Zapatistas' Stubborn Resistance and Political Savvy Shows That a Different World Is Possible Immanuel Wallerstein - Al Jazeera
go to original May 5, 2014

The neo-Zapatistas: Twenty years after (Susana Gonzalez/Al Jazeera)

On January 1, 2015, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its uprising in Chiapas. In anticipation, they are engaging in a self-appraisal. In April, in the official outlet of the EZLN, Rebeldía Zapatista, Insurgent Subcommandant Moisés has published an editorial about the "war against forgetting." He says that in a mere nineteen years, the struggle of the EZLN has "kept at bay" (toreado) the evil system that has been oppressing the indigenous peoples for 520 years.

What has been the achievement of the EZLN? In what sense can it be said to have been a success? The EZLN has been scoffed at not only by the world right but by certain elements of the world left as being largely irrelevant to the world struggle against imperialism and neoliberalism. What have they accomplished, ask the critics? Has their trajectory been more than a public relations show?

This kind of criticism misses the entire point of the uprising. Their first accomplishment has been to survive against a Mexican army that has been chafing at the bit for twenty years to destroy them. They have kept it at bay not by the military prowess of the EZLN (which cannot compare with that of the Mexican army) but because of their political strength - both internally with the indigenous peoples of Chiapas and externally in the rest of the world. It is this strength that has reduced the army's efforts to no more than harassment (sometimes murderous harassment) at the edges of their autonomous communities.

What was the manifold message of the EZLN to the Mexican government and to the world when they rose up in January 1, 1995?

Read the rest at Al Jazeera

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