379CHAPTER 10 THE MAYAN ZAPATISTA MOVEMENT
Readers may wonder why we have opted to devote an entire chapter to a localized
indigenous social and political movement that became publicly visible only a decade
ago, on January 1, 1994, in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. At midnight on that date,
several thousand armed Mayas and a number of nonindigenous allies, comprising the
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), occupied four major Chiapas
towns for several days. This event constituted an acute political embarrassment for
the Mexican government, for January 1, 1994, coincided precisely and not coinci-
dentally with the beginning date of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), whose approval by the U.S. Congress had required enormous concessions
by Mexico, all of which were perceived by the Zapatistas as being against the inter-
ests of Mexico’s rural poor in general and indigenous people in particular. Within
days, the Mexican army drove the Zapatistas out of the urban centers and declared
a victory over the insurgents, although to this day (January 2006), the Zapatistas hold
de facto political control in parts of over thirty of the 100 municipios in the state. (The
municipiois the administrative unit below the state, equivalent to the county in the
United States. It is variously referred to in this chapter as township or nonitalicized
municipio.)
Members and followers of the EZLN number today only a few hundred thousand,
and they are impotent as a military force. Indeed, they have very recently forsworn
violence as a negotiating strategy. However, their symbolic and political presence is
a reality that the Mexican state cannot ignore, for they constitute an articulate and
well-organized challenge to Mexico’s political class itself. By “political class” they
refer to the entire current political system, spanning ideological positions from right
to left, that fields local, state, and national candidates. They remain at war with what
they call the illegitimate Mexican state, not the Mexican nation. Many political ana-
lysts believe that the Zapatista rebellion, and the apparent inability of the Mexican
state to resolve the public policy issues that it raised, had a great deal to do with the
defeat of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Mexico’s ruling party for