Introduction

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, in this story written for a ten-year-old in Mexico City, employs his alter ego Durrito the Beetle to parodically sum up two commonplace propositions about globalization. First, it is analytically opaque. Second, and more important, it is embedded in neoliberal economic policies that cause the immiserization of vast populations. It was this sense of globalization as a boot pressing down upon the less powerful that impelled, within minutes of the inauguration of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on midnight of January 1, 1994, the sudden appearance of the Zapatista uprising in Mexico’s Chiapas State. The uprising has since spread, for example, to Seattle where, from November 29 to December 2, 1999, highly visible protests from without and within monkeywrenched the third ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Activists claimed that, in the words of one graffito, “We Are Winning,” and indeed a formalized international legitimation of ‘corporate globalization’ was, for the time being, squelched. There was, however a glaring lacuna in the week’s dissident proceedings, casting protesters in a reactionary light while suggesting future victory was anything but assured. There was no

well-articulated alternative to ‘corporate globalization,’ no “agenda for ‘globalization from below’” (Wainwright, Prudham, and Glassman 2000, 9). Perhaps, were the beetle only to elaborate upon the specifics of the many things to be taken into account, he could resolve this lacuna. Perhaps he fails to do so owing to the difficulty of explaining such things to those as young as the recipient of Marcos’s communiqué. But then again, it may be due to some uncertainty on Marcos’s part himself. If so, then Marcos is not alone. Such uncertainty is something we all share when attempting to wrap our heads around such behemothic symptoms of globalization as the North American Free Trade Area.