Posted by ricardo dominguez on February 10, 1997 at 12:46:35:
In Reply to: Re: Marcos in New York posted by ricardo dominguez on February 10, 1997 at 12:44:04:
Rabinal Achi/ZapatistaPortAction
Zapatista Backers Rally Forces via Net
6:49 am PST 1 Feb 97 - Supporters of the Zapatista rebels held
demonstrations at 29 Mexican consulates across the United States on
Friday, the culmination of a vast mobilization effort over the
Internet.
"The Internet has been key in helping us get the word out," said
Guillermo Glenn, an organizer at the National Commission for Democracy
in Mexico, the El Paso, Texas, group which planned the protests in
cities from Los Angeles to Nashville to Chicago to New York. "In
cities where we didn't have representatives to go to the consulates,
local organizations contacted us through the Internet offering help."
Small groups of demonstrators called on the government to resume talks
with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a rebel group
in the mountainous Chiapas region of Mexico that launched an Indian
uprising in January 1994.
The Zapatistas and their supporters have been credited as being the
most effective users of the Internet to distribute information.
Announcements were posted during the past week on newsgroups such as
Chiapas95, and Chiapas-L, and Web sites such as ZapatistaPortAction at MIT, and Usenet groups misc.activism.progressive and mex.politica.
"The renewal of negotiations necessarily requires a significant change
in the approach of the Mexican government," one email announcement
said.
Those who have long been advocates for the EZLN in the United States
and on the Net say that online activism is key to networking with
other supporters worldwide. Part of the EZLN's online success can be
attributed to the original Internet protest of NAFTA in 1994.
"After doing so much organizing on the Net against NAFTA, we were able
to take advantage of that infrastructure already in place," said
Tamara Ford, an activist and post-graduate student at the University
of Texas at Austin, who is producing a CD-ROM about the Zapatista
movement, The Revolution Will Be Digitized.
____________________________________________________
Feb. 11, 1997. We will be interviewing Dr. Harry Cleaver on "Netwars
and the Zapatistas."
http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/zapsincyber.html
Also, with Tamara Ford from ACTLab.
http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/~zapatistas/index.html
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Rabinal Achi/ZapatistaPortAction
http://www5.awa.com/zapa/zapata.html
Produced by Ricardo Dominguez and Ron Rocco.
A composite work weaving a history of the Zapatista's use of netwars,invisible theater and the emergence of so called speed-democracies with text, graphics, sound bits in an enactment of the Rabinal-Achi, a Mayan classic of highland Guatemala.
Tuesdays: January 28, February 4, February 11, February 18, February 25, March 4
2:00 - 3:00 pm
Web Site: http://artnetweb.com/port/
SOFTWARE: RealAudio plugin, Pseudo Chat, and CUSeeMe.
With technical assistance from Dan Melmid and Pseudo Studios. Readings by Ricardo Dominguez, Galinsky and Ron Rocco. With design help from Zhang ga, and
The Thingnyc.
Updates on Chiapas by the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico.
For more Information: rdom@thing.net