ABSTRACT
On New Year's Day 1994, a ragtag group of rebels calling themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army took control of large areas of the impoverished Mexican state of Chiapas. Their armed rebellion was to protest a pattern of economic development that was enriching a few large landowners engaged in coffee production and ranching while denying the state's impoverished majority the land reform once promised by the country's constitution. It was no coincidence that the insurrection occurred on the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) entered into force. Among its many other effects, NAFTA was projected to put hundreds of thousands of Mexican peasant farmers out of business by undercutting them with cheaper, subsidized corn from the United States.1
