The Zapatistas in 2015

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Many questions always come up when the Zapatista Movement is mentioned. Many have heard of them, some may know about their story, others have no clue about who they are. For being so far away, their actions and words have had considerable reach throughout the world. Their movement has been a long-term, sustained effort to build autonomy for indigenous peoples in Mexico and beyond, as well as facing and dismantling the neoliberal capitalist system that affects people around the globe. The Zapatistas have many principles guiding their work; many of them applicable to the work people in base movements are doing here in the US. For that, a quick retelling of their story might be helpful.

Chiapas is a southern state in Mexico, neighboring Guatemala. It has a rich pre-hispanic, colonial, and contemporary hxstory that dates back and continues through with the indigenous Maya populations who have lived in the area for centuries. There are many Maya languages spoken in Chiapas –as there are in the rest of the Maya region—including Tseltal, Tsotsil, Tojolabal, Zoque, and Chol.
In 1523, the Spanish arrived to the region to subdue and colonize, and in 1528 the second city ever built in the Americas was founded up in the Highlands, named San Cristobal de Las Casas. Many fincas [farms] controlled by Spaniards forced indigenous communities to work in coffee plantations all around the region of Chiapas. After Mexican independence, many land reforms were launched by Benito Juarez’ presidency, in which Church property, along with indigenous communal land ownership, were expropriated. This was part of the reforms that intended to solidify Mexico as a liberal nation mirrored on the political systems of Europe that were based on individualism, pushing aside the collective organization used among indigenous and rural communities for decision-making and control of resources. The result was that collectively owned land was put up for sale in the market, and only those with money could buy such land. This strengthened the rich Spanish and mestizos known as latifundistas, who already owned vast amounts of land.

         
For decades, indigenous communities were exploited at the expense of the rich mestizos who lived in fincas and the main towns, like San Cristobal de Las Casas. The city itself was originally –and remains to this date- designed to keep the Spanish people and their descendants at the center, while having Indian neighborhoods in the periphery that worked plots of land and interacted with the frays, the mediators between both populations. For five centuries, indigenous peoples lived under colonial relations –even when the Spaniards left—and lived with little land of their own, subject to labor exploitation. In the second half of the 20th century, many changes in the religious, economic, and political landscape that cannot be addressed in this article contributed to a mobilization of indigenous communities to fight for their interests. Among those in the Lacandon Forest, a tiny group founded the The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1983. They would stay quiet, for ten years, while their military training took place and their numbers and community support grew. Their clandestine period came to an end when in January 1st, 1994, they declared war to the Mexican government and condemned the NAFTA agreement that president Salinas de Gortari signed the year before. This war came to affect not only the relations between mestizos and indigenous peoples in Chiapas, but the debates about what being Mexican means, as well as the perspectives on globalization, resistance, and anti-capitalist philosophy and practice.