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This paper details the history, organizational structures, and strategies of the Zapatista movement originating in Chiapas, Mexico, and contains an analysis of the potential and limitations of the movement. The paper is thus organized into three sections. The first section will discuss the history and origins of the Zapatistas, the second will discuss Zapatista organizational structures and strategies, and the third will conclude the paper with some reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the movement, and its potential to endure as a social movement. By Zapatista movement, I refer to not just the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional, EZLN), but to the entire set of individuals and groups mobilized by the actions or messages of the EZLN. As will become clear after the first two sections of this paper, the Zapatista movement may be thought of as consisting of two distinct spheres of Zapatista activity: one consisting of local organizations in Chiapas, Mexico, and another consisting of what Olesen (2005) calls a transnational solidarity network, which operates at the transnational level. Both components of the Zapatista movement have their origins in the EZLN, the formation of which I will now trace in the first section of my paper.

1.

Zapatista

origins:

the

historical

roots

and

organizational

development of the EZLN In this section I will discuss the origin and development of the Zapatista movement by tracing the roots of the EZLNs formation in the 1980s leading
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up to the 1994 insurrection. Next, I briefly discuss how the EZLN turned from a socialist revolutionary organization into an indigenous-based resistance movement. I will then examine how the Zapatista movement spread beyond the organizational structure of the EZLN itself to become a social movement that involved elements of both Mexican and global civil society. Womack (1999) and Barmeyer (2009) note that the Zapatista movement grew out from the intersection of two community organizing efforts conducted under the auspices of Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garca and by the pan-Mexican socialist organization Forces of National Liberation (Fuerzas de Liberacin Nacional, FLN) respectively. This took place on a backdrop of a history of autonomous community organization by the Lacandn local communities. Historically, the Lacandn communities were settled by a stream of young, disaffected and dispossessed migrant laborers from the Chiapas central highlands (Womack, 1999). This migration stream, beginning in the 1950s, resulted in Lacandn communities with a young, mostly indigenous

demographic profile, settled far from central towns controlled by the PRI party machine (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI, Mexicos dominant political party). This lack of pre-existing power structures and the relative lack of stratification in communities of displaced, immiserated settlers allowed decision-making in communal assembliesan organizational form later to become a distinctive feature of Zapatista-controlled territories to become the predominant form of administration there.

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The community organizing by the Bishop and by the FLN differed in their motivations and goals. As detailed by Womack (1999) and Barmeyer (2009), Bishop Ruiz, influenced by liberation theology, aimed at conducting missionary work in a way that bettered the actual living conditions of the dioceses population, and enabled them to organize and lead communities themselves instead of facing an organizational structure imposed by Church authorities. Left-wing organizations like the FLN, on the other hand, saw in the poor yet organized Chiapas population an opportunity to expand socialism and use Chiapas as a base for revolution. The Bishop and the FLNs organizing efforts intersected when diocesan officers invited FLN social workers (including Subcommander Marcos, who was later to become a well-known Zapatista spokesperson) to help regain control over the Union of Ejido Unions (UU), a union of communal landholding communities that the church helped to establish, but which then fell under the sway of the Proletarian Line (LP), another socialist organization active in Chiapas. Womack (1999) notes that church officers were apparently unaware of the FLN cadres socialist affiliations or goals. With this access to community organizations and unions, the FLN began organizing clandestinely for an armed revolution. They worked within Churchestablished unions to build the structure of the EZLN which would become the core of the Zapatista movement later. This was not, however, a process of imposing socialist ideals on a passive indigenous audience. On the contrary, the EZLN became indianized in the process of organizing its forces in
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Chiapas, shifting their goals from class struggle and socialist revolution to an ethical struggle to assert the basic rights and dignity of the indigenous (Higgins, 2004). Higgins points to two main factors that led to this Indian turn. Firstly, FLN members themselves, struggling to find the relevance of their urban-based socialist discourses to the reality of life in rural indigenous communities, were driven to re-think their ideology. Secondly, extensive community organizing efforts had already taken place in Chiapas before the FLNs entry, most of which were conducted autonomously by the communities or with the encouragement of long-standing insiders such as Bishop Ruiz. The only reasons that could make the FLN proposal of insurrection attractive to local communities, was the sheer lack of economic and political opportunities that persisted despite all the other initiatives already taken. All this meant that while indigenous communities felt motivated by necessity to ally with the growing EZLN, they continued to be assertive within the organization, as per the customary autonomy in previous community organizations. On 1 January, 1994, the EZLN proclaimed its First Declaration of the Lacandn Jungle and launched its armed rebellion. This was swiftly checked by the Mexican Army, and the conflict ended in 12 days. Within those 12 days, however, Mexican civil society reacted quickly to the conflict with large protests, sympathetic to the Zapatistas but demanding peace and negotiation a reaction which the EZLN did not initially expect (Womack, 1999, chap. 23). Responding to this public pressure, first the Mexican government and then the EZLN declared ceasefires and commenced negotiations. I will detail the
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complex developments that took place after negotiations in the second section of the paper below. For now, I will focus on two fundamental changes in the Zapatista movement that occurred in the wake of the public reaction to the 1994 rebellion: a new focus on civil society instead of armed insurrection, and the building of a global consciousness in connection to the Zapatistas. On March 23, 1994, while government-EZLN negotiations were still taking place, Luis Donaldo Colosio, the expected successor to then-president Salinas of Mexico, was assassinated. In view of this, the EZLN decided not to accept the governments proposals in the negotiation, because, as Subcommander Marcos explained, coming to an agreement with a government leadership that could not reliably ensure the security of their own heirs would not guarantee much (Womack, 1999, chap. 28). The Zapatistas thus turned towards an appeal to civil society, which they prominently addressed starting from their Second Declaration of the Lacandn Jungle (June 10, 1994). This focus on civil society marks a shift away from the strategy of armed insurgency towards a nonviolent social movement, and, I argue, also marks the expansion of Zapatismo into a broader social movement that goes beyond the

organizational base of the EZLN alone, to involve both national and transnational groups. What made this turn to civil society possible? Gilberth and Otero (2001), in arguing for their view that the Zapatista uprising was a principal force for democratization in Mexican politics, have shown how the EZLNs rebellion in 1994 served as a powerful call to action for Mexican civil society. Initially,
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protestors turned out in the tens of thousands to rally against the governments use of force, securing concessions in the form of a unilateral government ceasefire and agreement to negotiations. The EZLNs uprising also sparked new discourses of opposition to neoliberalism in urban Mexico, symbolized by its starting date1 January 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect. This resistance unraveled urban Mexicans conception of neoliberalism and NAFTA as signs of modernization. It also led to the crumbling of legitimacy for the Salinas administration, for, by passing NAFTA, it had aimed to legitimate itself through discourses of neoliberal progressivism. The Zapatista uprising quickly demonstrated the shortcomings of progressive neoliberal rhetoric, in the process transforming the movement from a small armed rebellion into a potent symbol of resistance to state and market oppression. It is this symbolic power that drew activist support to the EZLN, and made it possible for the Zapatistas to transform into a social movement that appeals more to civil society than to force of arms. Nor was this symbolic power only potent within Mexican borders. Olesen (2008) argues that the Zapatistas have managed to create a global consciousness by becoming a universal symbol of exclusion and

oppression. Admittedly, this comment is more appropriate for a later period, when the Zapatistas began to explicitly address topics such as the parallels between their conditions and those faced by indigenous communities worldwide. However, as Olesen (2005, p.3) notes in his timeline of the development of transnational Zapatista solidarity networks, the network was
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already existent during the 12-day uprising, when transnational activists joined Mexican civil society to protest against government use of force. The emergence and development of the Zapatista transnational solidarity network will be detailed in the next section of this paper. In sum, the Zapatista movement emerged upon a background of preexisting communal organization by Chiapas indigenous communities. The nucleus of the movement was the EZLN, which was built up from the confluence of community organizing efforts by the Catholic diocese under Bishop Ruiz, and clandestine appropriation of these networks by FLN cadres, including Marcos, for purposes of armed revolution. This was the initial recruitment network for the Zapatista movement. While organizing indigenous communities in Chiapas, the EZLN became indianized, shifting their goals away from traditional and universalistic socialist ideals of proletarian revolution towards a struggle to make the needs and demands of Chiapas indigenous communities heard. The military failure of the 1994 12-day rebellion, and resulting civil society reactions to it, resulted in the transformation of the Zapatistas from an armed resistance group to a social movement that engages with civil society. Following on from this, the next section will focus on two things: first, the shifts in the Zapatistas strategies, discourses, and self-framings in response to changing political opportunities, economic necessities, and local social conditions; second, the post-uprising organization of the Zapatistas and their support networks at both national and transnational levels.
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2. Strategies and tactics, organization and structure In this section, I turn my attention to the strategies and tactics of the Zapatistas, and the structures of Zapatista organizations. This section is divided into three main parts. The first is a detailed discussion of the organizational structures, strategies, and tactics of the EZLN in its formative and early post-insurrection period, stretching from late 1993 to 1998. The

second section details the rise and structure of the Zapatista transnational solidarity network. The third and fourth parts introduce two later changes in Zapatista organizational structures, strategies and tacticsthe first being the establishment of autonomous municipalities, which began in 1994 but became more extensive after 2003, the second being the so-called Other Campaign of engagement with Mexican activists outside Chiapas, which began in 2006. Looking back at the origins of the Zapatista movement detailed in the first section of this paper, a few points regarding the early organizational structures, strategies, and tactics of the Zapatistas may be observed. In the period leading up to the armed insurrection of January 1994, the initial organizational structures of the Zapatista movement consisted of autonomous community organizations grouped around settlement and church, upon which the FLN grafted the EZLN military hierarchy. This organizational structure remained largely intact after the failure of the insurrection. However, as has also been noted, after the failed insurrection, the strategy of the Zapatistas shifted away from military action to civil society engagement.
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During this period, several distinct tactics were used by the Zapatistas. The first, perhaps in contradiction with popular perception of the Zapatistas as a democratic bottom-up movement, involved consolidation of solidarity in Zapatista-controlled communities by the expulsion of inhabitants against the movement. This action is best documented by Barmeyer (2009, pp. 39-40), who records three villages where up to a dozen families were expelled. Noting the Zapatistas slow takeover of land vacated by expulsion, Barmeyer argues that the expulsions were aimed at maintaining community cohesion and not economically-motivated. Despite the use of expulsion, an authoritarian tactic, it is important to bear in mind that the Zapatista uprising was still a collaborative project between indianized FLN socialists and local communities. Support for the Zapatista cause was, at that time, still the dominant sentiment in the Chiapas lowlands communities, a fact that Barmeyer affirms in his ethnographic account. Community dissent, motivated by economic necessity, was a later phenomenon, which I will examine in the third section of this paper. In line with their new post-rebellion strategy of appealing to civil society, the Zapatistas made use of specific negotiation tactics. It is important to note that the Zapatistas themselves did not actually believe in the sincerity of the government in negotiation. Some regarded it as a potential trap to lure and capture Zapatistas (Marcos, 1997, quoted in Womack, 1999). Mistrust of the government ran even higher with the assassination of the expected successor to the Mexican presidency, Luis Donaldo Colosio, in March 1994. Thus the
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Zapatistas believed that the government was neither sincere in their intent to negotiate, nor cohesive enough to follow through with any promises from the negotiations. Instead, Zapatista negotiation tactics were calculated to present their cause positively to Mexican civil society, and to buy time so that changes in Mexican national politics might result in higher support for the Zapatistas. Womack (1999) notes that the Zapatistas hoped the next presidential election, in which Ernesto Zedillo was expected to be elected, would be so corrupt that Mexican civil society would be driven to more aggressive anti-government action. The Zapatistas also repeatedly attempted to incite participatory political action in Mexican national politics by calling for a National Democratic Convention (Second Declaration of the Lacandn Jungle, June 10, 1994) and a Zapatista Front of National Liberation (FLZN) (Fourth Declaration of the Lacandn Jungle, January 1, 1996). These calls for direct, widespread Mexican activism came to nothing. Mexican civil society, while voicing sympathy for the Zapatistas, did not take action above and beyond that (Womack, 1999). This was to become an enduring difficulty for the Zapatistas, a difficulty only partially alleviated by transnational support for the Zapatista cause, and the Zapatistas recent (since 2006) efforts to connect with other Mexican activists in the so-called Other Campaign, which I will describe later. Finally, one other tactic the Zapatistas used in the early post-rebellion years was the invitation of transnational activists to Zapatista events in Chiapas. Thus in 1996, two events for transnational activists, celebrities, and intellectuals were held in La Realidad, in the Zapatista-controlled region in
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Chiapas. These events, first the Continental Encounter for Humanity and against Neoliberalism (April 1996), and then the International Encounter (July 1996), had several aims. Most importantly, the presence of foreign observers in Chiapas was intended to provide a degree of safety from state violence. Barmeyer (2009) recounts that in his time in Zapatista territory, he was tasked with prominently showing himself whenever Mexican Army convoys passed througha tactic which often did turn back military patrols. The avoidance of visible violence by state authorities was crucial for a Mexican government eager to present itself internationally as a modern neoliberal state that respected personal freedoms and property rights. The logic of this could be considered an example of what Keck and Sikkink (1998) call the boomerang pattern in transnational activism. According to this model, social movements that face domestic repression could appeal to transnational advocacy networks based in other countries, which could then exert external pressure on the offending national government. Mexico is a good case for this, since the sensitivity to Euro-American perceptions of Mexicos neoliberal-oriented government resulted in reluctance to commit violence on the Zapatistas before the eyes of foreigners. Besides protection by the physical presence of foreign observers, the Continental and International Encounters also aimed to increase transnational awareness and media attention of the Zapatista movement. The mediaoriented nature of the events is evident from the list of individuals the Zapatistas invitednot just transnational human rights activists, but also
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media celebrities and artists (including, among others, Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone), political figures (such as Danielle Mitterrand), and famous intellectuals (Noam Chomsky among them). To some extent, this is consistent with the maximization of foreign scrutiny to prevent government violence. However, as Olesen (2005) notes, the personal ties generated through these events translated into new electronically-mediated relationships in the Zapatista transnational support network. It is to this network that I now turn my attention. Marcos (1997, quoted in Womack, 1999), the most widely known spokesperson of the EZLN, has noted that over time, two strands of Zapatismo have emerged: original or armed Zapatismo, consisting of the members of the EZLN and community organizations in Chiapas, and civilian Zapatismo, consisting of national and transnational activists mobilized by EZLN-related issues. While the events and activities described in the above sections were almost exclusively related to the EZLN and associated organizations in Chiapas, the Zapatista transnational solidarity network involves the

intersection of the EZLN Zapatistas with civil society actors, both Mexican and international. Olesen (2005) describes the Zapatista transnational solidarity network as a tiered set of connections relaying Zapatista-related news. At the base level are the local communities of Chiapas. These pass information to individuals and organizations physically present in Chiapas and in personal contact with the EZLN. In turn, this second tier in the network conveys information outward to a third tier of actors, based worldwide, who typically
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perform editorial functions by condensing and summarizing information from multiple second-tier sources. Olesen considers second and third-tier actors the core of the transnational Zapatista solidarity network, as their work maintains regular ties between each other and also between themselves and more peripheral actors. They are thus crucial to the networks continued existence. Information from the third tier is accessed by a worldwide community of committed (fourth-tier) and transitory (fifth-tier) individuals and groups, which form the periphery of the network. The transnational Zapatista solidarity network is not built on such a network infrastructure alone. It also involves constructing a global

consciousness, a framing of the Zapatista movement in a way that makes it relevant for actors in disparate locations worldwide. Olesen suggests that the Zapatistas have constructed a globally-relevant frame by emphasizing universal respect for, and openness to communicate with, unique identities. This also implies the assertion and defense of diverse minority identities against forces which may endanger them, whether these forces involve economic inequalities, political exploitation, racism or other forms of oppression. This global frame is exemplified by the Zapatista slogan a world in which many worlds fit. The global framing of the Zapatistas bears similarities to what Donatella della Porta (2006) calls a master frame. In particular, the assertion of universal dignity for diverse identities can perform what della Porta terms frame-bridging: serving as a common standpoint from which to articulate critiques of diverse forms of oppression from neoliberalism
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to racism. The construction of this discursive frame of universal respect for diverse identities could in fact be considered the signature achievement of the Zapatistasan argument I will elaborate on in the third section of this paper. Now, I will return the discussion to the Zapatistas of the EZLN, to discuss two changes to Zapatista organization, strategy and tactics which occurred in the later years of the Zapatista movement. The first of these is the establishment of autonomous municipalities. While lowland Chiapas

communities have always practiced autonomous organization and community governance, the increasing encroachment of the Mexican state-party

patronage system increased interference with local autonomous governance. The introduction of the EZLN military structure threatened to impose an undemocratic formal hierarchy over these communities as well, a risk that EZLN leaders such as Marcos (2001, quoted in Olesen, 2005) recognized. In response, the Zapatistas gradually established autonomous regional selfgovernance with civilian administrations separate from the military hierarchy. According to Barmeyer (2009), the first autonomous municipalities were set up in December 1994. Through the late 1990s, the autonomous municipalities were then consolidated on land vacated during the insurgency. The organization of autonomous municipalities culminated with the establishment in 2003 of Councils of Good Government (Juntas de Buen Gobierno), essentially regional governments above the level of municipalities. Barmeyer (2009) describes the administration of Zapatista communities at the community and municipality level as drawing on administrative
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structures that already had a long history under the ejido (communal landholding community system). Any such community had three

administrative committees: a commissariat, a council for land control, and an autonomous police agency. The commissariat was responsible for day-to-day administration; the land control council dealt with land use related issues, including land conflicts between communities and proper use of forest resources; the police agency enforced communal laws. Ad hoc committees could also be elected by community members at any time to administer specific projects. Finally, each village had one representative from the EZLNs military command structure, responsible for maintaining the flow of

information from EZLN to community and vice versa, as well as to call for votes when the EZLN leadership needed feedback on proposed changes to military action. An example of community feedback is the selection of January 1, 1994 as the date to begin the armed rebellionthe date was not the military leaderships first choice, but community members voted for earlier rebellion and the military command complied. The community level

administrative structure detailed above was replicated at the municipality level. At both the community and municipality levels, administrators were elected biannually but could be instantly recalled by their communities at any time. Administrators were not paid, except for reimbursement for travel costs incurred due to administrative work, and community assistance on their planting fields. Finally, EZLN regulations prohibited any individual from holding a civilian administrative post and a military post at the same time. This was
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aimed at reducing the influence of the EZLN on community administration. Councils of Good Government were administered by 2~3 (unpaid) delegates from each autonomous municipality administration in its domain. Delegates administer the Council in a rotating manner, with 15 days for each delegation. The extremely short period of rotation prevents patronage relationships from developing and also minimizes disruptions to administrative delegates personal lives, since unlike municipal administrations, Council administration typically takes place away from a delegates home community. Barmeyer notes that the short rotation period does not seem to be an impediment to efficiency, since at the municipal level community members select for administrators based on known competence. The last part in the story of Zapatista tactics involves the commencement of the so-called Other Campaign in 2006. This campaign, introduced by the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandn Jungle, involved sending delegations of EZLN leaders to speak with left-leaning Mexican civil society organizations across the nation. This represents an interesting move by the Zapatistas, as it focuses on the national rather than the local or transnational localities Zapatista discourses have often stressed. It also appears to reframe their domestic voice slightly, emphasizing political orientation rather than

indigeneity. Given the lack of analytical literature on this newest phase of the movement for the time being, it remains to be seen what the effects of this new tactic of Zapatista mobilization will be.

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Looking back at the history of Zapatista organization, strategy, tactics, and framing, it is tempting to conclude that, while being unambiguously successful, even inspiring, at the transnational level, the Zapatistas have faced mixed fortunes in their local context. In the next section, I evaluate further the achievements and weaknesses of the Zapatista movement at the local and transnational levels, and conclude with a discussion of what the future of the Zapatistas might be like.

3. Transnational solidarity versus local uncertainty In this section, I will examine the achievements and weaknesses of the Zapatista movement. I argue that at the transnational level, the Zapatista movement can be considered very successful, especially because their discourses have spread to and inspired many disparate social movements worldwide. At the local level in Chiapas, however, the Zapatistas have been less successful and their situation more precarious, partly because of the vagaries of local economic and political conditions, and partly because the strong adherence of the Zapatista leadership to idealistic principles sometimes results in failure to respond adequately to local political and economic circumstances. I have noted earlier how the Zapatistas have constructed a master frame (Donatella della Porta, 2006) of their struggle by framing the movement as one of many potential struggles to assert universal respect for unique identities (Olesen, 2008). The Zapatistas master framing project can
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thus be summed up as the project of making an alternative global through intercommunication and mutual respect between countless unique and different locals. This model of globalization is contrasted against more exploitative forms of globalization, such as transnational neoliberal capitalism, which seek to homogenize disparate populations. By casting the Zapatista struggle as a fight for minority identities to be heard, but without specifying what those identities must consist of, the Zapatistas have created a form of struggle which disparate minority groups struggling for recognition can all identify with, without thereby subordinating themselves to any sort of shared, trans-local identity. This characteristic of Zapatista discourse, concisely expressed by the Zapatista maxim a world in which many worlds can fit, may be considered the signature discursive tool which enables Zapatista discourses to span disparate movements growing out of very different contexts. The great effectiveness of Zapatista discourses in exerting a transnational frame-bridging effect can be seen in how Zapatistas are hailed as a positive example by activists spanning very different contexts and aims, from anti-neoliberal activists in Canada (e.g. Naomi Klein, 2002) to anarchists in Texas (e.g. Scott Crow, 2011). At the transnational level, therefore, the Zapatistas are an impressive success, not only in spreading word of their cause globally, but also by making their struggle relevant to a large and diverse cross-section of activists worldwide, energizing those disparate movements by setting an example and by pointing out the relevance of those individual struggles to each other. This
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global success, however, contrasts starkly with the less optimistic realities of life in Chiapas, Mexico, where the indigenous of the Lacandon Jungle, the Zapatistas of the EZLN, face an uncertain future. I will now detail why this is so. The first source of uncertainty for the Zapatistas in Chiapas stems from economic factors. When conducting ethnographic work in the villages of San Emiliano and La Gardenia, both core communities in the Las Caadas heartland of Zapatista territory, Barmeyer (2009, p.121-134) observed that there is a dimension of opportunism in the attitudes of local communities towards choosing support for the Zapatistas or the government. Support for the initial rebellion was associated with hopes for economic betterment through separation from the exploitative party-state political system which tended to reward non-indigenous and party loyalists. Similarly, dissent in later years was motivated by portions of Chiapas communities deciding they would be better off with the party-state systems handouts after alla sentiment hauntingly portrayed by community members inversion of the Zapatista slogan for everyone, everything; for us, nothing as a cynical comment on the unrealistic altruism and very real long-term privations associated with supporting the Zapatista cause (Barmeyer, 2009, p.127). These tensions were further aggravated when, in order to maintain cohesion within the movement, the EZLN instituted the policy of requiring community members to refrain from accepting government handouts, a policy known as la resistencia. At these moments, large proportions of village communities quit the movement and
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moved out of the autonomous village communities. Some of them returned, however, when they failed to receive any actual handouts from government officials. Because of these fluctuations in allegiance driven by local-level economic forces, the support base of the Zapatistas in Chiapas can be considered unstable at best. To the Zapatistas credit, they refrained from using authoritarian means to hold the village populations under their control a conclusion which can be inferred precisely by observing how freely such allegiance shifts occurred. Barmeyer (2009, p. 234) estimates that more than half of all the autonomous community members that constituted the Zapatistas original support base had changed their allegiance at least once. While this reflects well on the authenticity of Zapatista claims of being democratic, it also results in great uncertainty for the EZLN in Chiapas, since they can never be sure how strong their support base is. On top of the uncertainty stemming from shifting allegiances driven by local economic conditions, uncertainty in the effects of political strategies also plagues the Zapatistas in Mexico. Over the course of their existence, the Zapatistas in Chiapas have faced two types of political uncertainty, involving their interactions with other Mexican civil society groups on one hand, and their interactions with political parties on the other. I have noted in section 2 above (p.8) that inaction of Mexican civil society has been a constant problem, from the point of view of the Zapatistas. Even though the sympathetic response of Mexican civil society played a decisive role in shaping the Zapatistas into what they are today, there was a lack of
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mass mobilization against the Mexican government, despite the Zapatistas repeated efforts to instigate this. It is unclear whether the lack of results from the Zapatista calls for national civil society solidarity against neoliberalism and the corrupt Mexican state-party system reflects the Zapatistas poor understanding of Mexican civil society divisions and disagreements outside the Chiapas context. In any case, one of the key objectives of the recent Other Campaign is to enable the Zapatistas in Chiapas to learn about the views, strategies, and challenges of left-leaning and/or indigenous groups from different parts of Mexico (Hernandez Castillo, 2006). This effort is crucial to prevent Zapatista isolation within the national context. It remains to be seen whether this will be a successful effort, and whether a new basis for national civil society solidarity could be built from there. Another uncertainty that the Zapatistas in Chiapas must face from time to time is their ambivalent relationships with political parties. Although the Zapatistas have consistently condemned the PRI party, the principal controller of state-party patronage relationships in Chiapas, the Zapatistas have been ambivalent in their stance towards the left-leaning PRD party (Womack, 1999). In the late 1990s the Zapatistas expressed tentative support for the party but then refused to endorse their political candidates on the grounds that they wanted to stay out of party politics. Since 2005, however, the Zapatistas have begun criticizing the PRD and distancing itself from the party, on the basis that corruption and business-friendly interests within the party have stripped it of much of its left-leaning political identity. Some authors, such as Hernandez
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Castillo (2006) see the recent blanket condemnation of all PRD activists by the Zapatistas as an unwise move, since this makes the Zapatistas even more politically isolated in Mexico, and seems like a contradiction with the Zapatista principle of flexible engagement with all who are willing to listen. However, Hernandez Castillo admits (p.117-119) that racist, exclusionary, and

indifferent attitudes towards the indigenous are common among the Mexican political elite, regardless of party or ideology. On this basis, the Zapatista decision to stay out of party politics is understandable. This does not, however, mitigate the risk of political isolation that the Zapatistas continue to face in the Mexican context. The Zapatista movement has sometimes been called the first postmodern revolution. Looking at the stark contrast between transnational Zapatismo and the unstable conditions the Zapatistas of Chiapas still face today, one can get a sense of why this might actually be a useful way to describe the movement. The upbeat images of the Zapatistas as seen by activists outside Mexico make no reference to the more prosaic, local-level and often village-level conflicts and instabilities that have constantly plagued the Zapatistas of Chiapas. We could thus consider transnational Zapatismo a hyperreal construct

(Baudrillard, 1994), a vision of a reality which never really existed in Chiapas. The Zapatista movement thus appears to consist of two quite different groups: one made up of transnational activists mobilized by idealized messages from or about the Zapatistas, and participating in either the Zapatista transnational solidarity network, or in social movements inspired by the Zapatistas, the
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other made up of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, those members of the movement who live in the communities under Zapatista control and participate in, or collaborate directly with, the EZLN. This two-sidedness to the Zapatista movement poses serious difficulties for speculation on the future of the movement. On one hand the transnational components of the Zapatista movement are robust and face very few acute threats; on the other hand, the sustainability of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas is constantly under threat by local economic and political

circumstances, threats which transnational Zapatistas are seldom aware of. Optimists might note that even if the efforts of the EZLN prove unsustainable, the spirit of Zapatismo will live on in the many movements they inspired worldwide. But one wonders if that would be an empty victory, since the movement would not then have fulfilled its original purpose of fighting for the dignity and autonomy of the indigenous communities of Chiapas. Only time will tell if this original Zapatista cause will succeed.

Conclusion: Zapatismo as movement with specific local roots but diverse transnational effects In this paper, I have traced the origins of the Zapatista movement, which lay in the confluence of community organizing efforts by several local social groups in Chiapas, Mexico. I detailed the organizational structures of the Zapatistas, which consist of the military structure of the EZLN and autonomous self-administering communities at the local level, and an
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electronically-connected support and solidarity network at the transnational level. I then traced how the social movement that grew from those roots changed over time, both in ideology (from socialist revolution to indigenous dignity) and in strategy (from armed rebellion to civil society engagement and administrative autonomy). Finally, I identified the differences that set apart the transnational and Chiapas branches of the Zapatista movement, showing how transnational Zapatismo has become successful by exerting a bridging influence between disparate social movements worldwide, while eliding the many local-level difficulties that continue to threaten the Zapatistas in Chiapas. I conclude that the main lesson to be learned from the Zapatista movement is that we cannot assume either coherence across time or coherence across space in the motivations and goals of social movements. This is because activists, even though they may be motivated by framings of their social movement which transcend their local context (and in the case of the Zapatistas, local can often mean the level of an individual village), are always nevertheless responding constantly to local and personal social conditions which they face in their everyday lives. The choices of individual persons, households, and local communities that constitute a social movement can shape or splinter the movement itself. Even when a social movement is able to construct a master frame which is accepted by all its members in disparate localities, the different ways activists respond to their local conditions in each different location will affect the subsequent evolution of the
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movement in that location. If our world is one in which many worlds fit, it is also a world in which each of those many worlds evolves in a different way. The one question that remains for the Zapatistas is whether their allembracing conception of their cause can continue to make a difference in the one local world which continues to be their original site of struggleChiapas.

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