Ladies and Gentlemen of Coha:

I have read the article by Frederico Lozano on the Zapatista Red Alert, the critique by Al Giordano of Narconews and Coha's response/retraction.  As someone who has followed
the Zapatista Uprising closely ever since 1994 and accompanied some of its civilian communities in constructing autonomy, please be assured that the only reason I did not also write a scathing critique of the article is because Mr. Giordano did so quite eloquently and left little for me to say.

Part of my interest in the Zapatista movement is due to the cultural values it reflects; i.e., communitarian and collective, egalitarian and directly democratic.  Had I written a response to the article I would have added my profound concern for the values that article reflected: anti-Zapatista.  There are those who write articles friendly to the Zapatistas but make factual errors and those whose overall tone combines factual errors with a disguised anti-Zapatista attitude.  Lozano's article falls into the latter category.

My immediate emotional reaction to the original article was that the author was a State Department or CIA plant, planning to make a living on writing rationales for the neocons.  As I replaced emotion with a touch of reason, I realized that the article is merely one more example of people who know nothing about the Zapatistas writing articles about them.  It demeans your organization to permit that to happen.

Your critique of Mr. Giordano is unwarranted. Mr Lozano did your organization far greater harm than Mr. Giordano ever could.  You really need to check out those who you associate with your organization and what they write before they are permitted to publish.  And, perhaps, you just might have someone who knows something about his/her subject write the article.

Vary truly yours,

Mary Ann Tenuto Sanchez
Chiapas Support Committee
www.chiapas-support.org

Like I noted above, I really don't mind bearing the brunt of COHA's misplaced anger - it comes with the work we do - but I agree with Mary Ann that COHA's analysts really don't seem to understand this very important theme that it writes about, or perhaps is simply applying an old matrix for Latin America to the new (and ancient) ideas "from below" that have been unleashed by zapatismo, therefore missing the big story.

The Zapatista movement is no better understood nor explained in the second COHA press release, the retraction. Even though COHA took back the most unjust statements, it has yet to fill the vacuum with an accurate report on this very important social movement that continues to rock Mexico, our América and our world. Zapatismo is taking hold in other lands throughout Latin America. It would be a very good idea if COHA analysts do as Mary Ann has done, as so many others have done, as many of us have done, and spend some serious time looking and listening more seriously at what the Zapatistas are saying and doing, before the next time they deem to issue expert testimony on the subject.