This text seeks to answer the question: How is the Zapatista movement exploring the dimensions of autonomy and what does this mean for democracy? To answer I begin by placing at the center words and work of Zapatista women and men (something we have learned in these more than three decades of walking alongside them).
| Author(s) | Xochitl Leyva Solano |
|---|---|
| Topics | Democracy, Land Use |
| Case Report | Radical Democracy: recovering the roots of self-governance & autonomy |
Contents
- 1 Mexican democracy and the Zapatista movement
- 2 Zapatista de facto and comprehensive Autonomy: A Contribution to the World
- 3 Organization of the Zapatista government
- 4 Women participation in the Autonomous Government
- 5 A turn in the Zapatista Autonomy[7]
- 6 A final idea to continue the struggle
- 7 Further explorations
- 8 Notes
This text seeks to answer the question: How is the Zapatista movement exploring the dimensions of autonomy and what does this mean for democracy? To answer I begin by placing at the center words and work of Zapatista women and men (something we have learned in these more than three decades of walking alongside them). Here is an excerpt from the words of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, for its acronym in Spanish) spokesman, Subcommader Insurgent Moises, given on December 31, 2024, in the Caracol Oventic located in the mountains of Los Altos de Chiapas (Mexico). There, the "Zapatista Cultural Festival and signers of the Declaration for Life" took place as part of the celebrations of the 31st anniversary of what the Zapatistas called "the beginning of the war against oblivion", referring to the armed uprising of January 1, 1994.[1] These words were addressed to Zapatista combatants fallen in duty, to militiamen and women as well as grassroots supporters. The message was read in front of the people of the world. SubMoi said:
Comrades fallen in duty; we have discovered one more path than we had discovered 31 years ago. The one forced upon us by the capitalist system; violence because it leaves us no other way; the other is the peaceful one without leaving us to the objective which is the liberation from the capitalist system. And it is here where they will not leave us, here where we have to be organized to defend ourselves, because they will never, never, never stop exploiting us [...] Fallen comrades we discovered two weapons in the peaceful struggle which is resistance and rebellion [...] We have already seen that it is possible to have a peaceful political struggle with resistance and rebellion [...] No, we do not want the war of death that the capitalist system makes. We fight for life, we fight for life and for life [...] But we also want to make it clear, it is not right that they want to kill us and that they want to make war against us for what it means to build truth, freedom, justice and democracy for the people. But we also want to make it clear that we are also prepared to defend ourselves. We are not threatening, we are telling the truth, we are going to defend ourselves if they come to attack us, we are thousands of combatants[...] A year ago we said: in common we have to build a new life, a new society. We have already experienced all the evils of the system, we already know it, now it is our turn to make the change, we, the peoples of Mexico, those who want to organize and the world[...] Let us think now, let us discuss now, in each geography where we are and according to our calendars, how we want a new life [...] beyond [...] capital. We, the Zapatistas, think that Mother Earth is the source of life, without her, we will not live [...]. The source of life for future generations to come, therefore, we must be responsible for taking care of them [...] We invite with all our hearts for the new life and the new society, we the Zapatistas are demonstrating that it is possible [...]. We the Zapatistas will dedicate ourselves, we will concentrate on how to care for and work with the earth and, along with it, to care for our health to continue fighting and in the construction of another form of life without capitalism.[2]
The Zapatista movement cannot be understood if it is not placed in the context of war from which it emerges. Not only because they declared war on the Mexican government and army based on Art. 39 of the Constitution, in which the people have the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government,[3] but, above all, because since they became publicly known, the EZLN stated in the First Declaration of the Lacandon Forest to be the result of more than 500 years of resistance to what they called "an undeclared genocidal war against our peoples". Then, they asked for support for the Mexican people's plan for work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace. And they closed by saying that they would not stop fighting until they succeeded in forming a free and democratic government for Mexico.
As readers can imagine, the Mexican state responded immediately with a counterinsurgency policy and a low-intensity war in the midst of which the EZLN and Mexican civil society had to act. The latter said “Yes” to the Zapatista political demands and “No” to the war and pushed for a peace process in which the government, the EZLN and civil society itself were the protagonists.
Mexican democracy and the Zapatista movement
In the Mexican public sphere of the 1990s, the dominant discourse was that of electoral democracy within the framework of something broader: the democratic transition after almost 70 years of government by the State party (the Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI for its acronyms in Spanish) and after a major split within the PRI itself in 1988.
Six months after the armed uprising, in June 1994, in the midst of the counterinsurgency war situation, the EZLN launched the Second Declaration of the Lacandon Forest in which it announced that it was taking aside its arms and called for a civil and peaceful effort through the convening of a national dialogue, which it called: the National Democratic Convention. The goal was to achieve "democratic change" and "the transition towards democracy, freedom, and justice."
In that second declaration, the Zapatistas invited Mexican civil society and leftist political parties to meet in the Zapatista village of La Realidad, in the heart of the Lacandon Forest, to organize civil expression and defend the sovereign will of the people. The goal they proposed was to arrive at a transitional government and a new constitution. At this time, the EZLN considered the electoral route as a way in which it did not get directly involved but neither did it obstruct it. At the same time, there was an encouragement of convergence with leftist parties that seemed to have shared interests. Both aspects were to change radically because representatives of the leftist parties in the Senate betrayed the spirit of what was signed in 1996 as peace accords between the EZLN and the Mexican government. All this led the Zapatista movement to explore other paths and, specifically, the path of de facto autonomy without permission.
Zapatista de facto and comprehensive Autonomy: A Contribution to the World
Zapatista autonomy broke with the tradition in Latin America where indigenous autonomies had been, above all, state-centered. According to its history and context, Zapatista autonomy is rather de facto. I mean, it has been exercised beyond the permission and recognition of the State, but supported by international laws such as ILO Convention 169.[4] Convention ratified by the Mexican government in 1990.
Zapatista autonomy has been lived as a way of life, as a collective and anti-systemic struggle gestated in the midst of wars. It is the result of a permanent dialogue between civilian and military authorities and grassroots communities formed by grandmothers and grandfathers, mothers and fathers, young men and women, as well as children. Zapatista autonomy is comprehensive because covers all aspects of life and is organized by areas of work that vary from community to community, but include: women rights, health, education, government, justice, agroecology, agrarian affairs, collective work, care of Mother Earth, commerce, transportation, civil registry, arts (dances, theater, music, murals, handicrafts, paintings, sculptures, poetry), science and communication (social networks, radio, video and cinema).
Organization of the Zapatista government
There are important differences between the Zapatista government and the Mexican representative democracy. The first one is about economic support. Representative democracy obtains its economic support from the Mexican government and private capital collected by political parties and politicians. On the contrary, the Zapatista government is based on voluntary work without payment to its authorities. People’s participation as authorities is part of duties and communal rights. The Zapatista authorities are elected in assemblies by agreements and consensus. There are four different Zapatista organizational levels to govern: communal, municipal, zone and regional. But how do these four levels work? Let me explain briefly.
In December 1994, the Zapatista movement created the Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Municipalities (MAREZ, for its acronyms in Spanish) in order to break the siege imposed by government counterinsurgency policies. The Zapatista municipalities had different territorial delimitations than the governmental municipalities, they were self-organized based on Zapatista ethical principles and revolutionary laws. They were under the military surveillance of the Zapatista forces but above all, under the organization of the Zapatista civilians, I mean, the Zapatista grassroots supporters spread in different indigenous, campesino and rural areas of Chiapas (see Map 1).
From December1994 until November 2023, MAREZ served:
- to organize the activities done in different areas of work (see above),
- and to administer and defend Zapatista territory and population.
From August 2003 to November 2023, based on the territorial organization of the MAREZ, the Zapatistas created another level of government: the Good Government Councils (JBG, for its acronyms in Spanish) and the Caracoles Zapatistas (Zapatista Snails) (see Map 2).
Although each MAREZ had its own particularities, we can say that the Zapatista civil authorities always worked as a team and, in general terms, we can point out that there was:
the Autonomous Council,
the Agrarian Commission and
the Commission of Honor and Justice
elected all of them in community assemblies, part of each rebel municipality (MAREZ).
Zapatista municipalities had different numbers of communities as part of them. At community or local level there were different kinds of authorities, such as:
an Agent,
and a Commissariat,
and each of them in turn had their respective collective-work-team that included
the Commander,
and his community police forces.
In August 2003, after self-criticism and internal analysis about the equal distribution of economic resources and the relation to international and national solidarity supporters, the Zapatistas created a new level of government called the "Good Government Council" (Juntas de Buen Gobierno in Spanish). The term “Council” (“Junta”) was used not by chance, it was due to the way Zapatistas operated to exercise decision making processes: “always together” (siempre juntos).
The authorities of the Good Government Councils worked in a socio-territorial space called Caracoles Zapatista or Zapatista Snails. From 2003 to 2019 there were five Caracoles and in 2019 Zapatistas created more, until twelve in total.[5] The Caracoles Zapatistas have been the political space and territory where Zapatistas meet national and international civil society. The Caracoles are also the space where the Zapatista authorities who are members of the JBG meet every day of the year, 24 hours a day, to carry out their functions at the zone or regional level. The JBG authorities are appointed by the different communities and zones that make up the movement. They hold rotating positions that change every month. These authorities are dedicated to the administration of common goods, to the attention of productive projects and to the organization of supracommunity collective work as well as to the resolution of conflicts, the administration of justice and the elaboration of communiques to the outside world.
The MAREZ, the Good Government Councils and the Caracoles were based on the principle of "commanding by obeying" where the people command and the Zapatista government obeys. This idea was key for what Zapatistas called "good government" in opposition to "bad government" referring to the Mexican government run by representative democracy and political parties.
The Mexican “bad government” ("mal gobierno" as they say in Spanish) has been criticized not only by the Zapatistas but also by many radical movements and analysts. It has been criticized for its authoritarianism, corruption, clientelism, and co-optation. All these labels are used not only to describe the 70 years of rule by the party governing the Mexican State (PRI, for its Spanish acronym) but also to refer to the democratically elected governments of the right and left that have held power at different levels in recent years. In response, the Zapatista government created and practices seven basic principles:
To Obey, Not Command
To Propose, Not Impose
To Represent, Not Supplant
To Convince, Not Conquer
To Construct, Not Destroy
To Serve Others, Not Serve Oneself
To Work from Below, Not Seek to Rise
In cases where a Zapatista authority violates any of these principles, their case is dealt with at the local level and may even be taken up by the Good Government Councils. After being “studied,” that is, analyzed collectively, this may lead to the dismissal of the authority in question or their expulsion from the movement.
It is also important to note that in the Zapatista government, people are not professional politicians but members of the community or the organization who are educated by their families, the Zapatista school, and the organization as people who are jointly responsible for collective and communal life. This life exists without the intervention of political parties; on the contrary, at the center are the assembly, agreement, and/or consensus.
PHOTO 4
Women participation in the Autonomous Government
The respect shown to the women of the support bases and their inclusion in all spheres of life and struggle has been a priority for the Zapatista movement as a whole. All one has to do is listen to the women in meetings on different levels or in the written and audio-visual media available on the Internet, where they narrate in detail their situation before and after joining the EZLN. As Mayor (Major) Ana Maria explained in 1994:
We demanded from the compañeros of our villages that women can organise as well, represent something, do something, not only the men. Whenever we arrived at the communities, there were only men at the meetings and in the study circles. We worked a lot so that women would stand up and have the opportunity to do something; women themselves were asking for it. They would say: “if men will study and learn things, why should we not?” We also want to train, learn something […] Furthermore, we have insurgent compañeras who have proven that they can; so, yes, women can, just give us the opportunity! That is how many women began to enter the militia.
Zapatista women today, 32 years after the creation of the Women’s Revolutionary Law,[6] participate on equal terms in the regular militia forces and the general command, as well as in the Councils of Good Government, the local and zone committees and the commissions that make up the different levels of autonomous organisation. But despite that reality, Zapatista women describe how their rights came to be, the enormous difficulties they still face and what remains to be accomplished.
A turn in the Zapatista Autonomy[7]
Zapatista autonomy and its government are so alive that they continue to flow and transform day by day. I will briefly mention the changes they underwent between 2023 and 2024, when the Zapatista movement celebrated the 30th and 31st anniversaries of the “beginning of the war against oblivion”—as they call January 1, 1994.
These changes were announced in a series of communiqués published between October 22 and December 20, 2023.[8] Reading these statements should be complemented by the words of the general command of the EZLN and its support bases, who were the protagonists of the first session of what the Zapatistas called the Encounters of Resistance and Rebellion. This session was held in December 2024 at CIDECI Las Casas/Unitierra-Chiapas.
In the aforementioned series of communiqués, the Zapatistas announced the disappearance of the autonomous structure that existed until 2023, namely the Zapatista Autonomous Rebel Municipalities (MAREZ) and the Good Government Councils (JBG).[9] These changes, they explained, are necessary for security reasons given the narco-war ravaging various parts of Chiapas, but also to confront the worst of the "Capitalist Hydra". They stated: “We have prepared ourselves so that our peoples may survive, even if isolated from one another.”
The new autonomous structure[10] is based on Local Action Groups (GAL, Spanish acronym), which exist in every community where Zapatistas live. Several GALs can form Zapatista Autonomous Government Collectives (CGAZ, Spanish acronym) to address issues that concern several GALs. And finally, there are the Assemblies of Zapatista Autonomous Government Collectives, which convene zone meetings when requested by the CGAZ. These are not spaces of authority, they clarify, but of coordination. Thus, “the pyramid is inverted,” returning decision-making power to the peoples and communities.
That December 2024, the Zapatistas also shared with us one of the most radical decisions they had ever made: to declare “no ownership” of a portion of the recovered lands.[11] They considered that ownership of land, both private and communal, has pitted peoples against each other, so land under “common work” will not be owned by anyone. It will be worked in shifts and through agreements between the GAL and the neighbors, whether or not they are members of political parties. In that same session, the Zapatistas developed “the Genealogy of the Common” to explain where this type of work comes from, as well as their experience of practicing the common with their Zapatista brothers and sisters.
The Zapatistas emphatically told us that the JBG and MAREZ served as their political school, but they reproduced “the bad things about governments.” The appointment of representative authorities removed decision-making from the participation of the people. The rotating nature of the positions made it difficult to continue projects, and they were unable to incorporate women and youth equitably. The “pyramid,” they added, also contributed positive aspects: learning self-government, the need for women to be authorities, practicing what good government for the people should be like, learning both how to do “true justice” and how to make laws.
A final idea to continue the struggle
In this time of the collapse of representative democracy I wonder how many governments in the world that boast of being democratic would be capable of such a deep and collective self-criticism. How many of those democracies would be willing to try a new form of government for life, putting Mother Earth, women and common or no private property at the center. The Zapatistas are doing it and in doing they challenge, provoke and invite us, saying emphatically: No to wars, Yes to Life. Undoubtedly, this is one of their contributions to the world.[12]
Further explorations
“Las Compañeras Tienen Grado / Zapatista Women”: https://evo.re/rd10301
Who are the Zapatistas?: https://evo.re/rd10302
"The Zapatista Uprising, 30 Years Later": https://evo.re/rd10302
References and sources
First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (December, 1993): https://evo.re/rd10304
Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona (June, 2005): https://evo.re/rd10305
EZLN. 2016. “Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra: I”, Contributions by the Sixth Commission of the EZLN. Durham: Duke University Press.
Leyva, X. 2022. Wars, Zapatismo, Networks. https://evo.re/rd10306
Alonso and Alonso. 2022. An Overview of Zapatismo: https://evo.re/rd10307
Notes
- ↑ For those interested in following his words and activities of the 31st anniversary and other activities, go to the Enlace Zapatista and Radio Zapatista websites, as well as to FB Radio Pozol.
- ↑ Taken and transcribed from https://www.facebook.com/CdhFrayba/videos/881163953897023)>. Boldface mine.
- ↑ “Article 39. The national sovereignty is vested, originally and essentially, in the people. Public power comes from the people and it is institutionalized for the people’s benefit. People, at all times have the inalienable right to change or modify its form of government”. Taken from https://archivos.juridicas.unam.mx/www/legislacion/federal/leyes/consting.pdf
- ↑ On line: https://normlex.ilo.org/dyn/nrmlx_en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:55:0::NO::P55_TYPE%2CP55_LANG%2CP55_DOCUMENT%2CP55_NODE:REV%2Cen%2CC169%2C%2FDocument>.
- ↑ See https://www.jornada.com.mx/2019/08/18/politica/008n1pol>.
- ↑ On line: https://schoolsforchiapas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Zapatista-Womens-Revolutionary-Laws.pdf>.
- ↑ This section is taken from the Presentation written by Leyva, Cubells, Alonso and Köhler for the book entitled Autonomía Zapatista frente a la Tormenta. Madrid and San Cristóbal de Las Casas, CLACSO, Cooperativa Editorial Retos, CJA-CUCSH-UdeG, Traficantes de Sueños, 2025: 8-10.
- ↑ First communique on line: https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2023/10/23/first-part-the-motives-of-the-wolf/>. Last communique on line: https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2023/12/22/twentieth-and-last-part-the-common-and-non-property/>.
- ↑ On line: https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2023/11/06/fourth-part-and-first-approach-alert-several-necessary-deaths/>.
- ↑ On line: https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2023/11/13/ninth-part-the-new-structure-of-zapastista-autonomy/>.
- ↑ On line. https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2023/12/22/twentieth-and-last-part-the-common-and-non-property/>.
- ↑ For more information about the legacy of Zapatismo see Enlace Zapatista (https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/), Radio Zapatista (https://radiozapatista.org/) and the Collection The Zapatista Beacon (https://alfarozapatista.jkopkutik.org/ and https://radiozapatista.org/?p=43471).