Lessons from the Zapatistas, an English translation of a 2023 Spanish edition, offers a concise summary of nearly 30 years of political activity by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), the largely Maya-peasant army that took up arms against the Mexican government in the southern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994. Lia Pinheiro Barbosa is an activist and professor of Sociology at the State University of Ceará, Brazil, and Peter Rosset is an academic author and activist based in Chiapas. The authors’ perspective is sympathetic to the Zapatista movement; therefore, they tend to replicate the EZLN’s official narrative of its history and politics. The book draws on primary sources written by the Zapatistas, including communiqués, published interviews, propaganda, as well as scholarly literature.
The book begins by providing a historical background of the 1994 rebellion and then, transitions to a description of the most innovative aspects of Zapatismo in comparison to other armed experiences from below in Latin America. They highlight the impulse to women’s liberation; the construction of an autonomous structure through self-government; a popular justice system based on restorative principles; a communitary education that strikes a balance between the humanities and the sciences; and a rural economy, based on voluntary collective work, cooperatives, tax collection, collective accumulation, and agroecology.
The authors also take seriously what they call “Zapatista Critical Theory,” a body of ideas that includes an emphasis on the Indigenous as a political-historical subject; a specific theory of the state, power, and capitalism; a vision of democracy from below; a well-developed theory of praxis; a belief in popular and class autonomy; and the necessity of the struggle for decolonization, and the defense of territory. The authors also underscore the points of convergence and divergence between Zapatismo and Marxism, arguing that while the Zapatista ideology is a cocktail, it still has strong Marxist influences and is fully anti-capitalist.
The principal focus of the book is to explain how Maya peoples—Tzetzal, Tzotzil, Ch’ol, Tojolabal, and Zoque—built self-governance structures based on their own customs and traditions.
The principal focus of the book is to explain how Maya peoples—Tzetzal, Tzotzil, Ch’ol, Tojolabal, and Zoque—built self-governance structures based on their own customs and traditions. The authors describe in detail how the Zapistas organized their communities in line with these principles, tracing the construction of autonomous municipalitiesin the territory that they liberated in 1994, as well as the construction in 2003 of five wider territorial structures called the Caracoles (“snails”), each presided by a good government council. The authors describe the internal organization of these councils, their grassroots democracy based on popular assemblies, and the institutional building within their territories, which rejected any form of state intervention. The authors also outline the seven philosophical-epistemic principles underlying the whole project, which reflect a Maya horizontal worldview and a communal ethics of caring about others and the land itself. The authors chose not to delve into the military apparatus (the EZLN and the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee-General Command, CCRI-CG) that has run parallel to the communities’ political structure. This omission is problematic because, while the Zapatistas claim to have a democracy predicated on leadership turnover, the most prominent figures in the movement from 1994 to the present have been the EZLN’s military leaders, such as Marcos and Moisés.
This book is a useful reference for social justice activists and for those who want to explore the Zapatistas’ official narrative. Also, this English-language edition includes a postscript with translations of communiqués explaining the latest developments in the Zapatista movement, particularly the transformation of the autonomous structures in 2023. Overall, the book provides an insightful perspective on the organization of autonomous, democratic political and economic structures among rural Maya communities.
Yet an informed, critical reader will recognize some of the authors’ shortcomings. They fail to address the Zapatistas’ multiple ideological shifts over three decades, giving the impression that the construction of autonomy was a linear process. Also, they minimize the role of solidarity networks—especially from the Global North—in underpinning the autonomous projects. The protagonism of Subcommander Marcos (now demoted to captain), the mestizo long-standing Zapatista spokesperson and alleged translator of the Maya worldview, is not problematized. The Maya worldview is itself at times essentialized and underexplained. The authors do not discuss either the local impacts of the Zapatista movement among non-Zapatista indigenous communities, the contentious relationships of the EZLN with other leftist groups, peasant organizations, and the electoral left, the influence of the Catholic Church in the Zapatista territory, or how the communities have resisted decades of counterinsurgency activity and drug-cartel penetration.
Because of those important omissions, this hybrid of sociological analysis and political advocacy does not fully convey the lessons that we can draw from Zapatismo. However, those overlooked aspects are crucial to understand why indigenous groups have not been able to reproduce the Zapatista autonomous model in Mexico and beyond.
Adela Cedillo is an Assistant Professor of Modern Mexican History at the University of Houston. She is the co-editor with Fernando Herrera Calderon of Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico. Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964-1982 (Routledge, 2012) and the author of Crossroads of Violence: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs in Northwestern Mexico (University of California Press, 2027).