Mexico’s Anti-Globalisation Rebellion
In 1994, the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) resulted in an uprising organised by the Zapatistas — the first proof that even in the era of globalisation, resistance is still possible.
The Zapatista-led rebellion in 1994 was a challenge to corporate power. (Photo by Susana Gonzalez/Newsmakers)
The stories we tell in Silent Coup are unfinished. They also began long before the period of time that the book covers. Stepping back, we seem to be in the final act of an epic saga that stretches back centuries, throughout which corporations have amassed new powers and sought, not only to free themselves from the control of states but also to reshape the world in their interests. Around the world, however, people and communities have also resisted this power grab. Sometimes, they’ve had victories too. To have hope for a better future we must know more about both of these things: how corporations have stolen our power, and how we can work to get it back.
Consider the curtain rising, for the final act of this saga, on New Year’s Day, 1994. That was when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force. It was the first deal of its kind between one developing country, Mexico, and two richer ones, the US and Canada. While called a trade deal, it also expanded a supranational legal system. This is the so-called ‘investor-state dispute settlement system’ via which multinational corporations can bypass local courts and take entire countries to shadowy tribunals to protect or advance their interests. NAFTA didn’t create this system, but it was a watershed moment, inspiring other such deals and a dramatic rise in such cases — challenging everything from taxes companies don’t want to pay to environmental regulations.
NAFTA was signed in the wake of the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union: in the early years of a new era. Gone was the dominant international opposing power to the US, and its fiercely-marketed brand of deregulated capitalism. US conservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously declared the ‘end of history’, arguing that we had reached ‘the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and there was no longer a real debate about how societies should be structured. In the years that followed, state-owned enterprises — and these significant sources of public revenue — were privatised en masse around the world. Corporations gained new powers within, between and even above states.
During the Cold War, which lasted for decades from the late 1940s to 1991, the major conceptual framing of where power lay was with states — with the US on one side internationally, and the Soviet Union on the other. The supranational infrastructure that was established in this period seemed to lay largely dormant. It was then ‘activated’ to facilitate a historic shift from state to corporate power on a global scale, and with aspirations and institutions to make it last forever. Each of the areas of global corporate power — control over laws, economies, territories and the use of force — reached dizzying new heights.
NAFTA, however, wasn’t created overnight. The idea for such a North American regional treaty had been conceived more than a decade earlier. It had been included in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign for US president, for example, and it had been pushed for years after by conservative lobbyists, including from the Heritage Foundation think tank. (It was also Reagan’s administration that launched the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade talks in 1986, which would lead to the creation of the World Trade Organisation). At the same time, meanwhile, something else that would shape the next period was also under development, thousands of miles south of Washington DC.
Other revolutionaries assembled and began to plan their own historic moves in the 1980s, in the jungle in Chiapas, Mexico. Near the border with Guatemala, the EZLN (the Zapatista Army of National Liberation) formed as a small guerrilla group named after Emiliano Zapata, the early 20th-century Mexican Revolution hero who had fought for ‘tierra y libertad’ (‘land and freedom’). Its members took up arms after previous, peaceful movements for land reform failed. While rich in resources, Chiapas had extremely unequal distribution of land and high levels of poverty. Like NAFTA, they would also take the world stage thirty years ago, on New Year’s Day, 1994.
Another World Is Possible
As dawn broke, the EZLN army of primarily Indigenous peasants, about a third of whom were women, emerged from the jungle in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas. They occupied several cities and towns, took over government buildings and began freeing prisoners from jails. From the balcony of the municipal palace in San Cristóbal, Subcomandante Marcos read out their Declaration of War, explaining: ‘Today the North American Free Trade Agreement begins, which is nothing more than a death sentence to the Indigenous ethnicities of Mexico.’ That is why, he said, the rebels had chosen ‘that same day to respond to the decree of death… with the decree of life that is given by rising up in arms to demand liberty and democracy.’
The EZLN accused the Mexican government of siding against the people, and of embracing a neoliberal form of economic globalisation that would privilege large corporations and worsen the situation of Indigenous and peasant communities. They connected this to a very long history of oppression and resistance, starting with the ‘discovery’ and conquest of the Americas by Europeans from the 15th century, and said: Ya Basta (Enough)! Their war declaration cited Mexico’s Constitution, which came from the early 20th-century Mexican Revolution, and its Article 39 that states: ‘National Sovereignty essentially and originally resides in the people. All political power emanates from the people and its purpose is to help the people. The people have, at all times, the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government.’
Also on 1 January 1994, the first issue of the EZLN’s newspaper, El Despertador, detailed new ‘revolutionary laws’ they sought to enact under which, for instance, ‘large agricultural businesses will be expropriated and passed to the hands of the Mexican people, and will be administered collectively by the workers.’ The Mexican army moved in quickly to fight the EZLN in Chiapas and stop their rebellion from spreading; in the end, the uprising lasted just twelve days — though its effects were neither brief nor narrow. The Zapatistas continued their struggle and to reach out to other people’s movements internationally, combining new technologies (the Internet, in the ‘90s) with old-fashioned, face-to-face organising. In 1996, they held their ‘First Intercontinental Gathering for Humanity and against Neoliberalism’. In the process, they ‘helped jumpstart a worldwide anti-globalisation movement,’ said author Hilary Klein, who called the Zapatistas ‘one of the first peoples’ movements to recognise neoliberalism as a dangerous new stage of global capitalism’.
The Zapatistas and the alter-globalisation movement popularised defiance towards global corporate power as well as the idea that ‘another world is possible.’ Popular education and mobilisation went hand-in-hand and sometimes, people won. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been more-or-less stalled since the ‘Battle in Seattle’ shut down its talks in 1999. Peoples’ opposition also led to the failure of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which was the target of large protests, including in Quebec City in 2001, and collapsed a few years later. Among the reflections of the EZLN’s legacy are judgments from researchers that they’ve been ‘a driving force in Mexico’s democratisation, even more significant than opposition parties’. They’ve also been called an inspiration for the Occupy movement in 2011; and ‘a huge influence on many left-wing movements in Europe too’.
We are all still living in the world that NAFTA helped to create in the wake of the Cold War’s end. Thankfully, we are also still living in the world that the Zapatistas helped to shape with their defiance — refusing to accept that the story was over, insisting that alternatives are possible and boldly proposing ways forward. In their 1994 war declaration, they also called themselves ‘a product of 500 years of struggle’—– in reference to the late 15th century end to the ‘pre-Columbian period’ when the Americas were ‘discovered’ and became a focus of European imperialism and colonisation, in which forerunners to modern corporations were heavily involved. This is the backstory to Silent Coup: how corporations gained their power.