Zapatismo at 30: An Indigenous Rights Movement Faces Perilous Times

Widespread support…enabled the Zapatistas ultimately to govern an autonomous zone covering about 300,000 people in 55 municipios (counties).Thirty years ago, thousands of Indigenous people (as many as 12,000, primarily Mayan) rose up in armed rebellion and declared war against the Mexican state. While their arms were largely makeshift weapons, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, known as the EZLN for its Spanish initials, briefly occupied several cities, including the popular tourist destination of San Cristóbal. Although fighting lasted only about 12 days, the uprising’s impact has been long-lasting.

Intentionally timed to coincide with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on January 1, 1994, the revolt elicited widespread support across Mexico and beyond. That support enabled the Zapatistas ultimately to govern an autonomous zone covering about 300,000 people in 55 municipios (counties).

Today, however, the Zapatistas face new threats. Cartels are muscling their way deeper into Chiapas, while large-scale infrastructure and mining projects are encroaching on their lands—bringing in money and the corruption that often goes along with it.

From a distance, the October 2024 swearing-in of Claudia Sheinbaum, a lifelong leftist, as Mexico’s president might appear to benefit the Zapatistas. Those close to the movement, however, are not optimistic that she will prioritize Indigenous wellbeing. Still, the Zapatistas are not giving up on their vision to create un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos—a world in which many worlds fit.

A Fateful Encounter in Chiapas

Margaret Cerullo, an emeritus professor at Hampshire College and a longtime civil rights advocate, made her first trip to Chiapas shortly after the uprising. It proved to be a fateful encounter. Her initial visit led her to organize student trips to the region, over the years bringing scores of students to one of the Zapatista-governed caracoles—or snails, as the Zapatistas refer to their autonomous municipalities.

“The Zapatistas touched my heart in a way that has lasted until now,” Cerullo says. “The Zapatistas have an ethical core and an openness.”

Although the EZLN had its roots in Marxist insurgencies not unlike those seen elsewhere in Latin America, the movement has never fit neatly into an ideological mold. Its communiques are known to drift into poetry. Governance is based on communal participation and consent, and seven principles of mandar obedeciendo—which literally means “obeying by following,” but is more aptly described as servant leadership.

Specifically, these principles, described in greater detail in English here, are as follows:

1. To obey, not command
2. To propose, not impose
3. To represent, not supplant
4. To convince, not conquer
5. To construct, not destroy
6. To serve others, not serve oneself
7. To work from below, not seek to rise

A Focus on Building Community

Over the years, the Zapatistas have largely focused on creating and maintaining institutions in their communities, including health clinics and schools that teach in the Indigenous languages still commonly spoken in the region.

“In the US and a lot of parts of the world, NGOs already do a lot of that institution building,” observes Quincy Saul, who is now an author and musician, but first came to Chiapas as one of Cerullo’s Hampshire students; he has since returned three more times, most recently in 2017. “So, a lot of the things that the Zapatistas are doing—like a school, a hospital, a women’s weaving cooperative, a radio station, a communal coffee collective—people take away from that experience, ‘Oh, wow, this isn’t just about holding a sign and saying I’m against this.’”

While the Zapatistas have long rejected participation in traditional politics—a wariness based on the long history of government hostility and betrayal—they have nonetheless had a significant influence on Mexican society. Two years after the uprising, representatives from Mexico’s more than 60 Indigenous groups formed the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), which remains a force in Mexican politics. In the years following the uprising, the percentage of Mexicans identifying as Indigenous has increased, in part due to activism from Indigenous groups pressuring the government to allow people to self-identify in the census. From the 2010 census to the 2015 census alone, the number of Mexicans identifying as Indigenous climbed from 14.9 percent of the population to 21.5 percent—more than a 40 percent increase.

The Struggle for Land

As inspiring as their ideals may be, the Zapatistas face a harsh reality in Chiapas today, amid growing violence and threats of displacement. The caracoles that once welcomed visitors are far less accessible these days.

These difficulties may seem incongruous given the ascendance of the formal political left in Mexico. The Morena (Movimiento de Renovación Nacional or National Renovation Movement) party was founded and led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was Mexico’s president for the past six years, serving as the nation’s first avowedly leftist president since Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s.

AMLO, the term by which López Obrador is most commonly called, described his political and economic agenda as the nation’s Fourth Transformation—building, he has argued, on the three prior transformative moments: the country’s independence from Spain in 1821, the mid-19th-century reform period under the nation’s first Indigenous president Benito Juárez, and the country’s revolutionary period of 1910 to 1917.

AMLO’s legacy is mixed. He is responsible for expanding financial benefits for the poor but also pushed large-scale infrastructure projects like the Maya Train, which is in the early stages of construction and will loop around the Yucatán peninsula. The Zapatistas have called the project the “train of death” for the environmental and cultural destruction they say it has brought and will continue to bring.

Despite many challenges, the Zapatistas are still pursuing their visions of liberation.

Compared to his predecessors, AMLO has taken a less confrontational approach toward the country’s drug cartels, a policy that he’s called abrazos, no balazos—hugs, not bullets. The idea was to demilitarize the drug war in Mexico, which, of course, has its parallel in the US “War on Drugs,” whose devastating effects are especially evident in Black communities.

But AMLO’s policy has hardly curtailed the drug cartels’ influence. Gerardo Alberto González, a public health professor at the College of the Southern Border in Chiapas and a longtime observer of the Zapatista movement, observes that “those hugs and not bullets had to be translated into a policy that I call the recovery of public space,” and this, he cautioned, had not happened. How Sheinbaum, Mexico’s newly inaugurated president and AMLO protégé, responds remains to be seen.

Elisa Cruz Rueda, a professor at the Autonomous University of Chiapas who has worked closely with the Zapatistas, is skeptical that Sheinbaum will be able to change the difficult realities on the ground in Chiapas.

“If what matters most to the new political class and the new bureaucratic elite is to maintain or gain more institutional and political space, then security will remain in the background,” she says.

A Flame of Hope

Despite many challenges, the Zapatistas are still pursuing their visions of liberation. “Wherever you go, you mention Zapatismo and it resonates. It touches hearts. It continues to be like a flame of hope, a beacon of light,” Cruz Rueda says.

This past winter, the Zapatistas celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of their uprising, although they warned outsiders against traveling to the region.

Cerullo was there; it was how she marked her retirement from Hampshire College. While she was keenly aware that circumstances had changed, she was encouraged to see young people—the children and grandchildren of the people who had fought in 1994—invested in the movement while still aware of and interested in the wider world.

Over the last 30 years, the Zapatistas’ principles have expanded far beyond Chiapas, taking root around the world. For instance, it is worth noting that United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples dates from 2007, 13 years after the Zapatista uprising. While the Zapatistas were hardly the sole cause of the UN declaration, the impact of their example is widely acknowledged.

The Zapatistas continue to inspire social change advocates in many ways. For his part, Saul went on to help found an organization called Ecosocialist Horizons, which seeks to build a global ecology-focused alternative to capitalism. He recalled sharing the Zapatistas’ seven principles of community-responsive leadership with a group in Kathmandu—observing as they read the document translated into Nepali.

“Just seeing everybody’s faces light up around the room when they heard each one of these concepts was really moving for me,” he says. “It shows how universal it is.”