From the¡Ya Basta!to theCaracoles: Zapatista Mobilization under Transitional Conditions

Abstract

This study draws on the literature on political opportunity structures to investigate the effects of local and national factors on the Zapatista cycle of protest from 1994 to 2003. A cross‐sectional, time‐series, negative binomial model for event counts is used to analyze the ebb and flow of Zapatista protests across the 111 municipios (municipalities) of Chiapas during this 10‐year period. The results show that while all types of demands appear to have been significant triggers of protest activity, Zapatistas concentrated their protest events in larger and more closed localities that had a history of protest activity, stable elite alignments, and a larger military presence. Openings in the political system at the local and national levels lessened protest activity in the more democratic scenarios. These results suggest that the curvilinear relationship between the structure of political opportunities and protest mobilization posited to explain social movements in well‐developed Western democracies does not explain the development of the protest cycle of a new social movement in an emerging electoral democracy.