ABSTRACT
Perhaps more than any other recent guerrilla insurgency (e.g. FMLN, FSLN) the Zapatistas have consciously sought to use the media as an integral part of their overall political strategy, and have used an articulate, humorous, and poetic spokesperson in the masked figure of Subcommandante Marcos. As a result, the Zapatistas have received enormous national and international media attention. Thousands of column inches have been devoted to them in the print media; a Zapatista web site – including information updates, Zapatista communiqués, and analyses of the movement – exists on the world wide web,
and journal articles and books about the Zapatista rebellion have appeared in both academic and activist publications (e.g. Ross 1995; Harvey 1994; Burbach 1994). In this chapter, I wish to discuss the importance of the Zapatistas’ strategy to a critical geopolitics. In order to do so, let me first consider the importance of social movement practices for critical geopolitics.
