Dispatches from Resistant Mexico is a series of short documentaries from southern Mexico, each depicting one of the thousands of pockets of resistance throughout Latin America that are in struggle against what the Zapatistas call “the capitalist hydra”.

These individuals and communities affirm a way life in opposition to capitalist economics and values. They fight the devastating neoliberal “development” and “mega-projects” that loot resources and land from indigenous communities and threaten forms of life that have survived despite 500 years of colonization.

The resistance shares many of the principles and goals of the Zapatistas: autonomy from the capitalist economy, communalist self-government rooted in indigenous collective traditions, an end to the subordination of women and a respectful, life-affirming, non-dominating relation to nature. Indigenous women are at the forefront of many of these ongoing struggles.

In this latest dispatch of the series, we follow Faustino Guzman Cruz of the Social Economic Development of Indigenous Mexicans (DESMI). Cruz is working together with the local Chol community to promote the ideology and practice of agroecology, and to discourage the widespread use of pesticides and herbicides among small farmers in favor of more traditional and ecological-friendly farming methods.

Dispatches from resistant Mexico