On January 1, 2006, the Zapatistas proposed an initiative to tour all of Mexico in order to articulate broad networks of collaboration and solidarity among localized social movements “from the grassroots and the left”, putting into practice two central points of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle of June 2005. The tour around different Mexican states was baptized as “The Other Campaign,” a counter-reference to the presidential campaign that was beginning at that time. The objective of The Other Campaign wasn’t, however, to make electoral promises, but rather to listen to different voices of social and popular movements at the margin of the system, whose struggles necessarily leave them outside the framework of political parties and institutions. This first phase meant learning about other ways of struggling against the oppression of the social, economic and political system imposed from above.

On January 1, 2006, the Zapatistas proposed an initiative to tour all of Mexico in order to articulate broad networks of collaboration and solidarity among localized social movements “from the grassroots and the left”, putting into practice two central points of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle of June 2005. The tour around different Mexican states was baptized as “The Other Campaign,” a counter-reference to the presidential campaign that was beginning at that time. The objective of The Other Campaign wasn’t, however, to make electoral promises, but rather to listen to different voices of social and popular movements at the margin of the system, whose struggles necessarily leave them outside the framework of political parties and institutions. This first phase meant learning about other ways of struggling against the oppression of the social, economic and political system imposed from above.

A second phase of The Other Campaign began on January 1, 2007 with the objective being to brainstorm common strategies for struggles to stop the destruction provoked by neoliberalism in the communities of those “from below.” The campaign, therefore, emerged in defense of land and territories of indigenous pueblos. That focus was determined largely as a response to the neoliberal reforms undertaken by the administration of Salinas de Gortari in 1992. Article 27 of the Constitution, which had originally declared lands and waters as public, therefore protecting small farmers of ejidos, was amended to allow for privatization of lands. For indigenous communities, land transcends its utilitarian value, and given the process of privatization under way, the Zapatistas publicly expressed their vehement opposition to all projects and policies that would entail changes in land usage on territories where indigenous communities live, including cattle ranching, agro-business, and foreign resorts for tourism. The campaign in defense of Land and Territories aims to protect the integrity of the 250,000 hectares recovered by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1994 whose beneficiaries have suffered a series of threats of displacements, both legal and illegal, by government-sponsored paramilitary organizations.