It's 6:15 in the morning and the sun is starting to rise over the forested hills of San Cristobal, Chiapas. This will be our third day here. In an hour, we will get on the back of a pickup truck headed for Oventic, one of the Zapatista communities. There we will participate in the Zapatista encounter with the peoples of the world for the next four days. We will be camping along with hundreds of other participants and attending workshops on different aspects of the Zapatista movement. Tomorrow night there will be a No Border Camp meeting with activists from the States, Mexico and hopefully other countries and we are all very excited. Yesterday we had a very good meeting about the camp with about 15 people from the States and Mexico and there was a lot of interest and very good discussions. Vamos a ver!

Right now, there is a lot of optimism in the air. We spoke to two Oaxacan anarchists who have been organizing for a few hours yesterday and they had many interesting things to say. One thing is something that I talked about later with lotus which is that the struggle in Oaxaca can't be conceived as having a defined victory or defeat. They said that because of the repression in the central valleys, the focus of organizing will now be in the more rural areas. Also, they said that they have learned a lot from the first phase and now hopefully will be able to incorporate that knowledge into their future tactics. They talked about ways that anarchists can participate in a mass movement where there are diverse ideologies - when to compromise and when to say that groups need to take autonomous action.

The struggle in Oaxaca is not over. The first battle has finished and now both sides are regrouping, reorganizing and preparing for the next confrontation. A few hours before we caught our bus for Chiapas from Oaxaca, we looking in on the APPO State Council meeting which had about 100 people from diverse organizations. During this meeting, a few delegates left to talk to us and receive donations that we had purchased with the funds from the Oaxaca benefit. People were positive and excited that the solidarity movement in the States has been so strong. We found out later that in that meeting it was decided to set up barricades (for the first time in a month) in front of the jails where political prisoners are currently being held and to realize another mass mobilization on January 27. Many leaders of the popular movements in Oaxaca are in jail, in hiding or in other states. Despite all this, the spirit of resistance of the Oaxacan people has not been crushed. If anything, the repression that they have experienced has emboldened them. One person told us that now the general population no longer fears the tear gas and confrontations with the police. I saw a picture yesterday in a San Cristobal cafe of a elderly Oaxacan woman in a demonstration with googles and a surgical mask on. La lucha sigue!