The Zapatistas and the art of ventriloquism

Abstract

At the end of 1993, a revolutionary organization called the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejercito Nacional de Liberacion Nacional – EZLN) was making its final preparations to take power in Mexico by armed force. It appeared to be an absurd undertaking. On the one hand, this army, which had been operating in a clandestine fashion in a corner of the state of Chiapas, made up of a relatively small number of poorly armed indigenous peasants, was going to declare war on the Mexican government and army. But the enterprise also seemed uncertain in political terms. At that time, the EZLN defined itself according to the conventional terminology of an armed, left-wing, revolutionary organization: a front line group, leading the working class, with the idea of taking power and installing a socialist political regime. At a time when such revolutionary attempts had been widely discredited, and after the peace accords between governments and guerillas in Central America, its language and ideology seemed somewhat out of place. And yet, a short time after the armed uprising had taken place on January 1st, 1994, the Zapatista army managed to substantially alter its profile and present itself to public opinion as an ethnic movement, a defender of indigenous culture and its traditional order. In other words, within the space of a few months, the EZLN had moved from defending the Revolution to defending ‘identity politics’; its cause was no longer socialism but Indian dignity. This new way in which the Zapatistas presented themselves inverted the initially weak situation and not only managed to save the organization, but provoked an extraordinary resonance and public response. But identity politics has its limitations. By shedding its revolutionary language and adopting an ethnic rhetoric, the Zapatistas also committed themselves to a type of politics that turns out to be difficult to abandon once it has been chosen.