The Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee - General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Spanish: Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena - Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), sometimes simplified as CCRI, is the joint command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).
This collective leadership of the EZLN is made up of 23 commanders and 1 subcommander (Subcommandante Marcos, who acts basically as speaker). This is one of the unique characteristics of the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena or CCRI, (Revolutionary Indigenous Clandestine Committee).
Most of the CCRI commanders are only know by their nom de guerre if at all. Their names are: Comandante Brunel, Comandante Abraham, Comandante Alejandro, Comandante Bulmaro, Comandante Daniel, Comandante David, Comandante Eduardo, "Comandanta" Esther, "Comandanta" Fidelia, Comandante Filemón, Comandante Gustavo, Comandante Isaías, Comandante Ismael, Comandante Javier, Comandante Maxo, Comandante Míster, Comandante Moisés, Comandante Omar, "Comandanta" Ramona†, Comandante Sergio, "Comandanta" Susana, Comandante Tacho, "Comandanta" Yolanda, Comandante Zebedeo.
Women in the Clandestine Revolutionary Committee demanded right to education, justice, democracy, life without poverty, and a right to be heard as Indigenous Women. Ramona, a Comandante and a popular figure of this group, spoke on behalf of the indigenous women of Mexico: "The army destroyed food and seeds; took away tools, and now we can't even sow. We women will believe in peace only if government soldiers stop threatening us, we will only believe in the government's words of peace if its army is not pointing guns at our children's heads."
Famous quotes containing the words clandestine, indigenous and/or committee:
“There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What a wise and good parent will desire for his own children a nation must desire for all children.”
—Consultative Committee On The Prima. Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School (HADOW)