The Zapatistas had a romantic appeal. Isaac Guzman/AFP/Getty Images
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As the early morning mist began to rise over the rainforest thicket, I shook my boots to ensure no scorpions had taken shelter during the night. The black flag with the red star flickered in the breeze. It was New Year’s Day, 2006, and I was in the heart of Zapatista rebel territory, a guest in the autonomous municipality of la Garrucha in the Chiapas region of south Mexico. This particular municipia was the first to open its doors to foreign journalists hoping to learn more about the indigenous insurgent movement, which rose to prominence just over a decade before.
The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) announced themselves to the world on 1 January 1994, when they overthrew and temporarily occupied various Mexican centres for political power. The timing was symbolic, corresponding with the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect. Outraged at the treaty’s effective removal of Article 27 from the Mexican constitution, which guaranteed indigenous peoples their rights to collective lands, they became the first organisation to declare war on an internationally recognised treaty. Their campaign came to resemble a war from February onwards, as Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo launched an offensive to capture or destroy them.
In 2006, I was part of a delegation accompanying the Zapatistas as they returned to the streets of San Cristobal in what they called the “Other Campaign”, a broad movement of protest and civic resistance. Our vehicle followed directly behind their leader, the Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos. He led the rebellious cavalcade out of the canyon on a motorcycle, inevitably recalling the spirit of Che Guevara. For many activists of the Nineties, Marcos had filled a similar space to Che: the exotic radical who combined the roles of intellectual and man-of-action. And like Che’s movement, the Zapatistas’ idealism eventually shattered when it collided with the raw realities of power.
Often described as the “poorest of the poor”, the Zapatistas connected their fight to a broader history of persecution. “We are a product of 500 years of struggle,” their First Declaration proclaimed. Theirs was a fight for dignity, which was inseparable from their demands for autonomy and the constitutional right to self-govern according to indigenous laws, customs and practices. And their name bound their struggle to the nation’s revolutionary past, invoking Emiliano Zapata, who led the Mexican revolution of 1910.
But though the Zapatistas wove themselves into a tapestry of Mexican history, many observers felt what they represented was radically new. My guide in 2006, the late journalist and Beatnik poet John Ross, told me: “If the Zapatistas hadn’t appeared, we would have needed to invent them. There would not have been such a thing as the anti-globalisation movement without them. They were the catalyst.” The Zapatistas immediately became icons of a global Left, largely thanks to the non-indigenous Marcos, who positioned himself as a bridge between the two worlds. Like all revolutionaries, Marcos projected a romantic allure with his trademark military cap, smoking pipe and balaclava. He became a new kind of pin-up for a globally sensitised radical generation. Indeed, perhaps part of his appeal was precisely that he was faceless, the balaclava he wore acting as a kind of leveller, which allowed men at least to dream of the romance of being a revolutionary without the impossible handsomeness of El Che.
Beyond his mystical appeal, Marcos’s greatest accomplishment was the originality of his writings. The Zapatistas insisted that words were their most formidable weapon, and Marcos became their most recognised author. Not only did he display an astute reading of global political affairs, but his adaptation of myths and tales with human spirits and fictitious animal characters showed the true power of fabulation. If there were to be a genuine revolution, he insisted, it would need to be written in a different style. Marcos quipped he was a Marxist who, intent on converting the indigenous to his doctrine, found himself being converted to an indigenous way of seeing the world.
But his movement was soon to be lost in translation. The Zapatistas arrived at the dawn of the internet age; some commentators even claimed they were the first internet revolution. Leading security think tanks, such as the Rand corporation, called their struggle “network centric warfare”. And Manuel Castells, among the most prominent social gurus for what he called the “information age”, even fronted one of his books on “The Network Society” with Zapatista artwork. It was hard to read any study of the Zapatistas in which the new language of the digital age — networks, non-hierarchy, connectivity — wasn’t applied. Yet during my visit to la Garrucha, which was widely promoted as the first rebel stronghold to have internet, it was clear that the technology simply didn’t work. The projection of digital language onto the Zapatistas was designed purely to appeal to bourgeois radicals in the West.
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SubscribeI know what you mean about the Zapatistas having been fetishised. Subcommandante Marcos is even on the cover of a Thievery Corporation album.
“Sound the alarm, order the attack, Selassie-I soldier beat Babylon back…..“
I always had a respect for the Zapatistas. In a world where leftist revolutionary movements were always wanting to remake the world by any means necessary all they wanted to do was protect the little guy. They also held themselves to higher standards. Emiliano Zapata was a fascinating man himself.
Emiliano Zapata was a fascinating man himself. Great moustache too.
“I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.”
What I found interesting about Zapata is he could have seized all the power for himself. He could have been a dictator like many revolutionaries proved to be in the end but he refused. Maybe that is why he is so beloved in Mexico? He and Villa whatever you may think of them, never pretended to be anything other than what they were.
I become aware of the Zapatistas because the rap metal band Rage Against The Machine used to bang on about them incessantly. RATM basically promoted almost every fetishised leftist cause.
It enabled them to sell a lot of records.
Leftist communal narcissism 101!
The Zapatistas announced their presence on the stage with an armed uprising in 1994. Marcos was rarely seen in public without a weapon, and the EZLN were always armed, even though they only resorted to violence as a last resort. The ‘Western anti-globalists’ meanwhile, were never armed: though the police they confronted often were. I was one of them in Prague. There was no ‘violent confrontation’ outside of a tiny few morons. This account turns the facts on their heads in the service of the author’s argument.
Just curious. I can see who was being protested. But what was the specific objective of the protest that you were in?
I was in San Cristobal de las Casas during a Zapatista protest on New Year’s Eve. It must have been in the 90s sometime. The army rumbled through the streets to quell the uprising. As a South African, I remembered us being very interested but not panicked. I remember going for supper round the corner.
I was there in San Cristobal on New Year’s Eve and Day, 1993 into 1994. Woke up to find armed, balaclava-clad figures on the street corners, and posters everywhere explaining what they were doing (Hoy decimos: ¡Basta!). It took the Mexican airforce several days of bombing to bring the area under control. The military seemed to have been taken totally by surprise.
You are perhaps talking about a previous year?
We spent two nights effectively trapped in our hotel, where there were some young people from Mexico City in the same boat. They phoned their parents, who had no idea anything was afoot –national news blackout.
I am glad at least someone appears to remember that there was a left opposition to globalism once upon a time.
Why the hell would you evoke Che Geuvara; Fidel’s chief torturer and executioner? Just because the left, worldwide, had romanticized him, he is nothing more than a vicious murderer. You lost me at that mom not.
And a coward. “Don’t shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”
I guess little marxists want to grow up to be as handsome and dashing as his promos.
This is bizarre. The first few paragraphs show, over and over again, exactly how unique and important the Zapatistas were, and while fetishing anything is problematic, it happens and in this case pretty much deservedly.
How exactly did NAFTA nullify naive rights in Mexico? There was no such effect in the US.
I forget the details, but it had something to do with, in the event of a dispute about environmental laws or land use or the like, the NAFTA appointed tribunal would have jurisdiction and greater authority than the usual courts of the country.
My memory was that the problem was the abolishment of ejidos (?) which guaranteed a price for corns and beans in Mexico and provided an income for peasant small holders. This was eliminated leading to lower food prices for Mexicans but impoverishing the peasants. This may have not been disastrous if Mexico had industrialized faster but they were swamped by the entry of China.
Thanks. Nice piece