ABSTRACT
Readers may wonder why we have opted to devote an entire chapter to a localized indigenous social and political movement that became publicly visible only a decade ago, on January 1, 1994, in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. At midnight on that date, several thousand armed Mayas and a number of nonindigenous allies, comprising the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), occupied four major Chiapas towns for several days. This event constituted an acute political embarrassment for the Mexican government, for January 1, 1994, coincided precisely and not coincidentally with the beginning date of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), whose approval by the U.S. Congress had required enormous concessions by Mexico, all of which were perceived by the Zapatistas as being against the interests of Mexico’s rural poor in general and indigenous people in particular. Within days, the Mexican army drove the Zapatistas out of the urban centers and declared a victory over the insurgents, although to this day (January 2006), the Zapatistas hold de facto political control in parts of over thirty of the 100 municipios in the state. (The municipio is the administrative unit below the state, equivalent to the county in the United States. It is variously referred to in this chapter as township or nonitalicized municipio.)
Members and followers of the EZLN number today only a few hundred thousand, and they are impotent as a military force. Indeed, they have very recently forsworn violence as a negotiating strategy. However, their symbolic and political presence is a reality that the Mexican state cannot ignore, for they constitute an articulate and well-organized challenge to Mexico’s political class itself. By “political class” they refer to the entire current political system, spanning ideological positions from right to left, that fields local, state, and national candidates. They remain at war with what they call the illegitimate Mexican state, not the Mexican nation. Many political analysts believe that the Zapatista rebellion, and the apparent inability of the Mexican state to resolve the public policy issues that it raised, had a great deal to do with the defeat of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Mexico’s ruling party for
over 70 years, in the presidential election of 2000. The winner of that election and past president, Vicente Fox, of the right-of-center Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), has not delivered much cause for optimism. PAN in fact mustered the votes in Congress to change the original language of the San Andrés Peace Accords with the Zapatistas that government representatives signed in February 1996, so as to effectively kill the peace agreement. (We are grateful to Duncan M. Earle for his help and critical commentary on the introductory section to this chapter.)
The Zapatistas themselves declared and honored a unilateral ceasefire shortly after the original insurrection and have recently indicated their intention to participate in the national political process. Indeed, on January 1, 2006 (the twelfth anniversary of the launching their movement), they began a major public relations tour, projected to last six months, to all of Mexico’s 31 states with the goal of reshaping the nation’s politics and influencing the recently completed July 2 , 2006 presidential election. They have publicly declared, as of January 1, 2006, that they will “stand Mexico on its head” with a new left coalition. We know that they oppose candidates from all three major national political parties (PRI, center; PAN, right; and PRD, Partido Revolucionario Democrático, left), and that they are determined to critique the failure of the Mexican political class in general for their failure even to listen to the issues that are important to the rural and urban poor. The substance of their current position on national issues can at this point be inferred from their public statements and actual practice in the past. The message is simple: They insist on grassroots listening and response-a bottom-up approach to representation and governance. They demand and practice an anti-ideological stance. Zapatismo and its leadership are in constant dialogue among themselves and with their allies in “civil society” (meaning national and international allies and potential allies) about what issues need to be addressed. There is no fixed platform or ideology. Zapatismo and its leadership have in fact evolved since the beginning of the rebellion through their preferred dialectical process of listening and response, such that issues like women’s rights, youth involvement, the role of labor and peasant organizations, the role of ejido organizations, the use of alcohol, and the encouragement of sustainable and profitable agricultural practices-not important in the beginning and centrally important now-are moving to the fore through what has been called radical democracy, in dialogue both with itself and with civil society (Earle and Simonelli 2005; Harvey 1998; Nash 1997).
