Subcommander Marcos (now known as “Delegate Zero”) and other members of the Zapatista delegation arrived in Tijuana Oct. 18 after traveling up the Baja California peninsula, with stops in Ensenada and other communities where they met with Mixtec migrant laborers from Oaxaca. Marcos remarked publicly on their abysmal living conditions in shanties around the agribusiness farms, and attacked Baja California Gov. Eugenio Elorduy as “stupid” for tolerating such conditions. He also expressed solidarity with the struggle in the Mixtecs’ native Oaxaca. In Tijuana, where the delegation is hosted in a reconverted theater by the local Multikulti collective, Marcos is scheduled to meet with maquilladora workers. The delegation also atteneded a demonstration outside the local Sempra Energy gas plant, which is accused of contaminating local waters. (APRO, Frontera, Oct. 18)
Readers will recall that Sempra was the firm at the center of the Black October protests that brought down the Bolivian government in 2003.
See our last posts on Mexico and the Zapatista tour.
