A Rainbow at Midnight: Zapatistas and Autonomy

December 22, at the hands of paramilitary death squads linked to the PRI government served to remind world opinion that the ‘Rebellion of the Forgotten’ of January 1994 has moved from a low to a high intensity conflict. The success of the Zapatistas in mobilising Mexican and international ‘civil society’, particularly through the Internet, in a common struggle against the disastrous human and environmental consequences of neoliberalism, globalisation and “free trade ” and for increased autonomy for indigenous peoples has forced the PRI regime, under the instigation of the US government and World Bank, to adopt a more violent and politically riskier strategy of repression through state terror. This has effectively ended the phase of negotiations which led to the signing of the San Andrés Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture in February 1996, which the PRI (Party of the Institutional Revolution) regime has since refused to implement, so intensifying the conflict. As in Bosnia and Rwanda, the war is not being fought so much against the armed guerrillas of the EZLN, but rather the civilian population of the Zapatista ‘base support communities’. The PRI regime’s aim is to exterminate and expel the Zapatista communities, so depopulating huge areas of the oil, water and mineral-rich Lacandona Jungle, an area even more biodiverse than the Brazilian rain forests. In this way not only will ‘the fish have no water to swim in’, but the path towards the greater exploitation of the area’s human and natural resources by mainly US-based transnational corporations (TNCs) will have been greatly smoothed, as was always the intention of the NAFTA free trade agreement. The Acteal Massacre has been cynically used by the PRI regime to step up the repression and harassment of the indige-nous Zapatista communities by both the army and PRI paramilitary groups who, despite some token arrests following the massacre, now enjoy ever greater impunity and support from the Mexican Federa