The EZLN and Indymedia

Abstract

In 1994, as the political and economic elite of the United States, Canada, and Mexico inaugurated the North American Free Trade Agreement, an army of masked guerillas from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) declared the birth of a new Mexican revolution. The ensuing encounter between the indigenous army and the Mexican state, and in particular the EZLN's flexible adaptation to modern warfare, has rewritten the common story of twentieth-century revolution, leading to new strategies and dynamics of social struggle. This chapter looks at the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas to illustrate how it laid the foundation for the indymedia movement and other Cyber Left institutions. It focuses on the conditions within Mexico that led to the EZLN's political praxis. It argues that the revolutionary strategy of the EZLN was shaped through the social and economic conditions of the region as well as a series of confrontations between Marxist revolutionaries, Mayans, and eventually the Mexican state.