Interview by Patrick and Diana Zaachila, a small city south of Oaxaca, was the cradle of the Zapotec Civilization. There are approximately 25,000 residents, but now only the oldest community members speak Zapoteco. We grow corn, peanuts, and jicama, which is a fruit harvested around All Saints Day. A lot of people also raise beef cattle and hogs and many bake bread and mole, a spicy salsa known in the region. Fortunately, we also have an abundance of clean drinking water, which is rare in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, and becomes scarcer as the population increases. In Zaachila, as in all of Oaxaca, people struggle to make ends meet. When I was a kid, we didn’t have enough to eat and there weren’t a lot of jobs available. I started working when I was six or eight, planting and weeding corn, collecting trash, sweeping the market, and helping my mom sell tortillas. These are the some of the experiences and conditions that shaped the way I see the world. It’s different for kids who always got new shoes, who could go to college. We’re surrounded by lifestyles that don’t have anything to do with our own interests, aspirations, hopes or dreams. But why should we have to fight off someone always telling us what to think, to buy this brand of television or car? We can think and make decisions on our own. We’re victims of the few economically-privileged who make decisions that end up affecting lots of people. We have the right to ask why. And from this why we can look for answers and initiate a process of transformation. In Zaachila, there have always been people asking these questions. A few years ago, Coca-Cola wanted to build a plant here, which would supposedly bring lots of jobs to the community. But some people realized that they were going be using a tremendous amount of water, limiting what would be left for the rest of us. So a group of people organized and prevented the construction of the Coca-Cola plant. There have always been these activists; they just haven’t been able to reach the majority of people in most cases. Authoritarian regimes always construct campaigns to discredit organizers, and try to convince people that protesters are crazy. It wasn’t until the severe repression, starting with the violent removal of the teacher’s encampment on June 14th, that the majority of people started to see that there were fundamental problems here, and began to support the movement that has taken shape over the last year. *** When the teachers’ union was attacked, all the teachers in Zaachila starting organizing and brought people together. Early on in July, a month after the repression, people were called together by the ringing of the bells. The ringing of the bells in Zaachila is very symbolic, rooted in the tradition of blowing the conch shell. They’re only rung under very special circumstances. In this case they were used to bring everyone to the city center for the first popular assembly. There we determined what the position of the town was in regards to our mayor, José Coronel Martinez, who had upset many people by sending the city police to back up the governor on June 14th. He also made people mad by organizing a number of so-called “Peace Marches” along with the PRI, paying people to march around town dressed in white to show their support for Governor Ulises. So there were a series of meetings, where we discussed the movement and the role of our city government in the repression. We discovered things that we didn’t expect that added to our more immediate frustrations. For example, we started to investigate and learned about a housing development deal that would strain the city water supply, but was approved because the developer had agreed to give eleven houses to the mayor and his friends. We also discovered a long history of misuse of funds intended for children, students, and the elderly. For the first time, the majority of the people in Zaachila started to see this corruption. So after ringing the bells and bringing people together, we decided that José Coronel needed to leave the municipal building and never come back. However, just like Ulises Ruiz, he didn’t accept the people’s decision. He did leave the municipal building eventually, taking all the vehicles, computers, and files with him. But he took refuge in another community nearby and then started moving all around Oaxaca. He made the same declarations that Ulises Ruiz was making: “I’m not leaving” and “The people elected me” and “I don’t listen to the APPO, only to my constituency.” Men, women, children, and city council members joined together to take over the municipal building. A lot of the building was locked and we only used the hallways and the offices that were open. We stayed in the municipal building night and day, taking care of everything. And that’s how the neighborhood assemblies were born. We’d say, “It’s the neighborhood of La Soledad’s turn and tomorrow it’s up to San Jacinto.” That’s how the neighborhood assemblies were first used, and then later they turned into decision-making bodies, which is where we are now. The seizing of the municipal building was totally spontaneous. The activists from before played a role and initially directed things, but the popular assembly structure was developed little by little, and many of the earlier activists dropped out of the movement because they had a different perspective of how social transformation would take place. Among the people most involved now, only a handful were activists before. Taking over the municipal building brought the conflict in Oaxaca City here to Zaachila. We wanted José Coronel out of office as much as we wanted Ulises Ruiz out. We built barricades across the main roads in the city during the most intense moments of the conflict. We used the bells as a resource to alert people of confrontations between the APPO and police, so we could go and help those in Oaxaca City. When people heard the bells they came running with rocks, sticks, pistols, whatever they had available, ready to protect Zaachila from the state government. We had entered the struggle. *** After seizing the municipal building, people interested in the transformation of Zaachila started to talk to each other. Many different visions came to the forefront – some wanted to pave all the roads in the city, others wanted a hospital or a cultural institute. However, there were some of us that didn’t look to the modern world for our transformation; we wanted to resurrect the forgotten structures of our ancestors. We began asking people how they wanted to see the city run; we looked into how things were organized in the past. Sure, there were people directing this initiative, but they would always ask the community: “Given the information we have, what do we do?” This process led to the creation of a permanent popular assembly to govern the city. We didn’t have a mayor, and we didn’t want to submit to the authority of the state government, so we named our own people’s mayor, and our own people’s city council. Neighborhood assemblies, comprised of a rotating body of five people, were also formed in each section of town and together they would form the permanent popular assembly, the People’s Council of Zaachila. The people from neighborhood assemblies may not be activists at all, but little by little, as they follow their obligation to bring information back and forth from the Council, they develop their capacity for leadership. All the agreements made in the Council are studied by these five people and then brought back to the neighborhoods for review. These assemblies are completely open; anyone can attend and have their voice heard. Decisions always go to a general vote, and all the adults present can vote. For example, if some people think a bridge needs to be built, and others think we need to focus on improving electricity, we vote on what the priority should be. The simple majority wins, fifty-percent plus one. Once the Council was formed, it started to work with the scarce resources that were available. We got our funds from taxes on stands at the market. The economy of Zaachila didn’t stop, and taxes on business are what maintained the Council. We named our own police force as well, composed of people from Zaachila and without any direct connection to the state government. Services began to be provided despite resource scarcity: trash pickup started, the water stayed on, public works continued. People were very enthusiastic to begin with and responded to the needs of the new government. For example, on Christmas Eve we hold an important celebration in Zaachila and that first year, there weren’t any city resources, but the people made it happen. They brought piñatas and all the food. It was an amazing experience. In the month of January, on Three King’s Day, when all the kids were expecting toys, people brought tons of gifts to pass out to all the families. It was quite a surprise for everyone that with so little so much could be done. We realized that the strongest solidarity exists among those with very little. In fact, in some sense wealth has distanced us from our capacity, intrinsic to the human spirit, to build community . *** From the heat of this movement the community radio station was born in Zaachila. But this doesn’t mean that the groundwork hadn’t been laid. For example, as the principal of an elementary school, I directed a kid’s radio station, and one of my friends got me to bring the equipment to Oaxaca City to support the teacher’s encampment. Later we saw the necessity of starting a community radio station in Zaachila, to share information about the movement, to coalesce divergent ideas and start to resolve conflicts. We asked the people’s mayor if he would loan us space for the station in the municipal building. He brought the idea to the popular assembly and once they approved the idea, we brought all of my equipment to the building to get started. We began with the idea of providing a channel of communication for the movement, so that people could call in and communicate with each other. When there were meetings or mega-marches, we always broadcasted the details on the radio. But things didn’t start out smoothly. We were always vulnerable to threats from paramilitaries and the state government. We always operated under the assumption that someone might come to kill us or to take away all of the equipment. When we heard about threats, each of us would take part of the equipment and hide it somewhere, and then bring it back the next day. For a long time there was a warrant out for my arrest, and none of us could move around freely. For months the station was in limbo. Mostly youth were here keeping it alive. They were willing to stick around no matter what happened; they were dedicated to the station. Little by little, we started to focus on what was going on here in the community of Zaachila. We invited people to share their experiences with us on air. We started to play the music that the people of Zaachila wanted to hear, rather than just streaming what was on Radio Universidad in Oaxaca City. When things calmed down, we started to expand our programming. We’re lucky to have more than thirty people participating voluntarily who are all very professional. We have political talk shows, news shows, a poetry hour, alcoholics anonymous on the air, and a program where migrants come to share their experiences. We play protest music and we provide a variety of children’s programming, which facilitates their self-expression. In our culture, adults are always the ones to answer the phone. When children call into the station and hear themselves on the radio it helps them build confidence to express themselves freely. We want our radio to represent a symbol of resistance to the government and promote media that we ourselves create. We also want the radio to be a space where we generate new ideas. For example, the idea that we don’t have to be capitalists, that we can make radio without paying salaries. And the idea that radio can be subversive, and bring us to new ways of organizing ourselves. Through the radio, we have started to construct new identities, and because the people of Zaachila appreciate the work we do, they will protect us from the state government. While we’ve received threats, we haven’t faced any direct government aggression because of our popular support. *** Zaachila has already been an example for others. People start to ask, “Why does Zaachila have a community radio station and we don’t?” Or: “Why does Zaachila have a popular assembly and we don’t?” There’s a lot of work to be done, but the seed has been sown. Despite all the enthusiasm, in reality these are difficult times. There are elections in December for a new mayor, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. The People’s Council of Zaachila has decided to support a candidate, and we’ve even given him airtime on the radio. This has been a challenge, because some think that it shouldn’t be our role to get involved in the elections. If our candidate doesn’t win, if the PRI wins, we don’t know what’s going to happen to the radio or to Zaachila in general. But if we can maintain the neighborhood assembly structure I don’t think it matters who gets elected, we’ll have our independence. These paths have not been traveled before, and we won’t find answers in a book. Social movements can sometimes be short-sighted. We’re looking for ways to move into the future. There are a lot of people ready to defend the system we’ve created. Zaachila has survived so far because people are frustrated, not only with Ulises Ruiz or the former mayor, but with a whole political and economic system. It helped that there were people around to direct this frustration towards a certain end. In addition, the pride and identity of Zaachila has been strengthened by the people from all over the world that have come to recognize what we’ve done here. We’ve see the links between the tanks of repression in Oaxaca to those in other countries. We recognize that we are part of an international movement. Eventually our struggles will unite; in this I’m almost positive. We may not be around to see it, but I think it has to be. *** The diversity of cultures on this globe will make our struggles look different. We have to learn from all the different paths towards transformation, but if we try to come to some agreement, I don’t think we’ll ever be successful. Each of us has to do what we can in our communities. That’s how broad transformation will take place. In the struggle we find our reasons for living. There are those who want to live in a big house or have a nice car, and accept the happiness that’s imposed on them by someone else. Maybe the work we do won’t make us happy, but we’re contributing to the transformation of reality and, at the same time, of ourselves.