Subcomandate Marcos on Indy Media

A leader of the Zapatista movement, Marcos, sent a video greeting from the jungles of Chiapis in Mexico to a 1997 gathering of U.S. independent media practitioners in New York City. By "neo-liberalism," he's referring to unregulated corporate-dominated globalization that often bulldozes the poor, especially indigenous people. In the video, he criticizes global corporate media for their worship of VIPs and celebrities, and for showing common people only if they kill someone or get killed. Instead of accepting corporate media or ignoring it as a lie, he urges a "third option" -- building independent media that can spread word about the realities of life, and save "the history of the present," especially for indigenous people. He compares the task of independent media makers to the heroes of "Farenheit 451" who memorized books to save them before the authorities burned them.