On January 1st, 1994, the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect. On that same day, armed peasants and indigenous people, members of the EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) took over several municipalities and towns in the state of Chiapas, southern México. Their Manifesto against the neoliberal policies adopted by the Mexican government and political corruption of the ruling party read: “¡Hoy decimos BASTA!” (“Today, we say ENOUGH!”).
After two weeks of intense army operations, the Mexican president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, unilaterally declared a cease fire agreement and proposed negotiations through a reconciliation commission. Why did the government radically change its position after only 12 days of confrontation?
The conflict dynamic between the ELZN and the Mexican Government could be labeled as of its own kind under the peace and conflict theory. An analysis from the communications and media perspective will facilitate an understanding of the role that the media played in the transformation of the parties’ behaviors and attitudes.
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The Fleas:
“The guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog’s disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with.” (Taber, R. 2002. 24)
The EZLN has its roots in the FLN (Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional), a 1970`s Mexican guerrilla group that used the traditional configuration of small, dispersed units of insurgents that could attack, retreat quickly and concentrate for larger battles.
Zapatista dolls. San Juan de Chamula market, Chiapas , Mexico. Dec. 2009
In 1983, when a faction of the FLN adopted indigenous causes, they formally organized the EZLN keeping the traditional guerrilla strategy but, given the response of the military in 1994, this organization proved to be inadequate. (Firefight in the Ocosingo Market). According to David Ronfeldt, author of The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico, “their doctrine of open confrontation, which they expected would spark a national uprising (…) showed no sings of emerging (…). At this point a shift from guerrilla warfare to social netwar occurred”. (Ronfeldt, D. 1998. 48)
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Subcomandante Marcos, the character:
“It doest matter what is behind the mask, what’s important is what it stands for “. (‘Marcos, el Señor de los espejos, de Manuel Vázquez Montalbán).
It would be impossible to talk about the structural changes of the EZLN without discussing the influence of this character throughout the conflict and his ability to detect opportunities.
Naomi Klein wrote about the The Masks of Chiapas in one of her articles: Subcomandante Marcos, “he is a master of political metaphor, challenging his supporters to break out of staid old left thinking and build a movement fluid enough to adapt to the global economy”. He is said to be an intellectual who participated in the FLN, a better off Mexican with background in media and communication studies (Castells, M. 1997. 76), that would explain his charisma with the media and his triumph in creating an unmistakable character. Probably one of the many ironies of the Zapatista Movement against capitalism, neoliberaliberalism, giant corporations and trademarks is that the image of Marcos has become an international logo for the EZLN with mass appeal.
- Children Story books
- Literature
- Posters, songs
- Dolls, key chains…
Regarding the unveiling of his true identity, Héctor Sánchez de la Madrid, president of the board for the Diario de Colima newspaper, said: “It was interesting what happened with Marco`s identity because nobody was interested in knowing, nobody cared who he was. Its something similar to the masked wrestlers, if you take the mask of you want to know who he is but the people will be disappointed because they wont recognize him anymore” (Sanchez interview, Sept. 30, 2009).
“Although there is a myth that Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante Marcos sits in the jungle uploading EZLN communiqués from his laptop, the reality is that the EZLN and its communities have had a mediated relationship to the Internet”. (Cleaver, H. 1998. 8). Subcomandante Marcos’ greatest accomplishments for the EZLN has been the establishment of an international support system (with him at the center as an international masked avenger character), and as a spokesman he has taken the movements message and adapted it in order for it to transcend the immediacy of the media.
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The Swarm:
“When we understand that only the lion can defeat the lion we begin to think how to make the lion confront himself.” (Subcomandante Marcos- Los otros Cuentos).
Taking into account the watchdog function of media and how media can reflect a society`s situation, in Marco`s story The lion and the mirror, the Mexican government is the lion and the media is the mirror in which the lion cannot hide from himself or from the international community.
The EZLN`s transformation into the “first informational guerrilla movement” (Castells, M. 1997. 72) has very much to do with the international flourishment of networks:
In 1990 the First Continental Encounter of Indigenous Peoples was held in Ecuador witch lead to the creation of the Continental Coordinating Commission of Indigenous Nations and Organizations in Panama the following year. Other examples of this transnational networking previous to the EZLN advances in Internet were the 1993 Conference on Human Rights in Vienna and the Cairo Conference on Population and Development.
During the 1994 confrontations, national and international NGO`s established in Chiapas contacted their international partners creating a swarm effect in which everyone is connected to everyone else, there is no specific or concrete agenda, only the unity to mobilize in mass numbers in hopes of getting each individual point across and be noticed.
“Chiapas is a place where there has not been a shot fired in the last fifteen months (…). The shots lasted ten days, and ever since the war has been a war of ink, of written word, a war on the Internet”
(Gurria. 1995).
The EZLN understood this dynamic and took advantage of it in what Cleaver calls The Zapatista Effect (play on words for the CNN effect): they called upon the solidarity of national and international NGO`s and appealed to their individual issues for support: Indigenous rights and human rights, environmental policies, democracy and participation activism, among others. Every time the Zapatista issue seems to fall off the radar, the EZLN has had the flexibility to accommodate its discourse, reignite NGO international support and hence create pressure on the Mexican government through nonviolent information operations (email listings, communiqués, faxes, publicity caravans, among others), in this way “the conflict became less about the EZLN than about the Zapatista Movement ”.(Ronfeldt 61).
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Bibliography
Dangond, M. Victoria. “A local eye on the Zapatista Movement: Hector Sanchez de la Madrid.” E-mail interview. 30 Sept. 2009.
Gurria, José Ángel. Interview. La Jornada [Mexico] 15 Apr. 1994. Print.
Kleine, Naomi. “Ya Basta! The Masks of Chiapas.” Naomikleine.org, 06 Dec. 2000. Web. 30 Sept. 2009. http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2000/12/ya-basta-masks-chiapas
Subcomandante, Marcos. Los Otros Cuentos. Argentina: Cooperativa Artes Gráficas Chilavert, 2003. www.losotroscuentos.org Web. 03 Oct. 2009.
Taber, Robert. War of the Flea: The classic study of guerrilla warfare. Virginia: Brasseys Inc, 2002. Google Books. Web. 03 Oct. 2009.
Vázquez Montalban, Manuel. Marcos, el Señor de los espejos. Madrid: Aguilar, 1999.
