All workers in tanneries and factories producing leather goods, luggage, boots, and shoes.
Submitted on Wed, 11/02/2005 - 6:09am
By Chris Arsenault, Halifax - Industrial Worker, November 2005
It's been more than eleven years since the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico said 'ya basta' or 'enough' to neo-liberalism and initiated a struggle for self-determination.
Today, the Zapatistas are creating a variety of participatory economic institutions to meet community needs: women's artisan co-ops, communal corn farming organizations, fair-trade coffee cooperatives and a non-sweatshop boot cooperative.
On a sunny day last year, myself and a delegation of foreign solidarity activists tramped the muddy hills around Oventic Caracole, in the Los Altos region, to visit the 1st of January boot co-op. Rafael Hedez, a leading activist with the co-op, and several other compañeros welcomed us with Cokes and bowls of snow-tire tough beef soup stewed on an open fire.
Inside the workshop, basically a barn with corrugated iron roof, one of the higher-end buildings in a region of thatched farm cuts, a dozen or so men busily cut leather, stick patterns and heat branding irons, large blue flames erupt as glue is melted to stick on the soles.
