Zapatista Encuentro

"Why is everyone so quiet? Is this the democracy you wanted?" So ask the Zapatistas, the group of indigenous Mexicans who, on January 1, 1994, mounted a rebellion against the implementation of NAFTA, political corruption, and the slow, unreported genocide of indigenous people worldwide. As the group expressed their demands and revealed their tactics, it quickly became obvious that they were less an armed guerilla force seeking to seize state power, and much more a social movement seeking to catalyze civil society's full democratic power. For this reason Mexican political analyst Gustava Esteva has called the Zapatista rebellion "the first revolution of the 21st century." He explains that whereas the revolutions of the 20th century were tests for state power, the Zapatista struggle was for greater local autonomy, economic justice, and political rights within the borders of their own communities. Zapatista Encuentro contains documents and communiqués from Subcomandante Marcos - the leader of the Zapatistas - from the 1996 Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. This remarkable event brought together 5,000 activists from all over the world to discuss how globalization (neoliberalism) affects us politically, culturally, economically, and socially.

Part literary criticism, part media analysis, and part marketing handbook, A Poetics of Resistance provides a refreshingly new take on the Zapatistas. While much has been written on the history of the Zapatista insurgency and on the communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos, very little has been said about Zapatismo: the ideologies, organizing methodologies, and communications strategies of the movement. The appeal of the Zapatistas, and their survival, has as much to do with their goals as with the compelling and wildly effective language and aesthetics they’ve used to convey their vision. Weaving together varied elements of poetics and symbolism, Zapatismo has emerged as something entirely new: a resolutely radical public relations campaign for human liberation. The first “postmodern revolution” presented itself to the world through a complex and evolving web of propaganda, using a wide range of media: the colorful communiqués of Marcos; the ski masks, uniforms, toy dolls, and other accoutrements of the insurgent or sympathizer; and murals, songs, and other popular cultural forms. Employing persuasive publicity, myths, and symbols, the Zapatistas both communicated their message and developed a clear aesthetic that could contain many messages at once and self-replicate on a global scale. Jeff Conant offers an engaging and innovative tool for organizers and educators to understand how the Zapatistas' strategy works, and to continue developing and refining their effective messages of participatory, bottom-up revolution. Jeff Conant is a writer and activist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health.

In the early hours of January 1, 1994 a guerrilla army of indigenous Mayan peasants emerged from the highlands and jungle in the far southeast of Mexico and declared "¡Ya basta!" - "Enough!" - to 500 years of colonialism, racism, exploitation, oppression, and genocide. As elites in Canada, the United States, and Mexico celebrated the coming into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) declared war against this 500 year old trajectory toward oblivion, one that they said was most recently reincarnated in the form of neoliberal capitalist globalization that NAFTA represented. While the Zapatista uprising would have a profound impact upon the socio-political fabric of Chiapas its effects would be felt far beyond the borders of Mexico. At a moment when state-sponsored socialism had all but vanished from the global political landscape and other familiar elements of the left appeared utterly demoralized and defeated in the face of neoliberal capitalism's global ascendance, the Zapatista uprising would spark an unexpected and powerful new wave of radical socio-political action transnationally. Through an exploration of the Zapatista movement's origins, history, structure, aims, political philosophy and practice, and future directions this book provides a critical, comprehensive, and accessible overview of one of the most important rebel groups in recent history.

The Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, have often been portrayed in reductive, polarized terms; either as saintly activists or dangerous rebels. Cultural anthropologists Duncan Earle and Jeanne Simonelli, drawing on decades-long relationships and fieldwork, attained a collegiality with the Zapatistas that reveals a more complex portrait of a people struggling with self-determination on every level. Seeking a new kind of experimental ethnography, Earle & Simonelli have chronicled a social experiment characterized by resistance, autonomy and communality. Combining their own compelling narrative as participant-observers, and those of their Chiapas compadres, the authors effectively call for an activist approach to research. The result is a unique ethnography that is at once analytical and deeply personal. Uprising of Hope will be compelling reading for scholars and general readers of anthropology, social justice, ethnography, Latin American history and ethnic studies.

An exploration of the Zapatista project, from its conception to the present. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Mayan Indigenous uprising in Chiapas, The Zapatista Experience reconstructs the trajectory of the Zapatista struggle over the last three decades, both in its concrete achievements and in its contributions to the renewal of critical and antisystemic thinking. The Zapatista rebellion has become a reference and source of inspiration for many struggles around the world due to its major contribution in reformulating a credible and desirable path to emancipation, a path that broke with previously dominant conceptions: state-centric, productivist, Eurocentric, modernist, and patriarchal. Baschet demonstrates how the Zapatistas have succeeded in materializing, on a massive scale, the concrete experience of another way of living, a forerunner of possible emerging worlds. The autonomous rebel territories of Chiapas are among the most developed and radical of the "real utopias" that exist in the world today, exceptional in their experiments in self-governance and anti-State political form, argues Jérôme Baschet. The Zapatista Experience orients readers in the profusion of Zapatista writings concerning, for example, the elaboration of a different understanding of politics, the Zapatistas' planetary conjunctural analysis of capitalism as a total war against humanity, their conception of Indigeneity that breaks with both modernist individualism and identity politics, and their notion of time and history. All this in clear opposition to neoliberal capitalism.

Examines the isgnificance of the Zapatista struggle within the broader context of North American political activism since 1994.

For ten years a voice from deep within the Mexican jungle has inspired us to fight back.

Transitions from authoritarian to democratic governments can provide ripe scenarios for the emergence of new, insurgent political actors and causes. During peaceful transitions, such movements may become influential political players and gain representation for previously neglected interests and sectors of the population. But for this to happen, insurgent social movements need opportunities for mobilization, success, and survival. This book looks at Mexico's Zapatista movement, and why the movement was able to mobilize sympathy and support for the indigenous agenda inside and outside of the country, yet failed to achieve their goals vis-à-vis the Mexican state.

On January 1, 1994, in the impoverished state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, the Zapatista rebellion shot into the international spotlight. In this fully revised third edition of their classic study of the rebellion's roots, George Collier and Elizabeth Lowery Quaratiello paint a vivid picture of the historical struggle for land faced by the Maya Indians, who are among Mexico's poorest people. Examining the roles played by Catholic and Protestant clergy, revolutionary and peasant movements, the oil boom and the debt crisis, NAFTA and the free trade era, and finally the growing global justice movement, the authors provide a rich context for understanding the uprising and the subsequent history of the Zapatistas and rural Chiapas, up to the present day.

The Zapatista movement and its leader Subcomandante Marcos have attracted enormous political and scholarly attention ever since their uprising began in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1994. The movement not only struck a chord inside the country as Mexico was switching to neoliberal economics and attaching itself to the USA in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but it rapidly evoked an extraordinary up-welling of political interest and solidarity in the Americas and worldwide. Thomas Olesen explores this phenomenon in the context of globalization and the networking and communications potential of the Internet. What is the infrastructure of the global Zapatista solidarity network? What activities has it engaged in? What enabled it to develop? What are the longer term implications for new kinds of political action and international solidarity? And what can social theory tell us about the new global patterns of social interaction that are emerging?