The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric.

• Author: Cleaver, Harry M., Jr.
• Position: Mexican Zapatista National Liberation Army

The primacy of the nation state is being challenged from both above and below. From above, after the Second World War, the growth in the power and scope of supranational institutions--from multinational corporations to the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund--have gradually usurped national sovereignty in both economic and political matters.(1) More recently, from below, the increasingly active role of regional and city governments in foreign trade, immigration and political issues have challenged national governments' constitutional monopoly over foreign affairs.(2) Simultaneously, there has been tremendous growth in cross-border networks among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the hundreds that mobilized against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Not only do such networks outflank national government policymakers; they often work directly against their policies.(3)

In the last few years, governmental concern with the ability of NGO networks to mobilize opposition to the policies of national governments and to international agreements has grown--both during the period of policy formation and after those policies have been adopted or agreements signed. In part, this concern is derived from the growing strength that such networks gain from the use of international communications technologies. The rapid spread of the Internet around the world has suggested that such networks and their influence will only grow apace.

No catalyst for growth in electronic NGO networks has been more important than the 1994 indigenous Zapatista rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico. Computer networks supporting the rebellion have evolved from providing channels for the familiar, traditional work of solidarity--material aid and the defense of human rights against the policies of the Salinas and Zedillo administrations--into an electronic fabric of opposition to much wider policies. Whereas the anti-NAFTA coalition was merely North American in scope, the influence of the pro-Zapatista mobilization has reached across at least five continents. Moreover, it has inspired and stimulated a wide variety of grassroots political efforts in dozens of countries.(4)

Today these networks provide the nerve system for increasingly global organization in opposition to the dominant economic policies of the present period. In the process, these emerging networks are undermining the distinction between domestic and foreign policy--and challenging the constitution of the nation state.

For reasons outlined below, it is not exaggerated to speak of a "Zapatista Effect" reverberating through social movements around the world; an effect homologous to, but potentially much more threatening to ,the New World Order of neoliberalism than the Tequila Effect that rippled through emerging financial markets in the wake of the 1994 peso crisis. In the latter case, the danger was panic and the ensuing rapid withdrawal of hot money from speculative investments. In the case of social movements and the activism which is their hallmark, the danger lies in the impetus given to previously disparate groups to mobilize around the rejection of current policies, to rethink institutions and governance, and to develop alternatives to the status quo.

REPRESSION IN CHIAPAS

The voices of indigenous people in Mexico have been either passively ignored or brutally silenced for most of the last five hundred years. Indigenous lands and resources have been repeatedly stolen and the people themselves exploited under some of the worst labor conditions in Mexico. The official policies of the Mexican state have been largely oriented toward assimilation, with only lip service given to the value of the country's diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic heritage.(5)

The result has been a long history of fierce resistance and recurrent rebellion, first to Spanish colonization and then to the dominant classes after independence. Since the consolidation of the modern Mexican "party state" controlled by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), this resistance has been met with both the iron fist and the velvet glove. Overt rebellion has been crushed, while the Mexican state has distributed land to selected indigenous communities dating from the first land reforms of President Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s.

For several decades prior to the 1994 uprising, local communities in Chiapas largely confined their efforts to legally recognized vehicles of protest, such as demonstrations and marches--sometimes as far as Mexico City--and petitions for access to confiscated lands. The Mexican state responded to such actions with limited patronage, creating local instruments of power and endless bureaucratic delays in issuing land petitions.

Under continuing pressure for land reform, but unwilling to undercut the power of local rural elites, the government opened uncultivated forests for colonization after the Second World War.(6) Immigrants from various parts of Chiapas and elsewhere carved new farmlands and new communities out of the forests. Ironically, it was often in these land-starved campesino populations, where the PRI was unable to install institutions of control, that peasant self-organization and sympathy for the Zapatista movement thrived in the late 1980s and early 1990s.(7)

Caught between acute poverty and a dearth of arable farming land and inputs on the one hand and oppressive exploitation in the agricultural labor market on the other, some peasants began to join the Zapatista National Liberation Army(8) (EZLN) in the mountains or participate in their work in the villages. Within the context of a highly patriarchal indigenous culture, young women also began to join the EZLN, encouraged by the Zapatista egalitarian ideology that allowed them greater control over their lives and provided them with an opportunity for public responsibility.(9) Gradually, over a period of years, a guerrilla army was formed and a new fabric of cooperation was woven among various ethnic groups.

THE ZAPATISTA REBELLION

Committed to a radical restructuring of the Mexican economy in order to attract foreign investment and secure the NAFTA, President Salinas abrogated the last meaningful guarantees of community integrity in Chiapas by altering Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution to allow for the privatization of communal land. In response, the Zapatista communities ordered their citizen army to take action as a last ditch effort to stave off what seemed like imminent annihilation. According to Zapatista spokespersons, preparations proceeded throughout 1993. The day on which NAFTA went into effect, 1 January 1994, was chosen as the moment of action.

The rebellion came to the world's attention on that day, when the units of the EZLN emerged from the jungle and took over a series of towns in Chiapas. The uprising was designed to make indigenous voices heard at the national level in Mexico and appeared primarily to be a challenge to Mexican domestic policies on land and indigenous affairs.(10)

The initial official response was to isolate the Zapatistas through a variety of policy levers. Militarily, the government sought to crush the rebellion and confine it to Chiapas. Ideologically, state control of the Mexican mass media was used to limit and distort news about the uprising. Overall, the government attempted to portray the Zapatista movement as a danger to the political integrity of the Mexican nation by conjuring the threat of a pan-Mayan movement embracing both Southern Mexico and much of Central America.(11) Evoking the horrors of the Balkans, the Mexican government equated indigenous autonomy with political secession and the implosion of the country.

Military clashes lasted only a few days, giving way to three years of on-and-off political negotiations that have catalyzed a much wider assault on the power of the ruling party. Grassroots movements have both attacked and withdrawn from the official institutions of the one-party state at the national and local levels. The PRI and the hitherto powerful presidency have come under unprecedented attack for human rights violations, media manipulation, corruption and lack of democracy.

Disillusionment with the prospects for meaningful Mexican electoral reform has also led many communities in Chiapas to withdraw entirely from the electoral process. These communities have burned ballot boxes, overthrown fraudulently elected officials and created municipal governing bodies through a variety of means that may or may not have included a popular vote.(12)

Political stalemate, negative public reaction to events in Chiapas and the Mexican peso crisis prompted the Mexican government to launch a new military offensive in February 1995.(13) Such politics "by other means" caused the Zapatistas to withdraw from occupied positions into the mountains. Massive protests in both Mexico and abroad, however, forced a halt to the offensive. Instead, the Mexican government has continued its search for a forceful solution by conducting a covert, low-intensity war that employs the military, various police forces and even paramilitary terrorists.(14)

The Zapatista movement supports autonomy within, not against, Mexican society--a point dramatically symbolized by the flying of the Mexican flag at virtually all Zapatista gatherings. But if the Zapatista-led reform efforts do not threaten the integrity of the Mexican nation, they certainly threaten the integrity of the Mexican state under one-party control. The demands for autonomy involve a devolution of both authority and resources to local levels. The search for wider citizen participation in public policy-making involves not only more direct democracy but also the liberation of Mexican politics from the grip of rigid electoral rules.

Importantly, such reforms have been widely perceived as a threat in all corners of the mainstream political arena in Mexico. The PRI fears...