The Narco News Bulletin

The "Gallop of Bolívar's Horse" Draws Closer to the US Border

Narco News Needs Your Help to Make It Heard on Both Sides

By Dan Feder
Managing Editor, Narco News

September 21, 2006
This report appears on the internet at http://www.narconews.com/Issue43/article2089.html

When Narco News launched in April of 2000, Al Giordano wrote these words in his "Opening Statement" for the newspaper: "Something is happening in Mexico that the officials in Washington DC don't like. But it's not drugs: it's the gallop of Bolívar's horse, pounding toward the north."

Can you hear it getting closer, kind reader? In just 20 days, that charge northward begins again, as the Zapatista "Other Campaign" closes in on the border. In the north of Mexico, the epicenter of NAFTA, blanketed with sweatshops, new immigrant metropolises, and drug war battlefields, a masked rebel leader will meet with thousands of indigenous people, workers, students and other Mexicans who dream of building a different, an "other" future.

For more than six years since Giordano wrote those words, Narco News has exposed the hypocrisies of the "war on drugs" and related U.S. impositions in Latin America, at the same time as it has reported on movements like the Zapatistas, fighting from below for authentic democracy. These two sometimes seemingly disparate narratives will be one and the same on much of this trip. In places synonymous with "drug cartels" in the commercial press - Sinaloa, Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez - the Other Journalism will be publishing the word of the people who that commercial press ignores. "The simple and humble people who fight," as Subcomandante Marcos says, are coming to the House of Death's neighborhood.

In the Narco Newsroom, we are getting the Other Journalism with the Other Campaign - our massive international team of writers, photographers, filmmakers, translators and editorial team - back into gear, after several months of downtime. With a stolen election to reveal and an ongoing revolution in Oaxaca to cover, it has hardly been a vacation, but beginning in October, the Other Journalism will be working and producing at its highest level yet.

No other news organization, reader, has brought you into this atmosphere of struggle and change like Narco News, and it has been your support and nothing else that has allowed all of us - the dozens of different authentic journalists working in their own ways to make this unique coverage possible - to keep this project going. You have proven, time and again, that a group of essentially unpaid reporters working for a newspaper that accepts no advertising can accomplish what the commercial media never will.

As the pace picks up, as the sound of that gallop gets closer and closer to the Rio Grande, as the struggle for the freedom of Atenco's prisoners intensifies, as the stakes continue to go up for the nonviolent revolutionaries in the "Oaxaca commune," we must not fall behind. Our friends and neighbors in Mexico who are putting everything on the line must have their story told, and if we don't do it, who will?

Please, make a donation, of any size, to the Fund for Authentic Journalism today. Think about how long it takes you to earn and spend $50 or $100, North of the Border. A few hours? A day? That money could very well make the difference as to whether our team can afford the gas or ticket to the next town, or whether we can eat when we get there. And that means it could make the difference as to whether the struggles and dreams of an entire community break through the information blockade.

Make your donation online via this website:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Or send a check, made out to "The Fund for Authentic Journalism," to:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
P.O. Box 241
Natick, MA 01760

It is a time of changes in the Narco Newsroom. New journalists will be working with us as this new leg of the Other Campaign begins. I am leaving my four-year role as managing editor and webmaster this fall to better report on the drug war and democracy from elsewhere in our América, and soon we will share with you how that void will be filled. Be a part of that new chapter - help keep that horse's gallop loud and steady as his journey continues.

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor, The Narco News Bulletin
dan@narconews.com