The Zapatista Movement: A Literature Review

Autonomy is the umbrella demand that embraces other indigenous concerns such as issues of development, cultural rights, and land rights. Mattiace (2002) argues that indigenous people embraced autonomy as a way to govern themselves (Shannan Mattiace 2002), the underline idea is the resistance against the State which takes land from them impose repressive mechanisms to dominate them. Land plays one of the most relevant roles since it regulates the type of life community members could practice. The premise today is that the indigenous communities hold the facto landownership, and they claim the rights of autonomy and self-determination. But, the Zapatista movement, in its uprising period included land redistribution. “the land is for the indigenous peoples and peasants who work it. Not for latifundistas. We want the huge amounts of land that are in the hands of ranchers, national and international landowners, and other people who occupy a lot of the land but are not peasants to pass into the hands of our communities where there is an absolute shortage of lands, as is established in our revolutionary agrarian law”. Comité Clandestino

But, among the members, the goals diverged. In the paper, Resisting Neoliberal Homogenization; The Zapatista Autonomy Movement, Sholcks (1997) describes different groups of mobilized indigenous people pursuing different goals and so forming different degrees of alliances with outsiders. Sholks failed in recognizing that in the Zapatista lines there were not only indigenous groups but as a Stephen (2002) and Harvey (1998) describes in their detailed ethnographies, the Zapatista members included peasants organizations and even Maoist