WE ARE SHADOWS OF GENTLE FURY

The story & lessons of the EZLN Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Here are the links to access and download the PDFs of the EZLN Zapatistas zines:

Printable mini-zine version: ZAPATISMO mini

Single-page full length version: SOGF

Full-length printable imposed version: SOGF-Booklet

An Introduction to Zapatismo & the EZLN

In recent years, many of us have learned all about the EZLN’s initial uprising on January 1st, 1994 when 3,000 indigenous campesinos (farmer and rural peoples) rose up in arms to decry “Ya Basta!” – enough! exploitation and inaction. We’ve all learned that they had been gathering their forces for ten years before their first public llevantamiento (uprising) – where an army of those desde abajo (from below), the people of Chiapas, decided to fight for their right to live with dignity. That day, their forces liberated cities, town centers, and about 500 ranches.

That same New Year’s Day, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. The agreement lifted internal protective tariffs and sanctions. This devastated Mexican campesinos who could not compete against the heavily subsidized corn and beans which flooded the country upon the agreement’s enactment. Two years earlier, in 1992, then president Salinas de Gortari had ‘reformed’ Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, allowing for the privatization of ejidos (collective communal lands). After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Constitution was amended to ensure that all ejidos were protected from private purchase so that the lands could not be accumulated by wealthy land-owners.

That was a major victory of the campesino revolutionaries against the hacendados (landlords), who had inherited their wealth and their campesino workforces from a legacy of colonial domination and ethnocide. The mutilation of Article 27 by Salinas resulted in large-scale theft of previously collectively-held lands by rich ranchers, dispossessing massive numbers of campesinos of their land base. The people of Chiapas and Mexico were devastated, and faced all-time high poverty. However, many of us have known that these changes were the most recent form of centuries of colonial domination:

“But today, we say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.” – First Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle

After their armed uprising, the Zapatistas catalyzed a global wave of solidarity that awakened a new generation of activists to organize for justice. Their actions have inspired all faces of the Earth: from demonstrations against global capitalism – such as the anarchist black bloc protests in Seattle in 1999 against the World Trade Organization – to the Occupy Wall Street and “We Are the 99%” movements after 2008, to the Purépecha municipality of Cherán in the Mexican state of Michoacán which rose up and proclaimed autonomy in 2011, to present-day Latino/Chicano anarchist and autonomous collectives. Perhaps most importantly, the EZLN offers one answer to the question of what a better kind of society might look like after the end of the Cold War.

The EZLN movement is an impressive, living example of the possibilities we can reach by refusing to engage with government. Zapatista communities adopted the strategy of building autonomy (independence and self-sufficiency), not of taking over authority or institutions. They organize themselves without the Mexican (narco)government. They have their own systems of justice, health, education, and production. Independent studies of the quality of life for people in Zapatista territory have shown the following: people opt for local justice systems, higher levels of primary education completion and literacy, increased positive health outcomes, and near elimination of maternal mortality rates and of hunger (Alvaro Reyes & Mara Kaufman, 2015).

As the Zapatistas would say: “there is a time to ask power to change, a time to demand change from power, and a time to exercise power.” The EZLN’s autonomy stems from their successful strategy of actively taking territory back from government and landlord control, directly acquiring resources into the hands of indigenous peoples in Chiapas, and self-management of their communities. The EZLN prove that it is possible to create a new world: a world in which many worlds may fit. Subcomandante Marcos put it simply:

“We Zapatistas say: ‘I am as I am and you are as you are. Let’s build a world where I can be, and not have to cease being me, where you can be, and not have to cease being you, and where neither I nor you will force another to be like either me or you.’ So when we Zapatistas say, ‘A world where many worlds fit,’ they are saying, more or less, ‘Everyone do your own thing.’”

The EZLN’s project of indigenous autonomy is a product of the Zapatistas’ high level of intentional organization. They envisioned a world of justice and dignity, and then set out to transform their dreams into reality. They built it all from scratch, and were not held back by the unlikelihood of success.

At the same time, the EZLN have demonstrated humility in knowing that they do not have all the answers – rather, they pose the question of “how do we live our lives” to all the peoples of the Earth, for them to begin to answer this for themselves. As the EZLN would say, the journey of a million miles begins with one step, preguntando-caminando (walking we ask and learn). They invite you to honor and walk your sacred path. May our commitment to dignity end the siege of colonization on our lives. Surrender does not exist in the language of truth: 

“In the committee, we debated all afternoon. We searched for the word in the tongue to say SURRENDER, and we did not find it. It has no translation in Tzotzil and Tzeltal. Nobody remembers that the word exists in Tojolabal or Chol.”