# Zapatistas The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, rose into public view on 1 January 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force, when indigenous Maya rebels took several towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The date was the argument: NAFTA changed Mexico's constitution to allow the sale of communally held ejido land, and the uprising was a response to a global economic order arriving to dispossess them. The movement is named for Emiliano Zapata, the agrarian revolutionary of the Mexican Revolution whose slogan — tierra y libertad, land and freedom — the Zapatistas carry forward. After the initial fighting, the Zapatistas turned from military insurgency to something more durable: autonomous government. Across the territory they hold in Chiapas they built their own schools, health clinics and governing bodies, funded without state money, organised into autonomous municipalities and, since 2003, five zones called caracoles ("snail shells"), each anchored by a junta de buen gobierno, a council of good government. Authority rotates, mandates are recallable, and officials serve without pay — an attempt to "govern by obeying" (mandar obedeciendo) rather than to hold power over others. #### The Fourth World War The Zapatistas' most influential contribution to political language is the reframing of the twentieth century. In their telling, the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold War are the same war, a continuous conflict over who controls life and land; what continues in the present is the Fourth World War, no longer fought between nation states but driven by financial centres and their corporate bases. It is planetary and ongoing, and its target is any person, group or community that insists on clinging to their difference and refusing market disciplines — anything that disrupts convivial, interdependent life. The war has an internal face too: a war of oblivion, which insists people forget their victories and their practices, and a war against subsistence, which frays the social relations that hold autonomous life together so that accumulation can proceed. Subcomandante Marcos, the movement's storyteller and spokesperson (retired from the role in 2014), carried this analysis through communiqués, essays and fairy tales that circulated worldwide, making the Zapatistas the reference point for the alter-globalisation movement of the late 1990s and for movements from Kurdish Rojava to autonomous neighbourhoods across the Americas. #### Assembly as technology The practice the Zapatistas are best known for among organisers is the sistema de asamblea: decision-making in village assemblies rather than through representatives. Around it sit three interlocking technologies — the sistema de cargo (duties of service distributed across the community), the sistema de tequio (collective work for the community), and the sistema de fiesta (celebration as social infrastructure). None of it is a relic; the assembly had to be relearned through struggle and remains under assault from colonial dispossession. What it exposes is the difference between two cosmovisions: the rights-bearing, property-owning citizen-subject of Western liberalism versus families, extended families and community as the locus of decision, work and care. #### Connections - [[Community Safety in the Fourth World War]] — Manuel Callahan and Annie Paradise build their five elements of community safety in direct dialogue with the Zapatistas, taking the assembly and the Fourth World War framework as load-bearing. - [[Peter Gelderloos]] — uses the Zapatista territories as a standing example that order without the state is possible, alongside the Spanish Civil War and mutual aid in disasters. - [[Murray Bookchin]] — the Zapatistas and Rojava are the embryonic versions of his ecological libertarian municipalism being practised. - [[La Via Campesina]] — a kindred movement: rural, indigenous-rooted resistance to the same global economic order, organised around food sovereignty rather than territory. - [[Indigenous peoples]] and [[Indigenous Knowledge]] — the Zapatistas are indigenous Maya people defending land held communally; autonomy here is inseparable from land and language. `Concepts:` [[Community]] · [[Capitalism]] · [[Indigenous]] `Knowledge Base:` [[Sociology]]