The Zapatistas' National Consultation for the Rights of Indians and Against the War of Extermination collected about three million votes in every state of Mexico and in dozens of other countries, Sunday March 21. (I read in papers here that voting booths were set up in places such as Watsonville and New York; was there one in Seattle?) Though the government began discounting the significance of the consultation, saying that the questions were heavily slanted, that the government was willing to negotiate, etc. etc. But nobody expected the government to suddenly change its tune and implement the San Andres peace agreement it signed years ago, just because of the Consultation; the real victory lies in the fact that many thousands of Mexicans got to see and talk with real live (unarmed) Zapatistas about their lack of schools, health care, liveable wages and productive lands. It was a wildly successful call for Mexican citizens everywhere to get involved in a national dialogue -- thousands of voting booths were set up by longtime activists and newcomers alike. (Once you get people to commit to participating, they're more likely to get involved in other social actions.) And in the Zapatista struggle, which from the beginning in 1994 has been largely about winning popular support, the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) made the national government look really bad in many people's eyes. (For more info on the Consulation, such as a listing of the four questions, see www.ezln.org.)

President Zedillo and his cronies in the hegemonic Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (PRI) for the past couple months have been pushing for the privatization of the electrical industry, which not only would put a major part of the nation's infrastructure in foreign hands (a very touchy subject in a country that has been invaded by the Americans, the French, and other powers dozens of times), but would likely destroy the Mexican Electricians' Union (SME) and other electrical unions. On Thursday, March 18, many tens of thousands of people (maybe hundreds of thousands; with such a huge crowd, it's hard to tell) flooded el Paseo de la Reforma and marched to the main square, the Zócalo, to demonstrate in front of the National Palace against privatization. A Zapatista delegation was on hand and students were really active. Groups of students from dozens of UNAM departments and from other high schools and universities were on hand. My favorite chant was nice and simple: "¡Electricidad ... Universidad!" linking two closely related subjects. Many Mexicans are standing up to the government's neoliberal policies of privatizing every state entity, one by one, to allow the market to rule society, to make citizens compete against each other for basics such as decent jobs, health care, and education, while lining the pockets of those in power.

And then there's the students. A second student strike was held Wednesday. Tuesday night saw a massive University Student Assembly and a smaller action group meeting that put the strike into action, beginning around 1 a.m. I hung out with students from the Economics department (which has lots of radicals, unlike the Economics bastions of conservative thought in the States) while they built barricades around all the entrances of their building and the main entrance to the UNAM. Later, as some quieter students painted signs and banners in the lobby, teams of students used a sledgehammer, various metal implements, and a tree trunk to knock down the door of the Ho Chi Min Auditorium, which they'd taken back from administrators last week only to have it re-stocked with broken tables, chairs and toilets when they went home for the evening. This time, they made good, knocking down the steel-reinforced door after hours of work. (Somehow I managed to sleep half an hour on a concrete floor nearby.) Shortly after dawn students began to arrive on foot to find that about 95% of the university was shut down. This despite the fact that the administration has maintained a steady mantra of "the rabble rousers who oppose the higher tuition are a just a handful." But the fact is that in elections and referenda held in departments across campus, time and again students have voted in favor of work stoppages. After a 24-hour shutdown of campus, the administration still refuses to take back its fee increase, and the word "huelga," a strike 'til the end, is on everyone's lips. However, Monday begins spring break, so we all have a while to wait when and if that will happen.