Zapatistas

Source
A Zapatista was originally a member of the revolutionary guerilla movement founded around 1910 by Emiliano Zapata, whose Liberation Army of the South (Ejército Libertador del Sur) fought during the Mexican Revolution for the redistribution of agricultural land.

More recently, the term is now used for a member of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), which in 1994 launched a popular uprising for agrarian and broader social reform.

Both movements started in southern Mexico — the 1910 movement in Morelos and the more recent one in Chiapas.

The Intercontinental Encounters for Humanity and against Neoliberalism resulted in various other Zapatista groups emerging outside of Mexico, including the West Essex Zapatistas in East London.

Zapatista Army of National Liberation
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) is an armed revolutionary group based in Chiapas, one of the poorest states of Mexico. Their social base is mostly indigenous but have supporters in urban areas; their most visible leader by far is Subcommander Marcos.

Going public in 1994 with the initial goal of overthrowing the Mexican government, some consider the Zapatista movement the first post-modern revolution, by defining both their rights and the kind of government they should have. It also incorporated modern technologies like satellital telephony and the Internet as a way to obtain domestic and foreign support to traditional guerrilla tactics.

Hostilities ended in a few months and there have been almost no full-scale confrontations since. The Mexican government pursued a policy of low-intensity warfare in an attempt to control the rebellion. After 2000 they mostly disappeared from public view, opaqued by the electoral victory of Vicente Fox, the first opposition president in 72 years. In June 2005 they recovered media attention by declaring themselves in "Red Alert", apparently in reaction to news that marijuana fields were discovered in Chiapas, with conflicting versions on whether they were found in Zapatista-controlled territory, calling attention on their unknown funding methods. A few days later, Subcommander Marcos downplayed the importance of the Red Alert, saying it was just to organize an assembly to vote on further policies.

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Since December 1994, the Zapatistas had been gradually forming several autonomous municipalities, independent of the Mexican government. By August 2003 these municipalities had evolved into local government "juntas", implementing communitarian food-producing programs, health and school systems, supported in part by NGOs. Then several "Juntas of Good Government" formed by representatives of the autonomous municipalities and overseen by the EZLN were created as an upper level of government under the motto mandar obedeciendo (to command by obeying the people). These renegade municipalities had been tolerated by the government despite being a state within the state, to the point the impose taxes on their inhabitants.

Noam Chomsky Interview
Zack de la Rocha: Thank you for joining us today. Just a few questions here, starting off with a question about NAFTA.

In my opinion, one of the current myths about the North American Free Trade Agreement, is that its passage would bring about prosperity for everyone involved, that the flow of cheap products from Mexico into the U.S. would save consumers money, and therefore increase their living standards, that the flow of capital into Mexico would create jobs, benefiting the people of both countries. But it seems pretty clear now that the opposite is happening.

So my first question is, what were the real terms set out by the North American Free Trade Agreement, and what were their real consequences?

Noam Chomsky: Actually, we don't even have to argue much about the consequences, because it's now generally conceded that the hullabaloo about all of the great things that were going to happen was just hype. It was intended to ram NAFTA through, and they really didn't expect those good things to happen. It had nothing to do with raising the economies, it had to do with locking them into the reforms.

What they call "the reforms" are the so-called "neo-liberal structural adjustment programs" that were imposed on Mexico in the early 80: opening up the economy to foreign imports, cutting back on public subsidies, putting an end to efforts to develop the economy internally (like import substitution), and so on. Essentially opening it up to foreign exploitation, and ending independent development.

That's "reforms." Now you've got to lock that in. What does it mean to "lock it in?" Well, NAFTA's kind of like a treaty, and that means that if another government comes along in Mexico, it's not going to be able to get out of NAFTA easily. If the United States wants to get out of a treaty, it's no problem, really, just tell them to go shove it.

So you want to make sure that you lock Mexico into the reforms. Well actually, there's a little more background to look at. Around 1990, just in the planning stages, there was a Latin American strategy development workshop in Washington, with all kinds of big shots concerned with Mexico. And they talked about U.S.-Mexican relations, and they said that the relations are basically okay, but they said there's one possible cloud on the horizon. And then came the following, this is almost a quote. The danger is that there might be what they called a "democracy opening" in Mexico: a new, more democratic government might try to pursue nationalist objectives, independently of the concerns of the United States. As long as Mexico's a dictatorship, that's no big problem. But a "democracy opening" could have all kinds of effects. If there's more democracy, people may want to pursue their own interests. So we have to make sure there's no democracy opening. And if we can't stop that, we want to make sure that it can't achieve anything.

That's what it means to lock Mexico into the reforms: even if there's this dreaded democracy opening, and the population of Mexico has more of a say in their affairs, there isn't going to be a lot they can do about it, because we'll have them locked in by treaty. That's basically the logic of NAFTA.

What about the effects on people? Wages have continued to fall, just as during the reform periods, so that they're now maybe twenty to thirty percent below what they were when NAFTA was passed. And there are reasons for it. One of the expected consequences of NAFTA, of opening up Mexican borders, is that they'd get flooded by highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness exports. You pour those into Mexico, and it drives poor peasants off the farms, because they can't produce for the local market anymore. And that has effects all through the society. The people they deal with can't function, and it ends up with millions of people being driven into the cities, where they lower wages. You're getting very impoverished people being driven into the cities, you get a massive workforce, you don't have to have unions, you don't have to have benefits, you can drive wages down as low as you like, and that's more profit for the corporation. As the wages go down, the profits go up. For the corporate sector, and for a sector of Mexican wealth too, NAFTA's doing fine. But for most of the population, it was extremely harmful.