ABSTRACT
Policy makers and citizens in the West ignore these pressures at their peril. In Chiapas, Mexico, Zapatista insurgents rose against land scarcity and insecure land tenure produced by ancient inequalities in land distribution, by rapid population growth among groups with the least land, and by changes in laws governing land access. The insurgency rocked Mexico to the core, helped trigger the peso crisis and reminded the world that Mexico remains-despite NAFTA and the pretenses of the country’s economic elites-a poor and profoundly unstable developing country.
