Zapatista Uprising

On January 1, 1994 — the day NAFTA took effect — the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional seized seven towns in Chiapas and declared war on the Mexican state. The uprising was the direct response of Mayan communities to the combined pressures of the 1992 Article 27 counter-reform and NAFTA’s liberalization of Mexican agriculture, which the EZLN described as “a death sentence for the Indian peoples.”

Among the ten Revolutionary Laws the EZLN approved before the uprising was an agrarian law promising land redistribution and a Women’s Revolutionary Law guaranteeing indigenous women’s participation in communal and political life. The uprising injected indigenous rights discourse into the center of Mexican national politics, catalyzed a generation of indigenous feminist organizing, and established the autonomous Zapatista municipalities of Chiapas as an enduring alternative project of community governance. It is the connective event between Mexican land reform history and the contemporary politics of indigenous autonomy, gender, and resistance to extractivism.