Who Does Zapatismo Speak to Today?

This article was originally published in Revista de la Universidad de Mexico in December 2023.

Founded in 1983, the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) is a militant, left-wing political organisation for the defence of indigenous rights and territory in Chiapas, Mexico. In 1994, the EZLN (known informally as the Zapatistas) declared war on the Mexican state in response to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. This led to the San Andrés Accords of 1996, committing the national government to uphold the right to self-determination of Mexico’s indigenous communities. Politically, the Zapatistas remain an active, de-centralised force concerned with governance in Chiapas and dialogue between Mexico’s marginalised communities. Named after Emiliano Zapata, figurehead of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, their cultural significance is also wide-reaching, their liberation struggle being representative of a wider anti-neoliberal and anti-imperial resistance movement.

For Celso Cruz Martínez, a flower in the desert
For Iván Gil. Tyoskujuyëp, amuum tu’uk joojt

Whenever I have the chance, I ask people: where were you when you first heard of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional – EZLN)? What were your first impressions? I listen to the testimonies and chronicles of people from very diverse contexts and origins involved in the protests against the Mexican government’s violent and repressive response to the uprising in the early months of 1994. They tell me about the marches and the initial speculation as to what kind of guerrilla it was (was it more like the FARC or M-19?), the frenzied chants that sought to impede the violent annihilation of a movement unthinkable in an environment celebrating the country’s supposed admission to the first world through the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada. Some say the uprising gave new impetus to the causes they were already fighting for; others remember how it became particularly relevant that they belonged to an Indigenous community; others still, spoke of their visits to Zapatista controlled territory, of their impressions as first hand witnesses to the round tables and negotiations that led to the signing of the San Andrés Accords. There are those who recall their active participation in the Marcha del Color de la Tierra – the Zapatista Caravan – or share anecdotes about when people from different Indigenous communities were for the first time invited to speak before Mexican Congress; they recount how the two main television channels, in the context of that historic march, organised a concert called ‘Unidos por la Paz’ (United for Peace) at which Maná and Jaguares played, but then refused to broadcast the arrival of the Zapatista contingent and their companions to Mexico City’s Zócalo; they remember the doubts expressed by Jaguares vocalist Saúl Hernández himself, in the press conference preceding the concert, after he sensed the event might be turned into ‘a trap and a way of questioning the Zapatistas’ visit’. Others have quieter tales of their participation in Zapatista educational projects; some speak of the disillusionment they felt with the Zapatistas years later when they failed to back Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s candidacies; and others still described their participation in the Encuentros Internacionales de las Mujeres que Luchan (International Meetings of Women Activists), organised by the Zapatistas. I think of my own story. As a Mixe woman, an Indigenous teenager, in 1994 my relationship to the movement in its infancy was tangential. I first heard of the EZLN from one of my teachers, Mr Celso, who showed us newspapers and magazines he’d bought in the city of Oaxaca. I especially remember the covers of Proceso magazine and the first pages of La Jornada. We didn’t fully understand what was happening, but we read and discussed the questions our teacher skilfully put to us about the EZLN and our own position as Mixe teenagers of just eleven and twelve years old. In 1994, our town, Ayutla, organised a movement resisting the influence of political parties that were threatening – and still threaten – our communal structures. ‘Ayutla defends its customs and traditions’, the walls of the main streets read. The topic was in the air, in the talks given in Ayuujk by our elders and in the assemblies we children frequently attended alongside the adults. But Chiapas felt far away. Gradually, we came to understand that what was happening there was relevant to us too.

In the Mixe region, as in many Indigenous communities, which are always resisting in some way or other, a land defence movement had been taking shape since the end of the seventies. Thinkers from the sierra, such as Floriberto Díaz, held intense debates and came up with their own categories to explain the workings of our communities. Along with the Zapotecan anthropologist Jaime Martínez Luna, Floriberto coined the word communality and described it as a political concept. In this context, we were swept up by the EZLN’s tide, a tide that, happily, drowned out Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s ‘Solidaridad’, sung by a Televisa chorus during his 1988 presidential candidacy and repeated endlessly on our screens. Despite the mobilisation within our community and the long process begun in the Mixe region and many other territories, we Indigenous peoples were largely absent from mainstream media and national debates; it seemed we were only of interest to those taking an indigenist perspective.

Our reading and debates at school crystallised into pieces of writing in Spanish, our second language, that tried to show solidarity with the Zapatistas. When I moved to Mexico City, the relatives who took me in were quite involved in the movement. I remember visiting the impressive Zócalo with my uncle Iván, who enthusiastically explained many things to me the day of the March of the Colour of the Earth took over the political heart of the country.

Perhaps for many on the left now immersed in defending what the President of the Republic has called the Fourth Transformation, the EZLN is no longer a valid interlocutor; perhaps for the young people immersed in the ups and downs of left-wing party politics, neo-Zapatismo is now a thing of the past. But one thing is undeniable: there was a time when the Zapatista movement, the struggles of Indigenous communities and debates about the architecture of the Mexican state in relation to the possible fulfilment of the San Andrés Accords were front and centre in the media and constituted a key national issue. Scandalised rightwing voices warned of a possible ‘balkanisation’ if Indigenous nations’ right to free determination was recognised, columnists were sparking debates left, right and centre based on contradictory stances, and the evolution of the Zapatista movement hogged the headlines. After 1994, the way this country conceived of itself was transformed forever. It wasn’t just about Indigenous communities; Zapatismo held a mirror up to the foundational myths of the Mexican state. The narrative of a single mestizo nation, the ideological aspects of Mexican identity as constructed by those in power, the nationalism that extracted cultural and symbolic elements from Indigenous peoples while doing everything possible to erase them, and the very structure of the state itself were put under scrutiny. The images reflected in that new mirror fractured ideological certainties built with such dedication, especially by the governments of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institutional – PRI) following the 1910 Revolution. While the EZLN resisted paramilitarism and the violence unleashed against it, society – if we can speak of society in the singular – responded by questioning itself profoundly. If we aren’t that mestizo nation in which Indigenous peoples are nothing but an anthropological curiosity on the verge of disappearing, if we aren’t that country soon to reach the developmentalist ideals of the first world, then who are we? Perhaps the youngest of us now fighting for the rights of Indigenous peoples don’t quite realise how profoundly our practices and discourses were permeated by that uprising that began in a visible way thirty years ago. We wouldn’t be able to talk about the things we talk about without everything we inherited from Zapatismo, even if we didn’t participate directly in the movement that transformed ‘the spirit of an era’. The EZLN created a new lexicon for realities and utopias and succeeded in bringing topics previously disregarded into political debates. For many people, being Indigenous became something they no longer had to deny, something that spoke of a fight they could be proud of. Even those who did not or do not agree with the Zapatista movement have been impacted by its practices and discourses. Gattopardist (a principle according to which the appearance of things must change in order for the structure to remain the same) though the strategy may have been, the very architecture of the Mexican state was indeed transformed. It failed to fully implement the San Andrés Accords it had signed, but the government did set in motion a series of changes in many of its institutions.

Without the Zapatista uprising, the National Institute of Indigenous Languages or the General Organisation for Intercultural and Bilingual Education, to mention just a couple of examples, would not have become realities. While attacking Zapatista communities, state administrative structures launched a handful of projects, departments, and initiatives that took into account the existence of Indigenous peoples and whose purpose was to see to their needs.

The EZLN’s powerful discursive influence remains alive. Even the discourses of power in current pre-campaigns (let’s call them what they are) for the Presidency of the Republic have appropriated their language: Claudia Sheinbaum says, paraphrasing Comandanta Ramona: ‘Never again a Mexico without us women.’ López Obrador, for his part, often uses one of Zapatismo’s principles as a slogan, that of ‘governing while obeying [the people]’, despite his followers discrediting the EZLN as a political force and accusing them of being merely an ‘invention’ of Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Despite what neo-Zapatismo has meant for the history of this country, part of the Mexican left has broken with the EZLN. The recent mobilisation calling for an end to the war against the Zapatista peoples met with little response from leftwing party politics. Armed attacks on their key communities and Caracoles are evidence that the violence against the movement and their support bases continues or is worsening through incursions into their territories, though it rarely makes the headlines, nor does the president, who once visited Zapatista territory, speak up in his daily morning press conferences about Chiapas and the violence that envelops it.

Various people have explained how this distancing arose. Beyond the anecdotes and accusations, I believe that key to this was a fundamental ideological shift that the EZLN figured out how to make but a large part of the (now Obradorista) left could not. After the Mexican government reneged on the previously signed San Andrés Accords, the EZLN and its bases created self-governing organisational structures called Caracoles, represented by Good Governance Committees (Juntas de Buen Gobierno). The fact that these worked and continue to work outside the logic of the state was evidence of how far we were by now from the EZLN that, in its First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, called for the fight to go on until ‘a government of our free and democratic country’ was formed. This was no longer about taking power so that the rights of Indigenous peoples would be guaranteed via the scaffolding of the state and a new government would be formed; now the idea was to build a different reality through self-governmental mechanisms. The EZLN, which, when it began, emphasised that its struggle was linked to the Mexican Constitution, now distanced itself from enthusiasm for reforming the state and fought instead for the creation of concrete structures to coordinate communal life based on anti-capitalist principles. This important shift reminds me too of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s change in objectives, which went from fighting for its own state to the creation of confederate, self-generated, autonomous bodies, a goal that transcends the model of the nation-state; we might call it a ‘post-state’ model.

A large proportion of the Mexican left finds it difficult to understand and decipher movements that don’t involve conquering state institutions; it was to be expected that many people found the EZLN’s new vision incomprehensible. The K’iche’ anthropologist Gladys Tzul Tzul speaks of the ‘desire for the state’, and it is precisely that desire Zapatismo turned away from. Those who continue to see the taking of state power as the only goal of political struggle are more comfortable with Obradorismo.

This profound misunderstanding is reflected in various phenomena. At the beginning of this administration, both Adelfo Regino, current director of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples and ex-Zapatista mentor, and López Obrador himself promised that an Indigenous reform would finally make the San Andrés Accords a reality, though the EZLN has clearly said that their members have moved on from those reformist agreements. Another piece of evidence that the party-political left does not fully understand Zapatismo’s current objectives is the irritation and concern its members expressed when the EZLN failed to join Obradorismo – natural allies, as they saw it, based on their shared ‘desire for the state’. A third piece of evidence was the insistence with which they referred to María de Jesús Patricio Martínez as ‘Presidential candidate’, despite her being the spokesperson for a broad movement that had no pretensions to state power but rather sought to bring topics into the public debate that none of the candidates would touch.

Who feels that the EZLN speaks for them today? Not, it would seem, the Mexican politicians who appropriate their phrases but not their principles, nor their detractors, who criticise the EZLN for not having joined Obradorismo, nor even those who long for the fulfilment of the San Andrés Accords. Who does the EZLN speak to today? It speaks to those who question the developmentalist model that has brought humanity face to face with climate emergency, the greatest catastrophe yet provoked by capitalism. If the world’s liberal democracies and the nation-state have worked to capitalism’s advantage – a capitalism that is furnishing us with death – then the EZLN offers us urgent, radical strategies. Zapatismo no longer talks about ‘advancing towards the capital to defeat the Mexican Federal Army’ and subsequently forming a new government. But it does still offer to create a world that encompasses many worlds, a world that is certainly not achieved by taking state power in order to reform it. We must follow the EZLN in this shift, if we are to make life possible in a future that seems to promise us only death.

Yásnaya Elena A. Gil (trans. Ellen Jones)