Hola!

I'm finally on the road again, and finally have something worth writing! I'm in Mexico at the moment, in San Cristobal de las Casas. You should have heard of it, but you probably haven't, as our media is so uttely crap at reporting. It's the town which the Zapatista army took contol of in 1994 to try and get the attention of the goverment and the world media and make their demands for justice for the oppresd indigenous peoples of this region. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I strongly recommend do a little research. The movies "A Place called Chiapas" and "Zapatista: a big noise film" are a good place to start, but do some searches on the web and you'll find some excellent resources. Indymedia is always a good bet.

Anyway, what's becoming more and more clear to me is that mexico is one of the major battlegrounds of this war of neo-capitalism vs. the people. The goverment here has fully sold out its people in trade agreements with the U.S., Canada, France, and the U.K. to name a few. But unfortunately for them there are still millions of indigenous people living here who just refuse to dissapear, and since 1994 they have had a voice through the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas have taken control of large regions of chiapas, and set up decentralized, truly democratic systems of governance, with every decision being made by an assembly rather than a single elected leader.

The goverment hate this of course, and systematically persecute those who support the zapatista movement. The global media are also very biased in their portrayal of the Zapatistas, trying to label them as terrorists or guerillas, when in fact they have not fired a single shot since their first action in 1994.

Anyway, you can expect to hear a fair bit of me ranting on about this conflict and it's connection with all of our lives as members of the new global community that we are so proud of.

On a lighter note, I have so far managed to meet some interesting people. Our first encounter with a fellow traveller was with a guy from an fransisco called "Tree". Yep, as in branches, leaves etc. He changed it 3 years ago. He was one of the sweetest, most cosmic people I have ever met. Everything, and mean everything that happened to him (or anyone else for that matter) was in some way connected to the mayan calender. If you don't know what that is, it's like a prophesy/horoscope/obsession of many hippies and trance heads that says the world is gonna go apeshit in 2012. Look forward to that then.

Right, seeing as no one is actually reading this I might as well call it a day. :)