The Zapatistas after 30 years

On 1 January 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a few thousand mostly indigenous guerrillas, came out of the Lacandón jungle in Chiapas, Mexico with the cry of “Ya Basta” — Enough.

On the day of the uprising, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, Canada and the United States came into force. The EZLN, fronted by subcomandante Marcos, called for the cancellation of NAFTA, land reform and indigenous autonomy.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in his last year leading the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), sent the Mexican military to suppress the rebellion. Throughout Mexico hundreds of thousands of people protested, demanding the assault stop. I recall enormous demonstrations in Mexico City and across the country, some involving hundreds of thousands of protesters, to demand a truce. I reported inSocialist Organiser newspaper during those first weeks about the palpable excitement the uprising generated. The mobilisations helped prompt an uneasy ceasefire.

The Zapatistas were founded in 1983 by activists in northern Mexico. They were inspired by an amorphous tradition of armed rebellion, notably Chinese and Cuban Stalinism, following the ideas of Mao Zedong, Che Guevara and Régis Debray.

Originally called the National Liberation Forces, by the late 1980s the group relocated to Chiapas. They added “Zapatista” to their name in honour of Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary peasant movement leader during the Mexican Revolution (1910-20). Since the revolution, Mexico had been ruled as a “soft” one-party state by the PRI and its predecessors.

The Zapatistas promoted a form of social ownership of the land. After the Mexican revolution, notably under Lazaro Cárdenas (1934-40), land was given to male members of peasant or indigenous communities in the form of ejidos, state-leased land to be held in perpetuity by them and their descendants. While sometimes collectively owned, ejido land was often held as individual parcels belonging to the patriarchal heads of families.

In August 1994, the Zapatistas called a convention in San Cristóbal, inviting academics, activists, and a handful of foreign delegates. Marcos spoke in front of an enormous Mexican flag. Zapatista soldiers marched with wooden rifles. The EZLN presented themselves as radical nationalists and supporters of indigenous rights. They called for a constituent assembly and a new constitution, but not socialism.

In 1995, the new PRI government led by Ernesto Zedillo ordered the Mexican army to harry the EZLN. The Zapatistas organised a “liberated zone” where their indigenous and mestizo supporters lived and ran their own autonomous communities, schools and local governments. On 16 February 1996, the Zapatistas signed the San Andrés Accords with Zedillo’s government, a treaty granting autonomy, recognition and rights to the indigenous people in Chiapas. But the Mexican Congress failed to adopt them.

In 1997, the EZLN launched a national organisation, the Zapatista Front for National Liberation (FZLN). But this was not a real coalition of social movements, trade unions and left political parties. The EZLN dominated the FZLN. As a result, it never had the desired impact.

The EZLN also attempted to form Zapatista workers’ organisations. The Zapatistas opposed participation in existing trade unions, not only because they were bureaucratic and tied to the state, but also because the unions held elections and the EZLN opposed voting. Unwilling to relate to existing union structures and spurning longstanding rank-and-file union organisations, the Zapatista labour front failed.

Holloway

In the late 1990s, academic John Holloway popularised Zapatistas ideas in a series of best-selling books. Holloway argued that under the influence of indigenous communities, the EZLN rejected the old Marxist paradigm of the working class struggling for state power. Instead, anyone could make the revolution by asserting their dignity and forming a liberated community where they were. The Zapatistas seemed to be building a communitarian alternative to capitalism in Chiapas. Holloway cheerfully told activists to follow the Zapatistas: “change the world without taking power”.

Holloway merely generalised the confusion inherent in Zapatismo from the start. The Zapatistas cut themselves off from the militant struggles of Mexican workers, preferring to base themselves on indigenous peasants. They failed to build united fronts with other left forces, including in the trade unions, to build a counterpower. They failed to use the limited openings of bourgeois politics as a platform to mobilise workers to struggle.

In the 2000 elections, the EZLN rightly did not support the ruling PRI, the conservative National Action Party (PAN), or the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. However, they did not back Manuel Aguliar Mora, a longstanding socialist, either. The EZLN rejected elections in general and denounced Mexico’s political parties as compromised and corrupt.

Vicente Fox of the PAN won the 2000 election, ending the PRI’s Bonapartist hold on the Mexican government. The Zapatistas took advantage of the political opening, travelled to Mexico City and sent representatives to address the Mexican Congress. They asked to implement the San Andrés Accords, without success.

In 2006 presidential elections, the EZLN took a different approach. They did not support Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) of the PRD. The EZLN did not put forward their own candidates and did not support the candidates of other parties, but instead travelled around the country with their Otra Campaña (the Other Campaign).

The EZLN’s campaign was joined by several other left groups, from Trotskyists to the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist (CPML). They held moderately successful meetings and rallies, sometimes speaking to thousands. But the CPML’s giant portraits of Stalin hung in the background, casting doubt on Zapatist liberatory politics. And the EZLN abstained from the ferment around electoral fraud.

Felipe Calderón from the PAN won the 2006 presidential election. He launched a “war on narco-traffickers”, which further brutalised Mexican society and led to incursions against the EZLN. The PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto won in 2012. Paramilitary attacks on EZLN communities increased.

The election of AMLO as president in 2018 might have heralded an improvement in the context facing the Zapatistas. However during AMLO’s term, the situation has dramatically worsened. For the last three years, the EZLN has warned about the escalation of violence, carried out by the cartels and the state.

In May 2023, paramilitaries funded by landowners unleashed a wave of kidnappings, assassinations, shootings and other crimes. The EZLN warned that Chiapas was “on the verge of civil war”. In November 2023, the EZLN leadership issued a communiqué calling for international solidarity. They also announced the dissolution of their autonomous councils and the reactivation of their military command. The Zapatistas seem to have come full circle, verging on a return to armed struggle.

The tragedy is that the Mexican left remains fragmented at a time when it is most needed. In the late 1980s, the Trotskyist PRT had six senators and a mass base among workers and peasants. They broke on the rocks of the PRD in 1988, before the Zapatista uprising. Despite the Zapatistas’ twists and turns, the left has not been rebuilt.

Today the sizable Mexican working class continues to resist exploitation. In places, it has formed militant, independent unions. Peasants fight for land. Sadly, no sizable socialist organising centre exists to direct and coordinate those struggles. Of course the left should defend the Zapatistas from the assaults on their communities and supporters. But Zapatismo is not the basis on which to form the next Mexican or international left that the new situation demands.