Zapatista Rebellion

Roots of Rebellion

Among the multiple causal factors behind the Zapatista uprising was a history of discrimination and oppression experienced by Indigenous Peoples, who make up some 11% of Mexico's population. Over 28% of the population of Chiapas is indigenous, a proportion topped only by the states of Yucatán, Oaxaca, and Quintana Roo. Although Chiapas produces over half of the country's hydroelectric power as well as oil and gas, most of the indigenous areas lacked electricity when the 1994 rebellion broke out.

Chiapas is one of the poorest states in Mexico, and indices of marginalization are highest in the predominantly indigenous municipalities in the central highlands, eastern Lacandón Jungle, and northern zone that were home to the Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, and Ch'ol, among other ethnicities. Historically a backwater since the colonial era, Chiapas was dominated socially and politically by a mainly Ladino (nonindigenous) conservative landowning elite that consistently obstructed reforms.

The agrarian reform that had been a cornerstone of the Mexican Revolution, championed by Emiliano Zapata and enshrined in Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917, was implemented in delayed and limited fashion in Chiapas. Beginning in the 1950s, primarily indigenous poor peasants, lacking adequate access to land, migrated in growing numbers from the central highlands and other regions eastward into the canyons running through the Lacandón Jungle. This migration offered a temporary escape valve for agrarian social tension and allowed the settlers to experiment with self-governance in a remote region neglected by the state.

Independent peasant organizations emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, promoting alternative credit, marketing, and production schemes, and the government responded with intermittent co-optation and repression. Mexico's long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institutional) (PRI) was beginning its slow decline, but local party bosses (caciques) retained an iron grip on many traditional indigenous communities, further fueling migration to the agricultural frontier.

Meanwhile, indigenous consciousness grew, particularly after 1974, when Bishop Samuel Ruiz hosted a statewide indigenous congress. The bishop, an adherent of the progressive Liberation Theology wing of the Catholic Church, actively promoted the training [Page 1424]of catechists organizing for social justice throughout the northeast half of the state, where most of the indigenous population lived. These peasant and religious organizing initiatives overlapped with small groups of Maoist organizers who had been working in the jungle canyons since the late 1970s. The growing squeeze on subsistence agriculture and escalating repression led many to support the more radical option of the then-clandestine EZLN.

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