“It’s a long way to Nottinghamshire,
Or to Chiapas, Mexico,
But you can’t tell me that Robin Hood ain’t real
Since the Feds caught up with Oso Blanco!”
– The Martyr Index, by “Oso Blanco”“I hope to inspire people to have courage beyond their daily understanding. As we truly have endless love and power within.”
– Letter from Oso Blanco, 6/4/2019
by Clayton P
Official sources say that Oso Blanco, to whom the State refers by his birth name, Byron Shane Chubbuck, is responsible for about 20 bank robberies from 1998-1999, all undertaken for the express purpose of aiding the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional/Zapatista National Liberation Army) in Chiapas. Oso Blanco himself puts the number of “robberies” at closer to 50.
“The bankers got bailed out. Oso Blanco went to prison.”
There’s a satisfying symmetry—I won’t call it poetic justice—in using money from banks to fund revolutionary struggle. Banks are in the business of burying people’s hopes and of destroying their dreams. But the goals of freedom-fighters like the Zapatistas—and like Oso Blanco himself—are to keep hope alive, to nurture the revolutionary dream of a world free from oppression and exploitation.
Continue reading “Love and Power: The Ballad of Oso Blanco Revisited”
Photo from the EZLN Roundtable April 5-15.
The Free 