Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) has announced it will begin selling organic coffee from Chiapas to help migrants persecuted by US President Donald Trump.
Working alongside allied international distributors, the EZLN will use coffee sale funds to provide financial assistance to US deportees in Mexico. They will also use funds to support pro-immigrant resistance groups around the world protesting anti-immigrant governments.
Much has been made of US President Donald Trump’s potential impact on Mexico, but one critical story has been largely ignored in the Western media.
Coverage of Mexico in the Trump era has been dominated by speculation over the fate of the stumbling Mexican peso, the possibility of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) collapsing and, of course, the wall.
Meanwhile, a seismic shift is quietly taking place in Mexican politics: the right wing is the weakest it has been in generations, while the left is seeing a historic resurgence.
A highway blockade in support of Mexico's striking teachers was increasingly gaining popular support in the capital of the southern state of Chiapas, La Jornada reported on July 13.
The protest in the city of Tuxtla Gutierrez was organised as a popular assembly. As of July 12, it had been active for 15 days, involving 3500 demonstrators in support of the radical CNTE teachers union.
Public school teachers in Mexico City launched an indefinite strike on July 5, called by leaders of the dissident National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) teachers union to protest the education reforms imposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Ten years after the Oaxaca Commune of 2006 — when for nearly six months workers, students, peasants, women, youth, indigenous peoples and urban poor brought the government of the southern Mexican state to a virtual standstill — teachers in the Mexican state are back on the barricades. Once again, the state has responded with brute force.
