An interview with Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, spokesperson and military commander of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) MARTA DURÀN DE HUERTA Translated, edited and introduced by NICHOLAS HIGGINS
It has been just over three years since the signing of the peace agreements at San Andres Larrainzar between the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and the Mexican federal government. While the talks broke down before all the tabled themes could be discussed, agreement was reached on the topic of Indian rights and culture. Since then the government has consistently failed to convert this agreement into constitutional law, a position viewed by the Zapatistas as further proof of governmental intransigence and an abject failure to take the possible peaceful resolution of the conflict seriously. More alarming still has been the increase in government linked paramilitary activity in Chiapas, a strategy of combat that most observers refer to as low intensity warfare. Conditions reached an all-time low with the massacre of unarmed Indians in December , soon followed by the renunciation of Bishop Samuel Ruiz as the president of the only existing mediation body, the CONAI, and its subsequent dissolution. Attempts by foreign observers to visit Zapatista communities have also been made increasingly difficult, with the notorious expulsion of Italian observers in May being indicative of a more general governmental stance towards perceived foreign intervention. As political parties throughout the country begin preparing themselves for the presidential elections in the year , Mexico may yet witness the end of years of uninterrupted rule by the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Below, Subcomandante Marcos, spokesperson and military commander of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, talks exclusively of the nature of Zapatista politics and the reasons behind the latest peaceful Zapatista offensive, which
Marta Duràn de Huerta is a lecturer in the Faculty of Political Science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She has written three books on various aspects of the Zapatista uprising and she is a regular contributor to the Mexican national press. For the last eighteen months Nicholas Higgins has been conducting research in Mexico on the Zapatista uprising, where he was a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Scholar at El Colegio de México. He is currently a doctoral candidate and part-time lecturer at the University of Kent’s London Centre of International Relations.
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