St John’s Church, 2640 St Paul St., Baltimore, Maryland, 4 May 2007

Background

In the 1990s, Giordano was the political reporter for the Boston Phoenix, and he had his own AM radio talk show. He said became disillusioned with the “alternative media” of the 1960s and 1970s, from which the Phoenix sprang, because he thought that they had become too driven by “market research” and hence catered increasingly to middle-of-the-road or middle-class interests. Ten years ago, while living in New York City, his hometown, he quit his job in journalism and traveled on a one-way ticket to the Chiapas in southern Mexico.

Giordano was drawn to the Chiapas because it was the scene of the famous uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), or Zapatistas, in 1994, an indigenous and leftwing insurgency that persists, and which has revitalized radical political movements on the left throughout the world for over a decade. Upon arriving in the Chiapas, he set out to learn to speak and write in Spanish, as well as to learn about local popular and revolutionary movements, by “shutting up and doing a lot of listening.”

Local people with whom Giordano conversed encouraged him to return to journalism, despite his professed disillusionment. They had a great interest in stories of their struggles reaching a wider national and international readership. So in 1999, he began to report for the Boston Phoenix again. His reports at first covered the political and economic impact of the “war on drugs” in Mexico and Central America, but they soon extended to covering popular movements in the region.

Lawsuit against Narco News et al.

Despite a successful re-entry into journalism in the United States, reporting on the topics mentioned above, he was unable to find a publisher of a 10-part series on trafficking in narcotics and related money laundering, in which he made the case that virtually “everyone except the guerrilleros were involved.” He was sharing information with the Mexican journalist Mario Menéndez, who had taken photographs of crews on Colombian military gunboats unloading cocaine on docks in Mexico. Giordano, trying to help Menéndez find readers outside of Mexico, put them on his recently established Narco News website.

Not only did Giordano and Menéndez accuse Mexican officialdom of complicity in the drug trade, but they also accused Roberto Hernández Ramírez, CEO of the National Bank of Mexico, Banamex (now part of Citigroup), of knowingly being involved in laundering money from drug-trafficking transactions. Banamex subsequently filed a lawsuit against Giordano, Menéndez, and Narco News in the New York Supreme Court. The court threw the suit out for two reasons: firstly, because of a technicality, there being no clear distinction between the legal “persons” of Giordano and Narco News; and secondly, and more importantly, because of the precedent set by “Sullivan v. The New York Times,” which determined that a journalist could not be sued for denigration of a public figure unless malice of forethought could be demonstrated.

After Banamex’s lawsuit was thrown out, Narco News received much attention in the “mainstream media.” This in turn attracted the attention of freelance writers and aspiring journalists, who often contacted Giordano about paid or unpaid placements in Narco News’ “office.” In fact, the “office” consisted of his and Menéndez’s laptop computers, so even internships were impossible. However, the response did inspire Giordano, Menéndez, and colleagues to establish the School of Authentic Journalism in 2002, together with the Fund for Authentic Journalism, which offers scholarships for travel and reporting. The result has been a larger group of writers contributing to Narco News, whose works also now appear in as many as seven languages, while the readership has increased at least “tenfold.”

In an aside, Giordano astutely noted that the story he and Menéndez had published gave lie to the term “cartel” used to refer to family-run companies in the cocaine business. He said the so called cartels were in nowise like the cartel of oil exporting countries (OPEC), which among themselves control prices by increasing or decreasing production and distribution, but rather that the international trade in cocaine consisted of companies involved in shipment, ostensibly illicit, and international bankers who launder their money.

Zapatista “Other Campaign”

After providing background on the development of Narco News until the founding of the School of Authentic Journalism, Giordano began to talk about the recent “Other Campaign” of the Zapatistas in Mexico. In his opinion, the “Zapatismo’s” many attempts to form alliances with other popular insurrections in Mexico failed because its promulgators wished essentially to “subordinate” popular groups to its strategy. This tendency ended, he thinks, after the Sixth Declaration of the Lancandón Jungle, which called for “reciprocal respect for the autonomy and independence of organizations, for their methods of struggle, for their ways of organizing, for their internal decision-making processes, [and] for their legitimate representations.” With this, the Zapatistas declared that they were going to go directly to “the people” to hear their complaints and solicit their opinions [in a way reminiscent of the cadres of the Chinese Communist Part until the Great Leap Forward—MFL]. The Zapatistas called this project of interviews with people struggling against economic exploitation and political oppression in Mexico “La Otra Campaña” (“The Other Campaign”).

He did not express this opinion as a condemnation of the EZLN. In fact, he thinks that the Zapatistas were right, conversely, to maintain their own autonomy, by forbidding “visitors,” especially from outside of Mexico, from becoming involved in their decision-making processes. He remarked that he was “afraid” that political movements following the protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation in Seattle in 1999, particularly movements in North America, may be “infected” by “a sense of entitlement among all participants,” dedicated or otherwise. A self-described “anarcho-syndicalist,” he further opined, problematically, that the small group of people “who like political process” are of the type that become “state managers” (more below).

Returning to the topic of the Other Campaign, Giordano showed a short video on DVD, the first of several shown that evening, all of which were edited in a classic newsreel style, combining both first-person testimony with Giordano’s voice-over commentary. The Other Campaign was realized between January and July 2006, and consisted principally of the Zapatistas’ renowned spokesman Subcomandante Marcos interviewing people in various localities in the south of Mexico and presenting recapitulations of what he had heard in public forums on in rallies.

The first video concerned Cancún, Chetumal, and Playa del Carmen in the first state in Mexico that he visited, Quintana Roo. Grievances that Marcos heard in these places included the government’s reclaiming or seizing of communal agricultural land for purposes detrimental to the campesinos, or farmers (for example, the construction of a new international airport), and the lack of permanent communication of the EZLN with the suffering local populace and of both the insurgents and the campesinos with the wider world. One man called the press corps that follows Marcos around “their life-preserver.” After a hearing and taking notes on the complaints, Marcos appealed at a public rally to indigenous identification with “Maya Civilization” that will “amaze the world again.”

The Other Campaign came to the state of Oaxaca on the Pacific coast of Mexico in February. One of the first things Marcos attended to in Oaxaca was the arrest of four young men, whom the police had wounded with automatic weapons’ fire at a demonstration in San Blas Atempa and subsequently arrested as they were receiving treatment at a hospital. He went, together with photographers and members of the press to visit them in prison, and he was granted access. Giordano played another short video from DVD, in which those imprisoned described their brutal treatment and voiced again their demand that the dictatorial mayor of San Blas resign. Marcos promised to get their message out.

Popular Peoples’ Assemblies of Oaxaca

The Left, broadly speaking, in Oaxaca is very fractious, and as Marcos approached the state capital, each party, union, and indigenous people’s organization wanted his attention for itself alone. So he sent a communiqué in advance of his arrival stating that he would only meet with them together. The various groups agreed to this proposal, and it came to pass with little strife. Giordano implied that the unification of leftwing forces was of critical importance to the success of their political actions in Oaxaca in the months that followed. He expressed the belief that a genuine camaraderie developed among the motley assortment of “anarchists, hippies, Stalinists, Marxist–Leninists, Trotskyists, etc.” that made up Marcos’s entourage, and this solidarity contributed to the united front against the common enemy.

May 15 is National Teachers’ Day in Mexico, and the teachers’ union in Oaxaca, “Section 22,” has held a rally on this day every year since 1980. In 2006, the teachers rallied a demonstrated for an increase in their minimum wage in particular. The demonstration turned into an encampment in the center of the city of Oaxaca. Marcos and his entourage joined them. All together, about 15,000 people ended up occupying the center of Oaxaca.

On June 14, the governor of Oaxaca, Ulíses Ruiz Ortiz, ordered 3,000 riot police to storm the camp at dawn. They dispersed the camp temporarily, but at some point, for reasons unclear to Giordano (if not others), the 15,000 demonstrators turned on the 3,000 police, disarmed many of them, and briefly took eight of them hostage (until they were exchanged for arrested teachers). After the demonstrators defeated the police, the police went to ground and attacked out of uniform, with the assistance of thugs hired by local rightwing caciques, or bosses.

The occupation of Oaxaca lasted for 153 days, from May till October. The police made major inroads against the demonstrators on October 29, and the last of the occupation was cleared away in late November. Although the final result may seem to be a defeat for the Left, Giordano argued that the occupation should be regarded as a success for two reasons. Firstly, he compared it to the celebrated Paris Commune of 1871, which lasted only two months. Secondly, he thinks that Section 22 and its many allies have the numbers and the resources to rise again in the spring or summer of 2007—May 15, of course, being the crucial date.

During the occupation, the effective government of Oaxaca consisted of the Popular Peoples’ Assemblies of Oaxaca (acronym APPO in Spanish). In Giordano’s view, the coalition so represented was striking not simply because it represented a previously intractable unification of various groups on the Left, but especially because it represented a unification between organizations of indigenous peoples and the “institutional Left,” in the form of parties and labor unions, in Mexico. Giordano observed that indigenous people generally distrust the institutional left.

Giordano further observed that the formation of the APPO was facilitated by a section of the Mexican federal constitution that allows local governments to be based on “usos y costumbres” (practices and customs). For a long time this provision was abused to sustain local cacique despots. The indigenous people participating in the APPO employed it to important and legitimate their own forms of decision making and authority, against the possibility that political structures on both the left and right was overwhelm them. As a general comment about the difference between political culture in the south of Mexico and that in the United States, Giordano emphasized that fact that the Mexicans are able to speak as easily and as eloquently about “capitalism” and “neo-liberalism” as some North Americans are able to quote from Christian scripture.

Giordano thinks that an important struggle remains “over the media,” meaning communication of events and developments such as he covers, to an audience outside the region. He observed that although the local, state, and federal Mexican governments were “stung” by the occupation of Oaxaca and news of the brutality of the police and paramilitaries, the capitalist mass media, especially television, were able to promulgate their propaganda against the protesters widely. Having said that, he noted that there were hopeful and unexpected exceptions. For example, during the occupation of Oaxaca, some indigenous women took over a local television station and began to broadcast their own commentary live, as well as to play Narco News newsreel videos.

He also noted that voices for the poor and oppressed sometimes arise where he least expects them. For example, Nancy Davies, an elderly American pensioner who had retired to Oaxaca, has become one of Narco News’ most important contributors. He commended her for avoiding stories about the street battles, which both leftwing and rightwing media often “sensationalize,” focusing rather on day-to-day struggles, political processes, and resulting revolutionary potential. The Fund for Authentic Journalism has just published a collection of her essays titled The People Decide: Oaxaca’s Popular Assembly.

Discussion

Half an hour or so of group discussion ensued. It was quickly pointed out that Giordano seemed to have contradicted himself, since on the one hand, he had disparaged “political process” as the domain of would-be “state managers,” as opposed to “ordinary people,” and on the other, he had then extolled the virtues of the Mexican popular assemblies. Giordano hesitated for a long time before replying to this criticism. Finally he said that his previous comment applied to the United States, where, he implied, political process becomes an end in itself, whereas his latter comment applied to Mexico, where decisions taken had a certain immediacy to struggles for justice outside the political deliberative body. [Needless to say, this distinction ignores the crucial struggles for justice in the US and the importance of political process in and for them—MFL.] A member of the audience, apparently coming to Giordano’s defense, said that in his experience, the meetings of the popular assemblies were just “big ‘speak-outs’”—that is, not even discussions. Giordano hesitated again and then replied, “Actually, I hate that part of it too,” further obscuring the issue of the importance and relevance of political process.

Giordano was asked whether the infighting among leftists had ended in Oaxaca. “Yes,” he said, “for now. They don’t love each other, but they focus on the bigger enemy.” Ruiz Ortiz remains governor of Oaxaca, and their central demand, perhaps to be expressed in protests this spring, is for his legal impeachment. In the course of discussion of Oaxacan politics, the name Ernesto Ledesma [Arronte], prominent human rights activist and member of the faculty of the Universidad de la Tierra (Unitierra) of Oaxaca, came up. Ledesma seems so far successfully to have bridged the gap between the APPO and the printed mass media, particularly such left-leaning newspapers as La Jornada, in which his articles are occasionally published.

Finally, Giordano was asked how the lessons of the Oaxacan struggle could be made relevant to those in Baltimore. He answered that we could all contribute to “pro-active journalism,” which seeks out the stories of the exploited and oppressed, as Nancy Davies has. “Denouncing things is a big part of the job,” he said. [Consideration of the role of political process might be appropriate too—MFL.]

Links

Narco News: www.narconews.com

Boston Phoenix: thephoenix.com

Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional: www.ezln.org

Consejo Indígena Popular de Oaxaca: www.nodo50.org/cipo//documentos/appo9.html