If 1994 had closed with the declaration of the Autonomous Municipalities by the Zapatistas and the crisis produced by the economic errors of Ernesto Zedillo, 1995 opened with the betrayal by the President of Mexico of the Zapatistas, in a desperate attempt to detain their “leaders,” which, although it failed, opened the door to a scenario of militarization and paramilitarization in the zone. It is followed by the hope, also failed, of achieving peace through dialogues, and then, the first Intercontinental Meetings, the loss of the presidency of the nation by the PRI, a new betrayal of the Zapatistas by all the political parties with presence in Congress, the deepening of their autonomy and the novel proposal of “La Otra.”
Ernesto Zedillo, who even before assuming the presidency on December 1, 1994, had begun an epistolary dialogue with the Zapatistas, affirmed that the conflict in Chiapas represented a constant threat to public tranquility, peace and justice, in an event on February 5, 1995 in Querétaro, although he said he remained open to dialogue. Four days later, he launched the army into the Zapatista territory in an attempt to detain their leaders. He did not succeed, but several people were detained in different parts of the country. The federal army occupied many communities that were forced to flee to the mountains, where some remained for several months, until civil society set up the first Civil Encampments for Peace, which provided security to the communities and allowed their inhabitants to return to their homes. The community of Guadalupe Tepeyac was not able to return until 2002. This attack became known as the February betrayal.
Although the Federal Army did not achieve its objectives of detaining the Zapatista leaders, it did manage to position itself and establish military bases in its territory. In addition, with the President’s approval, it intensified the application of “Plan Chiapas 94” which consisted, fundamentally, in the creation and consolidation of paramilitary groups to act in a low-intensity irregular war against the Zapatistas. Meanwhile, pressure from national and international civil society forced the Government to return to dialogue and it was agreed to hold several dialogue roundtables, of which only two were held, the one on Indigenous Rights and Culture (October 1995-February 1996), which ended with the San Andres Accords, and the one on Democracy and Justice (March-July 1996), which ended without agreement. The two roundtables had a format in which advisors and guests from all over the country participated, both from the Government and the Zapatistas, the CONAI, as mediator, and the Commission for Concord and Pacification (COCOPA), formed by legislators from all parties, as a support body. In addition, in August 1995, the National and International Citizen Consultation for Peace and Democracy was held with the objective of contributing to the establishment of peace with dignity and justice through détente and dialogue, in addition to making known to the EZLN the feelings of society, in the country and in the world, regarding the fundamental issues of their struggle.
The San Andres Accords were signed on February 16, 1996 and in them, the Government committed itself to respect indigenous culture, the preservation of their natural resources, a greater participation of the peoples in decision making and recognized their right to autonomy. At the end of the year, the Commission for Concord and Pacification drafted a bill to reform the Constitution in compliance with the Accords; being a minimal agreement, the EZLN accepted them, but the Government did not, and the bill was shelved, or rather ignored, by the Government in the following years.
At the end of July and beginning of August 1996, the I Intercontinental Meeting for Humanity and against Neoliberalism was held in a Zapatista territory. It was attended by more than 5,000 people from the five continents who were divided into five tables, each one in a Zapatista zone, with the inauguration in Oventik (Chiapas Highlands) and the closing in La Realidad (Lacandon Jungle). Prior to this meeting there was an American Continental Meeting and another European one held in Berlin. A year later, in 1997, the II Intercontinental Meeting for Humanity and against Neoliberalism was held in Spain. The objective of both meetings was to raise the “international of hope” against the “international of terror represented by neoliberalism” and to build a new political culture that would revolutionize the relationship between those who exercise power and those who suffer from it; it was the first step of what, years later, was called the Antiglobalization Movement.
Faced with the impossibility of reaching agreements at the Democracy and Justice table and the lack of interest of the executive branch to comply with the San Andres Accords, the EZLN decided to suspend its participation in the dialogues until five conditions were met: The release of all the presumed imprisoned Zapatistas and of the support bases detained in the northern zone, a government commission with political decision-making capacity and that would respect the Zapatista delegation, the installation of the Commission for the Follow-up and Verification of the Agreements already signed, serious and concrete proposals by the government on the subject of Democracy and Justice, and an end to the climate of military and police persecution against the indigenous communities of Chiapas.
Prior to the signing of the San Andres Accords, the indigenous peoples of Mexico present at the dialogue had held an Indigenous Forum in January, which continued in July and culminated in the creation of the National Indigenous Congress, presided over by Comandanta Ramona, the first member of the EZLN to travel outside of Chiapas, on October 12, 1996.
By the time 1997 arrived, the activity of paramilitary groups had already taken on alarming proportions, causing thousands of displaced people in the Zapatista zones. These groups, armed, instructed and financed by the federal army, were composed of indigenous people from the area, which led the government to publicly minimize their importance, saying that they were “intra-community problems,” an excuse that is still used today. The climax of their actions occurred on December 22, 1997, when the Acteal massacre took place in Chenalhó, where 45 people from the organization “Las Abejas” were murdered; among those killed were children and pregnant women.
Throughout 1998, not only did the paramilitaries continue to act with impunity, but the government also launched an offensive against the Autonomous Municipalities that led many Zapatistas to the prisons of Chiapas. Only a few months after Acteal, in the early morning of June 10, 1998, hundreds of soldiers and police, with helicopters and artillery vehicles, descended on four communities in the municipality of El Bosque, named by the Zapatistas as San Juan de la Libertad. The result of the attack was 8 civilians and a policeman killed, 53 detained, two of them minors, in addition to several violent robberies and acts of torture.
In 1999, the EZLN promotes the Consultation for the Recognition of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and for the end of the War of Extermination as part of a national and international peace initiative. And as part of this initiative “5,000 EZLN base support delegates (2,500 men and 2,500 women) will leave the mountains of the Mexican southeast and visit the most remote corners of the national territory.” Brigades were created to promote and disseminate the Consultation, which was held on March 21 and in which 2,800,000 people from all over Mexico and 48,000 Mexicans living abroad participated.
In the year 2000, for the first time in seventy years, the PRI lost the elections and the National Action Party (PAN) candidate, Vicente Fox, was elected president, who sent to the Chamber of Deputies the law drafted by COCOPA to comply with the San Andres Accords. In order to support this law, a delegation of 23 comandantes and comandantas and a subcomandante left Chiapas on February 24, 2001 and arrived in Mexico City on March 11, after traveling through 13 states of the republic. It was “The March of the Color of the Earth.”
There was much reluctance on the part of deputies and senators to allow the Zapatistas, accompanied by members of the CNI, to speak in Congress, although they finally reached an agreement that they would do so before the expanded Commission on Indigenous Affairs. There, on March 28, 2001, from the tribune of the Congress of the Union, Comandanta Esther gave the central speech: “The military commander of a rebel army is not in this tribunal. There is the one who represents the civilian part of the EZLN, the political and organizational leadership of a legitimate, honest and consistent movement, and, furthermore, legal by grace of the Law for Dialogue, Reconciliation and Dignified Peace in Chiapas.”
But finally, the parties made numerous changes and approved a law that did not respect the San Andres Accords, thus betraying their word. From that moment on, the Zapatistas broke off all contact with the political parties and began a long period of silence in which they dedicated themselves to working on the consolidation of their own autonomy and their Autonomous Municipalities, putting the San Andres Accords into practice, while beginning a period of reflection on themselves that led them to deepen their anti-capitalist discourse and to propose a new relationship with “civil society.”
On August 9, 2003, they reorganized their autonomy and created the Good Government Councils and the Caracoles, which began to work in their respective zones: Roberto Barrios in the north, Morelia, La Garrucha and La Realidad in the jungle, and Oventik in the highlands.
In June 2005, the Zapatistas released the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle in which they made public their reflections on who they are, how they see the world and Mexico, what they want to do and how they want to do it: listen and talk to the simple and humble people and the indigenous peoples and make an agreement to rebuild another way of doing politics and to move forward with the demands of the Mexican people.
To achieve this, on January 1, 2006, “The Other Campaign” began, in which, first Subcomandante Marcos as Delegate Zero and then a delegation of Comandantes and Comandantas, toured the country during 2006 and 2007. But before that, at the beginning of May, the tour was interrupted by the events of Atenco, where police and state security forces attacked the population, so that the tour did not resume until October; two months after Atenco, presidential elections were held with two candidates, Felipe Calderón for the National Action Party (PAN) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), in coalition with two other parties. With countless complaints of irregularities in the elections and suspicion of fraud, Calderon was declared the winner with a difference of only 0.56% of the votes.
At the end of the year, the I Encounter of the Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World was held in Zapatista territory, in which the Zapatistas explained how their autonomy is working. This meeting was followed by a Second Meeting, held in July 2007, the First Encounter of the Indigenous Peoples of America, held in Vicam, Sonora, Yaqui territory in October, and the Encounter of the Zapatista Women with the Peoples of the World, held in the last days of December.
The year 2008 began with a strong offensive by different organizations in Chiapas, very close to the state and federal governments, which tried to appropriate lands recovered by the Zapatistas, former farms owned by landowners, in order to include them in government land certification programs, put them in their name, and thus be able to sell them to the highest bidder. This led to the mobilization of national and international society, which organized a Caravan in August of that year, and visited various places in the Zapatista territories. At the end of that year, the First Festival of Dignified Rage is held, first in Mexico City, and then in San Cristóbal de las Casas.
In the following years, the EZLN intensified its contact with civil society through multiple meetings, seminars and workshops: “Mamá Corral” Encounter, the ‘Tata Juan Chávez Alonso’ Chair, I World Festival of Resistances and Rebellions against Capitalism, the seminar Critical Thought in the face of the Capitalist Hydra, the CompArte and the ConCiencias por la Humanidad, the Seminar Walls and Cracks, the Encounters of Women who Struggle, the Conversatorio Prohibido Pensar, the Film Festival “Puy ta Cuxlejaltic” and the three rounds of the Escuelita Zapatista (Little Zapatista School). In addition, on December 21, 2012, with Enrique Peña Nieto already in power, the Zapatistas marched, in silence, through the streets of several cities in Chiapas, in the largest peaceful demonstration they have held to date.
In the 2010s, direct lethal attacks against Zapatista communities returned. On May 1, 2014, members of the Central Independiente de Obreros y Campesinos Histórica (CIOAC-H), also belonging to the Partido Verde Ecologista de México (PVEM) and Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), assassinated José Luis Solís López, “Galeano”, EZLN support base and teacher in the Zapatista Escuelita, who was shot several times, one of them in the chest, and was finished off with a coup de grace shot. They also destroyed the Zapatista school and clinic, which were rebuilt months later. Despite this, the communities continued on the path of peace and strengthening their autonomy.
Twenty years after the beginning of the war against oblivion, the Zapatistas continued to organize, to work, to deepen their autonomy, to improve their daily lives and to meet other Indian peoples, through the National Indigenous Congress, and with national and international civil society, through Encounters and Shareings. The following years will bring more proposals, more encounters, and a few surprises.
Original text by Lola Sepúlveda of CEDOZ published in El Salto on August 25th, 2024.
Photos by Luis Suaste and Pablo Cabañas.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.