Now facing the presence of cartels more than the army, the Zapatistas are celebrating on Sunday and Monday the 30th anniversary of their pro-indigenous uprising in Chiapas, southern Mexico, which inspired the first demonstrators of liberal globalization.
Sympathizers from Mexico and Europe are invited to the celebrations in the forest, a four- to five-hour drive from San Cristobal de las Casas, the epicenter of the 1994 uprising.
The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) announced a speech at midnight (0600 GMT) on Sunday to mark the 30th anniversary of its “war against oblivion” of the Indians of Chiapas.
On the night of January 1, 1994, the EZLN captured several towns, including San Cristobal, and provoked a military response that left several dozen dead before a quick ceasefire ensued.
The riot occurred on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force.
For then-liberal President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, this trade agreement with the United States and Canada symbolized Mexico's entry into the “first world” of developed economies.
Chiapas is a poor and remote region and a killjoy. In a statement on January 4, EZLN spokesman Subcomandante Marcos called for the government's resignation and summarized the movement's priorities: “bread, health, education, autonomy and peace.”
A big novelty at the time was that the Zapatistas distributed their press releases on the Internet. “The advent of the Internet” enabled them to “win the battle for world opinion,” analyzes French researcher David Colon in his book “The War of Information” (2023).
The movement was popularized by the balaclava, whistle and poetic words of Marcos and has received widespread attention abroad, particularly in France, Italy and Spain.
The uprising could even be seen as the birth of “alter-globalism” (the challenge to liberal globalization).
Some personalities travel to Chiapas, such as former French first lady and human rights activist Danielle Mitterrand, who lyrically enthused after meeting Marcos in 1996: “I feel the wind that blows from Chiapas and Latin America and will regenerate us.”
The dialogue between the EZLN and the Mexican state led to the San Andrés Agreement in February 1996, which recognized the right to autonomy of indigenous peoples. In the same year, a National Indigenous Council (CNI) was founded.
“Complete chaos”
At the beginning of 2024, the colonial city of San Cristobal is stormed for the holidays by battalions of Mexican and foreign tourists indifferent to the Zapatista celebrations.
“We don’t hear that much about the Zapatistas anymore. If they still exist, they must be very far away,” 44-year-old Mexican tourist Lorena Cruz told AFPTV.
“I understood that it was a movement of local guerrillas, a bit like what happened in Cuba,” adds Jeannette Zabaleta, 32, an engineer at a refinery in the neighboring state of Tabasco, who admits to knowing little else .
In early November, the Zapatistas announced the disappearance of their “rebellious autonomous communities” (areas of Chiapas under the control of their sympathizers) and the closure of their cultural centers (“Caracoles”).
In a statement, they denounced the “complete chaos” in Chiapas and the threat of “disorganized crime”: “Blockades, attacks, kidnappings, extortion, forced recruitment and shootings are occurring.”
According to all observers, the two largest Mexican cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generacion, are fighting over the region. According to a video broadcast last September, armed and masked men posing as members of the Sinaloa Cartel marched to applause in a town in Chiapas.
“Federal, regional and local military and police forces are not in Chiapas to protect civilians. They are there with the sole aim of slowing down migration,” the Zapatistas accuse.
Their disappointment with the left in power is complete. After trying to support a candidate in the 2018 election, they denounced President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's major projects launched in the name of the development of southern Mexico (Mayan tourist train and interoceanic train).
What remains 30 years later but nostalgia? “Before the uprising we didn’t talk about indigenous issues,” Juan Villoro, a writer close to the movement, told AFP.
“We’re talking more and more about indigenous languages, indigenous cultures,” he continues. “This does not mean that the main problems have been solved, but the issue is in the imagination.”