The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) recently celebrated its 42nd anniversary, marking its founding on November 17th, 1983, when a group established a camp in the Lacandon Jungle to begin the first stage of organizing the movement in indigenous communities of Chiapas.
This silent movement burst onto the world stage a little over a decade later when it took up arms on January 1st, 1994, to demonstrate its radical opposition to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed by Canada, the United States, and Mexico, then governed by Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the political emblem of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
Since then, the EZLN has shaken the global political scene by proposing an ideology that, contrary to the long tradition of Latin American guerrilla organizations, did not aim to seize control of the state apparatus but—in the words of the intellectual John Holloway, who masterfully defined it in a resounding phrase—”to change the world without taking power.” Three decades ago, on a continent dominated by neoliberal administrations, the emergence of Zapatismo represented a novelty capable of outlining a new horizon for the collective social imagination. It spread its ideology and methods while always emphasizing that in specific territories, it was the local collectives that had to confront their own processes, “each in their own way.”
The magnetic figure of Insurgent Sub-commander Marcos (now Captain, in another singular demonstration that there, leaders “come down” rather than continue to ascend the hierarchy) with his remarkable literary rhetoric broadened the subjective base of the movement and facilitated its penetration, transcending both physical and ideological boundaries.
However, Zapatismo was not merely an aesthetic movement; it involved much bolder and more extreme political stances, such as generating “The Other Campaign,” capable of circumventing electoral logic and running counter to that adopted by the wave of self-proclaimed progressive governments that reshaped the Latin American map ten years after that Chiapas uprising.
Although it never remained static, since that moment in the regional calendar, the EZLN and its bases have gone through different phases that, broadly speaking, could be described as a certain international isolation and a profound retreat towards indigenous communities. This evolution strengthened the National Indigenous Congress (which it had fostered since 1996), with which it sought to participate electorally in the 2018 presidential elections, supporting the candidacy of the Nahual Marichuy in an election where Manuel López Obrador ultimately prevailed, becoming the first center-left president (with all the quotation marks one might want to add) in the country’s history. This sort of withdrawal from international political discourse did not prevent the creation of the Zapatista Little School (2013), nor did it prevent them, a couple of years later, from announcing “The Storm,” another metaphorical figure to explain with sharp precision and without euphemism the scope of the new world era. Along the same lines, they called for the exercise of critical thinking in the face of the capitalist hydra and also for the formation of “seedbeds” capable of bringing together autonomous experiences in different regions of the globe.
The pandemic context and the siege by paramilitary groups led to greater isolation, which was reversed externally when, at the end of 2021, the Journey for Life was launched. This combined a trip on the ship La Montaña as part of a larger delegation bound for Europe, with further stops planned for other continents. Since last December, the International Encounters of Rebellions and Resistances have been taking place, focusing both on moving towards “the day after” and on conducting a public self-critique of the political organization in order to illuminate another model. Insurgent Sub-commander Moisés summarized this new model by dismantling the pyramidal structure of the Good Government Councils and the Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Municipalities, bodies to be replaced by Local Autonomous Governments, the Collective of Zapatista Autonomous Governments, and the Assembly of Collectives of Zapatista Autonomous Governments in the 12 regions that make up this territory. Sociologist Raúl Romero, who participated in one of the panels held during the events that took place between the end of 2024 and January 2nd of this year, highlights these Zapatista ways of “understanding the dynamic nature of the constant change taking place in the communities, structural changes that occur based on their control of the territories.”
In a conversation with Zur from Mexico City, the intellectual and activist quotes Rosa Luxemburg and emphasizes that “in Zapatismo there are three main characteristics that closely coincide with what happened in the Paris Commune: First, there is the destruction of the existing apparatus of the State to create a form of popular self-government based on assembly-based decision-making and self-governing structures. Second, there is a dismantling of the State’s repressive apparatus and, in its place, a people’s army with its community authorities built by this autonomous self-government of the communities. And third, and perhaps most importantly, the recovery of territories as means of production that allow for the material and cultural reproduction of life, which is what sustains everything else.”
An Academic Technician at the Institute of Social Research and a Professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a frequent columnist for the newspaper La Jornada, co-coordinator of the book “Local Resistances, Global Utopias” (2015), and author of the recently released “Thinking Together About Alternatives,” among other professional endeavors, Romero emphasizes that Zapatismo, “from its consolidated territory and its armed organizational structure, engages in dialogue with the indigenous peoples of Mexico and the world.” Drawing on his knowledge and commitment as part of various groups of adherents and sympathizers of the autonomist ideas woven from Chiapas, he believes that “Zapatismo today, on a global scale, is one of the hearts of the anti-capitalist movement at a time when…” The world has shifted significantly to the right, and we are living through a time that some would describe as a civilizational crisis.”
And when asked to elaborate on this scenario, he points out: “Precisely in the face of this crisis of the liberal management of capitalism, which championed certain ideas that were false but enjoyed consensus, such as liberal democracy, human rights, and discourses about progress and science—while, particularly in Latin America, progressive movements failed to deliver for the popular sectors—fascist management has emerged, which is completely retrograde, anti-rights, and operates with a logic that even seeks to eliminate populations and implement models of accumulation by dispossession, extractivism, the degradation of territories, and confrontation with indigenous peoples.” So, in this situation of wars, climate crisis, and the rise of the right wing, Zapatismo has positioned itself as a reference point for the anti-capitalist left, allowing it to offer not only a discourse, a practice, and a theory, but also a conceptualization of the world.”
To elaborate on this point in the context of a conversation, excerpts of which were broadcast on the Buenos Aires program “Después de la Deriva” (After the Drift), Raúl invokes a powerful figure that seems to draw from the rich metaphorical tradition embedded within the EZLN itself, asserting: “While Zapatismo has always focused on seeing and building its work from the autonomy of its territories, it has never stopped thinking about a dream the size of the world, and for this reason, I consider it not a localist or nationalist movement, but an internationalist one.”
How much do you feel the concept of non-ownership impacts the international positioning of Zapatismo?
I consider it one of the boldest and most innovative proposals because it stems from understanding the recovered territories as territories that can be shared with other non-Zapatista communities, including those who were once partisan, to work the land collectively. This idea has also led to other initiatives, such as the construction of a hospital operating room in Zapatista territory, with the participation of both Zapatista and non-Zapatista communities. This reinforces the idea of a radicalism that Zapatismo claims to have arrived at after consulting with their elders and ancestors, asking them how they had survived the exploitation, contempt, and domination of the local bosses and landowners. Their ancestors responded that they found the commons when they escaped the haciendas and went to live in the mountains and the jungle.
Can this position be interpreted as a response to the practices of progressive administrations that promoted individual land ownership?
In Mexico, we currently have a government that could be classified as progressive, a very watered-down version of progressivism, now considered second-generation, lacking the same drive and radicalism as those of Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. The Mexican government under Claudia Sheinbaum, in addition to its matrix of extractive megaprojects and militarization, launched the “Sembrando Vida” (Sowing Life) program, which they present as the Mexican ideal of good living. This program allocates resources to farmers to plant timber and fruit trees, often sourced from army nurseries, in exchange for a subsidy for their crops. However, one of the program’s requirements is that farmers and Indigenous people register two hectares of private land in their name. This represents a continuation of neoliberal agrarian reform aimed at further privatizing land, which contradicts the logic of communal ownership. As a result, many of these young people sell their land to new landowners and use the proceeds to pay smugglers to the United States. There, they encounter a horrific immigration policy that deports them, forcing them to return to Mexico landless, indebted, and easy prey for organized crime.
From countries like Colombia and Ecuador, among others, warnings are being issued about drug cartels occupying territories that were once part of autonomous Indigenous communities. What is happening with this phenomenon in the region influenced by Zapatismo?
While drug trafficking is one of the most important sources of income for these networks in Mexico, today organized crime groups’ main business is human trafficking, part of the new phenomenon of global migration, which is compounded by a terrible crisis of disappearances. In Mexico, we currently have approximately 140,000 missing persons, some 500,000 murders, around one million displaced persons, and 13 femicides every day. In this context, since 2018 there has been a greater presence of organized crime groups in Indigenous communities, and with it, the emergence of young people from these communities with problems of addiction to synthetic drugs. In this context, Zapatismo finds itself in a kind of bubble, in a kind of peace belt, since in its territories there are no forced disappearances, no drug trafficking, no human trafficking, none of these horrors that occur in the rest of the country because it has managed to shield itself with organizational and community work, as also happens in Ostula in Michoacán and in communities in Guerrero of the Emiliano Zapata Indigenous and Popular Council.
Original article by Sergio Arboleya, Zur, December 2nd, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.