ABSTRACT
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) is a left-wing politico-military organization clandestinely formed in 1983 in Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico, by a group of activists from the urban revolutionary movements that emerged after 1968. Initially formed by a few thousand Indigenous peasants in a poor, isolated, little-known area of Central America, the Zapatistas became a strong source of inspiration for incredibly numerous and heterogeneous groups of activists and intellectuals all over Latin America, North America, and Europe.
This chapter offers a reexamination of the media repertoire of the Zapatistas to understand how and why media has been so central in the political agenda of Zapatista activist networks. Zapatismo owes some of its international fame to its media communication repertoire, as the conflict played out on the battlefield as well as in the news media and on the Internet. Our hypothesis is that the transnational movement’s media strategies significantly helped the Zapatista “text” circulate out of its “context,” contributing to the production of a universalist political discourse relatively independent of its social conditions of production.
