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The Zapatista Uprising, Chiapas, Mexico.

EZLN - Zapatista National Liberation Army

The Zapatistas first appeared on New Year’s Day, 1994, occupying government buildings in four towns across the state to demand greater equality and autonomy for the indigenous people of Chiapas. The uprising coincided with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a huge US-led drive towards privatisation and trade liberalisation which indigenous groups claimed would only grind the poor further into poverty. The Mexican army evicted the rebels within days, killing 150 people, and the group retreated to remote areas of the highlands and the Lacondon Jungle from where they drew their popular support. The propaganda war begun.

In the following months, peasants took over hundreds of the farms and ranches on which their ancestors had been forced to work - through slavery, oppression and total political and economic marginalisation - since the days of the Spanish Conquest. Eventually the government was forced to buy many of these properties from their former owners and hand them over to the peasants, but with the EZLN the Mexican state proved a lot less flexible.

The government response to the uprising has been a mixture of brutal attacks on Zapatista villages, the militarisation of the Chiapan countryside, the creation of right-wing paramilitary groups, and propaganda. The President denounced the Zapatista leaders as criminals, terrorists and foreigners intent on wrecking Mexico’s neoliberal economic dream. Typically, the rebellion has been attributed to a handful of subversives stirring up trouble amongst ignorant campesinos who don’t know any better. But ten years of on-and-off conflict have failed to dislodge the EZLN or reduce its popular support, and its message has spread from Mexico to the rest of the world. In the first days of the uprising, when asked how many members the EZLN had, one spokesman simply told the cameras: “There are fucking many of us.”

The Zapatistas take their name from Emiliano Zapata, the most radical of the various revolutionary commanders who overthrew the government in the chaos of the Mexican Civil War (he was photographed sitting in the Presidential throne alongside the legendary bandit Pancho Villa - one of the only people ever to have invaded the United States - but always refused a political position). The rebels never appear in public without their trademark black ski masks, which leave only the eyes showing, or else a red bandanna over the mouth and nose. The main spokesman of the group (there appears to be no ‘leader’), Subcommandante Marcos, is famous for his constant pipe-smoking and the poetic elegance of his many speeches, recordings and writings. In response to being questioned why the EZLN were “afraid to show their faces,” he replied: “You haven’t been interested in our faces for the last 500 years. Why should you want to see them now?” Massively outnumbered and outgunned from the start, the EZLN has always relied on the power of dialogue and the spoken word more than it can afford to rely on guns. They have, however, consistently refused to disarm, saying that only when the army hands over its weapons and closes the military bases that riddle Chiapas will the peasants consider giving up their guns.

In 1997 and 1998 the EZLN set up a number of ‘autonomous municipalities,’ outside the jurisdiction of the army, and ousted officials of the notoriously corrupt ruling PRI party, which has dominated Mexico for over seventy years. In 1999, after the Zapatistas organised a well-publicised national consultation on indigenous rights, the army launched a massive campaign of intimidation and violence in EZLN-supporting areas, displacing an estimated 21,000 people. New roads were built across the highlands, ostensibly for greater economic integration, but in reality to allow faster troop movements into non-compliant areas. The government tactic has always been to agree, publicly, with demands for indigenous rights, but at the same time to give free reign to the army and ensure that nothing really changes in the lives of Mexico’s poor.

Early in 2001, however, hundreds of Zapatistas staged a two-week journey to Mexico City which drew the support of many Mexicans. President Fox, conscious of public opinion, allowed an EZLN spokesman to speak in Congress for the first time. The government expected the Subcommandante, and many members of Congress refused to turn up when they heard that the spokesperson was actually a middle-aged Chiapan woman who no-one had ever heard of before. She started her speech by saying that these absences were exactly the reason that the EZLN had started fighting - struggling against the mentality that the voice of an ordinary indigenous woman is simply not worth hearing. Meanwhile, outside the building, Marcos appeared on stage to address a crowd that numbered in the tens of thousands. All the legendary orator said was: “Thanks, friends. Thanks, comrades. Thanks, mum. Thanks, dad. Thanks, buddy. Thanks, pal. Thanks, chum. Thanks, Mexico. Really, we’re leaving.” And shortly afterwards the Zapatista coach convoy set out back towards Chiapas.

They left behind them a massive pro-EZLN demonstration in Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitution. One of the most popular banners on view in this protest, and in others, shows how far the Zapatistas have succeeded in reaching out to people who live a world away from their remote and underdeveloped corner of the country. It reads: “Todos somos Marcos” - “We are all Marcos.” And this is perhaps the real philosophy, the real emotion, behind the idea of the black ski mask - that the movement represents everyone who lives under oppression, no matter what their country, and no matter what their face looks like.

The provisions of the San Andres Peace Accords, signed in 1996 by the government and the EZLN, have still not been implemented. Negotiations - and sporadic conflict - continue.

The Zapatista website can be found at www.ezln.org

Chiapas, Mexico on Google Maps