources, our health, our education, our common goods, our housing, our transportation—our very lives.
Every place, every aspect of life is an Eldorado of opportunity for them… they come as domineering colonizers to seize it all and to mark the territory on their fiefdoms with pillaging and plunder. They attack anyone who resists their plans. They isolate and expel anyone they cannot buy off, anyone who refuses to get paid as “company workers” for turning a blind eye. They have at their disposal the army, the police, judges, “experts” in suits, state and local officials, the media, and the passive consent of society.
Entire regions, stripped of every trace of freedom, democracy, self-sufficiency, public space, and social interaction, are being transformed into sacrificial zones of unaccountability and lawlessness for every “investor.” This model has been tried and tested for centuries by colonialism, in places “far away from us”, the so-called third-world. Their vision is for us to live under constant repression in ghettos where we will barely survive, to provide cheap labor without rights, without basic safety measures — where we will simply exist thanks to the “charity” of the bosses, as long as we don’t cause trouble, living a degraded life subsidized by the destruction of our homeland. And that is the optimistic version. The worst-case scenario foresees war, genocide, persecution, environmental displacement, cannibalism, and fascism. This is not a prospect. These are not evils yet to come. They are already present, and they are being experienced everywhere.
In defiance of the times, we believe that, through communities of struggle and through solidarity, we can find ways out and we can develop alternative proposals to the political and social dead ends imposed upon us. The hardships, the problems created by a system of domination and exploitation cannot be combated or resolved using the tools and methods of that very system that creates the problems.
We are united by the shared experiences of their continuous attacks against these lands, by our common struggles to defend nature, life, and our communities; by our collective action and way of life; and our solidarity with one another—these are our only weapons against the normalization of plunder, of fear and repression, both physical and institutional.
We are united by our common understanding that our struggles are not local, confined solely to “our own isolated problem.” Through the communities we have created and continue to create, we now recognize clearly the need for communication and connection among us based on equality, mutual respect, and active solidarity. We know that it is important to live within an open process of continuously connecting the many, diverse struggles and initiatives, so that we may find common ground and coordinate our efforts, as we all experience a shared reality of exploitation, oppression, and the plundering of our lives.
This is both the framework and goal we hope to achieve during the Ten Days of Struggle and Freedom, which will take place in the Skouries Forest in northeastern Chalkidiki from July 16th to July 26th, 2026. We invite you to this free, self-organized camp to share our experiences of struggle and our concerns, to discuss today’s reality, the prospects for resistance, and to collectively craft our own responses through networking and coordinating our actions.
Defeat is certain only for those who do not fight.
We do not need people to explain exploitation to us, because we have experienced it for centuries. Nor for them to come and tell us that we have to die to achieve freedom. We know that and have practiced it every day for hundreds of years. What is welcome is knowledge and practice for life.
Look, the delegation that went to Europe learned many things, but the most important thing we learned is that there are many people, groups, collectives, organizations that are looking for a way to fight for life. They have another color, another language, another custom, another culture, another way. But they have the same thing as us, which is the heart of struggle.
They are not looking for who is better, or to be given a place in bad governments. They are seeking to heal the world. And yes, they are very different from each other. But they are equal, or rather we are equal. Because we really want to build something else, and that thing is freedom. That is, life.
EZLN Twentieth and Last Part: The Common and Non-Property
For building and connecting our communities
through the common struggle for freedom
Against the plundering of the earth, of life, and of society
Communities of Struggle for Freedom Network
