Enclosure one was excerpted from Latinamerica Press, Nov. 23, 1995.
LP contributor Dauno Totoro Taulis interviewed Chiapas Bishop Samuel Ruiz.
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LP: At the moment, what is the conflict, the principal contradiction,
between the world and the church? What is the cross that it carries?
Ruiz: The cross that it carries is the system that threatens humanity
and the planet. There is a world where dispossession is the essence of
growth, and this dispossession has reached such a point that it no
longer affects just human beings, generating misery and poverty, but
it is also dispossessing nature. The survival of the planet is
threatened.
LP: Does the indigenous uprising in Chiapas contradict the dream of
justice and fraternity among men and women?
Ruiz: One must look at the facts. Something awaits the world,
something that can come out of all this. Perhaps it is a certain
model, a road to greater citizen participation in the transformation
of their own reality. The EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army)
has not called on the people to rise up in arms, it has called on them
to rise up as civic-political actors. It is curious that, after 500
years, when nobody was expecting there to be articulated indigenous
groups but only "conquered Indians," it is precisely these Indians
who are motivating us to change, to participate.
It is surprising that the most marginalized inhabitants of the
continent, who are on the social floor, are those who are rising up
with the prospects of a transforming success. A voice is being heard
from those living in a culture distinct from the West, from the heart
of the communitarian concept. It is an ancient voice that has never
been heard before--and for this reason appears as a new voice--and it
offers a successful alternative for everyone.
Besides it was always thought that we had to "rescue" the Indians,
that we had to help them, and now they are offering the possibility of
renovation for us.
LP: Isn't it contradictory that to talk of peace, the communities had
to take up arms?
Ruiz: What is new is that those who have risen up in arms did not make
the same decision as the continent's other known armed movements,
which believed that to achieve justice they first had to take power.
The EZLN does not espouse this idea. This is war for peace, a war so
that there is peace, a war in which they are not asking others to rise
up in arms but to rise up as subjects of a transformation.
It is not an armed group talking with a government to reach partial
accords, but a people, an organized civil society, that is
transforming itself through social change. It is a search that has
returned to the subject and protagonist of history, the citizen, the
right and duty for his or her own transformation.