ZAPATISTA UPRISING, 1994

On October 12, 1992, Antonio Turok witnessed the ezln demonstration on the occasion of the “500 Years of Indigenous Resistance” and documented the hammering until destruction of the Conquistador Diego de Mazariegos statue located in the center of San Cristobal de las Casas.

On the early morning of January 1st, 1994, Turok went out to buy more drinks with some friends to keep the New Year’s festivities and the opening of his internet café-gallery Copal. Upon entering San Cristobal he encountered a Zapatista column. Thanks to his job experience and his knowledge of the reality in Chiapas he quickly realized the situation. He went back to his home to fetch his cameras and returned to the center of the city to record the sieging of the Municipal Palace. From this point on and through the next days, Turok recorded the armed conflict up-close and those displaced by the violence.

On February 1994, invited by the ezln themselves, Turok collaborated with the team that carried out the first inteviews with the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee (ccri) and with Subcommander Marcos, both published in the La Jornada newspaper.

Women in Chiapas

“In Mexico in the past decades, it has gone from the almost total exclusion of women from the social ownership of the land to some progress manifested in the increase of community members and commoners, the participation in the spaces of the common and communal representation, usufruct of important areas of land, ownership of the land, among others. Although the progress is significant, it is not directly correlated to the number of roles and participation that indigenous and rural women have been forced to meet in the current rural productive space. It has adopted new responsibilities but it hasn’t kept pace in the increasing of its land ownership… The agricultural area which has been occupied by women is not directly linked to the exploitation of the land, we rather found, that in Chiapas a significant percentage of women in the suburbs hold the property of solar, ie, spaces for housing. A fact that places them in private spaces and links them to the traditional role of family reproduction. Women have a secondary role in the agricultural social space, they reveal themselves as a minority and marginalized group of the property. Despite having a very high relative weight in the population structure, their weight in the property is negligible and their presence is noticeable only in those secondary levels such as possesionary groups and the residents of the commons and communities”. (Reyes, 2006)


The economic system

“Since the nineties the rural crisis in southern Mexico, and particularly in Chiapas, reached deep levels that virtually destructured the basic institutions, such as family and community. It’s rural production crisis, the agricultural system and peasant organizations, a profound crisis that disrupts the fundamental values of social cohesion, solidarity, and personal meetings. This crisis that was growing for years takes deeper dimensions with the launch of a package of neoliberal economic measures –which includes the entry of the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta)– which generates irreversible impacts on the countryside and rural economies, pressuring organizations to search for alternatives focused on their own efforts and resources. The social movement, particularly the Zapatista uprising, failed to make neoliberal policies to at least be reviewed to address the most urgent problems of rural families, on the contrary such policies have been deepening with a huge social cost”. (Villafuerte and García, 2010, 20)


Fernando Yáñez

“On the other hand, in the National Liberation Forces, Fernando Yáñez –the native from Monterrey, that searched for his lost brother in the Lacandon jungle in 1974–, comes out of Chiapas and amnesties in 1978. In the early eighties, him and Gloria Benavides return to the state calling themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. In 1984 Rafael Sebastián Guillén, Marcos, a design teacher of the Metropolitan Autonomous University of Xochimilco, would be fully integrated into the organization that would come into contact with the structure of catechists in the diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas a year later. On January 1, 1994, the day that the Free Trade Agreement comes into force, the organization declares war on the Mexican government to demand social justice and respect for the rights of the indigenous people. Yáñez is identified as one of the founders of the National Liberation Forces that emerged in 1969. In 1994 he is the commander in chief of the ezln. The name and ideals of the organization are inspired by the spirit of the Plan de Ayala raised by the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, eighty-four years ago”. (Castellanos, 2008, 311)


January 1, 1994

“On January 1, 1994, the day that the Free Trade Agreement (nafta) comes into force, the armed uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (ezln) occurs. The reaction of the federal government was to send troops to Chiapas to quell the rebellion; almost 70,000 Mexican Army troops were dispatched. Civil society mobilized to stop the fighting and in 12 days of armed conflict, the federal government declares a unilateral ceasefire. Then came the dialogues of the Cathedral and later the negotiations on the so called San Andres talks, but the agreements did not materialize in the Mexican law (Villafuerte and Montero, 2006). Since then there has been no official communication between the guerrillas and the federal government”. (Villafuerte and García, 2010, 17)