Mexico's Zapatista Rebellion, Solidarity and Grassroots Organizing in Los Angeles teleSUR
go to original May 4, 2015

On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), after a decade of military training and political organizing across Southern Mexico, launched its rebellion against historic state-sanctioned violence in Mexico and the signing of the neoliberal North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada and Mexico. The Zapatista movement inspired an unforeseeable outpour of international solidarity. This solidarity also gave rise to countless other collectives, organizations and movements across the globe inspired by zapatismo, including the Chiapas Support Committee based in Los Angeles, California, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.

The world watched in awe as the EZLN took over the streets, towns and municipalities across Chiapas the first days of 1994. Immediately, delegations of Mexican nationals and citizens from around the world began to arrive in Chiapas to document the news of this 20th century Mayan indigenous uprising and to physically stand in solidarity with this emerging movement.

The Chiapas Support Committee* slowly formed after concerned community members, students, faculty and other members of the Claremont Colleges and surrounding San Bernardino Valley, and by extension greater Los Angeles, made coordinated efforts to organize human rights accompaniment delegations to Chiapas with the purpose of informing and encouraging a Zapatista-inspired movement in our own communities.

Since then, the Chiapas Support Committee has expanded its work into other regions across the Americas, engaging with popular movements fighting for liberation in Haiti, Honduras, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Venezuela. Twenty years later, the committee is now a transnational collective made up largely of working class women of color with an internationalist feminist and queer analysis dedicated to building community across borders throughout the Americas, guided by Zapatista principles of autonomy and self-determination.

Today, as we watch events unfold in Baltimore, Maryland, we are charged in the United States and internationally to protect, prepare and empower our communities to take on the incredible responsibility to think the unthinkable and create the impossible as we realize the Zapatista’s famous slogan to “build a world where many worlds fit.”

Read the rest at teleSUR

Photo: flickr

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