A common criticism of the solidarity movement for Palestine in Mexico is: “Do something for your own country, instead of protesting for Palestine.” Put another way: street angel, house devil. However, this criticism actually conceals much more than it reveals, by evading the uncomfortable question of the extent to which the Mexican state and the national economy are implicated in the genocide, the apartheid system, and the illegal colonial occupation perpetrated by the State of Israel in Palestine. The Zapatista perspective on the historical course of war in the world helps to see this relationship between Mexico and Israel in a different light (https://n9.cl/60cjz).
In the period the Zapatistas call the Third World War, the founding of Israel not only initiated what Palestine has taught us is called the Nakba, or Catastrophe, but also the relationship between its military corporations and dictatorships, authoritarian governments, armies, police and security forces, and even criminal organizations in Latin America (https://n9.cl/gmtlw). In Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, who was found guilty and sentenced to prison for genocide—although he later escaped justice—asserted that the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Maya people was due to the Guatemalan army being trained by Israelis (https://n9.cl/r4rj8). Israel used the limited aid it provided to persecuted, detained, and disappeared Jews to mask its close alliance with the civic-military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla, which openly committed genocide (https://n9.cl/3a0ovu), and simultaneously conceal Jewish participation in the armed resistance. Analogous cases include the dictatorships in Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, and Nicaragua (https://n9.cl/rcxdf). If its relationship with dictatorships, armies, and security forces allowed Israel and its military companies to gain counterinsurgency experience in territories outside of Palestine, then the so-called war on drugs and the militarization of public security—on which the neoliberal period was based and which the Zapatistas call the Fourth World War—opened up a new market and the possibility of deepening its existing relationship with most Latin American countries, this time with elected governments.
In Mexico, military and security cooperation with Israel has also been closely linked to the state’s policy of repression and counterinsurgency (https://n9.cl/ogxv5). In 1973, during the six-year term of Luis Echeverría Álvarez, who was also accused of genocide, Mexico purchased ten Israel Aerospace Industries Arava aircraft, which were used in death flights (https://n9.cl/87j7f). Despite the strained relations with Israel in 1975, after Mexico voted at the UN to define Zionism as a form of racism, the Echeverría administration and the two subsequent presidential terms continued arms purchases and provided training to police forces from the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) and later the General Directorate of Investigation and National Security (DISEN) in Israel during the 1980s (https://www.meh.org.mx/comunicacion/publicaciones/israel-y-mexico-cooperacion-para-la-muerte/).
Neoliberalism, promoted by the United States, revived relations with Israel after the Madrid Peace Conference (1991), in which Benjamin Netanyahu, then a member of the Knesset, participated as Deputy Foreign Minister. Mexico abandoned the definition of Zionism as racism and thus adhered almost entirely, in this area as well, to the international policy of then-President George H.W. Bush. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu shares with Carlos Salinas de Gortari the fact that he consolidated the neoliberal plan for his country. The Mexican state took advantage of the Zapatista uprising in 1994 to, more than ever before in its history, shake hands with its counterpart in Israel. Not only did it again use specially modified Israeli Arava aircraft for intervention operations in Chiapas (https://n9.cl/3v6ha), but it also—supported by the US, Spain, and Great Britain—trained soldiers in the Middle Eastern country to combat the rebel movement (https://n9.cl/5jgqjw). Some of these soldiers formed the Special Forces Airmobile Group (GAFE) and later the Los Zetas cartel. With their defection, Israeli counterinsurgency training fell into the hands of organized crime. In 2000, during Ernesto Zedillo’s six-year term, a free trade agreement was signed between Israel and Mexico that is still in effect today.
In the Zapatista view of history, as I understand it, the Fourth World War, after a period of retreat characterized by the resurgence of the extreme right, was surpassed by a total war “everywhere, all the time, and by all means”; a capitalist war against life (https://n9.cl/p9zhb). The capitalist storm flooded Mexico with investments in Israeli technology and military training during the presidencies of Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón, and Enrique Peña Nieto. In 2016, Benjamin Netanyahu assured Mexican business leaders that Mexico was one of the best economies in the world while the free trade agreement was being renewed (https://n9.cl/n9j5o). Today, with a MORENA government, Israel is making the exact same statement (https://n9.cl/q4nuo). Despite being a characteristic relationship of the international right and neoliberalism, in the last two presidential terms, Israel’s relationship with the federal and state governments, as well as with private security companies and organized crime, has only deepened.
In 2023, the AMLO administration spent millions of dollars acquiring Israeli weaponry and paid more than 312 million pesos to the network of companies that sold Pegasus to the Attorney General’s Office during the Peña Nieto administration (https://n9.cl/306gyp). Even the “Gacelas,” the security detail that protected the former president, were trained in Israel, according to national press reports (https://n9.cl/9o48a), as were high-ranking officers of the National Guard (https://n9.cl/wa0xdc; https://n9.cl/fow6r) and special forces (https://n9.cl/yra77). While AMLO sent two letters to Benjamin Netanyahu requesting the extradition of Tomás Zerón de Lucio, former head of the Criminal Investigation Agency, collaborator with Genaro García Luna, and responsible for acquiring Israeli malware that violated privacy rights, as well as being one of the main architects of impunity in the Ayotzinapa case, he was simultaneously betraying the mothers and fathers searching for the 43 missing students in defense of a neoliberal criminal military structure. Although President Claudia Sheinbaum has condemned the genocide, she has not taken any consistent action, thus undermining the historical principles of Mexican foreign policy.
Chiapas has once again become one of the Mexican states of greatest interest to the State of Israel and its companies, after AMLO, during Trump’s first term (2017-2021), authorized the militarization of the border to stem the flow of migrants and initiated, on his own initiative, a new chapter in the militarization of the rest of southeastern Mexico to support the Maya Train and Isthmus Train megaprojects (https://n9.cl/xlsin). Even earlier, in 2016, the Israeli Ministry of Defense had already visited the southeastern Mexican state to discuss technological cooperation and work plans (https://n9.cl/pgim6). In 2018, the Zionist Council of Mexico and the Israeli Embassy brought together Mexican, American, and Guatemalan evangelical pastors and leaders in Tuxtla Gutiérrez to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel (https://n9.cl/exduy). Collaboration with state institutions and the private sector has only expanded (https://n9.cl/ffo4d). Rocío Cervantes, a congresswoman from Chiapas representing the Green Party (PVEM), is now, amidst a genocide, one of the most frequent collaborators with Israel in the state, without receiving any criticism within the Chamber. While still a senator, the current governor of Chiapas, Eduardo Ramírez Aguilar, from the MORENA party, demonstrated his remarkable ability to repeat exactly what Zionism wanted to hear, word for word (https://n9.cl/5e4tp5). Now as governor, Ramírez Aguilar has implemented a very costly security strategy for Chiapas, which should be under serious scrutiny by anti-corruption authorities, and which, through companies owned by Israeli citizen Niv Moshe Yarimi, imports genocidal technology (https://n9.cl/b5mvw). Former Israeli soldiers are received by Chiapas state authorities on trips ostensibly for humanitarian aid (https://n9.cl/1tv8ct)
Not only has the neoliberal international relationship between Mexico and Israel remained unchanged during this and the previous presidential term, but so too has the counterinsurgency policy as part of the war against the Zapatista communities. The capitalist system is unable to find a way out of the multifaceted crisis it has generated in its need for accumulation, making even the war of extermination of peoples an economic end in itself to finance the costly military industry that sustains it. As the EZLN has perfectly explained, after the business of destruction and depopulation, a stage of reconstruction and repopulation follows, in which the regime of private property experiences an expansion (https://n9.cl/hrbmz). This logic is precisely what underlies Trump’s plan to transform Gaza into a tourist resort, where the Palestinian population that isn’t exterminated will be unable to govern their territories. These territories will fall into the hands of Israeli and transnational capital, and the Palestinians will instead become subject to servitude, subject to all kinds of exploitation and abuse. This same logic also underlies the Maya Train and other territorial reorganization projects that promote the acceleration of capitalist accumulation in southeastern Mexico and the expansion of private property ownership. Indeed, this megaproject has particularly benefited a network of businesspeople and politicians who are increasingly acquiring land (https://n9.cl/b46y9) that once belonged to the Maya people (https://n9.cl/07421) on the Yucatán Peninsula, and it has revived other land-grabbing projects such as the so-called “Route of Maya Cultures.”
The EZLN, the target of ongoing counterinsurgency policies, is a pioneering organization in promoting solidarity with Palestine from Mexico (https://n9.cl/v6s2g). Signatories of the Sixth Declaration and the Declaration for Life participate in the solidarity movement with Palestine in Mexico and around the world. In Chiapas, solidarity with Palestine, particularly since the beginning of the genocide, has been constant and diverse (https://n9.cl/29h52e). However, the EZLN’s approach has been notably different from that of other national liberation groups, aligning itself instead with a tradition of left-wing internationalism based on class and peoples’ collaboration, opposed to ethnic and nationalist chauvinism. In their attempt to preserve the rights of all the peoples that comprise them (Chol, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, Chontal, etc.) and also for their non-indigenous members, others, etc., the Zapatista communities are, in a way, the political counterpoint from below and to the left of the Judeo-ethnocentric kibbutzim that systematically excluded Palestinians, even as leftist projects, and which today are an vanguard of the settler colonialism promoted by the State of Israel.
Faced with the current total capitalist war and the continuation of counterinsurgency policies (https://n9.cl/vdlds), the most important step taken by the Zapatista peoples is what they themselves call “The Commons,” a proposal that now also includes non-Zapatista communities and individuals and that has been regionally accepted by populations threatened by the privatization projects of the state of Chiapas (https://n9.cl/dold7). This proposal, however, is at risk due to the counterinsurgency policy, which, as we mentioned, is advancing hand in hand with the Mexico-Israel relationship.
The attacks have not stopped. The Assembly of Collectives of Zapatista Autonomous Governments (ACGAZ) recently denounced threats, crop theft, the burning of homes, and the direct participation of municipal and state police, the Chiapas Attorney General’s Office, the Mexican Army, and government authorities, as well as the dispossession of a large territory recovered in the Zapatista Autonomous Community of Belén. At least 13 EZLN support bases and 40 non-Zapatista farmers were attacked and displaced. A group of families claims that these lands are private property, despite the fact that the Mexican State recognized as early as 1995 that the recovered territories belong to the EZLN (https://n9.cl/qadezn). Whether the State saw an opportunity in supporting this group, or orchestrated the privatization attempt, its intention is to portray this as a conflict between Indigenous groups in order to halt the EZLN, which, with its kind of grassroots agrarian socialism and its own self-critical form of autonomous justice (https://n9.cl/nxhyi), is successfully stopping the privatizing dispossession by the Mexican State.
In short, the relationship between Israel and Mexico thrives on colonial repression and dispossession in both countries and is sustained by a continuous counterinsurgency war and a war of extermination that is now a constitutive part of total war. In addition to the EZLN, the Ayotzinapa case, and the migrants facing the US wall built with Israeli technology, the relationship between Mexico and Israel has also severely wounded the National Indigenous Congress with the assassination of Samir Flores Soberanes (https://n9.cl/9hazb). This is why demanding a break in relations is a direct way not only to show solidarity with the Palestinian people, victims of genocide, but also with all the groups in Mexico who are victims of the military and security business that underpins this binational relationship in the context of a total world war. To paraphrase the wise Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “When you think of others far away/Think of yourself/Say: May I be a candle in the darkness” (https://n9.cl/745ix).
All eyes on Chiapas, all eyes on Palestine.
From Chiapas to Palestine, stop all capitalist wars,
Yes to life and the commons of the peoples of the world.
Original article by Claudio García Ehrenfeld, Camino al Andar, November 12th, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.