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THE ZAPATISTA UPRISING, 30 YEARS ON  
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Bernard Duterme
January 10, 2024
Equal Times
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_ Despite their relative isolation, the Zapatistas intend to continue
influencing social dynamics. They have demonstrated that mobilisation
for diversity doesn’t have to mean identity-base tensions, and can
accompany the fight for social justice. _

Displaced women from the Otomi Indigenous community of Querétaro
commemorate the 30th anniversary of the uprising, (Gerardo
Vieyra/NurPhoto via AFP)

 

It’s been exactly thirty years today. Three decades now separate us
from an event that marked the end of the previous century. On 1
January 1994, the very day that the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA)
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the United States, Mexico and Canada came into force, a few thousand
Indigenous Mayans from the state of Chiapas in south-east Mexico,
armed with old rifles, “declared war”
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army and “dictator” Carlos Salinas. Their spokesperson,
Subcomandante Marcos, one of the survivors of the core group of
Guévarist academic revolutionaries, had entered the region
clandestinely ten years earlier to create the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional,
EZLN) and “ignite the revolution”.

While the momentum of the armed conflict was quickly snuffed out, the
“Zapatistas”, their faces now covered by their distinctive
balaclavas – paradoxically in order “to be seen” – remained
mobilised against all odds, for “freedom, democracy and justice”
– and for “dignity”. The first few years following the events of
that New Year’s Day were marked by three concomitant processes:
erratic negotiations between the insurgents and the government, a
strategy of (para)military harassment of the rebel communities by the
authorities, and a succession of explosive encounters with national
and international civil society, initiated by the Zapatistas.

All three efforts failed. Both president Salinas and Congress refused
to implement the only agreement signed (in February 1996) with
Zapatista leadership on the right to self-determination and respect
for Indigenous peoples. The “low-intensity war” waged at the same
time against Zapatista villages strengthened rather than weakened the
movement. And attempts to integrate the left movements of Mexico into
a new organisational dynamic created more friction than synergy. Only
the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), set up in 1996 to unite
Indigenous peoples across Mexico in their struggle against
exploitation and discrimination, would survive these efforts.
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Redistribution and recognition

For more than two decades, in the absence of de jure autonomy, the
rebels of Chiapas have exercised “de facto autonomy” in the
organisation of daily life in their territory. They control a highly
politically fragmented area roughly the size of Belgium where they are
trying to build a “different world” that is radically
democratic, “anti-capitalist”
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Mexican state. The Zapatistas’ critique of the dominant model is
articulated through action and developed over time. Their new
emancipatory perspective
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“redistribution and recognition” is expressed both in their form
of self-governance that seeks to “command by obeying,” as well as
in their repeated intercontinental invitations to articulate struggles
“from below and to the left”.

In its early days, the Zapatista rebellion was often compared to the
Central American revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s,
either in an attempt to stigmatise it or to set it apart. Both
movements, which had similar “calendars and geographies” to borrow
a Zapatistas expression, represented historic insurrections against
the established order led by popular movements who challenged
repressive regimes. The very names of the driving forces behind these
political upheavals – the Sandinista National Liberation Front
(FSLN) in Nicaragua, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front
(FMLN) in El Salvador and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
(EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico – reveal more than just a structural link.
In their early writings, both the FSLN and the FMLN, as well as the
EZLN, identify “socialism” as their ultimate goal.

There were, however, many significant differences between the Central
American movements and the Mayan rebellion in Chiapas, and in some
ways they were quite opposite: whereas the former were more statist
and “verticalist,” tending to advocate change “from above,”
the latter was more autonomist and “horizontal,” emphasising
transformation “from below”. The Zapatistas have added
environmentalism, communalism, differentialism, etc. to the various
registers of emancipation – republican, nationalist, socialist,
Christian, third-worldist, etc. – used by the Central American
revolutionaries. Guided by the principle of “equal and different,”
the Zapatistas significantly have also incorporated feminism and
increasing awareness of gender issues much more resolutely than their
predecessor movements.

The persistence, political coherence and moral integrity of the
Zapatista rebellion, as well as its fidelity to its original ideals,
also distinguish it radically it from the revolutionaries of the FMLN
in El Salvador [[link removed]] and the FSLN in
Nicaragua [[link removed]]. The latter have, at
best, abandoned their founding objectives and, at worst, turned on
their own movements and “eaten their own children”. The
Zapatistas, on the other hand, have stubbornly persisted, continuing
their resistance even as conditions in their region deteriorate
dramatically. As the EZLN predicted in a 2021 communiqué and as the
local Catholic Church lamented as recently as last September, Chiapas
is currently experiencing unprecedented levels of insecurity
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situación de violencia y alarde criminal que no se había visto por
acá_” (an unprecedented level of violence and crime in the area),
as the excellent Mexican writer and journalist Hermann Bellinghausen,
who has been travelling the region for decades, explains.

Chiapas is exploding

“Chiapas is exploding,” writes Gloria Muñoz Ramírez in October
2023 in _La Jornada_. “The failed state [there] is overwhelmed
and/or infiltrated by criminal groups”. The population is subjected
to daily harassment by armed gangs and crime
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from threats and racketeering to kidnapping, land theft, forced
displacement, forced recruitment and murder.

The recent arrival of large numbers of major drug cartels, previously
more active in the centre and north of the country, has not helped,
nor has the surge in Central and South American migrants. Encouraged
to head north to the United States by President Joe Biden’s
misguided immigration policies
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migrants are preyed upon by lawless smugglers as soon as they enter
Mexico. According to Muñoz Ramírez, these dynamics, along with the
both Indigenous and non-Indigenous paramilitary units that have been
tearing the region apart for even longer, some with government
complicity, have turned Chiapas into a “powder keg”.

These conditions of social breakdown, bloody skirmishes and settling
of scores over territorial control of drug trafficking, arms, migrants
and even mining products, have made it difficult for the Zapatista
self-government to peacefully administer the daily life of its
“communities, collectives and autonomous assemblies” (whose
reorganisation the Zapatistas have just announced
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On the one hand, their own economic, agro-ecological, educational,
health and judicial activities, which form a part of their alternative
approach, are precarious and fragile, dependent as they are on
ephemeral international solidarity; on the other, they are faced with
a significant number of adversaries.

These include the rival Indigenous peasant organisations who, with the
consent or aid of the government authorities, claimed ownership of the
land “recovered” by the Zapatistas during the insurrection or,
failing that, set fire to Zapatista barns or schools. The federal army
is also omnipresent in the areas between the EZLN’s zones of
influence. At best, they limit themselves to dissuading any further
large-scale “subversive” demonstrations. Finally, their greatest
adversary and indeed that of Indigenous Mexican activists as a whole,
are the major public and private, national and multinational investors
pursuing their “mega-projects” – mining, airport, energy,
motorway, agro-industrial, rail
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for “development,” without the “free, prior and informed
consent” of the populations living in the affected territories.

Unprecedented scope

Thirty years after the uprising of 1 January 1994, the question
arises: is the battle half-lost or half-won? While the rebels of
Chiapas may not have succeeded in reforming Mexico’s constitution,
decolonising its institutions or even gaining a foothold in the
country’s political scene, they have nonetheless given unprecedented
local, national and international visibility to peasant and Indigenous
struggles for redistribution and autonomy.

Despite their relative political and geographical isolation, the
Zapatistas intend to continue influencing the balance of power and
social dynamics. Zapatismo is thus fully involved in the Indigenous
movements which, from the bottom up in Latin America, have
demonstrated that mobilisation for respect for diversity doesn’t
have to mean identity-based tensions, and that it can go hand in hand
with the fight for social justice and the rule of law. Global
recognition of their accomplishments, however fleeting, feeds and is
fed by their rediscovered dignity.

This article has been translated from French.

_Bernard Duterme is director of the Tricontinental Centre (CETRI) in
Belgium. He has authored or coordinated several books on social
movements in Latin America and on issues of development and the
environment in North-South relations._

_Equal Times is a trilingual news and opinion website focusing on
labour, human rights, culture, development, the environment, politics
and the economy from a social justice perspective._

* Zapatistas
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* Indigenous Rights
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* Mexico
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* Chiapas
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