Mexico's Masked Marxists: Meet the Zapatista Front of National Liberation Andrew Self - The Conversation
go to original January 13, 2014

On New Year's day in 1994, rebels from Mexico's indigenous community seized several towns in the south of the country, taking the government by complete surprise. Father Gonzalo Ituarte, a Roman Catholic priest who witnessed the uprising, describes the dramatic events. (BBC/NEWS)

On New Year’s Day 1994, the world was taken by surprise. A group of indigenous people staged a rebellion against a Mexican state that had continued the trajectory of racism, neglect, genocide and exploitation which started with the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas over 500 years ago.

The Zapatista Front of National Liberation (EZLN) invoked the name of legendary Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata but had a sophisticated and thoroughly modern agenda. They not only stood for the indigenous people of the southern state of Chiapas, so long neglected by corrupt rulers in Mexico City, but they also spoke out against Mexico’s accession on New Year’s Day of 1994 to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

What makes the Zapatistas novel, and worth the countless books, articles and revolutionary tourism that has been afforded to them, is that their path is grounded in democracy, dialogue, inclusivity and mutual recognition of dignity. The Zapatistas have attempted to build alternative community and political structures which work through direct democracy. They also promote autonomous projects on the lands that were occupied during the early stages of the rebellion.

The Zapatistas did not arrive in a vacuum. They came out of the slow-cooking cauldron of oppression in one of Mexico’s poorest states, Chiapas. With their non-prescriptive leftist ideology, the Zapatistas were well suited to recuperate the class struggle in Chiapas, turning it into a campaign for national democratic reform.

Read the rest at The Conversation

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