This unique interview with the Zapatista spokesperson and military commander, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, was created and conducted by a community assembly in Durham, North Carolina, as a direct conversation between people in struggle in the United States and the EZLN. A year into the Zapatista Other Campaign in Mexico, this conversation marks a moment of change and transformation in how the EZLN has seen and spoken about the possibility of alternative politics in the US and the role of migrants, people of color, and others from below in creating such a politics.

Yesterday, outside the Molino de Flores prison, about 70 members of the Peoples’ Front in Defense of the Land (FPDT) of San Salvador Atenco and members of The Other Campaign shouted out their rejection of the brutal new sentences in the Atenco case while the Zapatista Lawyers went inside to file an appeal. Demonstrators called to the state police (ASES) guarding the gate: “How can you look your own children in the face? They’re poor, like us. What if they turn out to be rebels? Are you going to murder, rape, and torture them, too?” And... voilá! Leaving the prison, the lawyer Juan de Dios Hernández reported that Judge Alberto Cervantes, who determined the new sentences, has been replaced. On charges of kidnapping? Conspiracy? Corruption? Ineptitude? None of the above. He was never anything but a vile prosecutor disguised as a judge who had his little deal worked out with the statewide mafia headed by Governor Enrique Peña Nieto. He did the dirty work he was charged with, endorsing and prolonging the kidnapping of Ignacio del Valle and all the other compañeros that took place in Atenco and Texcoco on May 3 and 4, 2006 and has continued ever since then.