Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)

Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)

APEC is an organization that aims to promote free trade and economic cooperation throughout the Asia Pacific region. It was created in 1989 because of the growing interdependence of Asia-Pacific economies and the establishment of regional economic blocs such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

APEC intends to improve living standards and education levels through sustainable economic growth and to promote a sense of community and an appreciation of common values among Asia-Pacific countries. APEC’s membership includes 21 states, called “member economies.”

Of these, 12 are founding members—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and the United States— while Chile, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, Taiwan, and Vietnam joined at a later phase. APEC has no treaty obligations of its participants.


Decisions made within APEC are reached by consensus, and commitments are undertaken on a voluntary basis. APEC’s membership accounts for approximately 40 percent of the world’s population, approximately 56 percent of world GDP, and about 48 percent of world trade.

The first APEC Leaders’ Meeting occurred in 1993 and was organized by Bill Clinton in Blake Island, Washington. At its 1994 summit meeting in Bogor, Indonesia, APEC set an ambitious schedule to achieve free trade and raise the level of investments throughout the Asia-Pacific region by 2010 for members with developed economies and by 2020 for members with developing ones.

The Osaka Action Agenda was adopted a year later and was designed to implement APEC’s goals of liberalizing trade and investment, facilitating business activities, and promoting economic and technical cooperation. The procedure that all APEC’s decisions had to be taken by consensus and preferably passed unanimously limited the effectiveness of APEC.

In addition, although decisions can be taken in the absence of unanimity, they are not legally binding on member governments. In 1997 at the annual summit in Vancouver, Canada, police forces violently clashed with demonstrators objecting to the presence of Indonesian president Suharto.

APEC is organized into numerous committees, special task commissions, working groups, and a business advisory council. The committees meet twice per year. The working groups are led by experts and consider specific issues, including energy, tourism, fishing, transportation, and telecommunications.

Every year one of the member economies hosts an economic leaders’ meeting, selected ministerial meetings, senior officials meetings, the APEC Business Advisory Council and the APEC Study Centres Consortium, and also fills the executive director position at the APEC secretariat.

The deputy executive director changes every year, as the position is given to a senior diplomat of the country who will be the APEC chair the following year. The APEC secretariat, established in 1993 and based in Singapore, provides coordination as well as technical and advisory support for all the organization’s initiatives.

Bracero Program (1942 – 1964)

Bracero Program (1942 – 1964)

The Bracero Program, begun in August 1942 at the height of World War II in response to war-induced labor shortages in the United States, was a joint U.S.-Mexican agreement to bring temporary Mexican male laborers to work in the United States agricultural, railroad, and related industries.

While the program was conceived as a temporary wartime expedient, commercial fruit, vegetable, and cotton growers in the United States Southwest found the program so profitable that they persuaded the U.S. Congress and Mexican governments to extend it for nearly two decades after the end of the war.

In the 22 years during which the program was operational, an estimated 5 million Mexican men worked as braceros (a term roughly synonymous with “jornaleros,” or “day laborers”). Repeatedly condemned by human rights activists as abusive and exploitive, the Bracero Program had a major impact on the economic, social, and cultural history of both Mexico and the United States.


The program provided millions of poor Mexicans with legal entrée into the United States, familiarizing them with the land, its people, its wage structure, and its employment opportunities. For some it provided an opportunity to reconnect with kin on the U.S. side of the border.

After completing the terms of their contracts, many braceros opted to stay in the United States illegally or to return to Mexico and cross the border clandestinely at a later time. The program also made major contributions to the development of commercial agriculture in the U.S. Southwest.

While the terms of the original agreement mandated a minimum wage of 30 cents per hour, humane working conditions, and free round-trip transportation between Mexico and sites of employment, in practice the U.S. companies hiring bracero laborers frequently failed to adhere to these requirements.

braceros in the farm

Unauthorized and sometimes exorbitant deductions for food, housing, medical attention, and other necessities were common, as were abusive practices such as substandard food and housing, poor sanitary conditions, physical intimidation, and violence. The program was briefly halted in 1948 in response to a decision by Texas cotton growers to pay braceros $2.50 per hundred weight, while non-braceros earned $3.00.

The Mexican government responded by suspending the program, an impasse resolved with a U.S. government apology and a new agreement in 1951 under U.S. Public Law 78 (sometimes called the “second” Bracero Program), which continued until 1964 (with successive “temporary” extensions in 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1961). Through the 1950s, an estimated 300,000 Mexicans worked as braceros annually.

In order to combat illegal immigration and the tendency of many braceros to remain in the United States without authorization, in 1954 the United States government launched “Operation Wetback,” a program intended to repatriate unauthorized Mexicans, which also resulted in the deportation of some U.S. citizens. By the mid-1950s such repatriations reached a high of 3.8 million.


The Bracero Program is the subject of an expansive literature. The most rigorous early scholarly investigation was by the Mexican-American scholar and activist Dr. Ernesto Galarza, whose book Merchants of Labor (1964) is considered a classic in the field. Testifying repeatedly before the U.S. Congress and other government bodies, Galarza and others finally persuaded lawmakers to end the program.

The program’s termination coincided with the rise of the National Farmworkers Association (later United Farmworkers of America, UFW), led by labor organizer Cesar Chavez. In many ways, the ending of the Bracero Program—and the glut of cheap migrant labor it provided—made possible the rise of the UFW.

Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)

PRI Campaign

For more than seven decades (1929–2000) Mexico was governed by a single ruling party that dominated Mexican politics in a so-called one-party democracy. Dubbed the “perfect dictatorship” in 1990 by the conservative Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the ruling party went through several name changes and transformed in important ways as the century progressed, but it also retained a high degree of institutional continuity.

Following the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), the constitution of 1917, and the turmoil of the Cristero Rebellion (1926–29), the party was founded in 1929 by Supreme Chief (Jefe Máximo) and President Plutarco Elías Calles (1929–34).

It was called the Revolutionary National Party (Partido Nacional Revolucionario, or PNR). In 1938, soon after nationalizing the properties of foreign oil companies, President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) changed its name to the Mexican Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Mexicana, or PRM).


Its final name change came under President Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946–52), when in 1946 it became the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institutional, or PRI), as it has remained into the 21st century.

The PRI and its forebears (hereafter referred to as the PRI) won every national election from 1934 to 2000, when it was defeated at the polls by Vicente Fox, candidate of the opposition party Partido de Acción Nacional (National Action Party, or PAN).

While the PRI did not outlaw opposition parties—in fact, encouraging their existence to lend greater legitimacy to its rule—its grip on the reins of state power remained unassailable by virtue of its domination of the machinery of state, the major media, and the electoral process, and by its capacity to repress or coopt opposition and to garner popular support by its selective dispensation of government patronage.

PRI Logo

Its strategies of rule and modes of domination were similar to the political machines that dominated major U.S. urban centers, such as Mayor Richard J. Daley’s political machine in Chicago (1955–76).

Despite its origins in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and its ostensibly “revolutionary” orientation, the PRI grew increasingly conservative, authoritarian, and corrupt after the major reforms of the Cárdenas years.

Cárdenas in effect forged an authoritarian corporatist state, in which all major social sectors were represented in the state and party’s bureaucratic and administrative structures: the military, labor unions, the agrarian sector, and the popular sector. Unlike the situation in many Latin American countries, the Mexican army and police remained firmly subordinated to civilian authority.

Organized labor was represented by the Mexican Workers’ Federation (Confederación de Trabajadores de México, or CTM), an increasingly bureaucratized union founded under Cárdenas and firmly integrated into state structures.

Independent or insurgent labor unions were either repressed or coopted. The agrarian sector was represented by the National Peasant Confederation (Confederación Nacional Campesino, or CNC) and other state-controlled organizations.

In the six decades from 1940 to 2000, the PRI was characterized by its conservatism at home and, from the 1950s, its rhetorical support for leftist and revolutionary movements abroad, such as the Cuban revolution.

Under President Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46), the PRI supported the Allies in World War II and in 1942 agreed to the Bracero Program with the United States, permitting a specified number of temporary Mexican laborers into that country annually to work in mining, commercial agriculture, and related industries. Conceived as a wartime measure, under pressure from the U.S. government and commercial interests, the program was extended until 1965.

Dispensing with much of the socialist rhetoric and orientation of the Cárdenas years, the Camacho administration slowed the pace of agrarian reform; installed the moderate Fidel Velásquez as head of the CTM (which he dominated until his death in 1997); established a state-run national bank (Nacional Financiera); loosened restrictions on foreign ownership of Mexican resources; expanded public works programs; and embarked on an export-led model of national development.

These trends continued under Camacho’s successors Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946–52), Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–58), Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64), and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–70). These were the years of the so-called Mexican Miracle, when relative social peace prevailed, state-led industrialization made major strides, and economic growth rates were the highest in the nation’s history.

The government’s principal source of foreign exchange derived from state control of the Mexican oil industry through PEMEX (Petróleos Mexicanos), established in 1938. In the 1960s many Mexicans grew increasingly disenchanted with the ruling party’s authoritarianism and corruption.

A major crack in the PRI’s ideological edifice came in the October 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, on the eve of the country’s hosting of the Olympics, when the police and state security forces violently repressed popular demonstrations calling for greater democracy.

The PRI’s corruption, graft, nepotism, and violent repression of opposition mounted in the 1970s under presidents Luis Echeverría Alvarez (1970–76) and José López Portillo (1976–82). Oil revenues were at an alltime high, though much of the income was squandered in bribes, kickbacks, inflated salaries, and wasteful projects.

Numerous protest movements by workers, students, farmers, and others were violently suppressed, including a guerrilla movement in the state of Guerrero led by former schoolteacher Lucio Cabañas.

Government debt rose dramatically, with world financial markets flush with petrodollars and transnational financial institutions like the World Bank eager to extend low-interest loans to “developing” economies like Mexico’s.

In 1982, under President Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88), a combination of a global recession, low world oil prices, record-high debt ($80 billion in 1982), galloping inflation, and massive government expenditures led to the effective bankruptcy of the Mexican state.

Devaluation of the peso and a restructuring of the international debt followed, though in December 1988, when de la Madrid left office, foreign debt had risen to a record $105 billion, second only to Brazil’s.

As a consequence of these and related crises, the administrations of presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94) and Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000) embarked on a major effort to rein in inflation and slash the size of the federal government through privatization of state-owned industries and pursuit of fiscal austerity measures recommended by the International Monetary Fund.

The combination of prolonged economic crises and erosion of the PRI’s ideological legitimacy led to the party’s defeat in the 2000 elections, though it continued to play a major role in the National Assembly and in state and local governments throughout Fox’s tenure, as it promised to play in the administration of PAN-affiliated President Felipe Calderón, elected in 2006.

Agrarian Reform in Mexico

Agrarian Reform in Mexico

Among the principal causes of the Mexican revolution (1910–20) were the country’s highly unequal landowning patterns and growing landlessness among the rural majority, especially during the regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910).

The 1917 constitution, which has governed Mexico since that time, included among its provisions several articles addressing the land issue, most prominently Article 27, which states in part: “The nation shall at all times have the right to impose on private property such limitations as the public interest may demand, as well as the right to regulate the utilization of natural resources ... in order to conserve them and to ensure a more equitable distribution of public wealth.”

Article 27 also stipulated that only ejidos (inalienable village-owned collective lands, generally distributed by villages to individual heads of households) and individual Mexican citizens could own Mexican land or subsoil rights.


In the early 1920s, under intense international pressure, Article 27 was watered down in a series of constitutional amendments to permit foreign firms, most notably U.S. oil companies, to be granted concessions on Mexican territory for the exploitation of natural resources.

Actual implementation of Article 27 varied greatly in accordance with the proclivities of individual presidents. In the 23 years from 1917 and 1940, approximately 30.6 million hectares were redistributed to villages and individuals.

Around one-third of this total (34 percent) was redistributed from 1917 to 1934 under the presidencies of Venustiano Carranza (1917–20), Alvaro Obregón (1920–24), and Plutarco Calles and his subordinates (1924–34), amounting to a little over 10.5 million hectares. The remaining two-thirds (66 percent), amounting to some 20.1 million hectares, was distributed by the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40).

After 1940, the popular clamor for land declined substantially, in consequence of both the aggressive implementation of the constitution’s land reform provisions under Cárdenas; formal representation of rural producers in national and local governments via the National Peasant Confederation (Confederación Nacional Campesino, or CNC); and the growth of rural-urban migration and the attendant shift in the nation’s demographic structure. According to one leading scholar, “[the] era of agrarian violence that began in 1810 finally ended with the land reform of the 1930s.”

After 1940, the national government under the PRI favored large commercial agricultural enterprises at the expense of smaller production units, resulting in growing impoverishment among rural dwellers. Under President Luis Echevvaría (1970–76), the government again emphasized the ejido sector, adding some 17 million hectares to the ejido total.

This was the last major redistribution of Mexican land. In 1992 the government radically altered the nature of the ejido, in effect privatizing it by permitting ejido-holders (ejidatarios) to sell, rent, lease, or mortgage their properties.

The neoliberal, free market, privatization-oriented reforms under President Vicente Fox (2000–06) continued the erosion of the ejido, though the institution remained important in many rural areas, while local struggles for land (as waged by the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, for instance) promised to continue into the foreseeable future.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a trilateral trade pact among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Implemented on January 1, 1994, the agreement is intended to foster open and unrestricted commercial relations among its three signatories.

Supplemental agreements, also part of NAFTA, are the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), and the Understanding on Emergency Action (Safeguards). Administered in the United States by the International Trade Administration of the Department of Commerce, NAFTA is one of several regional trading blocs in the Western Hemisphere.

These include the Andean Community of Nations (CAN, among Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru, f. 1969); the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM, f. 1973), the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR, among Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Paraguay, f. 1991), and the Central America–Dominican Republic–United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR, f. 2004).


NAFTA’s supporters conceive of the agreement as an important stepping stone in the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would include the 34 nation-states and territories of the Western Hemisphere.

In its goal of fostering unrestricted commercial relations, NAFTA follows the principles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO).

NAFTA has sparked a huge debate between its supporters and opponents. Its principal supporters in the private sector consist of the hemisphere’s largest corporations, most of which are based in the United States.

They argue that in all three countries NAFTA will increase living standards, create new jobs, protect the environment; and ensure compliance with labor laws. Its principal opponents include labor, environmental, faith-based, indigenous rights, and consumer rights groups.

They maintain that NAFTA, like the WTO, promotes a "race to the bottom" by favoring large corporations over smaller enterprises, benefiting the rich more than the poor; increasing inequality, causing a net loss of jobs, fostering environmental degradation, and failing to adequately protect the rights of workers.

The communiqués of sub-commander Marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico—a group whose rebellion against the Mexican government was timed to coincide with NAFTA’s implementation—convey many of the principal arguments of NAFTA’s opponents.

A large scholarly literature mirrors this debate. On the whole, the evidence demonstrates that NAFTA has increased trade dramatically while failing to meet its supporters’ expectations with regard to employment, poverty, inequality, the environment, and labor rights. In Mexico, poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all increased substantially since NAFTA’s implementation.

In the United States and Canada, the creation of new jobs has not kept pace with the outflows of capital and jobs traceable to NAFTA. The leftward tilt in Latin American politics since the 1990s has buttressed that continent’s opposition to multilateral trade agreements like NAFTA, the WTO, and the proposed FTAA.

Tlatelolco Massacre (1968)

In one of the most important and controversial episodes in postwar Mexican history, on October 2, 1968, police and army units violently suppressed a demonstration in Tlatelolco Square in the heart of Mexico City. The government’s version of events differed starkly from those of eyewitnesses and the version that gained currency among much of the populace.

The crackdown contributed to a growing crisis of legitimacy for the ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), fueling popular sentiments that the PRI was corrupt, dictatorial, and antidemocratic, and tarnishing Mexico’s image on the eve of the country’s hosting of the 1968 Summer Olympics.

The roots of the October 1968 events in Tlatelolco have been traced to the upsurge in student and worker democratic and anti-PRI activism from the late 1950s, including the Teachers’ Movement in 1958; the Railway Workers’ Movement in 1958–59; demonstrations in support of the Cuban Revolution (1959); a massive student strike at the National University (UNAM, spring 1966); and protest movements in the states of Puebla (1964), Morelia (1966), and Sonora and Tabasco (1967).


More immediate antecedents include the government’s mobilization of an antiriot paramilitary squad, the granaderos, in response to street fights between two Mexico City schools in July 1968, and again in response to student protests commemorating the anniversary of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. Tensions mounted throughout August as students held huge demonstrations at the UNAM and the National Polytechnic Institute.

The events prompted the formation of a National Student Strike Committee, which issued a list of demands that included disbandment of the granaderos and release of all political prisoners. An estimated 500,000 people, mostly students and workers, participated in antigovernment demonstrations in Mexico City’s central square (Zócalo) on August 27, to that date the country’s single largest mass protest.

Law enforcement agencies responded with tanks and armored cars, killing at least one student. In mid-September, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz ordered 10,000 army troops to occupy the UNAM campus. Some 500 protesters were jailed, and in the ensuing weeks tensions throughout Mexico City ran high.

The exact sequence of events on the evening of October 2 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures) in the District of Tlatelolco, where 5,000 to 10,000 protesters had gathered, remains disputed. The next day the government claimed that terrorists had opened fire on the police from a nearby building and that police had responded to the unprovoked attack.

Most newspapers at the time reported from 20 to 28 protestors killed. Eyewitnesses recalled with near unanimity that police and army units had instigated the violence, dropping flares from helicopters before spraying machine-gun and small-arms fire indiscriminately into the crowd, killing hundreds.

The British newspaper The Guardian estimated after "careful investigation" that 325 were killed, a figure cited by Mexican writer Octavio Paz as the most plausible. In the ensuing days and weeks, thousands were jailed.

Memories of Tlatelolco remained fresh into the 1990s and after, evidenced by a 1997 congressional investigation into the massacre and the 2006 indictment of ex-president and then-interior minister Luis Echevarría for his role in the events, which remain a festering wound in the nation’s collective memory.

Zapatistas

In the heavily Mayan Indian state of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico, on New Year’s Day, 1994, a group of rebels carrying automatic rifles, axes, and sledgehammers, wearing black ski masks, and calling themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) proclaimed themselves in rebellion against the Mexican government.

The uprising was timed to coincide with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, the United States, and Canada. The Mexican government responded by sending some 25,000 soldiers into Chiapas, armed with automatic weapons, tanks, and helicopters.

On January 12 the government declared a cease-fire, saying it would respond with force only if attacked. By this time around 150 people had been reported killed, most by government security forces. Talks between the EZLN and government negotiators began on February 20. The Zapatista spokesperson, who called himself Sub-Commander Marcos, soon became an international celebrity.


In what has been called the world’s first postmodern rebellion—waged against not only a national government but an international trade agreement, its principal weapons not guns but words, grassroots organizing, and the Internet, and launched not with the goal of military victory but of gaining indigenous rights and national and international solidarity—the Zapatista movement continued into the 21st century, posing a thorny challenge to the Mexican state and local powerholders. In 2007 the rebellion still simmered, centered in dozens of Zapatista "autonomous municipalities" in the heart of the Chiapas Lacondón rain forest, central highlands, and northern zones.

Home to some of the oldest civilizations on Earth, Mexico’s Maya zones have seen a long series of protest movements against local, regional, national, and imperial authorities that stretch back to the initial Spanish invasion in 1522 and continued with the Tzeltal Revolt of 1712, the Jacinto Canek Revolt of 1761, the Caste War of Yucatán from 1848 and its aftermath, and subsequent revolts and resistance movements.

After the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the establishment of a "one party democracy" under the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) in 1929, Chiapas remained one of the poorest and most marginalized states in the Mexican States United (Estados Unidos Mexicanos).

In 1994 its 3.5 million people, spread over some 76,000 square kilometers, included large concentrations of Maya Indians, some two-thirds living in rural areas and divided into numerous ethno-linguistic groups, including Tzeltales, Tzotziles, Choles, Zoques, and Tojolabales.

At least half of the indigenous people did not have access to potable water and were illiterate; two-thirds did not have sewage systems; and 90 percent had little or no income.

In 1992 President Carlos Salinas and the PRI-dominated houses of Congrttess approved farreaching changes to Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution, effectively privatizing the ejidos (collective village lands) that had been a cornerstone of Mexico’s postrevolutionary agrarian reform laws. The terms of NAFTA further accelerated decades-long trends toward privatization and the opening of the Mexican economy to transnational corporations and unfettered trade.

The rebels named their army after Emiliano Zapata, a village leader from the state of Morelos and one of the leading figures in the Mexican Revolution, whose honesty, rectitude, and uncompromising demands for "land and liberty" made him a heroic figure among the country’s poor and Indian population. The Zapatista spokesperson, Sub-Commander Marcos, remains an enigmatic figure.

Never photographed without his black ski mask, he is thought to be Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, a Jesuit-educated former professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City who began working and organizing among the Maya of Chiapas in the mid-1980s.

His name is presumed to be an acronym for the municipalities first taken over by the rebel army (Las Margaritas, Amatenango del Valle, La Realidad, Comitán, Ocosingo, and San Cristóbal de Las Casas). He is called the group’s "sub-commander" because the EZLN is based on grassroots participatory democracy, and he is therefore considered not the group’s leader but a subordinate to the people in whose name he speaks.

Peace talks between representatives of the EZLN and the national government began at San Andrés Larrainzar in April 1995. On February 17, 1996, the parties agreed to the terms of the Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture, known as the San Andrés Accords.

The Accords called for revision of Article Four of the 1917 Constitution to require the Mexican state to "recognize the right of Indian peoples to freely determine their own forms of social, economic, political, and cultural organization". In essence, the accords would have permitted an autonomous parallel state and political structure within Mexico, including an independent judicial system based on indigenous practices.

Meanwhile, the military buildup by the Mexican army and security forces in Chiapas intensified as the government waged a low-intensity war against EZLN forces throughout the region. Local paramilitaries, growing out of the "white guards" (guardias blancas) organized by the region’s cattle and landowning oligarchy and active since the early 1980s, also stepped up their attacks against EZLN activists and supporters.

New anti-EZLN paramilitaries formed, including the Indigenous Revolutionary Anti-Zapatista Movement (MIRA) and the Red Mask. Attacks, assaults, and human rights abuses against EZLN supporters mounted. On December 22, 1997, the Red Mask massacred 45 people at Acteal, including 21 women and 15 children.

In this context of growing militarization and violence, in August 1996 the EZLN sponsored an International Conference for Humanity Against Neoliberalism (called by Marcos the "Intergalactic Encuentro"), attended by intellectuals, activists, and celebrities from around the world.

In January 1997 President Ernesto Zedillo proposed a watered-down version of the San Andrés Accords that eliminated the provisions recognizing indigenous rights. The EZLN rejected the revisions, and henceforth the accords remained a dead letter.

Propaganda Offensive

The EZLN’s propaganda offensive continued in marches, demonstrations, solidarity agreements with various sectors of civil society, and a flurry of communiqués and declarations from Sub-Commander Marcos. In March 2001 Zapatista commanders headed a caravan to Mexico City, where they rallied with supporters to demand legislation implementing the original San Andrés accords.

Instead, the government passed a law denounced by indigenous rights groups. The Zapatistas responded with a four-year period of "strategic silence", which they broke in June 2005 with their "Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle", inaugurating a series of grassroots meetings and a national tour, the "Other Campaign", to form a coalition of left groups.

Typical of the EZLN’s approach to waging war was the assault by the "Zapatista Air Force" against a Mexican military installation in January 2000, in which rebels launched hundreds of paper airplanes into the camp, each bearing handwritten messages such as: "Soldiers, we know that poverty has made you sell your lives and souls. I also am poor, as are millions. But you are worse off, for defending our exploiter Zedillo and his group of moneybags".

Part of a broader resurgence of indigenous political organizing in Mexico, Central America, and the Andes, in 2007 the EZLN controlled over 30 autonomous municipalities, while the struggle in Chiapas and beyond showed no signs of abating.